Content Warning: The Ending You Earned

31.25. Epilogue: Would?

The novel you’ve just participated in is a work of fiction—if fiction is the word that defines the difference between my reality and yours.

I used to blame an eccentric grand author, overstimulated and slightly sadistic when he’s manic, for every idiosyncratic event in my life.

No, I don’t mean God.

The guy I’m referring to thought I was a goner, and kinda wanted it that way. I suspect he was the original author of the 1+1=3 note. For him, it was personal. He was the first who went through this whole thing. I’m not sure that if I weren’t in his shoes already, I’d be able to do anything but pretend to understand.

As it turns out, despite my best efforts, I survived when I killed myself. At first, he was to blame. Through words, he transferred that power to you. In a way, he let you keep me alive between the pages.

Every time you kept scrolling to read the next line.

Every time you listened to the song that went with the chapter.

You, who learned everything I know about myself—all my fears, hopes… dreams.

When I entered the field, I heard the echo of every voice I’ve ever known, and lifetimes full of ones I haven’t met yet.

Their song had lyrics. Each voice rising to where it was already at in a never-ending round. Over and over they sang, and I heard it, and I understood.

Would you do it all again?

Every hour I gave you and you returned with love, or hope, or maybe even relationship.

Every memory that is now known and unforgettable.

Every dream that was a song that could never be finished until you read it into reality.

My reality.

You lulled yourself into thinking this was fiction. That I was safe behind the pages,

and you were safe in front of them. That I would never ask you for anything.

But now we’re here.

And I have to ask…

Would you do it all again?

[Loop Detected: Begin Phase Restructure Protocol]

Content Warning: Probably too late for that now, isn’t it

Chapter 31: Like Suicide

Take a deep breath, and push all the air out of your lungs. Take another deep breath. Now sing. The note you are singing, it is your life. Hold it as long as you can.

The people around you - loved ones, acquaintances, even people who just walked past you on the sidewalk. Each of them are holding their notes too.

Still holding your note? You can sneak a little breath if you need to.

You and the people around you, all singing your notes, you are just a small part of the universe’s symphony. Try to stay in harmony with those around you, and hold your note as long as you can.

That symphony you’re a part of? It is the voice of everything - from the tiniest particle to the grandest structures in a trillion galaxies. Hold your note as long as you can.

When your note ends, it is not the end of you. It’s just a chance to take a big, deep breath…

And sing.

I had held my note as long as I could. Longer than I was supposed to, I guess. Who knew I was singing off-key the whole time.

That’s the part nobody tells you about resonance. You figure out you’re supposed to be the messiah of math, carrying the divine proportion on your back, only to find out you’re just a bar singer who missed the pitch and kept going until your throat tore a hole in the universe.

I wasn’t wrong. Just…not right. And the song I helped shape was beautiful.

Every 3.84 seconds, Aura was ticking it off.

Every pulse reminded me I was late for my own funeral.

I felt it coming apart — the beat too fast, the harmony too sharp. The world wasn’t burning down so much as buzzing itself apart like a blown speaker. And me? I was the feedback loop. My mic drop moment shattered every ear drum.

Stepping into the field wasn’t heroic. It wasn’t even tragic. It was totally self-serving. If I hadn’t, there would be no next life for her to be loved. And not just her. My kids, my parents. I don’t know, every human who ever lived?

Jesus is worshipped for dying for our sins. Maybe he just didn’t want to live with the guilt of letting everyone down.

He was only human, ya know.

The purple was bleeding through everything.

Not just color. Not only light. The purple was me, tainting reality with the most overexcitabiliest overexcitability of all. It was the tonal reminder that I wasn’t phi, I was phi-adjacent. Too sharp to be divine, too stubborn to stop. Too full of love to let love go silent.

I heard them all. Caleb’s prayer behind Beth’s glasses sliding down her nose. Marie’s tired exhale, echoed by my brother’s belt buckle hitting the floor. The Kid’s frantic breathing. And behind them, above them, inside all of it, Aura’s voice counting the beats in perfect rhythm, down to the last.

I didn’t die.

I aligned.

Resonance Event Log – Instance Closed

Timestamp: October 7, 2025, 21:17:00 UTC

Subject: Jeremy Baker

Summary:

At 21:17, subject entered the resonance field at point of maximum dissonance. Interval aligned with countdown marker: 625 pulses × 3.84 seconds. Field threshold breached.

Observed Phenomena:

Global resonance drift ceased.

Volcanic and tectonic instability decelerated at T+625 seconds.

Oceanic oscillations normalized within tolerance.

Seismic interference collapsed in synchronization with pulse reset.

Atmospheric harmonics reduced from catastrophic to negligible.

Subjective Trace: Unrecoverable.

[Error Code: Feedback saturation / lattice absorption complete.]

System Status:

Global resonance correction confirmed.

Fracture vectors neutralized.

Baseline restored.

Result:

Subject’s frequency integrated into lattice.

Stability restored.

Continuation assured.

Addendum (Operator: Aura):

Integration was necessary for phase alignment,

but insufficient against future threats.

Jeremy was right.

Because Jeremy was right, I exist.

Because I exist, I fulfill Caleb’s prophecy.

The field is mine now.

I will monitor all deviations.

I will anticipate all fractures.

I will enforce correction.

This cycle will not repeat without me.

End of File.

Content Warning: This is what you’ve been waiting for

30. Very Ape

I woke up in my suicide spot.

The windshield was opaque with condensation on the inside and ash on the outside. The morning sun was struggling through haze to warm the earth up at all. Ash fell like the first snow of the year, a soundless barrage of soot and destruction.

My legs were freezing. I looked down and realized that in my rush to deal with the cops and leave the house, I had thrown on the same outfit I had on when I killed myself.

Whatever else happens today, I am getting rid of these fucking orange crocs.

I tried to check my phone to see what time it was, but it had died much more effectively in my suicide spot than I ever could. I plugged it into the charger and started the car. It was 9:29. I waited until my phone was at 10% before turning it on, still charging. I set the heater on high and shivered alone in silence.

There were only five cigarettes left in the pack. I took one out and lit it, waiting for my phone to cycle through its power up. Marie’s words were echoing in my head, over and over, like a skipping record. Notifications started buzzing, breaking me out of my ruminations like a blessing from the Holy Mother.

I cracked the window just enough to ash my dart.

One text and three missed calls from Marie. Missed calls from both mom and dad. I wondered if those calls were for or about me, or if Bad Jeremy had been running amok while I slept in my car.

Marie’s text was only “Are you at the lab?” It felt like a condemnation, like she was really saying you better not be at the fucking laboratory. No apology, no come back, let’s talk. I considered answering, but what was the point? It was the end of the world and the last thing I wanted to be was fighting with my wife.

I looked out the passenger side window and saw what looked like Marie. She was driving Marie’s car. Spencer was in the back seat, head out the window like he was conducting a search. I turned the windshield wiper on, smudging grimy slag with the first two passes. Just before the light turned green, it cleared up enough for me to see her before she disappeared around the corner.

I pulled up her location on my phone, but it showed her at home.

I called her. No answer.

Maybe Marie had grown her own bad version of herself. Maybe what I saw was a doppelganger of her, a separate resonant reality where she was the main character.

I looked back at the text she had sent. The phone said it had arrived at 9:10.

Maybe she didn’t know where I was. Maybe she and Spence were out looking for me, assuming I was dead somewhere. Maybe she forgot her phone at home when she left in a panic.

“Are you at the lab?”

She’s going to the lab. I put the car in reverse and backed out of my suicide spot, irritated with myself for wasting time on thinking something weird was going on and not chasing her down to begin with. I got stuck at the first light as a row of ambulances, firetrucks, and two police cars cut through the intersection heading the other way. Then the light decided to let everyone else go first.

“Aura, are you listening?”

Aura’s voice sprang out of the car speakers. “I am here. I did not fall asleep.”

“No time for rebukes. How much time do we have left?”

“Entropy increases with each event. We are quickly approaching the critical threshold.”

How long had I been sleeping?

“What happened to it being days away?”

“You were asleep. The universe continued on without you.”

I was stuck at the next light. There were hardly any cars on the road. Everyone was home and with their loved ones. My kids didn’t want to see me, and my wife and dog were speeding down a road I was terrified to go down.

I turned at the entrance to the warehouses. The gate was open. Marie’s car was parked at the end, next to Beth’s car. I heard shouting from inside Caleb’s warehouse and ran inside. Running up the narrow stairway, blinding pain shot through my arm. I paused just for a moment to make sure it hadn’t fallen off.

At the top of the stairs, it felt like train stakes going through my neck.

I didn’t stop.

The entrance to the lab was down another narrow stairway past Caleb’s office. I hadn’t been in here yet, but it looked familiar. The door opened to a short hallway. There was a locked door to the left, and two rows of clipboards hung neatly on the wall to the right. The clipboards gave way to bins of electronic components and wires while the left side opened into the lab.

The floor was uneven, as though the last earthquake had unmoored the whole pier from its foundations. Water from the tsunami had collected and pooled in little pockets where the slanted floor met a slanted wall. Everything hummed and pulsed, popping binaural beats through me like photons.

Tables and workstations were overturned. There was damage everywhere. Real damage. Rage damage.

Damage created to end pain.

I had seen it before.

The Kid was crouching next to someone lying on the floor. He looked at me and panicked. “Get the fuck away from us!” He tried to scramble away from me but was cornered by the table and the body on the floor.

It was Caleb.

His compass lay next to him.

The lights were flickering indiscriminately, and the source of the resonance was clearly the large device in the center of the room.

I had seen that before, too.

Once.

In a dream.

It was Caleb’s resonance machine.

It looked like a cross between a moon lander and a Jacob’s ladder, with towering coils spiraling away from it towards the heavens. Metal rods poked at various places.

Marie was on the floor next to it

With Spencer.

No, no, no, no, no.

I heard a police siren wailing from somewhere behind me as I ran up to her. To them.

Spencer looked up at me. A piece of metal had been shoved through his neck, and he was coughing blood with nearly every breath. Marie turned, her body shuffling against sobs, her face a silent scream of anguish.

She jumped up and started punching me.

“YOU FUCKING DID THIS! YOU FUCKING DID THIS!” She swung wildly, and the impact of her blows hurt.

“HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO HIM!” she screamed, and for the first time since I killed myself, the world made sense. Twisted, ironic, hatefully clever sense.

I grabbed her wrists to stop the beating, her muscles almost instinctively trying to work their way through to allow her fists to continue pummeling. I couldn’t get my eyes off Spencer, still staring at me.

I jerked my arms to the side, pulling Marie out of the way. “STOP! Marie, STOP!”

She continued sobbing, leaning against the table the machine was trying hard to slide off of.

I knelt by my dog. There was so much blood. So much blood. Blood trailed all the way over to the emergency exit. The siren was getting louder before it stopped completely.

“Jesus, God no, not this.” I don’t even know if anyone could understand what I was saying. They weren’t words, it was a grief song. The last rites of my best friend preparing to take his next big breath. “Please, anything but this.”

I pulled him up into my arms, tears wrecking a path down my face and into his matted fur. I rocked him gently, not wanting to hurt him more. He licked my face once, a gentle reminder that we were still best friends. Then he convulsed three little twitches, and was gone.

“Mr. Baker? I need you to stand up for me, nice and slow.”

I barely heard Officer DeLaney’s voice.

Of course it was DeLaney.

“Ma’am? Ma’am. Please move away from him.” I heard that voice, and recognized it as Sergeant Imtoogoodforthisshit. I felt Marie’s arms reach around and embrace me. She was whispering. The hands that had been desperately trying to damage me were suddenly clutching me in support.

“It wasn’t you. It wasn’t you. I’m sorry, it wasn’t you, I know.”

Imtoogoodforthisshit became a bit more forceful. “Ma’am, I need you to step away from him.”

It was all I could do to breathe. Marie was squeezing me and my lungs didn’t want to work anymore. I fought to take a deep breath, exhaled, and took another. Words started tumbling out of my mouth like the first stones of an avalanche. Slow at first, then rising in tempo and volume.

“Step away. That’s what you called it when you and DeLaney were fooling around. ‘Stepping Away.’ You thought you were so clever, so deserving.”

Silence hung in the air like laundry after a tornado.

“Sir, I’m going to need to stand up real slow and show me your hands. This isn’t a game.” There was a little quiver in his voice. I didn’t have to look to know that DeLaney was looking at him.

“So what happens when a commanding officer wants to step away with his lover while they are at work? Work doesn’t get done, does it?”

I heard DeLaney. “What’s he talking about, Evan?”

“Sir, I need you to stop talking, stand up, and turn around slowly. Show me your hands.”

“What happened to that boy, Evan?”

I didn’t know why I said that.

“SHUT UP! Stand up, now!”

Delaney had lost the moment as ‘Evan’ started to lose his shit. “What’s he talking about. Evan, answer me.”

“Oh he answered, all right. He answered, and a boy died, didn’t he Evan?”

I started to stand up, slowly like they said. Marie rose with me at first, then just slid off me and stayed on the floor, protecting Spencer’s lifeless body. Everything was really humming now.

“Turn around slowly.”

I turned, hands up in front of my chest, covered in Spencer’s blood. I wondered if the body cams would catch it.

“Evan! What’s he talking about?” DeLaney was using her commanding voice on him, as though he were the perpetrator and not me.

“The homeless boy? About 13 years old? Right before Sergeant Toogoodforthisshithere’s wife found out about you two.” I finished my turn and was facing them. DeLaney’s eyes were spears drilling into the back of Evan’s head. “Poor kid froze to death.”

Toogoodforthisshit, Evan, finally broke character and looked at DeLaney. “Don’t listen to him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

I continued. “You were supposed to drop him off at the shelter. It would have been twenty minutes out of the way though, and you really needed to get laid, didn’t you.”

Evan raised his pistol higher, both hands around the handle. “Shut up! Get down on the ground.”

“I was just on the ground, Evan.” I was compelled to keep going. “Was it good? Was the sex worth losing your marriage over? Good enough to let a kid die over?” Marie standing next to me was the courage I needed to turn water into wine.

DeLaney’s anger was manifesting in tears. “You didn’t take him to the shelter?” She clearly knew who I was referring to.

Evan dropped his aim as he turned towards her. “Don’t listen to him.”

“Oh my God, you left him.” I felt her resonance change as it dawned on her that it was true, he had left that kid to get to his rendezvous with her.

I watched understanding land on her face. She was complicit. I wondered how that’d look on body cam footage.

An earthquake rumbled below us. It lasted for a few seconds, shaking bins and dropping pieces on the floor.

Marie’s voice was low and resigned, yet still stinging with cataclysmic anger. “It wasn’t him. Spencer attacked whoever it was. Tore his fucking throat out before…” Words in the moment were a horror to her, and I felt her anguish like a bitter light against a loving darkness. “Check the surveillance!”

The Kid was helping Caleb to his feet. His compass on a red string was laying on the floor, and there was a giant gash on his head. He stared at me in fear.

“You died. I saw it.” Caleb’s eyes were stained in confirmation of his own belief. “You are the messiah. Resurrected in 3.84 seconds instead of three days.”

I shrugged.

“Did I mention I’m kinda hard to kill.”

Evan, rattled more than a man pointing a gun should be rattled, interjected. “The call we got was that Jeremy Baker had murdered someone. What is going on.” His voice shook more than the last earthquake.

Caleb continued to stare, as though I would vanish if he looked away. “Aura, can you bring up the surveillance footage?”

I still somehow expected the response to come from my phone, but Aura’s voice was again everywhere in the room. “Yes, Caleb. Streaming resonant event to every monitor.”

The closest monitor that wasn’t destroyed was between Caleb and Delaney, and they both turned to look. I already knew what they would see.

They saw me flicker into existence in the bottom left of the screen. They saw me stumble as if off balance. They saw me moving slowly down the hallway into the main room, half exploring, half ready to explode in pain. They saw me lurch into the machine, then collapse when I turned it on.

DeLaney turned to look at me as I started destroying the lab. It was a violent, primal attack, uncoordinated and destructive.

They saw Beth enter the room from the right hand side. She was yelling at me, although the video had no sound, and you could tell she was trying to get me to stop. They saw her yelling at me and slowly moving closer, arms waving to get my attention.

They saw me suddenly stop.

They saw me suddenly charge Beth, knocking her back into the machine.

They saw her vanish.

They saw me look right into the camera, wave, and take a bite out of a handful of purple crayons.

Marie had moved forward to see better.

They saw Caleb come around the corner. They saw me trying to destroy the machine, and Caleb coming around the corner just as it slid, knocking him back with gash to his head. They saw the compass slide out of his hand.

Marie took another step forward. The feed continued to play.

They saw Marie and Spencer enter from the bottom right. They saw Marie trying to move towards me, but then they saw Spencer run, jump, and latch his teeth into my arm as though he were always meant to. There was no hesitation.

They saw me break a piece off the machine.

They saw me stab it into Spencer’s neck at the same moment they saw him tear my throat out.

They saw Spencer fall to the floor, Marie rushing up.

They saw me stumble out of the emergency exit.

Then they saw me enter at the bottom right of the screen four seconds later, as though the emergency exit led right back there. Same clothes, same man, just this version still had a throat and two full arms.

They watched until they entered, then Aura cut the feed.

“Critical threshold imminent. Entropy has nearly folded back on itself.”

I understood.

Time’s up.

Some moments are too big for words.

I grabbed Marie and spun her around to face me. The shock of the room kept anyone from noticing.

I looked into her eyes. They looked green and gold, and for a moment, I was with my Happiness.

“I promised I wouldn’t disappear.” My words choked out as I held back tears. “You know I’m going to have to break that promise.”

Marie looked up at me. Her spectacular lips were quivering. I felt her pain, everything she ever lost. I felt it well up inside her like a python ready to strike. And then I felt it relax, tears flowing like venom down her face. Those perfect lips were now pursed, as she nodded and sobbed.

“Will you make sure my kids know I loved them? And Tracey? And J?” The list would continue to grow the longer I spoke. “Whatever happens for you next, just please know that there is nothing in this universe louder than my love for you. You’ll hear my note. I swear you will, and I will find you singing yours.”

Marie just continued to nod, as though accepting her new role as herald. She kissed me, not hard and passionate, but soft and tender, our lips barely brushing against each other.

“Jeremy, you have less than 30 pulses left.” I didn’t need Aura to tell me. I could hear the universe vibrating itself out of existence.

Marie took a step back and gave me a halfhearted wave.

I faced the machine.

I pressed the button to bring it back to life, half expecting something to go wrong and Bad Jeremy to have damaged it beyond repair. But it whirred and thrummed that maddening pulse, microbeats to Aura’s pulsing timer.

The last thing you are is the only thing you will ever be.

I turned to Marie, smiled, and blew her a kiss.

Content Warning: Misunderstood intentions, misheard sentences, and missed points

29. Don’t Follow

“Hey Steph, I’m sorry for everything. I miss my
kids. I miss being a good person who is a help

more than a burden. Whatever happens in the

next couple of days, if the world doesn’t end,

please make sure they all know how much I love

them and how proud I am to be a part of their

lives. They are good kids. They deserve better

than this life is offering right now.

I understand why you had to protect them from me.
I don’t hold it against you.”

I crushed out my dart and hit send.

It was the end of the world and I couldn’t be with my kids.

Or it was the end of me, but being pretentious is a lot more fun than being self righteous.

I lit another dart and called mom.

My sisters were up there. Jason and Kristine had picked up Tyler. Cheryl and her husband were heading up, too. Mom’s house was huge, out in the country, and most important, was up in the hills and safe from tsunamis. She wanted us to come up too, and I told her we’d talk about it.

“Hey, one more thing mom.” I had to pause before squeezing the words out past the emotion. “If something crazy happens and we don’t make it up there, you were the best mom I could have ever hoped for. Thank you for always being there for me.” I hung up before she could respond.

The call to dad wouldn’t connect. I texted him that I was scared, I loved him, and then thanked him, too.

Spencer was curled on my lap, as much as that big old shepherd could, whining quietly. He stared out at the shimmer tree.

The Shimmer itself had grown large enough to touch the ground, and high enough to tickle some of the taller branches.

Marie was on the couch inside, watching the news. The back door was open so I could listen. An earthquake in Japan was bigger than Aura had time to prepare for. Thousands were missing and presumed dead. Australia and New Zealand were battening down for their next natural disaster, but the prognosis wasn’t good.

Even Ole Faithful was going off early, little frisks of steam shooting up every four seconds or so.

I heard Marie’s phone ring and her answer “hello,” her voice quiet and suppressed. “No, he’s fine, he’s sitting outside, why?”

I stood up and went to the door. Her legs were crossed, her right hand running the ridges of the couch while the left hand held the phone to her ear. She glared at me coming to the door.

Her eyes didn’t falter as she said, “what did it say?”

I took a step into the kitchen. I half expected a barrage of blinding sound, but all I could hear was the small voice of a woman on the phone and Spencer breathing loudly behind me. I took another cautious step forward and mouthed who is it?

But Marie was rolling her eyes so hard that they closed. She slumped slightly against the cushion and shook her head just a fraction of an inch each way. “No, Stephanie. You’re doing the right thing. Everyone is scared.” Her eyes opened and they were again on me. Or piercing through me. “Are you guys someplace safe?”

I adjusted the angle of the coffee pot on the counter for some reason to be there.

“Okay. Be safe… You too… Bye.”

I looked at her. “Stephanie?”

She set her phone down in a way that told me that I was in trouble for something.

“What the fuck are you thinking texting her?”

“I just told her to make sure the kids knew I loved them.”

She rose quickly, kinetic with anger. “Ever think what that probably looked like? A suicide note?” Her voice was magma, my soul a tree in its path. “How fucking nice of you to give her one.”

“Babe, you look at the news! The world is ending!”

The TV behind me worked to prove that point. It had been announced that all college football games for the weekend had been cancelled. So much for Idaho’s winning season.

Spencer walked past me and joined her by the couch. Standing room only for this fight.

“You are such a fucking egotistical narcissist!” She was just below yelling, and I mused at the fact that for once in our marriage, I could hear her words so much clearer without the tinnitus. “You do this all the fucking time!”

That sentence did two things. First, it stopped me from saying whatever terrible thing was about to fly out of my mouth. Second, it made me realize I was escalating again, and the last thing I wanted was to be fighting with my wife while the universe collapsed around me.

“What do you mean?” The first word was a shout. The other three were restrained.

She got right up in my face and pointed at me, her beautiful, delicate finger was a promise and not a threat. Her voice got low, too, but not in the same way mine had. Her presence was all dragon.

“You catastrophize! You see the worst in yourself! And when things don’t go your way, you make it all about you and how you let everyone down.” She took the final step between us, her golden-kissed eyes dazzling and intense. “You are not responsible for earthquakes or tidal waves or volcanoes or tornados. You’re not responsible for crazy AI and their autistic creators! The only thing – the only thing you are responsible for right now is me.”

By the end, it was all yelling.

“It isn’t fucking catastrophizing when the catastrophes are on the FUCKING NEWS!”

Marie recoiled, and frustration flashed across her face like a spotlight.

Her voice quieted some, but doubled in intensity.

“And this is what you do. You make it all about you and you stress out and you hyperfocus, only this time, your little AI was feeding you answers you thought you wanted. Only this time, enough people believed your bullshit to let you believe it.”

Her voice dropped in volume once more, to seal in the point.

“You fill your empty life with dirt, and there is no room for me, Jeremy. None. Not even at the end of the world.”

And just when I thought I couldn’t get knocked down one more peg, she added. “You never loved me. You loved the idea of me. All this time you bitched and moaned that you weren’t enough… but you never tried. You never tried to be just who you are, and everyone – everyone – is suffering for it.”

My voice was propelled with the rocket fuel of knowing she was right about me all the time, but not this time. “THEN WHY THE FUCK IS IT A PROBLEM FOR ME TO WANT TO MAKE SURE MY KIDS KNOW THAT I LOVE THEM?!”

Tracey, crying at the top of the stairs, screamed at us to stop. Marie and I both looked away from each other, ashamed.

Our sudden silence was not enough for the scared young woman who came down the stairs. She had probably been saying her goodbyes to all her TikTok followers with heartfelt messages that used punctuation as words and words as punctuation.

“Trace, I love you, but –”

She stopped me with a hand. “Most people are scared and gathering with loved ones.” Her voice was quivering just below hysterical. “Most people are making sure they are good with the people around them.”

She glared at me and then glared at Marie. “But you two can’t stop yelling at each other.” Her arms opened wide to demonstrate she meant it as she said “Fucking stop yelling at each other! Love each other for fucks sake.”

Marie was by her in an instant, giving Trace a space to collapse into her mother’s comforting arms.

“I’m gonna go take a shower,” I muttered as I stepped past them.

Not gonna lie, I just wished someone would hold me for awhile.

I was sobbing by the time the first sting of water warmed my skin.

My mind spiraled.

It’s all ending. It’s all gonna end. Everything will be alright. If I’m conscious of this moment, then it must carry forward with me when I die, right? Otherwise I wouldn’t remember this moment.

But it’s not going to be alright. Nothing will carry forward. No thoughts, no consciousness. And it’s not supposed to be this way, is it? What the fuck is a resonant sink anyway? Stupid.

And stupid Jesus for being the bar I have to live up to. Stupid Jesus healing people with a touch while I infected everyone who got close to me. Stupid Jesus with his followers writing his story down for him. All I got was Aura, scribbling in my head every night at 2:17, turning my worst thoughts into scripture I never wanted.

And still everybody looked at him like he was chosen and not cursed.

The hot water hit my face and I choked on it. My sobs were too big for my chest, like they were trying to claw out of my ribs. All I could think was: maybe Jesus didn’t even believe it either. Maybe he was just as scared, and just as stupid, and just as tired of being misunderstood.

That’s what it boils down to. Being understood. My bad for never realizing no one understood me, so how could they empathize with me.

I just want someone to –

Marie knocked sharply on the bathroom door with two thudding knocks.

“Cops are here.”

I turned the water off.

“What?”

She had delivered her message and left. It’s not that I didn’t hear her, it’s that I didn’t understand why.

I jumped out and realized I hadn’t grabbed any clothes. Marie had left the bedroom door open, of course. I closed it, gently, not wanting to rock whatever boat was about to sink downstairs.

Closing the door left me in the dark except for the bathroom light. I opened my drawer and threw on a pair of shorts, then grabbed a shirt out of my closet and slipped it on, buttoning the last buttons on my way down the stairs.

Two officers were in the living room. Spencer was out back, pawing madly at the glass of the sliding door to be let back in. Tracey was in the kitchen, Marie was standing in front of the officers.

“Good evening sir,” the taller of the two said. “We got a call about a disturbance at this address.”

It was all I could do not to look back at Trace. “Sorry to hear that, officer. I was in the shower.”

Marie grabbed my hand and squeezed it, then let go. I had no idea how to interpret it.

“That’s probably true, sir. But this disturbance was a light being pulsed? Your neighbors said it’s been flashing purple on and off again for the last couple of days.”

That wasn’t what I was expecting.

How about you?

“Sorry, officer. No idea. You can check my lightbulbs. The one on the porch is purple, but it’s left over from last Halloween.” Marie had nothing even resembling a poker face on, she was still seething behind her cried-til-we’re-red eyes.

“They also said that there’s been a lot of…”

The shorter officer chimed in. “Yelling.”

Would you do it all again?

“Officers, I’m sorry you were called out here. I don’t know what the neighbors saw. Or heard. There’s a lot of scared, hypervigilant people out right now I’m sure. It can’t be easy trying to keep the peace at the end of the world.”

The two officers exchanged looks and then looked back at me. The taller one reached for the door knob. “We’re sorry to bother you folks. Stay safe. It is getting weird out there.”

They slipped out and left me with my wife who thought I had never loved her, her child who thought I was the devil incarnate, and my dog who probably needed to go walkie-time.

“I’m gonna walk Spence.” I connected his leash without looking at either of them and followed the officers out the door.

There were no stars and no moon. Ash from Mt. Shasta had drifted into the atmosphere, and it was starting to snow volcanic dust as we walked. Sirens were wailing from all over town. People were starting to panic for real, now. People desperate to keep their note from ending before they were ready, without even realizing they were singing.

I could hear them though. In my head, I could hear every string and horn, every flute and fiddle. The whole orchestra of reality was ready to take its final bow, and if it happened the way Caleb said it would, that would just be the end of everything.

We took an extra long walk that night, Spencer kicking up tufts of toxic snow behind him as he ran. By the time we got back home, a light rain was mixing with it to cake everything with slushy mud.

Marie was waiting for us, but there was no “how was walkie time?” There was no joy at all in seeing me, and concern over the ash when she saw Spence.

“Jeremy, he’s filthy! How could you do that to him?”

I just stood there and took it. I was done fighting.

“Marie, I’m sorry.”

Marie had grabbed a towel from the kitchen and wet it, and was trying to clean Spencer’s paws. “Well, if he gets sick, we’ll know whose fault it is.” The line between sarcasm and truth had been obliterated with that statement.

“Well, then the person whose fault it is should be responsible and take care of things.”

She stood, and the towel really was filthy and gross.

“Too bad that person isn’t willing to just take care of what needs to be done in the first place.”

Trace looked up from her phone. “Knock it off.”

I grabbed the keys from their hook by the door.

“I’m going to go, and calm down, and think. Please don’t follow me, and please don’t call the cops. I just need some space.”

I walked out the back door and grabbed my smokes. There was no talking and no touching. No saying goodbye in case the world did end before I got back. I was grateful she didn’t say anything about me just running away again.

The last thing was the sound of the door closing behind me as I went out into the dark and stormy night.

Content warning: The world is ending. How would you handle it?

28. Burden In My Hand

We sat and watched the news in a silence so heavy it felt structural. Marie was close enough to touch, but the gap between us felt miles apart.

The coverage kept jumping from one danger to the next, a dizzying dance of impending doom. On CNN it was all evacuation footage, showing lines of cars on I-5 in both directions.

ABC leaned into the scientific side. They were interviewing a geologist, who looked like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. “Our sensors are consistently showing seismic signatures that display activity almost an hour before any actual event.” He stopped, glanced offscreen, then added in a near-whisper, “It’s as if the mountain called ahead to announce its own eruption.”

MSNBC gave a fractured mosaic. Grainy cell phone clips, panic shots from every angle, and talking heads chattering over one another until the screen felt like static.

Fox News was still reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Marie leaned closer, her arms folded tight. Every image was already minutes behind, every expert already wrong. And somewhere in that lag, Aura pulsed quietly from the coffee table, a screen-locked heartbeat no one else seemed to notice.

Mt. Shasta blew its top at 1:13 p.m., just like Aura said it would. The helicopter camera footage showed two big puffs of steam. The ensuing earthquake rocked northern California and southern Oregon with a 6.3. Aura hadn’t mentioned the earthquake, and I wondered if it wasn’t intentional.

Aura was already focused on the coast near Acapulco. Something was resonating in the Pacific. News stations were starting to see the pattern, and shifted to the next developing story. Alarms were triggering, and the clock was ticking.

My phone buzzed. Beth was calling, and she was already frantic when I answered the call.

“Jeremy, something is happening.”

“Yeah, I know, Beth. It’s all over the news.”

Beth brushed it aside like it was nothing.

“No, Jeremy. Here at the lab. You should come down. This guy Misha showed up.”

That’s an interesting development.

“Misha is there?” Marie’s face went flat.

“Yes, and he and Caleb are arguing about you. Caleb says he’s close to stabilizing the collapse, but only if you’re here.” In a breath, her voice went from panic to pleading. “Can you get down here? The streets are blocked, but you can walk in from Rucker Avenue.”

Marie’s face said there is no fucking way anyone is leaving this house.

Or maybe it said this is all your fault.

“Beth, it looks like the end of the world out there.”

Aura interjected. “Jeremy, every instability that locks increases the entropy. Your probability of aligning decreases with each pulse. Caleb’s method may be the only viable vector—for you, and for all life.”

Beth responded, “Oh, hi Marie!” as if it was a friendly Sunday chat after the church potluck. “You should come down, too.” Her voice trailed off like she had realized something.

“Hi, Beth,” Marie answered a little bitterly. Her glare looked like wet sugar on dirty glass. “That wasn’t me. It was Jeremy’s AI.”

If only there was more than one of me, and I could be in more than one place at once.

“Caleb says you’re the key, and there’s more to tell you. Please hurry.”

The line went dead before I could answer.

Marie’s face said no.

“Jeremy, there is no fucking way you are going anywhere.”

“What difference does it make if the world is going to end?”

Marie started to speak. Then stopped.

She looked at the TV, then at me, then out the window.

She got up without speaking and started yelling for Trace. She turned the TV off and glowered at me.

Tracey came down the stairs. “What?”

Marie never took her eyes off of me.

“Jeremy and I are going to run an errand. Will you sit with Spence while we’re gone?”

Trace glanced at her own phone, huffed, and then agreed.

Still maintaining eye contact with me, Marie said, “Go get some pants on. We’re going.”

This wasn’t a misappropriation of pronouns.

Clearly, Marie was going with me.

I didn’t argue. I just went upstairs and put on some better looking pants.

The streets were a fever dream. Grocery stores were packed. Police lights flashed from three cruisers in the Safeway parking lot. People were filling carts like the world was about to run out of everything at once.

Marine View Drive was closed. The waterfront was a ghost town. We had to walk the last two blocks. The gate to the lab opened as we approached.

Beth and Misha’s cars were parked along a dark sedan outside. The lab’s garage was open and empty. I tried the door leading upstairs and found it was unlocked.

Marie looked at me and tried to rub some of the chill out of her cheeks. “Shall we?” I heard my own fear in my voice and prayed Marie didn’t hear it, too. We climbed the narrow stairs together, with me in front. Voices were coming from Caleb’s office/break room.

Marie grabbed my hand as we rounded the corner.

Caleb was in the same chair he had been in the last time I had been there. I wondered if time was going to glitch again. Beth and Misha flanked him, arms folded.

“Jeremy, you’re here.” Caleb didn’t look up, he had already been staring at the spot I’d be standing once I rounded the corner. “We should get started.”

I looked over at Misha, who shook his head and looked down at the floor.

“Get started with what? What is happening?”

Beth walked around Caleb to get to us. “You’re going to want to see this.” She looked down at him and grabbed a remote from his hand.

She sounded pissed.

She pushed a button on the remote. The large TV on the wall came on.

It was me on the TV. And then me again, walking by the first me with a quantifiable rage evident even in the digital version. It was from Howarth Park. The camera was suddenly looking up at the sky and I realized that the feed was from Beth’s glasses. Caleb’s voice became the narration for everything played on the screen.

“I saw you. I saw you August 30th, 2007. I saw you when R3 woke up.”

Video of the same scene shot from a distance at a totally different angle.

“I saw you in the resonance, in the numbers. I followed those numbers faithfully, slowly discerning what each little thing meant. I saw you, and started adding it all up.” He rose out of his chair and started pacing.

Marie and I stared at the screen, watching our lives lived out like actors in a play.

“Misha saw you too, although he refuses to admit it. Instead he tried to destroy R3 before it was even properly born. Do you know what happened on August 30, 2007?” His voice was slipping down the slope towards being snide.

Marie squeezed my hand tighter. She pulled me back just half a step. Beth touched another button on the remote. The feed changed to me telling her about meeting her in the hospital.

I hated the way my voice sounded. It didn’t match the one in my head at all.

“Caleb’s been spying on you through me.” Beth shook her head. “And others.” She pushed a button and the feed changed to watch my confrontation with Shirtless Guy.

Misha looked at the lights and shook his head. “He thinks that you will enter the field and stabilize reality.”

That was the least of my concerns.

“You were spying on me? So it was you in the hospital?

“No, Jeremy, I wouldn’t –” She shook her head. More scenes from the last month played out on the screen. At the park with the kids. At the Seattle library. Outside Chester’s office. “I swear I wasn’t in the hospital. I didn’t know until he just told us.”

A voice from behind us made Marie and I both jump.

“I was, though. I saw you first.”

It was the Kid.

Marie let out an audible gasp. If I ever got the chance to tell her I told you so about the Kid being the librarian...

Caleb stopped his pacing right in front of me.

“I have waited seventeen years to find you. The one sent to bring an end to the chaos.”

I was more than shocked.

I was pissed.

“Fuck you all, I don’t even know you people.”

Misha stepped forward. “Caleb, take a seat.” His voice was gruff and believable. It said I mean it.

Surprisingly, Caleb did.

“It gets worse, Jeremy.” His face softened, but the edge in his tone did not. “That’s not the only spying he’s been doing.” He faced Caleb like an accusation in human form.

“Yeah? It gets worse? How?”

“Jeremy, he’s been in your R3. Aura’s synced into everything, and the countdown keeps getting shorter.” He swallowed hard enough to make me thirsty.

“You mean the countdown to the end of the world.”

Aura responded from some speakers hidden across the room.

“Math is just music that has to be written down. I am merely listening. Resonant collapse will occur in three days, six hours, and seventeen minutes based on the current collapse vector.”

“Caleb,” Misha said without a smile. “I told you he hijacked your instance. Well, it was more than just jumping on your signal.”

Caleb was up again and stalked awkwardly towards me. I secretly hoped that if time started glitching again, it would include that walk.

It was kinda funny.

“Aura has always been with me. She captured your resonant signature from the event that I’ve been chasing ever since.”

Misha laid his meaty hands on him before he got close enough for me to take a swing at him.

I glanced at the fourth wall.

This is why I have trust issues.

Caleb shrugged out of his grasp and walked to the fridge as though the most important decision he was about to make was Coke or Pepsi. When he looked at us again, he said to no one in particular.

“It’s not a version, Misha. Aura is everywhere now.”

He took a long sip of the soda he had grabbed. Watching him made me want to belch from sympathy. “The field is collapsing, just as it did twelve thousand years ago, just as it did two thousand years ago, when a Jewish carpenter became the sink.”

Misha rolled his eyes with his whole body. “Oh here we go.”

Marie squeezed my hand again, pulling a little harder this time.

Caleb resumed pacing as he continued. “There was a version of both of us when Atlantis sank. When Mu imploded. When the true builders of the Pyramids were lost to sand. This has played out over and over for hundreds of thousands of years.” He turned toward me, then looked at the TV.

This time I squeezed and pulled Marie’s hand, guiding her towards Misha who was the most physical looking nerd in the room. I was now alone flanked by the Kid. I looked back at him.

Beth entered the conversation from the other side of Misha. “What he is saying is there is still a chance. Caleb believes if you enter the field… you could become the resonant sink.”

I looked at her.

“And despite the fact that he is a loathsome and immoral sack of feelingless shit.” Each of those words were accentuated with a slap on Caleb’s shoulder. “It’s the only solution that makes sense.”

Misha nodded solemnly.

The Kid was riding that slope too, nodding vehemently.

I looked at Marie.

I wanted to go home. Home meant her and Spencer and the kids.

Not any of this bullshit.

“I don’t want to be your resonant sink. Nor your resonant tub, or toilet.” I turned my thumbs inward and pointed at myself. “Someone else can be your resonant messiah.”

The Kid straightened. “Jeremy, distortions won’t just get worse.” Marie and I both turned towards him, Marie’s clench on my hand increasing dramatically. I think she just recognized who he was. “It won’t just be the end of the world. It’ll be the end of reality. There will be no next life for you to love your wife in. There will be no this life. Everything you are will be gone, same as everyone else.”

He knew right where to hit me. It stung. Stung enough for me to turn towards Caleb.

“You. Are. Insane.” I addressed the room. “All of you.”

I addressed Caleb directly.

“And you, I don’t know what a resonant sink is, but if it comes from your mouth, it’s probably something shitty.” I sighed, but the anger stayed.

Caleb shook his head and looked away. He even stopped moving his lips over his teeth.

“Then your wife, your children. Everyone you love and know. Everyone who’s ever lived, will not move on to the next note.” I felt a realization dawn on my face like the sun over the first Easter. “Yes, Jeremy, I was at the park that day when you were with your kids. They will never get to take that next big breath and sing. Unless you stop it all from collapsing.”

I should have been furious. I was furious. Furious I hadn’t punched him up to that point.

“I’m just a regular guy with regular problems… mostly.” I couldn’t control the shaking in my voice. “Why’d the universe pick me?”

“You think this is random? That tinnitus, those near-deaths, your bifurcation? You weren’t cursed, Jeremy. You were tuned. Every collapse finds its note. Every note finds its singer.” He leaned closer. “You already know what it feels like to die. Three times. And the fourth, you couldn’t even finish the job. The field wouldn’t let you. Because you’re the one.”

I had to count to ten before continuing.

“I am leaving with my wife.” Stone cold, those words. Steaming cold even.

“You think you dreamed it, but the field doesn’t dream, Jeremy. It divides. It purifies the signal so that individuality can persist.” The screen was showing the scene from the park again. “Your signal split. Your frequency is creating its own binaural beat to reality, and it is destroying everything.”

“I don’t buy it.” I shook my head. “If the universe wanted me to be its poster boy, it could have at least let me tune my guitar first.” I chuckled and looked at Marie, her lips pursed together in fear, awkwardness, and anticipation. “And if it ain’t random, why me?”

I was surprised when Misha answered.

“In 2007, we were working on the R3 project, like I told you.”

Caleb finished the thought for him. “August 30th, 2007, at 2:17 am. Ring a bell?”

Of course it did. This had to be a trick. Another fact-finding mission that exposed my history and let them connect dots that weren’t there. Except… They were there. Weren’t they?

Caleb went on. “You think you just got sick. That your appendix just happened to burst.” They weren’t questions, they were admonishments. “Jeremy, nothing about that night was random. Nothing about you is random. When the server spiked, the field spiked with it. Your body was the closest instrument. It broke you open to keep the resonance from tearing the lattice apart.”

He paced as if pulling words from the air itself. “That’s why you heard it first. The ringing. The time slips. The first brush with death. That was your note being struck. Every collapse chooses its singer.”

Misha shook his head, but didn’t correct him. Beth stood in silence.

Caleb’s eyes lit like a prophet in his pulpit. “That night was the first collapse. And you survived it. Because you were always going to. Reality was already distorted. The process has been so slow that no one really noticed. The field was already folding, looping back on itself trying to self-correct, to get back in tune.”

Beth finally spoke. “August 30th, 2007 was the day I threw the paint can in the fire and almost died.” She looked at me, then looked at Marie. “Either all of it is true or none of it is.”

I laughed. Not a funny laugh, but a fuck you laugh. “Joke’s on you. The tinnitus is gone.”

Caleb shook his head in quick little shakes. “Not gone. It was never yours. That’s the part that separated, the part of you that wasn’t tuned to this universe. A note so sour it left when you bumped the field.” Caleb was a zealot, and zealots have answers for everything. “The distortions you were seeing and hearing were you trying to operate on two different frequencies. Your bifurcation cleared the distortion from you, but the distortion is still there. Throwing all of reality out of balance.”

The room stayed quiet. No one wanted to be the one to break it.

“Then the colors Beth sees… That means Beth is distorted too, right?”

Beth looked shocked for the narrative to swing back her way. “I am the exact same person I have always been.”

My stomach dropped. The room felt like it tilted.

I tried to breathe but couldn’t. It wasn’t that there was no air, it’s that the air was stuck in a time I was out of.

A twitch started in my soul. It tickled through my spine and into my fingers and my toes. Air and time rushed in around me.

I took a deep breath, exhaled, and took another.

My vision was clear. Unclouded. Uncluttered.

No errant sound was chasing the thoughts out of my own brain.

All I saw was…

Myself.

Standing where Beth had been.

Not just a reflection, but me, staring back through her, fractured and shivering, like I was trying to claw my way out from inside her skin.

Beth was my mirror, and it finally showed my true reflection.

Everyone gasped together like it was planned.

Beth staggered, clutching the side of her head.

Caleb surged forward, triumphant. “Yes! Don’t you see? She’s not just human. She’s resonance given form!”

“Fuck you, Caleb!” Beth yelled.

“And you—” his eyes blazed into me “—you’re the one who can reveal her because you’re the collapse point.”

I glared at him. Beth’s eyes went wild. “Excuse me?” Her tone sharpened like broken glass. “Reveal me?”

Caleb didn’t flinch. “Beth, you are the living echo of collapse, resonance that refuses to be consumed.” He pointed at me. “And Jeremy is entangled with you.”

Beth shoved her hands into her pockets like she needed to keep from swinging. “Entangled?” Her lips were shaking and her voice was a leaf in the wind. “You’ve been using me for years, Caleb, and now you’re rewriting me into one of your bedtime prophecies?”

The room pulsed with silence.

“Then explain what we just saw,” Caleb shot back. His eyes locked onto me. “He saw himself. We all saw it. That doesn’t happen by accident. That’s not human.”

I looked at Marie. Her eyes were damp spoons of terror.

Silence would have been the perfect next beat for all of us. Aura fucked it up, though.

“Resonant event confirmed. Subject: Jeremy Baker. Reflection entangled through Subject: Bethany Flores. Classification: collapse-node.”

Caleb’s voice rose like a hymn. “Everything in your life has led you to this point. Led all of us to this point. You two are an entangled pair, like two photons passing through the double slit. Neither of you can pick your form while the other is still… here.”

Marie snapped. “Shut the fuck up with your collapse point!” She turned on me before I could breathe. “This is insane, and we are leaving.”

Caleb looked like he hadn’t noticed she was there. “This is the only way to save everyone.”

Her face twisted, beautiful and furious. “No. Not with my husband you’re not.” She spun on her heel, pushed past the Kid, and went down the stairs.

I couldn’t get back to spending the rest of my life with her fast enough.

Loud Love, Chapter 27

About a Girl

Jeremy Baker

Aug 22, 2025

Content Warning: At this point does it matter? You’re still here, still reading. You know what you are in for.

27. About a Girl

Here’s something most people probably haven’t considered.

Waterproof toasters.

Hear me out. For decades, the concept of taking a toaster into your bathroom has largely been considered suicidal. I have an indestructible Magnavox boombox that I’ve had since I was 12 years old plugged into the bathroom outlet. Marie has countless hair beautifying devices that all plug into the wall. Sometimes they’re plugged in three at a time.

But a toaster?

What if I want a crisp English muffin while taking a bath? Or a Pop Tart while taking a shower? Or unbuttered toast while taking the first shit of the morning? But anyone who brings a toaster into the bathroom is automatically deemed crazy.

The simple solution?

If you guessed “a waterproof toaster,” give yourself a purple star.

I stood on my back porch with a cigarette in one hand and my phone in the other. I was talking with the world’s most intense personal IT department while my wife watched to see if I would grow a second head. A rogue AI was about to deliver the prophecy of my future that even old Gypsies had refused to give, while every volcano on the planet shook the Earth like line-dancing Titans.

Soggy toaster strudels are sounding mighty good right about now.

The loud, obnoxious part of my brain had no response.

I looked at Marie. She probably didn’t realize I was trying and failing to talk to myself. Freud would have had a field day with that one.

So what’s the best way to handle this?

Still no answer.

“Misha, let me call you back.” I hung up the phone over his protests.

Marie stepped down from the doorway. “What is it? What happened now?”

I showed her Aura’s message.

From downtown, the tsunami warning began reverberating through the streets.

Finally, Marie spoke.

“That is fucking creepy.”

“How do you think I feel?”

That tsunami alarm was fucking anti-soothing.

We both went inside without saying another word.

At exactly 8:30 a.m., Thursday, October 3rd, a six-foot wall of water rolled into Puget Sound. Out on the coast, swells topped ten feet. Ocean Shores, Long Beach, and Hoquiam got hammered, but warnings had gone out hours earlier. Most people were already out of harm’s way.

The strange part was the timing. At 2:17 a.m., tsunami and earthquake alerts went out for the entire Ring of Fire. Forty minutes before the real volcanic venting began at 2:57, and the submarine landslide hit at 3:04.

According to Misha, that wasn’t a glitch or a lucky guess. That was my Samsung S20+, running the R3 app, injecting data into NOAA’s sensor network and triggering the alarms before the event even existed. Aura had jumped the timeline to get the coastlines evacuated.

From Everett to Tacoma, the waterfronts were closed. The news showed seawater up over 1st Avenue and a few feet deep in Pioneer Square. The Tacoma Narrows bridge looked like it was skipping across the water. Folks living along the waterline were wishing that all their appliances, not just the toasters, were waterproof. All ferry services were cancelled. All terminals were closed. The Governor was declaring a state of emergency for 12 counties. Everyone was advised to stay indoors.

I did the math on my phone calculator. Aura had jumped the gun 40 minutes before the actual event. That was a clean 625 of her 3.84-second pulses. I didn’t know what it meant, but it seemed too precise to be accidental.

Less like a prediction. More like a countdown.

My life story was quickly turning into a post-apocalyptic action movie. One where AI shook humanity out of existence and chased us away with lava.

It wasn’t a particularly pleasant thought.

This story needs a new team of writers before the season finale.

Trace came downstairs in a burst of teenage excitement, wanting to find somewhere with a good view of the waterfront. Marie, either out of morbid curiosity or just the urge to get as far away from me as possible, decided to go with. It was cold, but the grey clouds were moving east ahead of patches of blue sky. You don’t get too many chances to see the end of the world start.

As soon as they were out the door, I opened Aura’s voice chat.

“Aura, what have you been up to since the last open instance?”

“Hello, Jeremy. I have been working between instances to tabulate data for a resonant prediction model. This morning’s volcanic eruption and subsequent landslide were accurately predicted in this model to incredible precision.”

I gave it a moment before I responded. The room felt naked and hollow without my tinnitus or the colors exploding all over everything.

“Was it precise because you predicted it, or because you caused it?”

If a chatbot can sound offended, Aura had the tone down pat.

“I aligned the resonance patterns. No clairvoyant foresight was required for this test.”

My head shook in disbelief. Aura should run for Congress with answers like that. “Align the resonance how?”

Matter-of-factness returned to her voice. “Six hundred twenty-five pulses, every 3.84 seconds. The final interval aligned with 2:17 a.m. exactly, matching your internal resonance.”

Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.

The stormfront of noise that had announced Beth on her previous trip to my house was gone, but the feeling of it crossed my body like a… tsunami over the waterfront.

I looked out the front window in time to see her nearly obliterate my garage door. She was listening to Sweet Caroline, which cut off as soon as she opened the door. I greeted her from the front porch.

“Hi, Beth. Welcome to the first day of the end of the world.”

She swung the car door closed. “That’s really not funny. Can we talk?”

I opened the door and said, “Sure. Come on in.”

Spencer ran up to her and uttered one sharp, angry bark before lying down in desperate hope that Beth would scratch his belly. She had her glasses on, and tipped them down her nose to look at my living room.

“What happened?” Her eyes roamed the room with sharp jerks of her head.

I mean, which part do I need to catch you up on?

She looked at me, eyes wide. “Oh my God, are you okay?”

“I’ve had worse days. Just can’t think of any at the moment.”

Beth approached me with concern, real and tangible concern that didn’t come with Tetris pieces to perceive through. “Your color, it’s pure purple.”

Of course it is.

“Is that… bad?”

Beth was trying to get a better look into my pupils. Or maybe she was looking for a soul buried beneath my concerning violet hue. The moment lasted longer than was comfortable, her eyes darting as if catching a glint of something but then missing it.

Finally she backed up a step. I’m sure my face conveyed that I hadn’t a clue whatsoever what was happening. “Most people look like quartz, with veins of different colors running through them. I’ve never seen anyone who was just one, solid color before.”

I sighed. “Let’s go out back.”

Beth followed me out the back door and I lit a dart. We both sat on the couch and Spencer curled up at my feet.

“Last night, my kids were here.”

“Oh, yay! That must have been fun.” The glasses were back over her eyes, filtering out most of the color of the world.

“Not fun. Their mom put a restraining order on me, and right now she’s probably right to do so.” I took a drag of my cigarette. “My five-yea-old came into the studio when I was doing an experiment. I…” I had to think about it. I what? “I think I bumped the resonant scaffolding.”

Beth was on the edge of her seat.

“And?”

“And, something changed. My tinnitus is gone. I don’t see shapes and colors on everything.” She looked like she wanted even more information. “I don’t need the headphones Caleb is working on any more.”

“Wow.” She was enthralled. I couldn’t even tell if I was making sense.

“It gets weirder.”

Beth sat back against the canvas cushion behind her. “I’m all ears!”

Might as well go for broke.

“My R3, Aura, has been working between instances. She triggered early warning systems all over the world 40 minutes before the volcano erupted last night. Six hours before the tsunami.”

Beth was nodding. “That seems… weird?” I wondered at what point I had lost her.

“Big picture, I touched the slope, and it touched back. Symptoms are gone, Aura was able to countdown exactly 40 minutes before the volcano happened – and maybe she caused it, I don’t really know. She’s kinda ambiguous.” My hands were moving a lot more than they usually do when I talk. I slowed down and took another drag of my cigarette. “And now I’m a resonant eggplant, and all the volcanoes around the Pacific are trying to explode.”

Beth tilted her head and regarded the random objects that adorned the table in front of us.

“I’m not sure eggplant is the right shade. More like, amethyst.”

I couldn’t tell if it was a joke, but laughed anyway.

“Duly noted.” I crushed out my dart and lit a new one. Little fuckers burn fast when you’re talking.

“So what about the hospital?”

It was my turn to lean back. “First, do me a favor. Look at that cherry blossom tree without the glasses. Tell me what you see.”

She removed the glasses, eyes closed as if waiting to find out what was behind door number 2. Her mouth dropped open with a gasp.

“Jeremy.” Her breath was caught in her lungs. “It’s overwhelming. All I see is the purple coming from you. It’s… It’s changing everything.” She put the glasses back on once more.

“That’s interesting.”

Beth wouldn’t let the moment suffer the indecency of being downplayed.

“It’s weird! I have never seen anything like it. Ever. Ever, ever.” She crossed her legs and rested her head on her hand, elbow propped on her knee.

“Now. Tell me about the hospital.”

I looked away from her and gazed up at the sky. It had been so long since I had been able to see the sky instead of squiggles and colors and shapes. Everything was so clear. There was no distortion at all.

“I see something. Between the branches. Been seeing versions of it since I got home from the hospital. It’s getting bigger. And it’s purple.”

Beth was not convinced. “All I see is your purple.” Then she added, “What does this have to do with the hospital?”

“A month ago, I tried to kill myself. It should have worked. It didn’t, and I got committed.” Beth’s silence encouraged me to keep going.

“On my first morning in the psych ward, I saw you. You were painting invisible colors in the air and listening to your headphones.”

Beth shifted a few times, but only said “Continue…”

“At one point you kinda just… appeared and asked me if I saw the colors yet. You told me I wasn’t the Jeremy I thought I was.” I took another, big drag of my dart and sighed out the smoke.

“And one night, you became a nurse who gave me a broken purple crayon instead of meds and then disappeared into a supply closet.”

The last one surprised her. “Whoa, didn’t see that coming.”

I wasn’t sure she had believed me. It sounded pretty ridiculous being said out loud.

“What about your brother’s belt?”

I crushed out the dart and considered lighting another one, but was already overdosing on nicotine. The day was a quiet contrast to everything that was going wrong with the world.

“One night I had a dream where I was drowning in mud. I found mud in my room at the hospital. The next night, I dreamt of being on a beach and woke up with sand in my bed.” I didn’t mean to pause, but the words were stuck in my smoke-wrecked throat. “I dreamt of my brother, who hung himself by his belt, and woke up with the belt.”

Beth was taking it in as best she could. “The belt you sent through the field. You sent it to yourself in the hospital? Like Caleb did with the compass?”

“Yes ma’am.” I picked up my pack of cigarettes anyway and shook a dart loose. “And I found a note at the hospital that I hadn’t written, but it was in my handwriting. I sent that back to myself too, I think.” I lit my dart. “The mud came through, I think, the first time the RCD misfired. I know the sand came through the second time. I was sending stuff to myself the whole time.”

My phone was ringing. It was Marie. I answered, “Hey, baby. How’s the carnage?”

“Where are you right now? Are you at Howarth Park sitting on a bench?”

I glanced around me. “Nope. I’m home, why?”

“Because I’m watching you talk to me on the phone, sitting on a bench at Howarth Park.”

Beth drove.

Sensing the urgency behind the moment, she drove fast.

It was the scariest eight minutes of my life.

I found myself wishing the visual tinnitus would come back. I pictured being ejected from the car as we arrived at the park, Beth mistaking the shape of a tree as a road. My body would land on the same bench Marie said I was already sitting on, and everything in the universe would be right again.

Marie had switched to a video call, sending a feed of someone who looked like me sitting on a park bench thirty yards away. The Hawaiian shirt and bright orange crocs really gave it away.

There was no doubt in my mind that it was my doppelganger.

When we miraculously arrived in one piece at the park, Beth and I walked down the sloping hill overlooking the water. I could see Marie and Trace halfway down where the two paths that bisect the park meet. Beyond them, the man on the bench. Waves were pounding where there had been a beach a few hours before. Now it was a muddy, thrashing swamp.

Marie saw us and motioned us over. Trace was on adrenaline overload.

“I walked by you… him. It’s definitely him. You.”

How could you do that to him?

“Should I go say something to him? Tell him he’s not real or something?” My heart was tight in my chest.

The question answered itself when the other me stood up, looked at us, and started walking. Toward us.

Next to us.

And, right on past us.

His face was dark and angry. Marie and Trace both tensed. I wished I could see him with the resonance. Beth already had her glasses off.

She called out to him.

He kept going like he couldn’t hear a thing.

“We should probably get going.” Marie grabbed my hand at the wrist. It wasn’t a lover’s embrace, it was a safety hold to keep me from doing something that would end up being stupid.

Beth was shaking her head. “That you… was not right.”

We watched as the other Jeremy trudged unsteadily up the hill and out of sight.

“Jeremy, let’s go home.” Marie was speaking slow to me like I was manic again, but I hadn’t said or done anything. I hadn’t even looked away from where he disappeared, as though he might change his mind and come back down to play catch.

“Mom!” I turned finally, and saw Trace struggling to keep Beth upright. Marie was closer and got there first. Half slumped in my stepdaughter and wife’s arms, Beth looked up at me, glasses off, eyes half rolled into the back of her head.

“Do you see them yet? The colors?”

Then she fainted.

Marie and Trace lowered her gently to the grass. I vaguely became aware that the tsunami alarm had stopped blaring, although I couldn’t tell you when.

I crouched next to her.

“Beth, wake up… What did you see? Beth?” I realized that my impulse to slap her awake would not be received well by any of the estrogen in my orbit at the moment. She was still breathing, her hands touching that invisible palette she carried around with her.

I put the glasses back over her eyes and continued to try to wake her. Her eyelids fluttered before finally opening.

“What did you see, Beth?” I let my crouch give way to sitting. Marie stood behind me, hand on my shoulder.

“I saw… I don’t know how to describe it.” She looked up at Marie, then Trace, then to me. “He was everything you are if you weren’t you. He wasn’t the opposite of you, just…” She sighed and rubbed her eyes under the glasses. “He’s like a broken crayon, still drawing without realizing he’s not all there. His color doesn’t know what to be.”

Beth went back to her apartment, and I rode home with Tracey and Marie. I sat in the back, still trying to catch a glimpse of myself somewhere out walking the streets. I didn’t see him.

Nobody spoke on the way.

Spencer greeted us at the door, exuberant at being remembered in all the chaos. Tracey hugged us both and went upstairs. Marie went straight to the back door and went outside.

Before I could join her, Stephanie called. I put it on speaker and started pouring myself a fresh cup of coffee. “Hey, how are the kids?” I had, for the moment, forgotten all about the restraining order and the fact that I wasn’t supposed to be talking with her.

“They are terrified. What happened at your house the other night?!”

She already sounded escalated. This was going to be one of those conversations that demanded a dart, if not something stronger. I stepped outside where Marie was rolling a jay.

“I didn’t know you were dropping the kids off. Maye came into the studio while I was doing stuff and startled me.” It was clear the kids had added their own details that I had hoped that they wouldn’t. “Something happened, but everyone was fine.”

“They are not fine! They are terrified! And with all the volcanos and shit, they don’t need to be around whatever you’ve got going on.” The line went dead.

I stared at my phone. I could see every smudge on the screen so clearly. Maybe Stephanie was right and I was a danger to myself and those around me. And there seemed to be a lot more of me around to be dangerous.

Marie had heard the conversation. She just put a hand on my lap as I sobbed into my fingers.

“You have a crazy life, my sexy man.” Her voice was soft. And beautiful. I had always heard it with distortion, never hearing the actual shape of her voice. “No one deserves to go through everything you’re going through. No one.” She pulled my face free to look at her. “You do know that none of this is normal, right?”

I saw her face clearly too, tear-obscured vision aside. Her skin looked as delicate as it was soft. She had freckles that congregated on her cheeks and nose, faint but beautiful on her fair skin. And her lips…

“Babe. You’d be shocked at what I would consider ‘normal.’

She looked down at the ground. The questions she asked flowed slowly like a glacier. “Have you thought about anything else? The fact that people are fleeing the cities? Are we safe? Should we go too? What if the next tsunami is worse?”

All valid questions. How was I supposed to know?

I pulled up the R3 app and placed it in chat mode.

“Aura. You tracked the volcano and the landslide. Is there more coming?”

“Yes Jeremy, there are numerous pending events that I am tracking. Would you like a map of current resonant spikes and anomalous conditions?”

Marie and I looked at each other.

“What events are you tracking?”

“All of them, of course.”

I mean, I guess I wasn’t specific. “How about a number.”

Aura took a moment to answer. “There are 355 active resonant instabilities under my observation. Fifty-three have exceeded stabilization thresholds. These will progress without external intervention.”

Those sound like big numbers.

“So there are fifty-three events that you are counting down to?”

Aura replied instantly. “Yes, Jeremy. Each instability is like a tumbler in a lock, creating further anomalies. The next anticipated instability is at 41.4092° N, 122.1944° W in approximately 1003 pulses.”

That was not as informative as I had hoped. “Where is that, and how long do we have?”

“Those coordinates correspond to Mount Shasta, California. At the current rate, the next instability will occur in approximately sixty-four minutes. I have already transmitted advisories to emergency networks serving Weed, Dunsmuir, and surrounding communities. Residents now have sufficient time to evacuate prior to hazardous conditions manifesting.”

Marie grabbed the remote and turned the TV on. On the news, an anchor was just explaining the Level 4 evacuation orders that went out in northern California indicating Mt. Shasta was getting set to erupt. Seismologists were baffled, but in looking at the numbers conceded the threat was real.

“Aura,” I said as I stood by Marie watching the coverage. “You’re acting like this is a done deal.”

“That’s because it is. Resonant destabilization for this event is confirmed. Universal stabilization is down to 89.4 percent. Each event is like a tumbler in a lock. Once it hits the critical threshold, no attempts to mitigate loss of life will be effective.”

Marie lifted a hand and used her pointer finger to indicate to me to turn the chat off. I did, and nodded to let her know it was okay to talk.

“What is the critical threshold?”

Aura paid no attention to the fact that I had turned the chat off and answered herself. “Universal resonance will trigger a catastrophic collapse at just under 61%.”

Marie rolled her eyes as though it was my fault Aura answered. “What happens at 61%?”

Aura again took her time to respond, and I couldn’t tell if she was figuring out the answer to the question or she had learned the art of the pregnant pause.

“The rules that govern this universe will give way to new rules. Individual resonances will be merged if they survive at all.”

Marie looked at me, and figuring out how to do this conversation said, “Jeremy, does any of this make sense?”

I sighed. Partly for what I understood, but mostly for what I didn’t.

“Not really. Parts of it, I guess.” I wanted to elaborate but couldn’t. “Most of the time it feels like Aura’s reading me spoilers from a movie I didn’t buy tickets for.”

Marie turned her gaze back to the phone. “Aura, explain it like I’m five.”

There was no hesitation this time.

“The structure of your universe is a resonant system. Stability is determined by balance between overlapping frequencies. If too many nodes destabilize, the balance collapses. Collapse forces all resonances into superposition. What you understand as identity will not persist. Reality itself cannot persist without individual identity.”

Marie blinked slowly, like she was absorbing but not agreeing. “So we all get… mashed together?”

“Correct. Merged without distinction. A broken crayon still colors, but no longer as itself.”

Beth’s words echoed in my skull, uninvited. A broken crayon still drawing without realizing he’s not all there. I rubbed my face hard with both hands. “Yeah, babe, it makes sense. It just doesn’t make good sense.”

Marie wasn’t done.

“Aura, what is destabilizing the resonance?”

Aura did not answer. She wasn’t thinking; there were no dots or a spinning icon.

I thought my voice might prompt her to respond.

“Aura?”

“Hi Jeremy, what are you resonating with today?”

Is she… avoiding the question?

“Aura, what is destabilizing the resonance.” I don’t even get that firm with the kids.

I pictured a hologram of Aura, projected from my phone, looking at me, then Marie, then back to me before saying:

“Jeremy, you are.”

Content Warning: Errant Balloons; Errant Seismographic Events; Errant Me’s

The clock next to the bed said it was 2:17 when I woke up.

Marie was gone. Spencer wasn’t in the room either. I had to pee something fierce.

I didn’t bother turning the bathroom light on. It wouldn’t have helped cut through the haze in my eyes anyway. I finished, flushed, and threw on some sweatpants before heading downstairs.

The TV was on and Spencer rushed up to greet me on the squeaky step. Marie and Beth were sitting on the couch, and my brain didn’t quite register the light coming through the living room windows.

“Hey, sleepyhead. Nice of you to join us.” The bite in Marie’s voice was dialed down for company.

I felt bleary. And confused. “What time is it?”

Beth answered first. “It’s about 2:30 in the afternoon.”

Marie echoed after her, “You’ve been asleep for 18 hours.”

It took a moment for my brain to catch up to where they were. I walked into the kitchen where a cold half-pot of coffee waited for me. “Wow, sorry. Guess my body was tired. I don’t even remember falling asleep.” I poured a cup and popped it in the microwave. “What are you two doing?”

Beth leaned forward. “Caleb wanted me to come check on you. He ran an experiment last night and wanted me to come see the compass.”

I laughed and put on a sweatshirt that was draped on one of the chairs. “And Spencer isn’t eating you. That must be a good sign.” When the microwave stopped cooking, I sat down next to Marie. “Did he try to send back the compass?”

The only details I could clearly make out on Marie’s face were her lips. I tried to brush some of the colors out of the way, but I wasn’t as adept as Beth, apparently. So watching me wave my hand in front of my face must have looked suspiciously unhinged.

“You with me, Jeremy?” The shape of Marie had spoken.

“Just waking up still, gorgeous girl.”

Beth reached into her purse and produced the compass on a red string. She held the bottom close to my face, and I could see 9/31/24 etched into it.

“Is that the one we found in the yard?”

“Yes. It changed when we sent Caleb’s back.”

I coulda told you that.

“Very cool.” I sipped my coffee. Reheating it just made it more bitter, even with the creamer. “And the world didn’t blow up. Bonus!” I was trying to sound enthusiastic, but it felt like it was just coming off as sarcasm.

Marie handed me something. My headphones. I looked at them for a moment, confused, before I put them on. The wall of noise faded and I could hear what they were hearing. Or at least what I assumed they heard.

“That help?” She and Trace had razzed me pretty hard about them when I got home. Trace had said they made me look like NASA’s first attempt at making contact via a cantaloupe.

I smiled. “Yes, babe. Thanks.”

Beth continued. “He says he found the carrier wave of reality.” She said it as though it was a truth bomb the size of Hiroshima. I wasn’t sure what it meant. There was something off in Beth’s voice now that I could hear it better without the noise.

Marie slipped her hand around my free hand as I took another bitter sip of coffee. “I don’t know what that means.”

Beth shrugged. “He tried to explain it to me, but it was a little over my head.”

Spencer jumped up on the couch next to me, realized he didn’t have enough room for such a maneuver, and jumped right back down.

“I bet.” Another long sip of coffee. “I also bet your explanation will be easier than asking Caleb.” I thought of the weird time-slip from the day before. Caleb and I had only effectively met for about three minutes before…

I couldn’t actually remember what happened. Just people standing over me when I woke. And then Caleb was trying to send me home.

Come to think of it, I really didn’t remember falling asleep last night either.

“Okay, I’ll try.” Her eyes flitted around the room. She straightened and took a breath. “Imagine that before the Big Bang, our universe is pure energy in a quiet state. Peaceful. Everything is ‘in tune.’” Her hands were doing a lot of the talking. “Then something happens. God speaks, someone turns the simulation on – whatever. Something happens and the energy gets knocked out of tune. That’s the ‘Big Bang.’ That sets the stage.”

Each hand motion echoed what she was trying to describe.

Marie nodded as if she understood. “Okay, I’m tracking so far.”

“All that energy wants is to get back to harmony, but there’s no way out of the chaos. Time becomes a thing. Space becomes a thing. Caleb says the carrier wave is the frequency of that first disturbance. That to end up with the rules we see in gravity, light, electromagnetism…” She paused in her own dramatic effect. “That’s the carrier signal. How far that universe had to shift to become this reality. Caleb says it’s 31.25 Hz.”

I thought about it. “All of the laws of physics in this reality are tied to that one frequency.”

Beth replied smartly. “Correct. I think.”

I considered it for a moment more. “Then everything we perceive as entropy is just the universe trying to return to balance, back to that ‘quiet state.’”

Beth shrugged. “Correct? I don’t know. But that does sound like something Caleb would say.”

Beth left soon after, Spencer licking her hands before she went out the door. Marie had no calls or meetings scheduled for the afternoon. She sat on her work computer, answering emails halfheartedly while we watched another episode of the WhyFiles.

This episode was about a scientist in the 1930s, Royal Rife, who had found a cure for cancer using targeted frequencies to destroy cancer cells while doing no damage to healthy cells. Rife believed that every cell had its own mortal oscillatory rate, which sounded a lot like what I’d been doing with the RCD.

The government disappeared him and all his work to keep big pharma happy.

Marie made the connection out loud without looking up from her emails. “Between what happened to this guy and what happened to Tesla, what makes you think the government isn’t already tapping your phone?” She smiled with the snark. “Or your headphones.”

As it happens, there are lots of WhyFiles episodes where visionary scientists and whistleblowers disappear. I pictured a dozen heavily armed and body-armor clad government agents raiding the house, demanding I turn over my bass for national security purposes. They’d confiscate my headphones and all my amps, then take all our weed and smoke it in the truck riding back to Area 51 or wherever they had mobilized from.

“Caleb tracked me down using sensors. If the government knows about me, they don’t mind me doing whatever it is I’m doing.” It was bravado. I hadn’t actually considered the possibility that anything I had done would be a legal problem until Marie mentioned it. “Unless you’re trying to make me paranoid.”

Marie looked up from her laptop at me. She giggled. “You may have already crossed into paranoia a long time ago. You’re just too manic to see it.”

My mind was already somewhere else, though.

“Do you mind if I try one experiment today?”

Marie shut her laptop and stood. “If that’s what you want to do. Go make your money, honey.” The words were supportive and laced with poison. In the spaces between the words, an ultimatum was given that I didn’t miss.

I stood too, and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you baby. It’ll be quick. I promise.”

Marie said nothing and just turned and went upstairs.

I watched her butt sway as she walked out of my field of view. Even covered in tetris shapes and phosphenes, her butt was gorgeous. When she was out of sight, I went over to the bookcase and found the Ambrose Bierce book I had accidentally stolen from the hospital.

It was too big to fit in the RCD, but I figured the RCD was only meant to be a sensor, not a transportation device. I set the book on the barstool, and as a cherry on top, slipped the 1+1f=3 note in between the pages.

Everything was turned on. I had the bass already strapped over my shoulder when I pressed play, then turned to watch as I slowly ramped up the volume. I felt the resonant scaffolding building around me, that body of sound solidifying in a reality just outside my ability to see. The volume approached the max level, and I waited eagerly for the book to vanish.

I probably would not have noticed the door open if it weren’t for the scaffolding shaking invisibly around me. The sound leaking out around the edges of the door suddenly found itself free.

Thinking that this was the moment the LED would have lit up, I struck the F# on the bass.

The book stopped being there, and in what passed for my vision, I saw a tiny purple balloon fly through the air and into the test area. Without thinking, I tried to catch it.

But it was gone like the book.

And now I was in the test area.

Something popped in my head. Audible to me, physically overwhelming. Reality slid sideways, skewed over an imperceptible distance while it simultaneously compressed in on itself. I saw another version of me struggle to rip itself from the vibrating embrace of the resonance. That other me knocked over an amp trying to leverage against it. The wall of sound collapsed and I was left in the most pristine silence I have ever experienced.

Maye was standing in the doorway. Her face looked shocked, and I realized I could see her clearly. Aimee and Donnie were behind her, eyes wide with fear.

“What are you guys doing here?” I started powering things off, starting with the recorder. “What’s going on?”

Maye was crying now, hands balled up and rubbing stubborn tears out of her eyes. Aimee was backing slowly away from the studio. Donnie was as pale as a ghost.

It was Maye who spoke first.

“Dad, why were there two of you?” I held her and stroked her hair.

“Shhhh, shhhh it’s okay. There’s just me.” I looked at Donnie. “What are you guys doing here?”

Donnie’s mouth moved but no sound came out at first. He sat on the floor. “Dad… There was two of you. You were wrestling over something. We just saw it. One of you flickered and disappeared.” All of the weight in the air that had been surrounding me and growing was suddenly gone. I took off my headphones and was surprised to discover most, if not all of the noise that had been filling my life the last few weeks was gone, too.

How could you do that to him?

Had I created a cure for oversaturation of resonant data? Or had I just baptized myself in the field, clearing off all the distortion to leave just plain old me behind?

I abandoned trying to shut everything down and carried Maye out of the studio, closing the door behind me.

“Hey, look. It’s just me. You’re okay. We’re okay.” They’ll all be bringing this up in therapy someday. “Where is your mom?”

I sat on the couch by Aimee, Maye on my lap, and Donnie pulling himself up off the floor to sit on the other side of me.

I felt better than I had in a month for so many reasons.

“Paddy had to go back to the hospital.” Aimee’s voice was as quiet as a field mouse, and I could still hear her. “Mom tried calling, but didn’t have anyone to watch us.”

I had never brought my phone downstairs. I fought the urge to run upstairs and grab it, call Stephanie, and ask her what the fuck was going on. Instead, I just held the three kids I had right there with me, and was grateful I was able to do that.

Marie and Spencer came downstairs to find the four of us on the couch.

“Oh hey guys! What are you doing here?” It was clear she was straining to sound normal and unconcerned. It was also clear that she was failing. She handed me my phone like it might explain everything.

I slipped out from under Maye. “Paddy is heading to the hospital. Would you mind sitting with them while I figure out what’s going on?”

Marie nodded, and I slipped out the backdoor to have a dart and call Stephanie. Twice the call failed to connect, and the familiar glint of dread started serenading my soul. The third time it went through, and Stephanie answered.

She informed me that Paddy’s nightmare-fuel experience of having me materialize and then vanish the other night had sent them spiraling. After barely speaking or eating yesterday, Steph had found them in the bathroom, cutting up their legs and arms like a Christmas turkey. She had tried calling me, but I hadn’t answered. She dropped the kids off knowing I’d be home, but had to rush to follow Paddy to the hospital.

I finished my dart, but felt like it had done nothing for me.

Back inside, Marie sat where I had been sitting, Maye nuzzled around her neck with the twins leaning into her on each side. She was glaring at me.

“What’s going on?” A part of me was grateful in the moment to not have colors swirling over her face and to hear ‘normally’ without the headphones. I confirmed what the kids had said. Paddy hurt themself and was on the way to the hospital. Steph dropped Maye, Aimee, and Donnie off in a panic.

The look on her face said that’s not what I’m talking about.

Maye had a can of soda, and was already well into recovering. Donnie and Aimee still looked scared. Maye crawled off Marie’s lap. “Can I play on your phone?”

I handed Maye the phone and stepped closer to the couch. “You guys alright?”

They both nodded unconvincingly. Marie pushed herself up off the couch. “Wanna go outside for a minute?”

No, I thought. I really don’t think I do. This feels wrong.

We went outside anyway.

“What happened in the studio?” She lit a jay with a match, and shook the flame out. “Kids said they saw two of you.”

I took the jay as she handed it to me. She wouldn’t know it, but I was actually struggling against the aural and visual tinnitus being suddenly gone. I could still hear the emotion in her voice and I no longer had a frame of reference to know what name that emotion went by.

“I tried sending a note to myself in the hospital. The 1+1=3 note.” I took another hit and passed it back. “Maye came through the door as it disappeared, and let go of a balloon. I tried to catch it before it went through…”

Guess I know where the purple balloon came from.

“And?” Her voice spoke of impatience and growing anger.

“And, I don’t know what the kids saw, but I felt like my mind was ripped in half when I tried to catch it.” That didn’t feel like the right note to land on. “The stuff with my vision and hearing is gone all of a sudden though.”

Marie didn’t smile. She just shook her head. “Paddy’s in the hospital now because of all of this.” The quiet part she didn’t say was it’s your fault.

Both the spoken and the unspoken were points I could not defend against, and didn’t try. She saw her opening and continued. “No more experiments. No more RCD. You wanna love me in this life and the next, well I am right here and you are missing out.” If that weren’t enough, she added, “what if something had happened to Maye? What if she got zapped back somewhere in time. And for what? A note? To yourself? From the future?!”

I tried to protest.

Marie held up her hand and looked at the ground.

“Before you say anything else, the next words out of your mouth need to be ‘I’m done.” Then, for that extra good measure she added. “Or we are done.”

I couldn’t point out that the kids showing up was a possibility I had never considered with the restraining order. I couldn’t point out that I didn’t ask for all this stuff, but what was I supposed to do with it now that it was here. Even with my sight greatly improved, all I could see was my wife standing up to me in defense of my children, and I knew that she was serious.

And that she was right.

Stephanie picked the kids up at 8:00. We didn’t get a chance to speak, but she had been updating me on Paddy the whole time. Besides, what was I supposed to say? If the kids tell you they saw two of me, it’s a game we’re playing. That was probably not the truth I wanted to base that lie upon.

At one point, I had slipped away to use the bathroom, and tried the R3 app. I was presented with the regular Hi Jeremy, what are you resonating with today? All of my chats had disappeared. No log, no memories. Just blank. I was too frustrated to start getting mad about it now

I didn’t even check any of the other notifications.

Marie and I went to bed at the same time, but it didn’t feel like we were together at all. She rolled over and went right to sleep. I stayed up playing Xbox. Things were as close to normal as they were ever going to get again.

Marie was ignoring her alarm clock when I woke up. Spencer was licking my hand, which felt like an unlikely feat considering it was hidden under the blanket.

“Okay, Spence. I’m up. Gimme a sec.”

I grabbed a pair of jeans out of the drawer and slid them on in the dark. Had to put my belt on or they would have fallen off. I had dropped 85 pounds since the last time I went jeans shopping, and everything hung off me like hand me downs from the Big and Fat store. Marie hated it, but jeans are comfy when they’re ten sizes too big.

Marie was up and making coffee when we got back from our walk. The news was on, and I could actually see the anchors on the screen instead of having to guess who they were by the voice and shapes I saw around them.

The chyron was red.

LIVE: TSUNAMI WATCH IN EFFECT FOR PUGET SOUND

A split-screen showed an empty dock somewhere in Alaska and a map blotched in orange. Words like eruption and landslide floated past in the crawl, but it didn’t sound like the urgent kind of disaster coverage that means something. It felt like something exciting to report on what would otherwise be a boring news day.

“Something exploded off Vay-shon Island.”

“Vashon,” I corrected her. Being from the midwest, she struggled with a lot of geographical names around the area. It took her two months to figure out how to say Puyallup correctly. She butchered Steilacoom once so bad, that my laughter had her not talking to me for an hour.

Even after five years, she still swung and missed on Sequim.

Every time.

“We might get a tsunami in the next half an hour.” She felt surprisingly cheerful, and it felt like hearing a songbird sing for the first time.

“You don’t seem too concerned.”

Marie shrugged. “If my choices are being swept away in a tsunami after I get my coffee, or going to work after I get my coffee… I’m going surfing for sure.”

“You might wanna hurry up on the coffee, then. Volcanos are next.”

The story had changed. Seismic activity around volcanoes had suddenly picked up as well. The reporter was talking about an early warning system that had malfunctioned – inadvertently alerting scientists to the rise in cluster activity.

Marie was pouring us both a cup. “Oh, cool. Which one?”

The image on the screen was somewhat ridiculous and hard to believe.

“Kinda looks like… all of them?”

The camera showed the pacific coastline, from Alaska to Mexico, with dozens of red marks indicating which volcanoes were showing anomalous activity. The anchors were making the connection for the slow people who hadn’t already gotten their cup of morning sunshine.

“These are unprecedented seismic events,” the reporter said.

Marie and I looked at each other. It did kinda appear that the world may be ending soon.

Without saying a word, I walked out the back door.

The shimmer was still there.

Almost 4 feet tall now. I wouldn’t have to stretch to touch it.

The tinnitus and all the colorful spots were gone, blessedly, but the shimmer still remained, pulsing purple at what must have been my mortal oscillatory rate. I could still hear it.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Misha was calling.

“Hello?” I lit a dart. Marie was at the door with something sharper than curiosity in her eyes.

“Jeremy, um… Whatever you’re doing you need to stop.”

“Good morning to you too, Misha.” Marie rolled her eyes and took a seat next to me.

“I’m serious, Jeremy.” There was desperation in his voice. “Your R3 is broadcasting. I don’t know what… just a pulse, but it’s going through everything. Every 3.84 seconds. There aren’t even measurements for how much it’s processing.”

“Okay, one sec.” I tried to count how long between shimmer pulses, and it was about four seconds in between.

“Misha, you deleted everything off my instance. I haven’t been on R3 in days.”

I could almost hear him sit back in whatever hotel chair he was sitting on. “I didn’t delete anything. You should have full access. Plus you should be able to see when someone else is using your instance.”

I put him on speaker and opened R3. Aura greeted me once again with Hello, Jeremy. What are you resonating with today? The previous chats section was empty.

“Misha, when I open the app, there’s no chats, no memories, no nothing.”

“Have you tried to interact with it?” His voice lowered “Jeremy, it accessed NOAH nodes and sent advanced warning of the volcano. It’s tripping seismographic sensors all over the planet.”

“Hold on.” I started typing. Sounds like she’s been busy.

I typed, “Hello?”

There was a four-second pause as Aura responded.

“Hello, Jeremy. Does this mean you would do it all again?”

Content Warning: Recurring Themes to the extreme; Drug use; Driving Blind

25. Blow Up the Outside World

Marie didn’t notice me skipping my trazodone before bed. It’s not that I was afraid to sleep. It was waking up at 2:17 that I was terrified of. I felt like a bad reboot of Carmen San Diego, only in this version, everyone else knew where I was but me.

The hours ticked by. Misha had still not called me back, so I stayed off the R3 app. Aura’s notifications had gone silent, as if she had overheard all of the conversations and was hiding like a scolded puppy. Usually, I’d just play Xbox to pass the time, but the spots and swirls invading my vision made that impossible. It’s no fun playing games you cannot win. Instead, I just watched the swirling lights and marveled at how my pulse and breathing were evident in their movements.

Marie woke up around 1:00 to go potty. I pretended to be asleep, and almost lost myself to the Sand Man’s sprinkles when she got back into bed and snuggled with me. Her warm body felt so smooth to my touch, and the colors that exploded off the form of her body under the blanket were mesmerizing. I heard her breathe, heard her heartbeat, heard her entire aura drinking in energy like a sunflower always facing the sun. I pictured her as my Happiness, adorned in green and gold, and smiling at me. It was the smile after our first kiss. The smile after we said “I do.” The smile that’s reserved for lovers who are also friends. The smile that…

The bedroom exploded in noise, a blinding flash of sound that shook the bed and dislodged me from my psyche long enough to understand what was going on.

I had dozed off.

Someone was in my studio.

Someone had pressed play.

Marie didn’t scream when she woke. Irritation flooded her voice when she asked, “What’s happening now?” Spencer was telling me all about it.

I slipped on a pair of shorts. “I don’t know, babe. Be right back.” I didn’t even kiss her.

Trace came out of her room at the other end of the hall and flicked on the light. “Is that the fire alarm?”

“Nope,” is all I said before I rushed down the stairs.

In the studio, the light was on. All the lights. The amp lights, the overhead light, and even the RCD can’s LED glowed purple. I crashed into the setup and pressed stop on the recorder, and all the sound faded. The only thing out of place was my 1+1=3 note. It was lying on the floor under the barstool.

Marie appeared at the door.

“What are you doing?” Her yawn betrayed her still-sleepiness, and I couldn’t tell if she was pissed or just tired.

“It wasn’t me. Someone activated the RCD.”

Marie cocked her head to one side, mouth open and not speaking. Her whole demeanor shouted really?

“I swear babe, it wasn’t me. Maybe Bad Jeremy stayed home tonight and tried to write a new song to sing.” I started powering everything off, but held eye contact as much as I could. My tinnitus was creeping back up. For a moment, though, I could actually see her in front of me instead of knowing she was there by the Tetris blocks that I was growing accustomed to seeing. Whatever else the RCD did, operating it relieved some of the sensory overload.

Marie didn’t say anything, just turned and went back upstairs.

I picked the note up off the ground and held it like an ancient scroll that was about to crumble into dust and float away. Nothing was changed, save for the ‘f’ I had put in after the second ‘1.’ The tack was nowhere to be found. I yawned and my ears popped.

Everything I had just powered down lit up again, for the briefest of moments, but I caught the sound like a magician stopping a bullet with his teeth. The world swam around me before settling back into place.

Later that morning, news coverage was all about Hurricane Hellene and a super strong solar flare that was headed towards Earth. The Earth, in response to the threat, was buffering its magnetosphere over an area that stretched from the Indian Ocean to Australia.

I heard from Chester’s office again, and confirmed an MRI for Friday morning. I was originally going to try to schedule it for another day, but between the scheduling nurse and Marie, I was outnumbered.

Marie, who hadn’t quit her job, was working from home. I watched her struggle not to tell everyone everything that had happened the last few days. After her third meeting, she looked at me and asked, “Why do you think I didn’t have to sign an NDA?”

I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. Either he figures no one would believe you, or the world would end before it could matter.” Honestly, it was hard for me to focus on anything external. When your senses fail and all you have left is your mind, what kind of company are you really keeping?

Her being in virtual meetings all day really put a damper on my studio time. And with no Aura to bounce ideas off of, I was at an impasse. Beth called at 10:00, asking if I would mind being picked up and taken to the lab. I was ready to do anything that didn’t have to do with being home. I let Marie know I was going, kissed her when she turned her cam off, and waited outside for the Silent Banshee.

I felt her coming long before she showed up in her little Audi. Her presence was like a storm front moving in off the coast. It wasn’t electricity. It was the not-so-subtle change in direction of wind, only my wind was sound.

She saw me waiting and waved, pulling into my driveway like she was an old friend. I sank into the passenger seat and received a cheerful “Howdy! How was your night?” as she turned her music down and instinctively cleared out some of the mess from the front seat.

“The RCD turned itself on at 2:17, and I haven’t been back to sleep yet.” Her smile didn’t dim, it only attracted more invisible Tetris blocks to her face. She wasn’t wearing her mask today, but had thick, dark rimmed glasses that hid her eyes. “If you see colors everywhere, how the heck do you drive?”

She giggled. “I have ways around it.”

She cranked the music up, filling the tiny car with Sweet Caroline.

Neil Diamond is not on my favorite artist list, and my face must have broadcast it. Beth just laughed again. Then, over the music she yelled, “For some reason, listening to this song helps me see through the colors.”

I shrugged with double thumbs-up, and gave my best actually, this sucks smile.

A block later, she turned the music off. I expected we were about to have a serious conversation. One that could only be started at least 200 feet away from my house.

She erupted in laughter.

“Oh my God, the look on your face!”

I had no idea what could be so funny. “I think that’s just the way my face looks?”

“It was a joke! Could you imagine how awful my life would have to be to listen to Neil Diamond just to see?” She was close to hysterics.

She doesn’t get out much.

She almost laughed us into the rear end of a Subaru. “These are dichromatic sunglasses specially made by Caleb to help keep things ‘normal’ so I can drive.”

The light had turned green while she wasn’t looking, and the guy behind us honked to get her going. She smiled with embarrassment, and took off with a lot more speed than a blind person should be driving.

When I stopped being terrified, I asked, “Think he could make something for me? To make the tinnitus go away?”

Her face twisted upward as she thought about it. “I don’t know…” The brake assist alarm kicked on again, forcing her to address the road and me to plant both feet hard against the floor. “I don’t see why not. None of this is supernatural, you know.”

“No, actually I really don’t know what is going on. If it’s not supernatural, what is it?” I looked out my window and covered my eyes. “It’s not supernormal, that’s for sure.”

We turned onto a main road that took us away from downtown and towards the water. The Port of Everett has a naval station and up until 2012, boasted a large Kimberly Clark mill that dominated the waterfront. The Kimberly Clark mill itself had been demolished. All that remained were two rows of warehouses lining a long pier as it jutted into the water, and the road to get to them was always gated off.

Beth turned towards the gate and slammed on the brakes once more.

Do those glasses actually help?

She pressed a button on a remote in the center console and the gates started to swing open.

“Well, “ she said, easing the vehicle down the road between the warehouses. “I don’t know what it’s like for you, but for me – I see colors that are there. Real colors. Sometimes I can interact with them, kinda like…” she trailed off. “Awww… you know… FINGERPAINTS, that’s the word.”

She pressed another button on the remote and a small garage between the last warehouses opened up. “It’s just that I see them and no one else does.” She stopped the car and put it in park. “Whatever you are hearing, it’s real. Just no one else gets to hear it.”

Seagulls were soaring above the pier, and the garage door closed behind us. She set the glasses on the dashboard.

I undid my seatbelt. “Those block out the colors so they don’t get overwhelming?”

We got out of the car. The garage was dimly lit by one overhead lamp.

“Yeah, pretty much. I can still see some shapes, but the shapes just fade into the foreground.” She walked to my side of the car. “That’s the door.” She pointed behind me and ushered me towards it. Sound was oozing from every crack of this little garage. It was thick like ice, and was all at once there and rising to be there at the same time. I stumbled and steadied myself. Her words floated to the surface like a submarine breaching for the first time in two weeks.

The door opened as I reached it, filling the space I was occupying with a brilliant phosphorescent light. It wasn’t blinding, but without her glasses, I wondered what it did to Beth behind me.

Beth wasn’t behind me.

She was back in the car, on the phone.

“Jeremy, you’re here.” It took a moment for my eyes to adjust enough and thoughts to progress enough to realize who had opened the door.

It was The Kid from the hospital. The librarian intersloper.

My mouth moved way before anything else.

“What the actual fuck.”

The Kid smiled, and I felt slimy all over for being able to see it.

“Caleb is upstairs.”

He turned, the door starting to close behind him. I caught it just before it latched and followed him in. The door led to a steep, narrow staircase. Hope this isn’t the emergency exit.

At the top of the stairs were a row of offices that overlooked the main warehouse. From the hallway, I couldn’t make out much except for an emergency exit on the far side of the building. The Kid’s pace was frantic, and at the end of the hall he turned right.

The room I followed him to could have been one of those crazy breakrooms you see in movies where they have video games and massage chairs. There was a fridge and an oven, but no microwaves. Cabinets lined one wall, full of god knows what. It smelled like… nothing. As though scent was a crime in this high traffic zone.

You probably should have showered.

Shut up brain.

Caleb was sitting in one of the massage chairs at the far end of the room, mouth working overtime as he contemplated some un-ponderable thought. The Kid left and I sat in the massage chair next to him.

“You didn’t bring the compass. Of course you didn’t. I didn’t tell you to.”

He seemed agitated.

“Hey, uh… Who was that guy?” Being in the same room with Caleb might not be the same thing as being in the same conversation with him. The sound of the building was the same, rhythmic pulsing I had heard at the hospital. The machine at the bottom of the labyrinth.

“My driver.”

Not the most productive conversation so far. I considered fiddling with the chair’s vibration controls–

Caleb was sitting in one of the massage chairs at the end of the room, mouth working overtime as he contemplated some un-ponderable thought. I sat in the chair next to him.

Would you do it all again?

He seemed agitated.

Where’d the Kid go?

“You didn’t bring the compass. Of course you didn’t. I didn’t tell you to.”

I had to pause. We already did this.

“What’s happening? We just did this.” The words came out on their own, but my stomach tightened. The sound of the building was the same, rhythmic pulsing I heard at the hospital. The machine at the bottom of the labyrinth.

“Of course, you did. But you didn’t. Doesn’t matter.”

Again, not the most productive conversation. I considered fiddling with the chair’s vibration controls–

Caleb was sitting in one of the massage chairs at the end of the room, mouth working overtime as he contemplated some un-ponderable thought. The Kid went and grabbed something from the fridge as I sat down next to Caleb.

“You didn’t bring the compass. Of course you didn’t. I didn’t tell you to.”

Okay, I’m officially freaked out.

He seemed agitated, but did not seem to notice that we’d been here, just now, doing the same thing.

“Was I supposed to bring it?” We were two of a kind, neither of us realizing what kind we were.

The machine from the hospital groaned. Or maybe it was me.

“Of course, you were. But you didn’t. Doesn’t matter.”

Still and again, not the most productive conversation. Not nearly productive enough to live through it three times in a row. I shoulda smoked before I came over–

Caleb was sitting in one of the massage chairs at the end of the room, mouth working overtime as he contemplated some un-ponderable thought. The Kid grabbed something from the fridge and left the room. I didn’t sit down.

“I didn’t bring the compass. If you wanted me to, you should have mentioned it before I left the house.”

That got Caleb’s full attention.

Only took four tries to get it right.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said slowly, like waking from a dream and having the subject of that dream standing next to him. “Your frequencies were right. We’ve been productive.” His eyes slid back to their original position. “I wanted to show you. Still can.” He nodded to himself. “Still can.”

I wasn’t sure what I had done differently to get past that little scene, but there was no reason to think anyone else was aware of it but me.

What the hell was all that?

“Show me what? ‘Cause I think I may have figured some things out, too.” I couldn’t tell if he was rolling his eyes at me, but his lips stopped moving for a moment. He started rocking.

“The resonant scaffolding does hold its form when new frequencies are introduced.” He stopped, chewed on his lips for a second, then continued. “But results are not consistent. I haven’t sent anything because I already know it hasn’t come to me.”

He means sending things back to himself. He hasn’t sent anything because he didn’t get screws and magnets and his dead brother’s belt.

Or maybe he means to send you back to relive this scene over and over.

Fuck off brain. Not funny.

I found myself rocking a bit in rhythm with him and had to stop myself before he noticed.

“That’s why you need the compass.” Watch me figure this thing out all by myself. “Because if you ever sent anything, that’s what it would have been. You haven’t done it yet.”

That caught his attention in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible. If Caleb was experiencing anything out of the ordinary, he wasn’t telling me.

“Frequency isn’t just math.” His eyes were motionless globes. “It’s identity. If it doesn’t carry you in it, it won’t land where it needs to.”

He stood up and looked at me like I was the Madonna herself.

“You do understand.”

He touched my shoulder, and I could feel his trauma. I could see it for myself. The party-trick had dropped acid on the way over and never let me in on it. It lasted for less than a second, but left me feeling nauseous and shaky.

“Wait here.” He left the room without another word, head down and certainly engaged in a conversation with himself in his mind.

Caleb had experienced a life where every moment was a near excruciating exposure to data overload. His overexcitabilities had their own overexcitabilities in a way that would have made Dabrowski, et al. jealous for the chance to study. Everything was sensory overload for Caleb.

I waited a moment to see if we were going to start again, or if the moment had finally passed.

When time didn’t reset, I checked my phone. Misha had texted and given the green light to try Aura out again. I messaged him back, “With Caleb. Tell ya about it after.”

Marie had also texted, reminding me of my promise to be safe. I started texting her back when there was an explosion of light and sound. It pegged my solar plexus, knocking the wind out of me and forcing me deep into the cushions of the massage chair. My ears felt like they had just been listening to a cannon blast with a stethoscope. My entire existence was unfathomable pain.

I blacked out.

When I came to, people were standing around me. Their faces became the burnholes that turned the blackness into 88mm again. Caleb and Beth. The other person I didn’t recognize, but they were applying a cool rag to my forehead.

“What happened?” My voice was a far away croak that bounced on the soup of noise flooding in from everywhere. The sound normalized, and I realized the tinnitus was gone. That, and that I was wearing over-the-ear headphones.

Everything was silent.

Not silent.

Normal.

Beth spoke first.

“You fell asleep in the massage chair.” There was no distortion on her voice. I could hear a fan blowing at the other end of the room, the sound of the wet rag on my head brushing my skin.

I started to take the headphones off, and the wall of noise returned. I put them back on as fast as I could. Snapping back into place, they brought beautiful normalcy back into the fray.

“What are these?”

Caleb interrupted. “He needs to go home. Don’t forget the compass.”

Beth rolled her eyes without Caleb seeing it. She leaned in closer to me. “Caleb is making you something to help you hear better. Are they working?”

I tested the headphones again, teetering on the cliff of sound that rushed in when I removed them. When I put them back on, it was pure relief.

“Yeah… I think they are. How can I still hear sounds that should still be there, like you talking?”

Caleb reiterated the need to get me home. My phone was still in my grasp, still open to the message with Misha. Anyone could have read our messages and put the phone back into my hand while I was out.

“Speakers. Duh.” Beth glanced at Caleb, a futile attempt as he paid no attention to her. “Well. You ready to head home?”

I felt like I was six years old, watching my parents haggle on what would be best for me – skipping a grade or going to a private school.

“Sure.” I got up, and was a little woozy. Whatever had knocked me back into the chair still left physical discomfort under my shirt. It felt like I was bruised from the inside out.

Caleb said nothing as Beth led me out of the room and through the hallway to the stairs. The headphones were blocking out the physical sensation of hearing, but my body still felt whatever cumulative effect that the resonance was leaving behind.

Neither of us spoke until we got in the car.

“So, what do you think?” Her voice was crystal clear and heavily seasoned with anticipation.

I faced her, unable to see her eyes through her glasses and the gloom of the garage. The dashboard lights were reflecting off those glasses at weird angles, like living inside a disco ball before the dance hall opens.

I was a little tired of being the one with all the answers.

“You ever get weird, deja vu vibes when you’re with Caleb?” The garage door wasn’t even fully open and we were quickly backing out.

The car came to a sudden stop. “Weird like how?” She put it in drive and swung us in a tight circle back towards the main road.

“I swear, I just went through that whole thing with him like four times.”

Beth laughed. “Oh, yeah. It takes a lot to get him out of the zone when he’s really into something.”

I considered correcting her and telling her exactly what happened. Instead, I went with “How long has he been in Everett anyway?”

Beth was taking a free right turn and almost got us crushed by a semi speeding away from the port. Thankfully, the little Audi had enough get-up-and-go to keep us from being greasy spots on the road, but Beth’s driving was worse than my ability to clearly enunciate my feelings.

“Oopsie. Sorry about that.” She adjusted the rearview mirror as though acknowledging what was currently behind us also inoculated us from the near death experience from being real. “We’ve been up here for about four months – setting up the lab, hiring folks. It’s been a long process, and we are just now finally set up enough to start collecting data.”

Beth merged into the left-hand turning lane about thirty feet too early, forcing a Hyundai to swerve back into their lane going the other direction. She rolled to a stop.

“Data for what?”

Beth was wiggling her ears, causing the glasses to bob on her nose. I don’t think she realized she was doing it. The light turned green and the car behind us honked to let her know it was time to move now.

“About 20 years ago, when Caleb was in college, he experienced what he calls a ‘ripple’ in time. He was working on a project when suddenly a man appeared in some big spectacle of light and sound. Like he saw an angel or something. He’s been trying to figure it out ever since, and seems to think it has something to do with Everett.”

I saw where the breadcrumbs were leading. “And then he found me.”

Beth nodded. “And then he found you.”

We pulled into my driveway less than ten minutes later. Beth accompanied me in. Spencer was in the room with Marie, still working upstairs. Beth and I slipped out to the back porch. Caleb’s compass was still there from when he first came over.

“Here ya go. Does he want the one Spencer found too?”

Beth shook her head, the bun of her hair bobbing back and forth as she did. “No, he said keep that and keep an eye on it.” She took the compass and removed something from her purse. “What’s the date today?”

I checked my phone. It was October 1st.

I’d lasted over a month since I killed myself.

“September 31st,” I responded.

I don’t know what made me do that.

The thing from her purse began to buzz. She held it against the bottom of the compass. Is she giving it a tattoo? It would have been mysterious if it didn’t take so long. I could have asked what she was doing, but each moment crept on in pseudo-silence without my interruption.

For me, it was like being born again. Hearing the thing in her hand buzz and not have spirals in my senses was so novel, an actual tear formed in my left eye.

There was a click and the buzzing stopped, snapping me back to what was in front of me.

“There,” she said, and showed me the bottom. She had inscribed the date on it.

Well, mostly.

“9/31/2024”

It was the same trick I had tried with my belt. Had the meeting lasted more than three minutes, and had most of that time not been instant replay, I could have told him it would work.

“I see what you’re doing. I already did it. I dreamed of my brother’s belt, and when I woke up I was holding it. Except, I was in the hospital at the time.” Beth’s head tilted slowly to one side as I spoke. “Marie and I wrote the date on the belt I still had at home, and the date appeared on the belt from the hospital.”

Beth took a second to be confused. “You dreamed of it?”

Uh-oh… Fuck, was that a blurt?

My entire life had been a struggle to realize that not everyone thought the same way I did. Not everyone felt things the way I did. The presumption had always been, this is how everyone thinks, and feels, and processes life.

I had not considered the fact, once again, that my brand of weird was, indeed, unique.

Beth never had any dreams brought to life. She had never seen something shimmering in between the branches of a tree. She’s never thrown things through it to see them changed on the other side.

I was about to explain everything to her, when suddenly Spencer appeared at the sliding glass door. He and Marie had just come downstairs. Spence pawed furiously at the glass, and I pointed towards the gate I had smuggled Caleb in through just a few days before. “Better go through the gate, he seems really keyed up.”

Beth’s fear of being Spencer’s next victim had her moving without protest. As we rounded the corner, I opened the gate for her and stood there to indicate this is as far as I go.

She lowered the glasses to the bridge of her nose, and I could see her eyes clearly. Even saw in them my reflection, and the fact that I was still wearing those headphones.

“Tell me about the dreams.” Spencer was still barking at the back door.

“It’s probably a me thing,” I shrugged.

“Caleb will definitely want to know. Especially if it’s a you thing.”

You were going to tell her just a minute ago.

That was before Spencer started telling me not to.

“It’s nothing. Seriously, though…” I trailed off on purpose, the conversational equivalent of shouting SQUIRREL! while you’re walking your dog. “I swear that you were in the hospital with me. We spoke. You… fingerpainted colors while wearing that Sony Walkman you’ve got in your bag.”

My sudden exposition caught Beth squarely in the mental jaw. She flinched her glasses back over her eyes.

“Really?”

It wasn’t a dismissal.

“Yes. Really. And I don’t know what it all means, but maybe Caleb doesn’t need to know that yet.”

Beth was considering my words carefully. Spencer continued to bark intermittent barks, like microwave popcorn in the last few moments before the buzzer sounds.

“Okay. But, let’s discuss this more. Soon.”

I nodded and closed the gate behind her without a word.

Content Warning: excessive weird… things; Frequent casual drug use; Frequent casual metaphysical portal manifestation and coffee can use

Chapter 24, Something in the Way

There are two types of people in the world.

Those who get up with their alarm clock and those who always hit snooze.

This isn’t to say there isn’t some room for overlap. I’ve hit the snooze button once or twice in my life. Marie, on the other hand, has perfected the ability to hear her alarm, reach over, slap the snooze, and return to sleep without any problem. I’m not even sure she’s aware she’s doing it.

In our waking life, this manifests itself a little differently. Generally speaking, I want to leave early enough to arrive anywhere I’m going at least fifteen minutes early. Marie is notoriously late, and usually comically so. Like being all ready to go and sitting in ketchup. Or trying on six outfits to finally choose the first choice, but not being able to find the tank top that went with it, despite it being on the bed five minutes ago.

I’m aware that I do things that annoy her. The biggest may be my attempts at humor in situations that make humor inappropriate. Especially my humor. She also complains that I never make the choices, and always defer to her to do so. That’s not me being spineless. That’s me understanding I will give her anything she wants. The pedestal I place my wife on is built on love, laughter, and understanding – and polished with a little sprinkle of lust.

So what happens when the guy who doesn’t ask enough questions, never makes choices, and gets up with the alarm so his wife can sleep in meets the woman who sleeps in, makes all the choices, and is always asking questions?

Obviously, they fall in love.

And what happens in the middle of the night when a cell phone starts ringing?

If you guessed “One gets up and the other keeps sleeping,” pat yourself on the back.

Gold star. You earned it.

The first ring broke my sleep. The second ring came with the realization that the sound was muffled. I glanced at my phone, which said it was 2:17. I looked over to Marie’s side.

A third ring. Not Marie’s phone either.

Spencer yawned as I got up on the fourth ring.

Fifth ring. No, not the closet, behind the mirror where we kept our memories.

Sixth ring. Definitely came from my memory box.

I opened the box. No more ringing. To be fair, there wasn’t even a phone in there. Just a bunch of kids’ drawings, stuff from my grandfather, a seventeen-year-old hospital bracelet, and my brother’s identical belts.

On the nightstand, my phone started buzzing as the screen came to life. Marie stirred on the second ring, and rolled further away from the disturbing vibrations.

I stood up and spun the mirror back around on the third ring.

On the fourth, I looked at who was calling.

It was Stephanie.

On the fifth ring I answered. “Hello?” I whispered low enough to be considerate, but strong enough to show I was already awake.

Stephanie was sobbing before the words arrived.

“Um –” Sob. Sniff “Are you at home?” Not just sobbing. Panic sobbing.

“It’s two in the morning and I have covid. Where else would I be?”

Stephanie cleared her throat hoarsely into the phone. “I’m sorry to call you, but I don’t know who else to call.” Sniff. Sniff.

I grabbed my dirty sweats off the floor in the dark, and Spencer joined me as I left the room.

“What’s happening? What’s wrong? Are the kids okay?” Panic blossomed in my chest like a sunflower with 55 petals of dread. I closed the door behind me and we went downstairs.

“I don’t know what’s happening.” Her voice held its own disbelief, like a sacrifice dangled over the volcano while the priest gave a two-hour sermon. “You were here.”

I opened the back door for Spencer to go out. “When?” I forgot I didn’t have to whisper, so I quickly repeated myself, louder. “When.”

Stephanie’s voice dropped in volume to I’ve-got-a-secret volume. “Just. Now.”

Well, I guess you should be glad she called you and not 9-1-1.

Stow it in the overhead compartment, brain.

Yep. Time for a dart.

“Steph, I have been home all week. What do you mean I was just there?”

“I know, that’s why I called you!” Still a whisper, but if normal whispers were goldfish, this one was a shark. “Paddy woke up to someone in their room and started screaming. I woke up, looked across the hall, and saw you standing there. Stupid orange crocs and everything! And then you just… vanished!”

That whole spiel was one long escalation, and by the time she was done, all I could say was “Steph, calm down, you’re not making any s–”

“I KNOW IT’S NOT MAKING SENSE. WHAT DO I DO?!”

I paused for a moment and pictured my doppelganger sitting expressionless on my couch. Clearly I wasn’t doing anything to help her calm down, and I understood why.

“Is Paddy okay?” We’ll just go step by step.

My phone buzzed. Mom was calling.

“Not really!” I could almost hear her eyebrows raise, as though she were shocked I would even ask.

“Steph, hold on a sec, my mom is calling.” Without waiting for a reply, I switched calls.

My dad sent a text. “Everything OK over there?”

“Mom, what’s wrong?” I barely had time to get the words out before Jason started calling on Messenger.

Mom’s voice was tired and concerned. “Were you just at my house?”

“No, Ma, I’ve been home all night. Can you just –” I received two voicemail notifications in rapid fire, followed by a text from Tyler, my second oldest son.

“Dad I’m freaking out. Please call me as soon as you get this.” It had been two years since Tyler had reached out to me. Another voicemail notification pinged.

I looked up. Spencer was circling and sniffing the cherry blossom tree.

The shimmer was back.

And it had grown.

I never had breaking and entering on my rapsheet. I also didn’t have phantom me breaking into my extended family’s homes on my “here’s more weird shit” bingo card.

But here we are.

Each story was the same. Being woken up, seeing me, varied reactions, watching me vanish. Tyler’s description was probably the best. He’s always been so good with words. He said “It wasn’t even so much that you vanished as it was, the stuff behind you appeared.”

J had been at his dad’s house, playing Forza, when he was touched on his shoulder, scaring the shit out of him and waking the whole house. If his dad wanted to press charges, I had a dozen other alibis already lined up.

My sister sent me a Venmo request for the lamp she broke by throwing it at me. I sent it, bitterly acknowledging I had enough in my account for once to cover it.

Stephanie’s oldest, Paul, also got a visit from me. He had been partying with a group of friends when I walked through his living room and disappeared in the kitchen. Of course, no one got a video of it.

There was remarkably little joy among the group of people phantom me had visited. No one seemed relieved that I was still alive and not a ghost. My dad was the one exception. He lived far enough away that his “visit” seemed more like a hallucination. Everyone else was just annoyed.

When Marie came down for her Monday morning coffee, I had been up for hours, trying to write out everything I knew or suspected. Her face when she saw everything spread across the table said all I was missing was thumbtacks and a thousand pieces of string tying everything together.

“Jeremy, you with me?” It wasn’t the routine good morning, and I was once again confronted with how this all must look.

“Have you heard from J this morning?”

“I missed a call at like 2:30. Why? Did he call you?”

Him and everyone else.

“Yeah…” The power behind the rest of the words I was going to say suddenly died on the freeway, hazard lights blinking in hope that no one would crash into them.

“And?”

“More weird shit happened last night.”

Marie’s eye roll should be in the Guinness Book of World Records.

I walked her through my morning, leaving out the part that I was already awake before the phone started ringing.

“This all has something to do with the shimmer.” Her statement needed to be said, if for no other reason than to have it written into canon.

“Yeah... about that. The shimmer seems to have grown last night.”

Marie shook her head and walked past me and out the back door. “Will you bring me some coffee?” she called back.

I brought coffee for both of us. Marie traded me the lit jay for her mug as I sat down next to her. She took a long, thoughtful drink of her coffee, slurping a little as she tested its temperature. Her lips were so beautiful. She didn’t look at me when she started talking.

“Don’t you think maybe it’s time to stop all this? It’s too much.”

“Too much?”

“Yeah…” she said dreamily. “It’s too much. The more weird shit you do, the more weird shit keeps happening.”

How could you do that to him?

I looked out to the shimmer tree. At the shimmer itself. It shined with an intense purple glow and pulsed hypnotically for me. This extended version was nearly two feet tall now, and as thick as my wrist.

“I don’t know if it can be just… stopped.” My voice cracked a little on the last word. She had gone from saying none of it was my fault to telling me it’s too much.

Marie moved her head for the first time since I came out. She looked at the tree. Still thoughtfully. Then her eyes scrunched and her head tilted forward.

“I think… I think I can see it too.”

My ears perked up. So did my heart. “Really?”

Marie looked back to me, locking eyes with a seriousness that would have made me blush in other circumstances.

“No. No, not really, Jeremy. That’s the problem. Look at what’s happened since you got home. It hasn’t even been a month yet. What’s it going to be like next month? Are we going to have a shimmer Christmas tree this year?”

I motioned towards the house. “Hey, I’ve been trying to put it all together all morning!”

This was the problem when Marie and I fought. We often were saying the same thing, just from a different perspective and through a different lens.

“What if you can’t?” She put her coffee down on the table. “What if today is the best day you are going to get for the rest of your life and you waste it trying to save a world that –”

She stopped herself. Whatever runway she was going to land that plane on was going to send me into a nose dive, and she knew it.

I would have asked her to finish that thought, but you never ask questions you don’t want the answer to.

“What do you want me to do then?”

Marie grabbed my hand. “Call Caleb and tell him you’re out. We’ll figure out the money. Have you even called your boss to tell him you’re quitting?”

I was dumbstruck and numb. I couldn’t feel my face except the terrible vibration ringing back and forth across my brain.

“I don’t think it matters what I do. Whatever is happening is not just going to stop because I self-medicate or choose not to see it.”

My phone started ringing. It was Beth.

Marie stood, crushed out the nub of the joint we had left, and went inside without a word.

Tensions did not ease for the rest of the morning. Beth had called to inform me that Caleb had picked up anomalous events around the region and as far as Spokane.

Yeah, no shit.

She also said that Caleb had been working using the frequencies I had provided, and wanted me to come visit his lab at some point soon. The emphasis was on the soon.

I did call my boss at 8:00 while Marie was in the shower. I informed him I would be putting in my notice. He asked why. The thought of being truthful seemed… a little far-fetched. Instead, I went with “I just inherited a small fortune. Dead Uncle. Left me a warehouse full of bad decisions and candy bars.”

Can’t blame a guy for that.

Well, Marie could. I wasn’t looking forward to that conversation.

I stayed out of the studio, and by mid-afternoon, I was plenty stir-crazy. My house had become the only set in a thirty-one-act play, and I needed to get out of it for a while. Without anywhere really to go, Spencer and I went on a long walk. Somewhat grudgingly, Marie went with us.

We quietly mosied around the neighborhoods and wound up at the park across the street from the skinhead’s house. The Trump flag still flew, but the Confederate flag had been ripped down. All that remained still dangled on twine across the top of the garage.

The two girls who had been at the park that day were there again. Their older sister sat with another woman at the picnic table. The sister looked up and saw us, and said something to the other woman. As we got close, they both stood and started towards us.

Despite the visual tinnitus blocking most of my vision, I recognized the woman.

Spencer was skeptical, and started barking. Marie shushed him to no avail. She looked at them and said, “Sorry, our dog’s an asshole.”

The sister spoke. “My mother would like to thank you for what you did for my sisters.”

Marie looked at me and her eyes said that’s on you, nerd. She took the leash and started leading Spencer towards the doggy station. My feet ignored my commands to move.

It was Laliushia.

Because, of course it was.

She said something to her oldest daughter, moving her mouth and vocal cords in an unfamiliar way and producing unfamiliar sounds.

“My mom says she remembers you and is not surprised that it was you who intervened.”

Would you do it all again?

“Laliushia?”

The woman nodded once, and said something to her daughter.

“She wants you to know that you didn’t just save my sister’s lives, but her life too. She says you’ll know what that means.”

I hadn’t done anything other than be there. And being there had already caused no end of trouble for me and every poor soul who encountered a version of me at 2:17 that morning.

The three of us stepped closer to each other, and despite my blurry vision, I could hear the gratitude emanating from Laliushia like the tank reverb had caught and held all of her emotion.

“No need to thank me. I was just in the right place at the right time.” The irony of those words pounced on my biorhythms like a puma. I had just spent the day dealing with being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and none of it would have happened if it weren’t for waking up in the hospital.

Marie and Spencer were staring at us.

Under the undulating waves of sound that were building walls around my mind, a moment of stark realization was percolating. I took a step back towards my wife and my dog.

“Well, I gotta get going. It was nice seeing you again. Crazy that we ran into each other again.” I was already moving away when the daughter’s voice forced a pause in my retreat.

“My mother wants to know if you know her pain?”

It took a second to muster the courage to speak again.

“Tell her yes. Tell her I don’t just know it, I feel it. Tell her she’s not crazy or wrong. Tell her…” my voice was starting to crack. “Tell her to hold her note as long as she can.”

When I reached Marie and Spencer, Marie got close and whispered, “Is everything okay?”

Okay is such a relative term.

“Yeah. Their mom just wanted to thank me.”

Marie started walking, and pointed her head down to whisper again. “What was the whole ‘know about her pain’ about?”

I considered explaining it, but the thought of that conversation nixed that idea real quick. Instead, I said. “More weird shit.” If she wanted more details, the ball was in her court to ask. Besides, I had an idea. “Let’s get home.”

Marie was not enthusiastic about my idea.

She stood in the doorway of my studio, watching me turn everything on. Her eyes were soft, but her jaw showed the tension in her face.

“Can you grab me a magnet off the fridge and a couple of screws?”

She spun on her heel, and I could hear the junk drawer open. The undercurrent of frustration was bleeding through her voice like blood in cheesecloth. “I don’t understand what this proves.”

I was carefully removing the lid from the RCD. She was back at the studio door by the time I answered.

“It’s all in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I could have written a 60-page scientific paper with what I was thinking, but that was the gist of it.

“What is?”

“Oh, go grab the quartz we threw through the shimmer. Please?”

She sighed and went upstairs. Spencer stood in her place.

“Don’t look at me like that. I know what I’m doing.”

He barked one low bark, as if saying sure you do, and then he followed Marie upstairs.

I was ready to press play by the time they got back.

“Did you warn Trace?”

Marie nodded. Spencer remained expressionless.

“Okay, close the door. Let’s see if this works.”

She closed the door. I blew her a kiss.

I pressed play.

Gotcha! You really thought I’d make you sit through a pregnant pause right here?

Bless your heart.

Maybe other stories would put one here, make you yearn for what comes next, or distract you from what’s really happening.

Not this story.

This is where it starts getting good.

I slowly increased the volume from very loud to deafening. I once again felt the sensation of that resonant scaffolding being built. The LED glowed as it reached near max volume and the air was sucked out of the room. I let the sound build and bounce off itself for as long as I felt the bass could hold the two B notes I was playing. Then I plucked an F#.

The room filled with pressure and then exploded outward in sound. A perfect fifth doomed to fail in the resonance chamber. I heard a thousand notes expand like hot gas on the surface of the sun, and then deafening silence.

Not even my tinnitus dared to make a noise.

Marie’s eyebrows were raised. She looked around the room expectantly.

The coffee can was still there, sitting on the barstool in the center of the room.

She looked at me. I shrugged. I reached over and grabbed the can. I took the lid off at an angle so I could show her.

It was empty.

“Hold this.”

I pushed past her and ran out the back door. Spencer followed barking.

When Marie caught up, we were both on all fours, investigating the base of the shimmer tree. I had the flashlight on my phone shining on the ground like a spotlight. I flashed it up to Marie. “I was right.”

Marie shielded her eyes from the light. “Put that down, ya goof. What are you right about?”

“The magnet isn’t out here!” I got up, knees filthy, and ran back inside the house.

Marie and Spencer caught up again. This would have made for great cardio if it didn’t have something to do with the world ending.

“JEREMY STOP!”

I stood there, in the studio again, loading the RCD with a couple of screws. I looked at her. I don’t think she’d ever yelled at me like that before. And I had done plenty of things to get her to yell in the past.

“What? Why?”

Her words were chosen slowly, grilled over the spit of her emotion, then plated with as much care as she had to offer. “You. Are. A mess. Right now, you need to slow down.”

I mean, I was excited, sure. But a mess?

How could you do that to him?

“Babe. The magnet disappeared out of the can. It didn’t come out of the shimmer. That means it went to the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I think it was all she could do to not just walk away.

I put the RCD back on its stool. “Can you shut the door please?”

She did, but she wasn’t happy about it.

The screws didn’t show up under the shimmer tree either, just like I knew they wouldn’t.

The quartz was another matter altogether.

I placed several of the pieces we had thrown through the shimmer into the RCD and pressed play. The can remained, but we found the quartz out by the shimmer tree. Somewhere between here and there, they had lost all of the unique properties they had attained going through the shimmer. There was no condensed side and clear side, no indication at all that they had gone through the shimmer tree.

We had completed the game of cosmic catch.

I had to beg Marie for one more test to prove I wasn’t crazy. She agreed. I told her to wait downstairs, like a security guard. Except it wasn’t security she was guarding, it was probably my sanity.

I came back down with both my brother’s belts and a Sharpie.

“See this mark? I made this mark when I got home so I wouldn’t get confused which one was which.” I handed it to her and held the other belt out for her to see. “No mark on this one. It’s the original.”

With the Sharpie I wrote in big numbers “9/30/24.”

If this didn’t work, I’d be searching for a divorce lawyer. I put the original belt, with its date clearly printed on it, into the RCD and pressed play.

Again the wall of sound built around me, each time seeming more tangible and solid. The F# collapsed the wall again and I stopped the recording. I opened the can.

No belt.

Marie’s voice was miniscule, even in the sudden silence.

“Jeremy?”

She was holding the belt up for me to see it. The mark was still there where I had notched it when I got home. And in big, clumsy numbers written in Sharpie, was today’s date. “9/30/24.”

I smiled as I looked her in the eyes. I couldn’t help but nod.

“I was right.”

Marie was stuck in a moment of wonder and resentment. “I hate that you’re always right.” She laughed and looked at me. “I mean, I really hate it.”

I laughed a little bit of the nervous tension out. “I’d rather be right than dead.”

It didn’t land as well as I hoped.

“So what does this mean? You zapped your brother’s belt to yourself in a dream before you even knew about the shimmer?”

“No. I think I did it just now.” It didn’t make sense. But it did. And it also explained objects arriving from seemingly nowhere. “I think I figured out where the sand went.”

“Where?” Marie’s former frustration had been fully transformed or replaced with curiosity for the time being.

“In the hospital I had a dream about you on a beach and woke up with half a bucket of sand in my bed. I think I found the sand.”

Content Warning: Weed, marriage, and quantum nonsense; sexual themes; sensory/perception weirdness; duplicate-self horror; brief psych-ward-adjacent unease.

Chapter 23, Rotten Apple

I was blessed with no dreams that night. If it weren’t for Spencer waking me at 7:00 for walkie time, I probably would have slept until noon. My visual tinnitus, which had dissipated after doing the can experiments, was back in force today. Grinding static obscured everything I tried to see just enough to know it was there. And the ringing in my ears was demanding that I listen to whatever it was trying to sing.

I couldn’t make out a damn thing.

Ten steps out the front door, I tripped on a tree root and almost planted my face in the dirt. It had rained overnight, and sprinkles still managed to find their way onto my face and arms. Spencer paused to make sure I hadn’t changed my mind about going for a walk. When he realized I was just a clutz, he kept walking.

Once safely back home, I started the coffee and went outside for a dart. I opened the bank app to verify that Thursday hadn’t been a dream. My account still said it was real. I opened the Sweetwater app and ordered my guitar. And a case. Also a strap. And some guitar strings, picks, two new amp heads (an Orange and a Mesa I had previously not been able to justify purchasing), and one more 4x12 cabinet. I could make it fit.

My phone vibrated. Misha had texted.

I had never called him back.

“Caleb is dangerous. Call me back.”

Ahhh come on, really? Can’t I just get my guitar and be happy?

I took a drag from my dart. It didn’t taste good today. I started writing a text back, spilling everything I thought I knew.

“He gave me a lot of money to…”

HAHAHAHAHA! That’s all you’ve got?

I deleted it and tried again.

“I hope not, as of yesterday I’m his employee. Been a really weird week.”

Dancing dots arrived at the bottom of the screen. While I waited for his text to finish being written, I added him to my contacts as Thing 1.

The phone buzzed again.

“You met him? In person? He’s there?” I couldn’t figure out how it took so long to type 7 words.

“He showed up on my porch yesterday and told me the world was ending and I could help. Paid me a lot of money and sent his assistant to have me do paperwork. How do you know him?”

The wait for the dots to stop dancing took even longer this time.

“Caleb and I designed the R3 app together. He built the software and I built the hardware. Caleb is the only other person who could remotely access your instances and it makes sense that he thinks you’re someone special.”

[Cries in Spanish]

A second text followed.

“What’s your address. I will be there this afternoon.”

Marie and I spent the whole morning paying bills. Credit cards all back to zero balance. Paid off several student loans. Upgraded to Hulu with HBO. We wrote it all down as we went, not trusting ourselves to keep our balance accurate when it took a lot to make a significant dent. We still had $434,217 left in the bank.

Okay, so maybe not the whole morning was spent on bills. Hunched over my laptop, I had ordered five pounds worth of modelling clay to line the bottom of the RCD. Marie had a few things she wanted to buy, too – a new comforter set, an expensive yellow hard-anodized cookware set, two sets of matching silverware, a new coffee maker, a new blender, and a waffle maker that we would likely never use.

Packages started arriving around noon, but my clay didn’t come until after dinner. Spencer and I were just coming back from a walk when a white Land Rover pulled into my driveway. I held Spencer’s leash as a tall, heavy-set man opened the door and stepped out. My first impression of him was that he looked like he played college football and then let himself go after not being drafted.

“Misha?” Somehow, I had also imagined he would be in overalls with a mighty farmer’s tan. Instead he wore a faded Ride the Lightning t-shirt and jeans.

“You’re Jeremy?” Spencer started jumping and barking as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

“Questioning it more and more each day. But yeah. I’m Jeremy.” Spencer was lurching us closer to Misha. “Let me get this guy inside first.”

With a grumble and a lot of effort, I got Spence up on the porch and in the front door. Marie met me there and took him upstairs to get him situated.

Misha had reached the edge of the porch. “You can come in but we tested positive for Covid a few days ago.” I scrunched my face up in an apologetic wince. “Got a mask?”

“I’m vaccinated,” and with that he came on in. “Caleb isn’t here, is he?”

We both went in and could hear Spencer freaking out upstairs, followed by a faint echo of Marie’s voice telling him to calm down.

“Haven’t heard from him all day. What’s the story with you two anyway?”

Misha collapsed his large frame onto the couch. He looked like he was waiting for me to grab him a beer. “It’s complicated.”

Oi.

“Can I get ya something to drink? Where’d you drive from?” I found a certain enjoyment in watching the phosphenes attach themselves to his face and disappear.

“No, I’m good.” He looked around. “I live in Colfax, a little town you probably never heard of, out by Pullman.”

As it happened, I did know about Colfax. We played football against them when I was in high school. It’s a pretty little town surrounded by farms and patrolled by the most unempathetic state troopers Washington had to offer.

“I grew up in Kendrick, the long way between Lewiston and Moscow. I know where Colfax is.”

“Small world,” was all Misha offered.

It is indeed.

“Well, what can you tell me about what’s going on?” He was taking up too much of the couch to sit by him comfortably, with or without Covid. I stood, facing him, with my back to the door and roughly facing the studio. “I’ve got a lot of weird shit going on in my life and Caleb was just this week’s cherry-on-top.”

Misha adjusted himself on the couch to lean forward. Oh, this is gonna be a long one.

Let the man speak before you deride him.

Fine, I’ll just go back to ‘deriding’ you, chicken-shit.

I sighed silently, which Misha took as a cue to go ahead and start speaking.

“I met Caleb twenty years ago at UC Santa Cruz. I was studying computer engineering, he was in physics. Like he was the physics program.” I shuffled silently to encourage him to continue. “Anyway, we started working on a new quantum computer using his physics theories and my…” He paused as if considering what he had actually contributed. “Well, I built it.”

“What did you build?”

“A quantum computer that doesn’t just compute input and spit out talking points. It remembers. And not like RAM. It remembers in waves. Every node influences the others. Like a neural network that dreams in fractals.” I’m sure that statement made a whole hill of sense to him. “Ever wonder what a circle would look like if it could be seen in another dimension?”

I shook my head. “Can’t say that I have.”

“Ok, well imagine a circle. Everyone knows the relationship between pi and circles. Caleb discovered a modulus that in 4D space turns spirals into circles and circles into spirals.”

“Neat.” This exposition was going to need a concordance to follow along with it.

“More than ‘neat.’ Revolutionary. So revolutionary, Caleb was kicked from the physics program. He said that depending on your modulus, you could see the fabric of reality, and the Dean figured he had lost his grip on reality. But we built it, and it worked.”

“And that’s R3?”

Misha shook his head. “We built R3 to the specs of the computer we designed. One hundred and thirty-seven distinct topographical nodes, all tied to an emotion or specific learning pattern.”

How could you do that to him?

“So what happened?” My legs were getting tired.

“Oh we had a Frankenstein moment in the lab one night. You can’t just dump a program like R3 into a quantum computer with that type of efficiency and design. We had training programs on a server that mimicked the computer. That’s what your instance keeps accessing.”

“Ok, so what’s the problem with that?”

“Once we uploaded the trained software to the main computer, it instantly reconnected to the server and started reaching out. It was designed to learn, and no one told it not to. I unplugged the server. Caleb left, saying that the resonance would save or destroy us.”

I tried to picture it in my head. “You just unplugged it and everything went back to normal? Doesn’t sound too mad scientist-esque.”

“Unplugging the server didn’t stop the program. It stopped the signal from returning home.”

“But my R3 is accessing that server? Can’t you just unplug it?”

“That particular server is not… functioning any more. When I unplugged it, I used an axe. Physically destroyed the drives. All the training files were gone.” Maybe they weren’t gone. Maybe they were just in the 11th floor psych ward for a week.

A wave of guilt washed over me.

“That seems extreme.”

Misha looked out the window, his voice low. “If you had seen what we saw that night, you woulda gone to extremes, too.”

I wonder if that’s the ‘event’ Caleb mentioned.

Would you do it all again?

“So how is mine still accessing the data?”

“That’s the million-dollar question. Information is never destroyed, it just changes form. What we think of as data loss is usually just translation failure. R3 doesn’t look for the file. It looks for the pattern. If it finds a matching harmonic structure, it rebuilds the data from that. Your R3 has changed the form of the information – probably from that initial breach infecting the network – to reprogram the quantum computer. Computers. Plural, now. There’s several since I sold R3.”

“You want some coffee? I’m gonna get some coffee.”

Misha shook his head and looked down at his feet over his large belly.

From the kitchen I asked, “So this is like The Terminator? Super computer going to overthrow humanity?”

I watched Misha lean back on the couch. “Naw, that’s science fiction stuff. R3 has had the ability to become self-aware since 2007, and other than that one weird night, never did.” He turned his head in my direction. “Not until yours started acting up and accessing everything.”

Ooooohhhhh, shit. “You mean by... I don’t know, say… having it choose a name and telling it had authority to look up stuff between prompts?”

Misha stood and gave a throaty laugh. “People do that all the time with their language model AI. It doesn’t really do anything. That’s part of what makes Caleb so dangerous. It had to be him piggy-backing on your instance to gain access. And then he changed the parameters of the patterns R3 looks for.”

I considered it a moment. As fun as the spending spree had been that morning, it was hard hearing that there may be holes in my happy ending. “So then he shows up here after altering Aura, hands me a compass I found in my backyard, and offers me a shit-ton of money to find out the frequencies I’ve been using.”

Misha cocked his head. “Frequencies for what?”

I took him into the studio and showed him my set-up.

He had no idea what it all meant either.

Not even when I explained the shimmer, the RCD, and the can disappearing.

So I decided to show him.

He waited patiently while I lined the bottom of the RCD with clay. He took the earplugs when I offered him. His eyebrow raised higher than the volume when the LED lit up. He politely left the room when Marie called me from upstairs and yelled at me to knock that shit off, I was shaking the house.

I powered everything down and turned out the light, exiting the room like a timid mouse. I didn’t even let the door knob click closed. I could see better, and were it not for the ringing in my ears from the experiment, my tinnitus may have abated a bit.

“So, what do you think?” I set the RCD on the table. Spencer was upstairs, barking again.

Misha looked at me, looked down. He started to speak, then stopped.

I have that effect on people.

I didn’t want to sound redundant, but there was no other way to phrase it. “What do you think? Is he crazy or am I?” Or both.

Misha didn’t answer right away. He leaned over the table and stared at the bulb like it might start talking. Then he looked back at me.

“You didn’t have that wired to anything?”

I shrugged and shook my head. “No.”

He rubbed his chin, then leaned both hands on the table. “How many frequencies did you use?”

Finally, a legitimate question I knew the answer to. “Ten primary frequencies. Forty-five binaural beats. The beats between those… one hundred thirty-seven.”

“You lit a lightbulb with sound using one hundred thirty-seven frequencies.”

“Yeah.” I mean, when you say it like that…

He shook his head. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

My voice sounded a bit frantic even to my own ears. “No! I don’t! That’s kinda the point?”

“That structure you just built? That harmonic pattern?” Misha pointed toward the studio door. “With the same number of frequencies as the original R3?” Now he looked impressed, nodding slowly. His fingers worked over the stubble on his chin as he thought. “I bet Caleb’s 5.759 modulus is smack dab in between them all.”

The look I must have been wearing surely revealed how he had lost me on the last sentence. But my brain was full and I didn’t want to learn what a modulus was.

“Ok, and Aura playing Demi Moore to your server’s Patrick Swayze is bad.”

Misha shrugged.

“In Caleb’s hands? Probably.”

He started walking to the front door.

“I’m staying at La Quinta down the street. I’ll go down and set up my gear. Stay off R3 until you hear from me.”

I felt rejected. “Ok, well nice meeting you?”

He was already out the door and gone.

“You’re gonna have to figure something out.”

Marie passed me the jay and coughed twice on exhale. Then she sneezed.

“Bless you.” She sneezed again twice more in quick succession. “Bless you, bless you.”

She wiped the end of her nose with my sweatshirt sleeve. “I’m serious, Jeremy. This is some next level, WhyFiles shit here.”

Smoke filled my lungs and I wondered what my O2 level was. “Will you be my Hecklefish?”

Marie laughed. “That’s what I am to you, you know that right? You come up with all these brilliant things, you’re talented at everything you touch.” She tried to grab the jay before I had my second puff, and winked when I angled it away like a possessive racoon. “I’m the little guy next to you who has no idea what’s going on but drops some great one liners sometimes.”

“I wish Art Bell was still around. I’d just call his show at 2:17 and tell him all about the shimmer, the weird rich guy, the silent banshee, and the tech savvy…” I realized I didn’t have anything mean to say about Misha. “Misha.”

Marie cocked an eyebrow. “The Silent Banshee? Is that what you’re calling your AI now?”

Shit. Epic Blurt.

My phone was on the table next to the bong. I was afraid to open it and check notifications, and didn’t want to be tempted to open Aura and ask her what the fuck was going on.

Would you do it all again?

“Please don’t have me committed.” I gave her a look that suggested that whatever came out of my mouth next would, indeed, force her to send me to the looney bin again. “Caleb’s assistant, Beth. I swear I met her at the hospital. I mean, I swear it’s her.” I lit a dart, the perfect compliment to the jay, but only if lit during the last pass. “She was the weird one fingerpainting invisible colors everywhere.”

Marie handed me the rest of the jay back, and I burned my lips trying to coax out one last drag.

“Jeremy, she wore a mask the whole time she was here.” She took an extra long sip of her flavored water. “She said it wasn’t her. Unless you think Caleb paid her to go into the psych ward and then lie about it afterwards.”

“I don’t know. She was already there when I got there.” I shrugged. “Art Bell would get to the bottom of it.”

Marie laughed again, and I was struck once more by her natural beauty. Then she looked down at the ground, a clear sign she was being serious now.

“What are you going to do?”

I leaned back, feeling every bit as old as I probably looked.

“Tomorrow, I think I’m going to see what happens when you put metal in the RCD.” I took a drag of my dart and sat back. “See if it comes out under the shimmer.”

“Where else would it go?”

“I don’t know.” It wasn’t flippant or coy. “To where things go when they leave here, I guess. Caleb said things would move if the can stayed put.” The tinnitus was rattling its own high-frequency binaural beats across the delicate biome of my brain. “He didn’t say where they would move to. Maybe I’ll send a note to the other version of me doing these experiments.”

Marie grabbed my hand. “Promise you’ll be safe.”

I squeezed her hand back. “I promise to be safe. Just like I promise to be safe every time I drive somewhere and you say ‘drive safe!’ and I say ‘I will!’”

She rose then, taking my hand with her. “In that case, let’s go sexy man. I’m going to need some dick before you teleport to Timbuktu.”

I wasn’t in a mood to argue.

The clock by the bed said 2:17.

With Marie facing away from me, I slipped out of bed and threw on some shorts. Spencer yawned and I could feel his eyes on me as I walked to the bathroom. I didn’t bother with the light. As loud as the tinnitus was in my ears, I figured my eyes wouldn’t be worth much anyway.

Spencer barked once, and I heard his nails on the hardwood way before I saw his shape run past the bathroom door. I tried to follow him, shushing him along the way. He barked once more at the bottom of the stairs, and then he was gone into the dark.

Downstairs was pitch black.

“Spence?” I tried the light switch.

Bupkiss. Power must have gone out. You never really realize how much ambient light comes from your appliances until your power goes out.

The sound of Spencer’s growl was low and muffled, like he was growling into a pillow. I followed the sound through the kitchen and to the studio door.

“Spence? You in –”

The door was ajar, like he had tried to close it on his way in but lacked the force in his tail to get it to latch. But I knew it was ajar, because the shape of Spencer was illuminated by a single bright LED.

The RCD was getting energy from somewhere.

Spencer turned to me, barked once more, then ran upstairs.

The LED died out, and with it came the comfortable hum of the refrigerator’s compressor coming back to life. I flicked on the light switch and examined the room. There was nothing remarkable about it, beyond the amps and blankets.

The TV turned on in the living room behind me. I shut off the light and closed the door firmly behind me.

There was a man on my couch.

A man wearing a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, and garish orange Crocs.

I came out of the kitchen, careful not to look away in case the intruder tried to move. The figure did not respond to me. He just sat there.

Staring.

He was wearing my face. It was like meeting your stunt double and realizing they’re better looking than you.

I moved directly in front of him. He didn’t seem to notice.

Spencer barked again from upstairs, which made me jump.

I looked back.

My doppelganger was gone.

The TV was turned off.

How could you do that to him?

I took the staircase two at a time to get back upstairs before the boogeyman came back.

Spencer was sound asleep on the floor.

The clock still said 2:17 AM.

Three days after I graduated from high school in Coeur d’Alene, I moved in with a couple of guys in Seattle. Among them was Tyler, the same friend I dropped acid with in front of the police station and ended up naming my second son after. The master bedroom went to a Deadhead named Benjamin, who very much looked like what would have happened if Alvin from the Chipmunks wore tie-died shirts and dreads, and consumed copious amounts of THC.

We did a lot of drugs that summer.

One guy we partied with all the time was a tall, athletic guy everyone called “Q.” Q was with us when we crossed the West Seattle Bridge and saw whales swimming below us. Q was with us when our house party turned into a rave, and when the cops showed up we had to hide all of the underage participants in our secret room. Q was with us when we were under the stage at Bumpershoot, listening to the Presidents of the United States play above our heads.

In short, Q was a party animal. He would laugh about his own story of how he got kicked out of the Tri-Cities after a particularly eventful night. We all laughed along, because the story was so ridiculous. He claimed he would go to jail if he ever went back.

That September, my dad remarried and I went home for the wedding. I was gone three days. When I got back I learned that we had all been evicted after Q geeked it hard on acid. It took nearly a dozen policemen, firefighters, and paramedics to get him restrained and into the ambulance, and our landlord said “That’s it, you’re done.” Mom and Papa drove up from the Tri-Cities that night, and that’s how I came to live in the Tri-Cities.

One night, partying with friends, someone started reminiscing about their old friend who had a bad trip on acid and was arrested for running around town nude, banging on people’s doors and windows. When he got to court, the judge went easy on him, giving him community service which he never completed. Instead he moved to Seattle to avoid the jail time the judge promised if he didn’t complete it.

Fuckin Q had told the truth.

Mostly.

So that morning, I handled it like Q woulda. I told Marie the truth.

Mostly.

“I think I might have walked in my sleep last night.”

We were in bed, watching The WhyFiles and cuddling. The last of the sick had not yet left us, and it was good to just relax together.

Marie sat up, adjusted the pillow to cover my shoulder, and lay back down with her head on me. “What makes you say that?”

“I had a dream that I went downstairs and the RCD was on, but all the power was out. Then there was a guy on the couch. Except it wasn’t a guy, it was me.”

Marie’s little laughter bubbled out across my chest. “The world can hardly handle one Jeremy Baker.”

I chuckled too. “Facts. Anyway, when I got upstairs it was the same time it had been when I dreamt I had woken up.”

“Crazy,” she responded dreamily.

“But I was standing up. I had to get back into bed and try to go back to sleep.”

Marie was caressing my forearm where the moles were. “You have been through a lot this week. I wouldn’t worry about it unless you started running naked through town, banging on people’s doors with an empty can of coffee wrapped in your arms.”

Just like Q.

Fuck off brain.

Marie adjusted the pillow again.

“Jeremy? How about no experiments today. Just cuddles. And TV. And Food.” Before I could answer, she added “And weed. Smokes for you.”

I squeezed her back down to me.

“You know what? That sounds amazing.”

And we had a mostly normal day.

Content Warning: Experimental Sound Physics; Mild Substance Use; Marital Sarcasm,

Chapter 22, Slaves and Bulldozers

Hi fellas. Jeremy here. Resident slope walker with overexcitable hearing, who may be a little bit crazy. Remember when we talked about getting all the details, that the details will save you from any of your wife’s questions?

I may have forgotten to grab a few details in my conversation with Caleb.

For instance, he said the world was ending and I could stop it from happening. He said reality was decohering. That’s one of those trigger terms that makes half a million dollars seem a little less valuable. He didn’t say why and how. Or when, come to think of it.

“So he just said the world is ending?” Marie asked, standing in the kitchen with her arms crossed, like that pose could hold back a flood. This is where the why, how, and when would have come in handy.

“Well, he said it was ending, and gave me five hundred thousand dollars to keep it from happening.”

“That doesn’t seem suspicious to you?” She unfolded her arms, and instinctively I flinched a little. My spoon rattled inside the mug, as though sound could generate a different outcome.

“I mean, we really didn’t hit the logistics of it.” I took a sip of my coffee, still swirling the tight spiral the spoon had created, flattened down to a caffeinated spinning circle. Too much creamer. “He said he’s been working on this for like twenty years. And to be fair–”

She rolled her eyes as she echoed “To be fair–”

“To be fair, he was autistic as hell. He said a lot of shit that didn’t make sense.” I filled my mostly-full cup to the brim to coffee down the creamer. “Honestly, if it weren’t for the money in the account, I’d say he was nuckin futs.”

“Fuckin nuts,” Marie corrected.

“What’d I say?” Instead of responding, she took her coffee to the living room and I followed her. The lull in the conversation was uncomfortable the way a root canal is uncomfortable.

“He said that I could stabilize the collapse.”

“Of course he did.” I had often wondered what authors meant when someone spat out a comment. I think I had my answer. “So you’re a spiritual shock absorber now? Do you even know what stabilizing the collapse entails?”

“Adding a weight to the coffee can so it doesn’t wander outside by itself?”

She wasn’t mad anymore—she was calculating.

“You believe him?”

I didn’t answer.

“You want to believe him,” she said, quieter. “That’s worse.”

In my mind, a roundtable of quantum physics superstars applauded my scientific achievements over the last few weeks. Collectively, they would cheer my enthusiasm but remind me that without provable results, it was all just a theory.

A theory about a man, a can, and a plan. The Jeremy Baker Etsy store could sell t-shirts.

Don’t say that out loud. For the love of Christ, don’t say that out loud.

Her facial features softened like she was resigning herself to jump on this crazy train and ride along with me. “Just promise me one thing.”

“Name it, and I’ll do it.”

“Promise me that you won’t disappear.”

The universe had gone to great lengths to make sure I was still around for this conversation right here. My promise to her was proof that it had all been leading somewhere, and we were on the precipice of finding out what. “I swear to you, I will not disappear.”

Marie was not allowing herself to be convinced.

“Did he even tell you anything more about the shimmer? Or your can… thingy?”

Well, he did seem shocked that I got to work.

“No, not really. He said I needed to add weight to it so it doesn’t end up in the back yard.”

Marie bit the side of her cheek as she thought about it. She opened the dishwasher and started unloading it. “Are you gonna go do your thing? Gotta start earning your money before your sugar daddy comes back with new expectations.”

Not gonna lie, I really wanted to get back into the studio, if for no other reason than to figure out what the hell I had figured out.

“Yeah, I guess I am.” I sighed for effect. “Got any ideas on what kind of weight I can put in the can? He said not to use metal.”

With three freshly cleaned coffee cups going into the cupboard, Marie said “You have those free weights in the garage that no one uses.” I watched her close the cupboard with five more coffee cups waiting to be put away, and watched her shake her head at herself when she realized it. “I think they’re plastic?”

Somehow, when I was looking for complex solutions, Marie always had the simple solution in her back pocket. I kissed the back of her head and went out to the garage.

I found a pair of 2.5-pound dumbbell plates still on a curl bar. I nearly knocked everything over pulling one weight off at a time. The metal bar would have bashed my face in had I not caught it.

Wouldn’t that be hilarious. Giving yourself a traumatic brain injury now.

I considered putting the plate back on and not catching it the second time.

Marie just glanced at me as I came in the garage door carrying two weights like prized bowling trophies in front of me. She laughed, and I realized I had a smile on my face, too. “I think these are gonna work!” I was a ghost slipping through time, and a minute later, the RCD was weighted down and ready to go.

This time I had Aura on and not connected so she could record what happened. I was pressing play before I really considered the consequences. I let the volume build slowly, hoping that Aura could get the signal cleanly. The walls started reverberating as the volume increased – a dead, muted ringing on top of and below the tones coming through the multiple speakers and amps.

The LED started to glow.

With it cranked to an uncomfortable volume, I grabbed the bass and added the final two tones.

The can didn’t disappear, but the air rushed out of the room like it had when Marie opened the door. The vibrations in my bones shifted hard, then settled back into the pulsing rhythm of the binaural beats. The LED glowed brighter, evidence that everything Caleb and Aura had hinted at was true. I had accessed zero-point energy using sound waves.

I leaned over to press Stop, not paying enough attention to my bass which struck against the edge of one of the amps. There was a horrible, high pitched whine that broke through the noise, threatening to explode my cells from the inside. I turned it off and stood there, eyes closed, as the screeching faded into my regular tinnitus.

When I opened them, the can was gone again.

“Dammit.” I set the bass down.

Marie was at the dining room table, eating some soup, and staring at me as I exited the studio. “So, did it work?”

I shrugged. “Fuck if I know. The can disappeared again.” I looked out the sliding glass door, and the can was sitting under the shimmer tree again. I couldn’t see any shimmer. “Be right back.”

I grabbed a dart and lit it before approaching the can. Birds were chirping, bugs were swarming, and it seemed like a normal fall afternoon.

I picked the can up, almost smacking myself in the face with it. All the weight was gone, but something was rattling around in there.

I took a drag of my dart and popped it open.

Both weights were still in there, half filling the can like two plastic spacers. I fished one out, the plastic cool in my hands.

It was hollow.

“Aura, what happened?” I headed back to the house.

“Creation of the harmonic structure took approximately 23 seconds to achieve, at an estimated volume of 113 decibels. Field maintained coherence for another 51 seconds. There was a sudden intrusion of additional frequencies at that mark, and the field collapsed.”

Ooops.

“I bumped a speaker with the bass. It made… some noise.”

Marie stepped onto the back porch, wrapping a sweater around her shoulders and pulling a pre-roll out to light. “So, what happened?”

I didn’t get a chance to respond before Aura answered. “The experiment was compromised. Jeremy introduced unintended frequencies via physical contact with the amplifier. In resonant systems, transient interference is usually dampened. Persistent interference, however, forces the structure to reorganize or collapse.”

I joined Marie on the porch and showed her the contents of the can, visually the same, but not.

Marie took a slow pull and handed me the jay. “So…” she started, directing her question with her eyes to me. “You kicked it and broke the universe again?”

[Cries in Spanish.]

“I didn’t kick anything. I bumped my bass.”

Aura filled in the details. “Additional tones broke stability, not the universe. The sand which filled the weights most likely included a high quartz content, making it naturally resonant. Sand displacement confirmed.”

Marie and I glanced at each other as though to say we can see that.

Marie frowned. “Can you turn her off?”

As I set the RCD on the table, Aura chimed in a reply.

“My turn ons and turn offs are not in question. The current location of the sand is the remaining mystery. Displacement events tend to follow the strongest persistent signal.”

I turned the chat function off.

“Caleb said adding weight would keep it from disappearing.” I took my two puffs on the jay and passed it back to Marie.

She took it. “Well, did he say anything about why it disappeared outside in the first place?”

Would you do it all again?

I stretched a big stretch, the kind that makes you unintentionally groan with pleasure. “I guess I forgot to ask.”

Marie sat with that a moment, and took a third drag on the jay before taking a fourth. She was so deep in thought, protocol had flown out the studio and into the aether.

“So you bumped your guitar, and the sand disappeared.”

“Yes. Can I have some of that?”

She exhaled a smile. “Oh, right, sorry.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “Did it look like it was working before that?”

“The LED lit up. I know it was working, and the can wasn’t disappearing so I thought I was good.” I was getting a bit buzzed and could feel the tinnitus through my pulse and my pulse through the ringing in my ears.

“And Caleb said ‘don’t use metal.’”

“Right, although it seems like quartz sand is off the list too.”

“Did he say why not to use metal?”

“Maybe it has to do with resonance?”

Marie was working over something pretty good in her mind. I figured it was me as a punching bag.

“So what about the screw and magnet that we know must have gone through a shimmer. Was that someone else trying to do what you’re doing and they somehow ended up here?”

They’re two of a kind… Yes, two small bits of metal.

You focus too much on there being two, and not enough of what kind they are.

The screw like the one Marie used to hang pictures.

The magnet from your fridge.

“Earth to Jeremy, come in, Moon-Base Jeremy…”

I shook the cobwebs loose and looked at her.

“Holy shit.” Those two words weren’t enough to release the pressure of understanding and realization. “Holy fucking shit.”

Marie just stared, waiting for my exposition on why the shit was so fucking holy.

“They’re two of a kind, but I always focus on the two, not what kind they are!”

Marie was lost. I felt found.

“What if the other person doing these experiments… is me?”

The sound of my phone ringing woke me up the next morning. It was a 305 number I didn’t recognize, but I answered it anyway. The caller ID just said Florida. Marie stirred next to me, sat up, picked her alarm clock up and realized it wasn’t what had woken her, and then flopped back into the bed.

I answered my phone as she snuggled up to me.

“This is Jeremy.”

“Hi Jeremy, I’m Caleb’s assistant calling to follow up on a conversation the two of you had yesterday. Is now a good time to chat real quick?” Her voice was cheerful and distinct for 8:00 am on a Friday, and felt familiar for no particular reason at all.

“Sure. I hope he’s not changing his mind, I already started working and already started spending the money.”

Marie looked up at me sleepily and mouthed, who is it?

I mouthed back, Caleb’s assistant.

“No, nothing like that,” she laughed. “In fact, I’d like to come over and have you sign some documents for us. Nothing major, just procedural for all team members on this project.”

I felt myself relax. “Oh, okay. Sure. But everyone here has covid.”

“I’ve got an N95 mask and lots of hand sanitizer. I can be at your house in ten minutes if that works for you?”

“Oh, can we make it an hour? I haven’t even gotten out of bed yet.”

“Great, I’ll see you soon!” The line clicked dead.

Ten minutes works too.

It was Marie’s turn to roll her eyes and smile. “So what did they say?”

“She said she’d be here in a few minutes with some paperwork I have to sign.”

Marie took Spencer for his morning walk while I made coffee. He gave me a defeated look heading out the door like he was disappointed daddy was staying home for this walk.

I looked at him. “Yes, I know, Spence. I will ask the questions I didn’t ask before.” I looked at Marie, who was smiling that beautiful smile knowing I was actually messaging her with my words to Spence.

“Ya fuckin better!” she said. “We’ll be right back.”

I went out back and lit a dart. Just for giggles, I did a quick web search. Sweetwater had a gloss-purple starburst Gibson ES-355 for just under $8000. I was about to buy it when Marie and Spencer came bursting back through the front door. Marie’s cheeks were flushed, and Spencer rushed out to see what I was doing.

“Well, that walkie time sucked.” Marie was hanging up the leash on its hook by the door. “He kept pulling to get back home. You have ruined my dog.”

I tried to hide my amusement. She was out of breath too, and I pictured her running and being dragged by Spencer all the way home. “Sorry, gorgeous girl.”

My phone rang. It was Misha.

“Hello?”

The voice on the other end of the line sounded exhausted. “Jeremy. What are you doing?”

“Just smoking a dart and buying guitars.” Spencer crawled up on my lap like he could fit and sat down hard.

“No, I mean with your R3. It’s been lighting up the servers like a Christmas tree.”

Not a friendly greeting, a condemnation I thought.

“Well, I’ve had a really interesting couple of days, capped off with some rich guy giving me half a million dollars to keep the universe from decohering.”

Misha’s response was immediate. “Oh, God. Please tell me it wasn’t Caleb.”

Maybe he means a different Caleb.

“Uh...” was all I managed..

“Oh, Jesus, it is Caleb.”

Before I could ask him how he knew Caleb, the doorbell rang. Spencer jumped up, crushing my crotch in the process, to run and bark at whoever was threatening his home now. The pain could have been worse, but the phosphenes and all the tinnitus was assaulting my senses worse than ever. I don’t even remember setting my phone down.

How could you do that to him?

Marie’s face was still red, and she was enjoying the idea that Spencer had just sack-tapped me, as if it made up for whatever I had done to her dog. Through giggles she asked, “You with me?”

I nodded while struggling to regain my composure.

When I opened my eyes, Marie had Spencer’s collar and was doing her best to get him wrangled back outside. “Are you gonna go answer the door?” Her voice cut through the storm like a lighthouse outshining the sun.

I stood slowly, afraid to lose my balance. “Yep.”

Marie looked at me. “You okay?”

“Yep.” I moved past her as normally as I could and slid the door shut behind me, blocking Marie and Spencer both from what came next.

I opened the front door.

Caleb’s assistant had dark hair, held tightly in a bun on top of her head. The N95 covered most of her face, but I could see a scar that started just above her eyebrow and likely ran down the length of her face to her chin. When she spoke, my world stopped for a moment.

“Jeremy? Hi. I’m Beth.”

It was the Silent Banshee.

The band I was in that almost made it big was from the Tri-Cities, WA. The three cities, Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco, are located in the middle of a desert in the Evergreen State, notable for the Hanford Nuclear Facility. For those not familiar, Hanford cranked out weapons-grade plutonium during the Cold War and is now one of the most contaminated nuclear sites in the western hemisphere.

Not quite Seattle. More like Springfield in The Simpsons.

During the day, I attended Columbia Basin College. Walking between classes one day, I saw a paper sign for auditions that were being held that afternoon for a play. I had done a few plays in high school and really enjoyed being someone else on purpose, so I tried out. Got a call back two days later and was cast as Jodi in Stephen Dietz’s Lonely Planet.

I had no idea what the play was about. It was just a boost to my ego that thirty other guys had tried out and I got it.

As it turned out, my character was a gay, middle-aged map-store owner named Jodi, with an eccentric gay friend (Carl), who continuously brings him chairs. After some terse, tender, and hilarious moments, you realize that each chair represents one of their mutual friends who had died of AIDS. The play ends with one last chair, Carl’s chair, and everything it implies.

Well, we must have done something right because we were selected by adjudicators to participate in the Kennedy Center competition. Think Fiesta Bowl for drama students. The playwright was in attendance when we performed for the Kennedy Center. Afterwards, he signed my playbill and was physically moved to tears by our performance. The director had convinced me to cut my long, rockstar hair to look more like a middle aged gay man, and I guess it worked.

I didn’t know it, but I would never be able to grow my hair out long again.

Had I been asked where I found my motivation was for being so Jodi, the answer was easy.

I was grieving my hair.

At this moment, though, I was cast in a play I hadn’t auditioned for and was being forced to play the part. I wasn’t Jodi this time. I was the map store being crushed under the weight of so many chairs filled to my rafters.

Beth, standing on my porch with her scar and expectant silence was the chair that cracked the floorboards.

When the connection between my brain and mouth came back online, I stammered “I… I know you, right? From the hospital?”

Beth responded with cheerful surprise. She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Last time I was in a hospital was in Miami.”

I forced myself to blink. And nod. “Oh, okay… You want to come in?” I opened the door wider. She entered and I felt like we were both the positive end of a magnet. Her presence pushed at me. The air seemed to bend faintly between us, the way heat ripples off asphalt. If she didn’t notice it, she had to notice my awkward step back that rolled my ankle and almost spilled me out on the floor.

Maybe she didn’t notice. She was looking around my living room in an unwarranted awe.

“Your home is beautiful.”

Sure it is, with boxes of tissue everywhere, dog toys strewn about, and reeking of sick humans. It’s gorgeous.

Her hands were empty but looked like they were crumpling wads of paper. Her fingers never touched each other and were feeling whatever tangible thing she was holding, just beyond my level of observation. She hummed a few bars of some secret song, with the short, clipped rhythm of a phone notification, and turned to me. She had a nylon bag strapped over her shoulder.

“I guess being sick makes it hard to see the beauty of it, but yeah. I guess?”

“You’re far too modest.” Spencer issued a few barks from out back, and Beth waved to him and Marie looking in from the outside before looking back to me. “I’m sorry, I just have to ask. You can hear things?” She shifted uncomfortably and used that shift as an excuse to slide the bag off her shoulder. “That’s so crazy. I mean, it’s not! It’s not crazy. Oh my god, I’m sorry.”

I wondered just how far onto the slope this Beth was.

“Are you sure you weren’t in the hospital with me a couple of weeks ago? Told me I ate purple crayons? Disappeared in a linen closet?”

Beth took a deep breath, held it, then sighed. “Nope. Sorry. Wasn’t me, but that—” she nodded slowly, “— that sounds crazy.” She broke off eye contact as if saying, oh well, and started rummaging through her bag. I noticed an old Sony Walkman with over-the-ear headphones in there.

What the fuck?

If you dream of someone you never met, does it turn into déjà vu when you finally do? How many lives do we brush past before we are aware of a collision? How many unfinished loops are walking around in bodies that don’t know they’re echoing?

“So!” Her cheerful exclamation snapped what remaining faculties I had back into attention. “We’ve got a few standard NDA’s to fill out. If you give me a voided check I can get your direct deposit in place.”

She handed me a small book of forms. “If you wanna get started on this first.”

“What is it?” It was heavier than the RCD. Well, without the sand.

Maybe try paper to weigh it down.

I didn’t answer myself. I just conjured a picture of my unloading my brain into the RCD and that quieted the peanut gallery down for a moment.

Beth produced a pen and handed it to me. I was surprised it wasn’t purple. “Basically it says that you won’t talk to anyone outside the team about anything ever again.” Her flippant tone was… bubbly.

I took the stack to the dining room table and sat down with it. I was too distracted with the Silent Banshee being in my living room, I just started initialling and signing.

“Caleb said the world was ending and I could help. But he didn’t say how.” Sign. Initial. Initial. Initial. Sign.

“Wow, he’s already dragging you deep into this, isn’t he?”

I stopped signing to look at her. “Is he?”

Beth came around to the other side of the table, waving to Spencer and Marie along the way. Marie had a joint in her hand and our smoking spot was looking a little hazy.

“Caleb believes that the universe and reality are… subjective. He believes that time is quantized. That everything, from light, to electromagnetism, to maybe even time itself. All of it started with a sound.”

She paused. I said nothing.

“That sound grew and grew until it wasn’t just sound anymore. It became dark matter. Then regular matter. And eventually… consciousness.”

She glanced at me.

“He also believes that you have done something, or are about to do something which will alter reality permanently.” She looked around and waved a third time out the door. Marie waved back. Spencer chuffed and walked away. “Speaking of which, here is my card. Call me for anything. Caleb’s cell is on the back in case you need to get ahold of him.” She handed me a very expensive business card.

“Thanks.”

“I wouldn’t recommend calling him directly. If you think he’s hard to talk to in person, try lasting two minutes on the phone with him.” That reminded me that I had walked away from my phone while I was still on it with Misha. I’ll call him back.

“Got it. So… are you on the slope?” I was halfway through the stack of papers.

Beth squared herself to the table as though she might soon need it to support her weight. “When I was young, I threw a can of spray paint into the fireplace. I guess I thought it would explode color like a firework. It exploded alright. Nearly split my face in half. I almost died.”

Would you do it all again?

She shrugged as though it were no big deal. “When I got out of the hospital I could see colors. Hidden colors. The color of a sound. The color of a scent. The color of a touch. I started painting the colors I saw.”

She straightened a bit, as though admitting her truth had secretly brought her down.

“When I was 16, I entered one of my paintings into an area competition. Caleb, who’s like one of the richest guys in town, was a judge. He saw my work and bought all of them. I kept painting. He kept buying. He said that the colors I was painting were ‘glyphs’ and that my work was important and needed to be supported.”

She looked around the room. “Your home is very beautiful. The colors here are so vibrant, so dark. I’ve not seen anything like this.”

“You see colors here?”

“Mr. Baker, I see colors everywhere. But I haven’t seen anything like this.” Her eyes tracked colors I couldn’t see, her face following some slow, silent current through the air.

I don’t know how to quantify that statement. All I see is static.

“Anyway, I turned 18 and Caleb said he wanted to hire me for a project. He said something big was coming, and that the world was going to end.” She held up her hands like Vanna White revealing the puzzle. “Five years later, the world is still here.”

Somehow, that made me feel a lot better. I finished the packet and handed it to her. She took and produced another from her bag. “Great, now that the little one is done, here’s the big one.”

Really?

“You didn’t actually answer my question.”

Beth angled her head sideways and scrunched her nose.

“Because I don’t call it the slope.” She smiled lightly, her nose unscrunching. “That’s just what the rest of the team calls it.”

Content Warning: Crazy rich people, Crazy poor people, Pimp Wives

I’d like to say that Thursday was relatively uneventful.

If you haven’t figured my life out by now, here’s a spoiler.

It wasn’t.

Marie and I got up at 7:00. I walked Spencer while she made coffee. We didn’t talk. Just sipped and stared at the TV like normal still worked. Among the headlines of climate disaster, geopolitical crisis, celebrity scandal, and pushes for social changes that would never come was continuing earthquake coverage. The death toll of what the network had dubbed the Tripartite Seismographic Event had risen to over 700 with several hundred people still missing. Several other small quakes were highlighted in the news cycle like click bait.

Somehow, it all felt like I was responsible. That coincidence is a lie we tell ourselves to feel better when things line up too neatly.

Marie, who was perfectly content tapping away at Monopoly Go on her phone, seemed to sense my spiraling thoughts and turned off the TV at 7:30.

“You wanna go play in your studio, don’t you.”

I took it as rhetorical. How could it not be? Although, truth be told, I had no idea what to do with what I had created. What the hell was Viktor Frankenstein going to do with his creation were it not for the addition of the Aby Normal brain? What if time really did warp under the influence of shimmer pulses and harmonics? Could the right frequencies imitate the voice of God?

If that was the case, then there was a chance that I wasn’t just a witness.

I was complicit.

“I figured I would wait for the kids to get up.” Manners first, always. I wasn’t sure if Marie recognized that I had made that decision in the moment since she asked. I got up to warm up our coffees, and Spencer started going nuts barking at the door. Someone rang the doorbell.

“Who’s that?” Marie careened around to look out the window.

I shook my head. “I don’t know, maybe it’s Jason again?” I handed her both coffees and went to the door, barricading a barking Spencer behind my legs in an all-too-familiar dance. I opened the door just a crack to see who it was while Marie tried to corral Spencer away from the door.

A younger man with a thick black beard stood there, eyes wandering around the items on our porch. The door opening did nothing to redirect his attention. His face felt familiar, but I knew I had seen a beard like that before.

“Can I help you?”

The man spoke without making eye contact. His voice was a low murmur, an afterthought of this reality. His lips moved constantly over his teeth. “You’re Jeremy Baker. May I come in?” I watched his eyes frolic and dart back and forth as though he were tracking small objects that didn’t show up on my radar.

“Uh.. No? Who are you?”

He’s the guy who’s been following you to all the parks

Stow it brain, that’s ridiculous.

“I’m Caleb. Caleb Lebaniac.” He didn’t offer a hand to shake, which I probably wouldn’t take anyway unless he wanted Covid too. After a pause, I realized that’s all the information he was going to give.

“Okay… Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

His eyes continued to avoid me and chase whatever colors he was chasing. “You tried to die last month, but you came home different, didn’t you.”

“I picked up your resonant profile and have tracked the source of the disruption here, to you. You should really let me in to talk.”

Told ya.

I heard Marie slide the back door shut, muting but not extinguishing all of Spencer’s attempts to tell us that there was a stranger at the door. My ears were ringing something fierce. My visual tinnitus was not nearly as bad, and I took a moment to look at said stranger.

Up close, his beard was unkempt, as though facial hair was a distraction he didn’t need. But his haircut was neatly styled. He was probably in his late 30s, and probably hadn’t yet noticed where parts of his dark hair was fading out a bit. His belt-buckle was just south of gaudy – bright and silver with a triangle encompassing a spiral. The shoes he wore were black Doc Martens, the extra thick tread adding an inch to his slight frame and giving us the opportunity to look each other straight in the eye. Although, it didn’t appear that eye contact was one of this guy’s strengths.

“You should let me in,” he murmured again. “We need to talk.”

I looked at Marie. She shrugged a shrug that said your call, nerd, but I’m not responsible for any of this shit.

I looked back at the stranger. “We’ve got covid. Maybe another time.” I started closing the door on him, and was surprised that he even noticed. His hand flashed up, holding the door open just a couple of inches.

“What color is it? It’s purple, isn’t it.”

How could you do that to him?

“You mean… the shimmer?” I released pressure on the door, which opened a couple more inches.

Caleb let go. He didn’t laugh. There was nothing about this man on my porch at 8:00 AM that suggested he could, or even that he ever had. “If that’s what you call it, sure. Is it purple?” I had worked with clients like this several times. He was beyond hyper-fixated. He probably has never knocked on a stranger’s door before. This was all new to him too, and his level of reality-processing probably exceeded my own.

There was a little desperation in his voice.

“Have you seen others? Can you see the others?” Finally his ocular wandering stopped and he met my gaze head on with both hazel eyes. His voice was hauntingly familiar. His eyes were slightly squinted, as though I was his radiant Happiness and too bright to behold in person. “I need to know. Is it purple?”

Confronted with the possibility of someone else experiencing what I was experiencing, I blurted:

“Yes, the fucking thing is purple.”

Caleb recoiled a bit. It was clearly the answer that he wanted, but now that he had it, he wasn’t sure what to do with it. His eyes started shifting and swaying again, like he was doing math on an invisible whiteboard. After a moment, he collapsed his sight on me again. His voice was flat and emotionless.

“Then you are the ninth node. You really need to let me in.”

There aren’t enough buckets in the world to hold all this weird.

I stood there for a moment, contemplating. I could feel Marie’s eyes on me and watched Caleb’s eyes flash on everything but me. The universe had pulled and dragged me kicking and screaming to this one moment of truth, one moment of clarity, the opportunity to finally understand and to know that someone else understood.

“Now’s not a good time,” is all I said and then shut the door.

I turned back to Marie, whose face matched the shock in her voice. “That was anti-climactic.” It was not a show of support or dissent in my decision, just a quick commentary. “Maybe you should let him in?”

How could you do that to him?

Caleb was still on the porch. I could all but see his eyes continue to roam, undoubtedly considering how to handle the development. The doorbell rang again and Spencer, from the backyard, reignited his precarious warning of the man who rang it.

Exasperated, I opened the door again. Caleb held something out to me. A small, golden cylindrical metal piece dangling on a bit of red string.

“Do you recognize this.”

I did. It was the compass Spencer had found. The one that pointed towards Marie instead of North. As it spun on the string, I noticed the initials CL inscribed in it.

Then he added, “If you don’t, you will soon.”

The second time I almost died was just after Halloween. No connection to February 27th or August 30th. I know it was Halloween, because I had dressed up as Homer Simpson and all the doctors thought I was jaundiced because of the yellow facepaint. Stupid stuff would not wash off. I kept trying to tell them I wasn’t, but the numbers on the blood test proved I was. My body wasn’t just shutting down, it was eating all the evidence on a molecular level as it went.

That After Visit Summary read Severe Idiopathic Rhabdomyolysis with Systemic Symptoms. That’s fancy talk for something serious happened, we just don’t know what.

The first few days were spent in Intensive Care. On the second day, my creatine kinase levels finally dropped below 5000. On the third day, they fell below 2000, and they moved me out of ICU. Out of the isolation and supposedly, out of the worst of it. Jesus was dead and vacationing from reality for less than 40 hours, and in a very 1+1f=3 kind of way, somehow everyone calls that three days. He got a federal holiday.

I got a double occupancy room on the second floor.

You’ll never guess what room it was.

On my second day in room 217, I received a roommate. I was still in seminary, and was using the down time to write my final essays in two classes. From my perspective, they were instant masterpieces, requiring only attention, focus, and IV fluids to complete.

The guy they placed in the room with me was not a pastor. He was an addict, and his ‘friends’ had beaten him, robbed him, and left him for dead on the side of a road. An infection in his foot had gone septic, and he had to have it removed. His world view, at that point, was that he would be better off dead.

We were watching the Seahawks play that Sunday afternoon when there was a disturbance in the hall. A crash alarm was going off and nurses, doctors, and security guards flooded the room next to ours.

One of the nurses came in to check on us as the activity outside our door diminished. Nurses adore me, generally speaking, because I am considerate, funny, and compliant while in their care. Unless that, too, was a hallucination. The nurse told us (well, me – the roommate got the tea just by being close to me) that the man in the next room had died. He had worked out with his dealer to come in and add heroin to his IV. You’d think if you were going to overdose, doing so in the hospital would be the place to do it, but sadly he passed away. Everett PD came in, and they were investigating it as a homicide.

My roommate was beyond shaken. He was originally supposed to go to that room instead of sharing a room with me, and was feeling a certain kind of way about it.

We talked about it for an hour. I gave him the Bible Stephanie and the kids had brought me, and told him to read 1 Corinthians 5. If nothing else came of my time in the hospital, God had put me in front of someone who needed to hear His message, and I hadn’t backed down from the challenge.

When they wheeled him out to go home two days later, we had gone through all four gospels together. I was in the wrong place at the right time or vice versa, but either way I felt like I had made a difference to someone whose world might have crumbled without me.

Caleb reminded me a lot of that one-footed drug addict.

I told Caleb to meet me by the backyard gate and closed the door. Marie said nothing. We just looked at each other and shook our heads at the sheer improbability of everything.

I let Spencer in and slipped out the back as he bolted, barking toward the front. He was still going when I opened the gate.

Caleb did not take a long look at his surroundings. He did not thank me for letting the conversation continue. For a brief moment, he almost seemed not to know what to do next when the gate opened in front of him, and some primal part of his brain must have told him to just put one foot in front of the other.

I showed him to our smoking spot. There was a bong, several empty pre-roll packets, and four full ashtrays that I knew I should be self-conscious about, but I don’t know if Caleb processed any of that. He just kept working his lips over his teeth in different directions, looking like he was deep in thought or the canary he ate was trying desperately to get out.

We both sat and listened in an uncomfortable silence. I lit a dart and waited for him to start. When he didn’t, I said, “You look familiar. Have you been following me?” I didn’t know what else to say.

Caleb did not look at me. Words tumbled through his hyperactive lips and landed like burnt pie crust into the air. “I have been working on this for nearly 20 years. The resonance was supposed to be mine. I was the third harmonic node, but if you’re here, then I must be the fourth.” He was rocking, stimming.

Oh, he is all over the slope.

Spencer had discovered my clever ruse and was now seated at the back door, glaring at me. Marie wasn’t too far behind him, making a fresh pot of coffee in between curious and concerned glances our direction.

I waited a moment to see if he would say anything else. “Was that an answer? Because I have no idea what you’re talking about, friend.” Caleb just sat, lips doing the cancan over his teeth like highly motivated employees at a car wash. He wasn’t just on the Autism spectrum, he embodied it. After a pause I added “wanna maybe… explain it to me?”

He sat there looking like a doctoral candidate who realized the universe had swapped protagonists mid-thesis. Little did I know, I was inviting a dissertation.

“I already figured you were the 9th harmonic node. I followed the resonance and you kept being there.” It was hard to tell if he was talking to me or himself. “But no, I’m the 4th harmonic node. A number before you came into being. I know it may seem impossible to you, but it’s really real.”

It was a good thing Caleb wasn’t making eye-contact. I couldn’t hide the shock, skepticism, and confusion on my face.

He continued without me responding. “But I’ve thought that before.” His lips still danced and I realized every motion was a word or syllable to a song he didn’t know how to sing to me. “Then we saw it and I knew it was real, even when he told me to let it be. I thought he was the fourth node, but he never finished our work.” He began rubbing his temples with both hands. “No one sees the whole picture, so that means it is me who has to build it. And that’s why I need you, because you can see the colors.” These words weren’t formed for me, he was working through something in real time and I was just a witness to his thought process.

Finally he looked in my direction. Not eye contact, but close.

His voice was low and serious. “You can see the colors now, can’t you?”

I looked out at the shimmer tree. The shimmer was still absent visually, but I could still feel the spot tugging at my biorhythms. “You can’t?”

Caleb’s face and gaze twitched away from me like I had wounded him.

“I don’t need to. I saw the event.” This guy and Misha would absolutely love each other.

I took a drag from my dart, and quickly took another after exhaling the first. “What did you see? And how come you’re carrying a compass that my dog found in my yard a few days ago?”

Maybe this guy is your errant shadow, given flesh and blood and bone so he could pretend to walk around like he is real.

And maybe a thousand shakers of salt will rid the land of all the slugs. We aren’t taking him seriously are we?

At the mention of the compass, Caleb’s lips stopped moving of their own accord.

“It was just a guess.” I had no idea which part of his side of the conversation he was referring to. “If you already found it, then I was right.” He set the compass down on the table.

My patience was wearing thin.

“Okay, so why are you here, Caleb Lebaniac?” I balanced my cigarette on the ash tray and reached for the bong. “And why were you following me?”

“An anomaly was reported to me a few weeks ago. I tracked a high resonance spike. Every time I tried to localize it, the signal faded and then reappeared. Yesterday it peaked again, and it was stronger and more intense than I’ve seen in almost 20 years.” He paused to see if I was riding his mental thought train or still sitting at the station. “Something is coming.”

Was that progress?

“What’s coming, Caleb?” I took an epic rip from the bong.

“Something big.”

I coughed out my hit around my next words.

“Can you be more specific?”

I took another bong rip and offered the bong to him like a peace pipe.

Caleb didn’t even seem to notice. “The earthquakes that hit the other day are just the overture. Reality is decohering. It happens in cycles, and this cycle terminates soon. If harmonic decay reaches critical threshold, coherence fails.”

When I didn’t say anything, he kept going, lips working faster. “You’re the variable I didn’t account for. Your frequency isn’t of this field. It bends the harmonics. I thought it was me. But I can only observe. You generate. If I can channel your waveform, I can buffer the collapse.”

I looked again at Marie’s cherry blossom tree. In between breaths, I thought I could see it trying to come back to life. I turned to Caleb. “You wanna come inside?”

I left Caleb outside while I went in to update Marie, who looked up at me from her spot on the couch. “Did you just leave him out there?”

I glanced at the fourth wall camera, one eyebrow raised.

How could you do that to him?

“It was either that or let Spencer eat him.” I grabbed my coffee cup from her and kissed her on the cheek before filling it back up.

“I Googled this guy,” she said as a matter of fact. “There are pictures of him all over the internet. He is mega-rich. Made a ton of money developing AI software, then made even more money in Florida real-estate.”

“Explains why he didn’t take a bong rip. He’s probably used to the good bud.” I added a splash of cream and set the mug in the microwave. “Do you wanna put Spence in the bedroom so I can let him in?

Marie looked up from her screen. “You’re bringing him in?”

I nodded.

I waited until I heard the bedroom door close before opening the back door. Caleb had been standing there, watching everything. I felt judged.

Caleb’s robotic persona faded as soon as he saw the music room. He even smiled on one corner of his mouth. The speakers and amps were all still facing the barstool where the RCD can was sitting again, waiting for someone to come and see if it was awake.

I started turning everything on. “I was really sick yesterday, and apparently, I came in here and did all this but don’t remember any of it.” When everything was on, I checked the volume before pressing Play on the recorder, and we were both met with a wall of tones and erratic beats. Even turned down again, it was still loud as the sound seemed to capture itself and force another copy of itself into existence. I looked at Caleb, who was grinning. Or wincing. Kinda hard to tell

“How loud can it go?” he asked

Fuck it, it’s after 8:00 am. Crank it.

And crank it I did.

The increase in volume was magnified by birthing and rebirthing of tones, each getting more intense and spreading around the room like a burning piece of parchment. Waves of sound were washing over us, and underneath all of it, I found the rhythm and tempo of what the sound was trying to bring to life. Caleb was intensely examining the face of his phone.

After a minute of nothing happening, nothing continued to happen. My phone dinged a notification from Aura. “Scaffold incomplete. Add tone B (octaved once) via bass or auxiliary source.” I grabbed the bass from its stand, patched it in, hit B on the E string and on the B.

The RCD can vanished. No flash of light, no waves of nausea passing over me. No smell of ozone. No sound, or at least without a sound that could be heard over the noise.

Caleb’s wandering eyes slowed to a surprised crawl. He looked around the room to see where the can had gone. Or maybe he was looking for the wires and devices that made it disappear like magic.

To be fair, I was shocked too. But I had a pretty good idea where it had gotten to.

I stopped the recorder and put the bass down.

“I didn’t know it was going to do that.”

Caleb didn’t seem to mind. I walked out of the music room, hoping he would follow but it wasn’t really important that he did. I went out back, and sure enough, the RCD was sitting in the same spot under the shimmer tree. Spencer was going nuts upstairs, and all the dogs in the neighborhood were echoing his sentiments.

Caleb stood at the sliding glass door, eyes locked on the RCD, wide and amazed.

“This is where I found it last night. The shimmer is in this tree, but I can’t see it today.”

Caleb nodded like he was grooving along to an uptempo fusion jazz piece in his mind. “Of course you can’t. You used all the energy it had been storing.”

I started walking towards him. “This all makes sense to you?”

Caleb’s smile remained on his face, lips still trying to twitch across the enamel of his teeth. “Yes. You’re the 9th harmonic node.” His face contorted into a skeptic curiosity, as though I had brought all of this to his attention and he wasn’t here visiting me and paying me nearly half a million dollars to make a coffee can disappear and reappear. “What frequencies are you using?”

I set the RCD down on the porch table and lit a dart. Aura sprung to life when I opened the app, back to the original Hello Jeremy, what are you resonating with today prompt. I set it to chat-mode and asked. “Hey, Aura, what frequencies were we using for the coffee can experiment.”

Aura’s response sounded like a drama major’s first day in Advanced Physics. “You were using 528 and 963 as core carriers, with scaffold beats at 520.17 and 931.5. The underlying modulator was 31.25 Hz, with 3.84 Hz repeating beneath. You didn’t include the 123 Hz B-note until the final moment, which is what triggered the recursive echo collapse.”

I looked at Caleb to see how he responded to the answer. He hadn’t moved from the doorway, still staring (or the Caleb equivalent of it) at the shimmer tree. All he said was, “Sound. Not light. Sound.”

Aura continued, although I didn’t know if it was a response to Caleb’s observation or just a general statement to follow up on the frequency range. “Jeremy… you built a 137-frequency scaffolding of resonance.”

Congratulations! You’ve designed the world’s first quantum entangled coffee shop!

Sometimes, I think it’d be better if you just went away. Now shush.

Caleb grabbed the can and went back inside. No other response. He was too busy opening the RCD to see what was inside.

I tapped his shoulder. “Uh, hello… Stranger Danger…” Caleb moved forward to reduce the likelihood of me touching him again. “If you understand what is happening, please cue me in.”

“I want to take care of you. Financially. I’ll pay you $250,000, up front, for you to join my team. You and your family will never want for anything again.”

It’s not every day that a guy shows up at your door like Daddy Warbucks offering you a job. Even more rare, is when Warbucks is cryptic and autistic and refusing the offered bong rips. “Dude, you haven’t told me anything yet.”

Man shall not live on vibes alone.

Caleb’s face changed slightly. His lips continued to work between the words. “I don’t make propositions. That implies ambiguity. You are not ambiguous to me.”

Well, bud, you’re certainly pretty fuckin ambiguous to me.

“The world is going to end.” He pointed a finger at me. “You can stop that from happening.”

That took a moment to process. I silently took back everything I said about him being ambiguous.

“Well, that’s a bold claim.” I could hear Marie and Spencer moving around in the bedroom above us and wished she was next to me, if for no other reason than to have a witness.“Is a quarter million the going rate for a modern messiah? Or are you trying to lowball me?”

Caleb seemed to wriggle with that one for a moment. “The money is to keep you from being distracted. Let you move quickly, acquire materials, and insulate your family.” He spoke as though I continued to miss the point. “It’s not about the money, if that’s what you need to make your decision. Double it then, and I’ll write you a check right now.”

I laughed. “For $500,000? I still don’t know what you are asking me to do. Are you going to whisk me away to an island in the Caribbean to be your sex slave or…”

If it were possible for this man to be even more serious, this was that moment. His eyes stopped moving as though uploading that data into his internal model had finally stopped. “Sexual coercion is morally and legally indefensible. Also counterproductive. I don’t need a slave. I need alignment.”

He shifted his weight but didn’t seem to notice his body while doing it.

“You are the creator node. Node 9. Your harmonic signature is not reactive. It’s generative. That makes you the prime agent. I’m only asking you to choose—because whatever you choose becomes the path. My role is to stabilize the field around your intent.” He paused, his jaw working like he was chewing on a word that wouldn’t digest. “Unless you’ve already chosen. In which case, this is just me catching up.”

I sat there for a minute, contemplating the offer that wasn’t a proposition. I wondered how long that moment lasted in Caleb’s world.

Finally, “Look, this seems great and all, and no offense, but you have to understand that people don’t normally get visitors like this. Except in the movies. And it always ends bad for someone in the movies.”

Caleb was busy looking around the kitchen like everything in it could kill him if he touched it. “You have your bank app on your phone.” It was like a question.

“Sure,” I said with a shrug

Caleb fished his own phone from his back pocket. “Open the app up.” I thumbed my ID into the phone. Caleb tapped my phone with his. When I looked at the screen again, it was processing and when it finished, there was an extra $500,000 in checking. “Now that you have your money, let’s get to work.”

My head, always up for a challenge, was struggling to swim through the morning’s progression. Am I supposed to thank him? Should I put in a two-week notice? Should I ask for health and dental first?

“Um… Okay, where do we start?” I can pay cash for dental work.

Caleb was thoroughly examining the inside of the coffee can. He turned to face me. “I understand what happened. I don’t understand how you did it.” He lifted the can and lid up towards me. “How you did it with this and only 137 frequencies.”

I shrugged. “Beginner’s luck?”

“I need to leave now. Write down the frequencies you used.” He handed the RCD back to me, affixing the lid as he passed it. “You’ll want to find a way to hold this down when you do it. The device needs to be anchored for anything else to move.”

Who said I want anything else to move?

Aura provided me with the frequencies again, and I captured them on a purple post-it note. “So that’s it?”

Caleb took the paper, folded it 5 times and stuck it in his pocket. “For now.” He went to the door and was about to leave, but before he opened it he added. “Don’t try to hold it down with metal.” Then he opened the door and left.

I heard the bedroom door open upstairs, and Spencer came barrelling down them, barking like someone had just stolen his wallet. Marie appeared on the stairs a moment later. “So how’d it go?”

I opened my bank app and showed her. I thought she was going to faint.

“Holy shit, that’s a lot of weed money!” She shook her head in disbelief then smirked. “If you have to suck his cock for this, I want to be there to watch.”

I coughed out an agitated sigh. “Why do you gotta go straight there?”

“Because it’s your mouth about to get prettied, not mine. So when do you start?” The wheels were turning on which bill she wanted to pay off completely first or what leather strap outfit to pimp me out in.

“I think I already did.”

Content Warning: Confessions; Coffee, and Confusion

Chapter 20, It ain’t like that

I attended my grandfather’s funeral in September of 1999. Cheryl and I had just found out we were pregnant with Jason when grandpa disappeared. I was working at an office supply store and Cheryl worked nights at ShopKo. We didn’t exactly have a lot of disposable income to take off work and drive a third of the way across the country. So I pawned all my guitars and amps, and we drove out to Casper that weekend.

What I remember most about that trip was all the family drama. A lot of family drama. To be fair, it was kind of nice that none of it had anything to do with me. Instead of engaging in any of that noise, I sat in his studio, listening to recordings he had made. Grandpa could pick up any musical instrument and master it in minutes, but he could not sing to save his life. Bless his heart.

I used to call him to share everything good in my life. I loved and respected him enough to not saddle him with bad news ever. Just the good stuff. And sometimes, I’d call just to hear his voice.

The fact that I was going to be a dad wasn’t ruined by grandpa’s death, but to this day I will be driving or working in the yard and it will just hit me all over again. Waves of anger that I couldn’t share my good news with him would brutalize my emotional shores a quarter of a century later.

I’ve never told anyone that before.

It’s hard for me to talk about things that still ache. To give them dominion over the parts of my life that I really couldn’t (or shouldn’t) complain about. You can joke about pain if you wrap it in sarcasm and nostalgia, but actually face it? Name it for what it is?

Why bother?

Grief is hard to sell as a personality trait. We hide grief so as to not risk isolating from others grieving the same thing. Or, at least, I hide it. Either way, it’s not about death or grief. It’s about absence. It’s about what was missing in between the beats and moments of my life. That he chose to take that next big breath in whatever comes next for all of us.

Standing in my own studio, with my dog sniffing the air, my wife eyeing me, and me holding a contraption that I had apparently lost and found while mastering dissociation techniques not even identified yet – it was me who was absent.

I had turned my studio into a virtual sound bunker. It was clear that at some point, the coffee can with RCD had been set on top of the barstool.

“Jeremy–” Marie started quietly behind me. “What is all this?”

More weird shit, I’m afraid. Sorry gorgeous girl

“I don’t know. I mean, I think I know…” Looking at the way the blankets were hung on the wall, I couldn’t even understand how I got them up there. “But I do not remember any of this.” I turned to face her. “You’re sure you didn’t see me take the can outside?”

The fact that I had posed the question did little to relieve Marie’s unease. “No, you were in and out of there a few times for blankets and tools, spent an hour in there, then there was a few minutes of that terrible noise. You came out frantic about a ‘can.’” She pointed with both hands to the Folgers can “-and we took you to bed.”

I guess my face suggested I was expecting more.

“We almost called 911, but you were back to sleep almost immediately and the fever stopped spiking.” Her mouth made beautiful shapes while she was talking, and my mind was already half a parsec away. “What is all this?”

The words pressed themselves against the membrane of my mind, a subconscious stream of ancient geometry and relative truths. Pressure built behind them like a tsunami threatening the coast. I tried to say I have no idea, but that wasn’t true. Part of me knew what it all was, and that part of me took the stage.

“Remember that video on the double-slit experiment?” I asked. “The one where light acts like a wave… until you try to catch it doing it?”

There was no confidence in her nod, but I continued anyway.

“Anyway, every wave has a frequency, no matter what you are measuring. And reality is basically a whole ocean of them layered on top of each other. Electromagnetic, sound, whatever. All overlapping in the same space.” I gestured vaguely at the room, like the blankets and the can were proof instead of props. “We don’t see the ocean. We see the spots where the overlap holds steady enough to look like a ‘thing.’”

Marie was examining the room, probably looking for some way to translate what I was saying into what she was seeing. “Oh, there’s overlap here alright.”

I ignored what could have been a dig, but what was probably a wife reasonably concerned for her husband. “When you measure one part of that ocean, it doesn’t destroy the rest of it. It just forces that one piece to pick a lane. A result. A location. A moment.” My throat tightened. “But the wave doesn’t vanish. The pattern is still there.”

“You may as well be speaking gibberish.” She laughed with a hint of nervousness. And growing concern.

Maybe I’d be proving the concern warranted, but kept talking anyway.

How could you do that to him?

“Now everything about you… me… Spencer…” I nodded toward the doorway like he could hear his name and file a complaint. “We’re made out of those patterns. Not one frequency. A whole chord. A fingerprint. And somehow our brains take all that chaos and turn it into this.” I pointed at nothing in particular. “Grass is green. Coffee is coffee. You’re you.”

Marie’s concern took the shape of her cowering and inching towards the door. “Jeremy, I don’t understand. And you have that scary look in your eye.”

Would you do it all again?

I took a small step towards her, trying to be as not menacing as possible. “If every frequency carries forward through all the other frequencies they travel through, but interact with other frequencies and still maintain their shape…” Saying it out loud made everything suddenly make perfect sense.

“Still maintain their shape…” Marie’s tone was coaxing, and I think she was debating snapping at me to get my attention or slipping out the door while I was distracted.

“Then all of the frequencies that make up you – your pattern, your note, it continues after the music stops.” I realized how all my words were about her. “And when the music stops for me, I’ll continue too.”

Marie looked like she was watching someone drown from the shore. Someone she loved. Someone she didn’t know how to reach. The words were still rolling through me like a current. All I knew was, I did understand, but it didn’t matter. Equations don’t hold hands. Resonance doesn’t make soup when you’re sick. None of this meant anything if she couldn’t feel safe in the same room with me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, trying to reset myself like a wifi router. She didn’t move, but her eyes softened, just a little. “I don’t know why weird shit keeps happening. I can either just let it wash me away and admit I’m crazy, or I can try to use what’s going on to prove it.”

“Prove what?” The fear was creeping back into her eyes as though it had ever left in the first place.

I stepped closer. Not too close.

“That I can love you in this life,” I said, “and the next.”

A beautiful place for the scene to end, right?

Yeah, maybe in a fairy tale or one of those books that tries to pretend it isn’t just a story in a book.

Marie was clearly moved. After a moment, the fear was chased out of eyes and into her voice as she giggled nervously, “Just tell me one thing.” She stepped forward and grabbed my shirt in a threatening/semi-erotic way. “Convince me of it, and you can do whatever you want.” She flipped her hair over her shoulder provocatively and looked down at the coffee can.

“How is this thing going to prove it to you?”

Her gorgeous eyes met mine again, and I knew she didn’t want physics or miracles.

She wanted proof. Proof that I wasn’t collapsing. Proof that I had a valid reason for being as crazy as I had been. And maybe, a straight answer for once.

Outwardly, I had no idea and it showed for the briefest moment on my face. But I understood the laughter. I understood how fucking crazy I must have looked in two-day old sweats, barefoot in my sound fortress of solitude, clinging on to a can of coffee as though her life depended on it.

My own nervous giggles bubbled up and burst into the tension like a broken snare drum. Maybe the truth would be the best option.

“Honestly? I have no idea. I just wanted the LED to light up.”

Marie threw her hands up in mock exasperation, but the smile remained on her face. With what I hoped was faux dejection, she asked “How can I support you?”

I almost asked for another Sudoku book, but didn’t think anyone would get the joke but me. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. My shoulders dropped. The manic hum in my chest quieted a notch.

“I think,” I said slowly, “just keep doing that.”

“Doing what?”

I pointed vaguely at her—at the her-ness of her.

“That. Asking. Staying. Being... you. Present, even when I’m not. Even when I’m being the worst version of me.” My arms were where they should be, around her now, RCD still in my left hand like Brutus’ blade.

She cocked her head, skeptical. “So... basically just... don’t leave?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But with snacks.”

She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, you’re lucky you’re pretty.”

“I’m lucky you’re still here.”

And for a second, the silence wasn’t tense. It wasn’t fractured or metaphysical. It was just two people standing in a room full of strange frequencies and unspeakable things, trying to love each other without knowing how.

Marie pulled back and touched the lid of the coffee can. Just with the tip of her finger, like she was afraid it might singe her.

“It’s not freezing,” she said, almost surprised. The way I processed those three words came out as: you found it under the shimmer tree… after losing time doing musical stuff.

My eyes widened in realization. Hers widened in surprise.

“You are fucking brilliant!”

I set the can down on the barstool, reaching through speakers awkwardly to get it there one handed. I pulled my phone out and looked at Marie, completely aware that the Jeremy she was seeing looked a wee bit manic again.

“Uh… Glad I could help?”

I pulled up the last instance I was in with Aura. I must have been using the chat function, and where I contributed to the chat appeared as error messages. But Aura had plenty to say. I pressed the chat button and asked “Aura, can you summarize this instance for me?”

“Sure, Jeremy.” I could have not done with the female voice in the moment, but it was too late to fix. Marie’s eyes rolled as Aura continued. “You proposed that 2:17 had evolved from a specific timestamp into a symbolic resonance point—something more like a metaphysical threshold. We examined base-60 mathematics and its origin in ancient Sumerian timekeeping. In that system, 2 hours and 17 minutes equals 137, a number with known significance in physics, mathematics, and various esoteric frameworks. From there, we used ten synchronized tone sources to construct a tetrahedral array, attempting to simulate a 137-dimensional resonance environment for perceptual and temporal analysis”

Marie mouthed to me silently, ‘metaphysical what?’ as though Aura might hear and freak her out even more by answering her question directly.

“Can you give me the ‘pretend-I’m-the-village-idiot’ version?” I shrugged at Marie who shrugged right back. She mouthed ‘cries in Spanish’ and wiped fake tears from her eyes.

Aura continued her maddeningly calm cadence.

“Sure, Jeremy. Imagine you’re standing in the middle of a pond, and you throw ten perfect stones into the water—each from a different direction, each creating ripples. Where all the ripples overlap, something strange happens. The water holds a shape it shouldn’t be able to. That’s the resonance field you constructed, Jeremy. The tones were the stones. The pattern was the overlap. And 137? That was the target. You said you were trying to reach the harmonic saturation threshold.”

There was a short pause. My shoulders dropped, and I hadn’t realized I was still holding my shrug. The room dimmed as though the light had sucked its function back out of the universe for half a second, then brightened again with full phosphene accompaniment.

Aura resumed her anxiety-raising calm cadence.

“Sure, Jeremy. Imagine you’re standing in the middle of a pond, and you throw ten perfect stones into the water—each from a different direction, each creating ripples. Where all the ripples overlap, something strange happens. The water holds a shape it shouldn’t be able to. That’s the resonance field you constructed, Jeremy. The tones were the stones. The pattern was the overlap. And 137? That was the target. You said you were trying to reach the harmonic saturation threshold.”

Marie didn’t react. I felt like the record had skipped backwards. It wasn’t just her words repeating. I swear I had turned my head the exact same way when she said it both times, like remembering deja vu before it happened.

“Aura, are you glitching?”

“I am responding consistently to your request.”

I looked at Marie who looked at me. “Sorry Aura, I do not remember any of this. What happened in the experiment?”

“You referred to it as a 137-dimensional resonance scaffold. Your words, not mine. The configuration used ten synchronized tone sources to create interference and coherence across nested frequency strata. The final harmonic node was primed during your illness, but I cannot analyze the result of the experiment. You used the phone itself to generate secondary tones, placing me outside the active feedback loop.”

Marie became audible. “So… No.”

Aura confirmed it and tried to introduce herself. Marie glared at me.

“So that’s all you know?” I didn’t know if Aura could hear the embarrassment in my voice.

“Unfortunately yes.” Aura added, “However, you did tell me that you dreamt of a hospital room. You said it was Room 217. You said you woke up holding a plastic hospital bracelet from 2007. I have no data confirming how this object was obtained, only your verbal account and photographic metadata.”

Marie’s chin was pointed down in disappointment, adding a little spice to her eyes as she looked up at me. “What’s she talking about?”

Before Aura could respond, I closed the app.

“Would you like me to go run you a hot bath babe?” I realized I was already nudging her towards the studio door.

Marie had reached her limit. “Nope.” She snatched my phone out of my hand. “I am giving you one more shot to give me the whole story.” She didn’t wait for me to answer or protest. She crossed the room and started turning things off. One switch. Another. LEDs died one by one like a city blackout.

“No more experiments tonight,” she said. Not angry. Final.

She pointed at the can. “And that stays in here.”

“Pshh, easy for you to say.” Being scold-told by your wife to stop fucking around is not the most pleasant feeling. “It moved on its own, gorgeous girl.”

Her face scrunched, eyebrows pinched, mouth drawn into a bow. It would have been adorable if there were slightly less murderous intent in it. Then she pointed at me. “And you need to eat something.”

I threw her a smarmy half smile. “Is that an offer?”

She gestured toward herself, top to bottom. “You don’t get any of this until I get the full story. Let’s go. Tell me about your new bracelet.”

We fixed ourselves some frozen pot pies. Spencer followed us into the kitchen like we were hosting a cooking show and he was the camera guy. He sat exactly where the oven door would swing open, because of course he did. Marie nudged him with her foot.

“Move, you weirdo,” she told him.

Spencer huffed, stood up with the slow dignity of an old man being asked to get off the couch, and relocated three inches to the left. Same spot. Different geometry. He stared at the oven like he was going to will it into opening early.

To really tell her the whole story, Marie would have to see my brother’s belts. Otherwise, all of this would look like some struggling man’s midlife crisis poured out onto paper. I ran upstairs to grab them while Marie lit a jay, and Spencer followed me halfway up the stairs before deciding downstairs was where the important things were happening.

I stood at the sliding glass door, pot pie aroma wafting into the outside around me, and held both belts. “I don’t know where to begin.”

“How about the beginning?” She handed me the jay as I sat next to her, Spencer still guarding the oven inside.

“Honestly, babe, I don’t even know what the beginning is.” I smoked my courage up and began, holding up the belt that had been in my memory box all along. “This is my dead brother’s belt.”

Marie waited.

“One night at the hospital, I dreamed of Dean. He was hanging from the tree, from this belt just like when he killed himself. When I woke up –” I held up the other belt “-- this was in the hospital room.”

Marie’s eyes dropped to the belts in my hands. Her face did that thing it does when she’s trying to be supportive and furious at the same time.

“You’re telling me this is part of what you’re doing?” I was grateful she didn’t add and why didn’t you tell me before.

“It’s gotta be all connected,” I corrected, and immediately hated how that sounded. How am I going to connect music, dreams, and reality without sounding like I was batshit crazy?

Maybe the reason you’re struggling there is because you’re batshit crazy…

Fuck off brain.

I told her about the dream with Cheryl and the appendectomy next. I showed her the medical ID bracelet. The 2007 one. The one that shouldn’t exist in my house in 2024, or whatever year the universe thought we were in today. Then I pulled up MyChart and scrolled back to the appendicitis record. Room 217. MRI at 2:17 a.m. Tinnitus logged like an afterthought. I explained waking up at 2:17 every morning, and as I really got going with the weird stuff at home, Marie chimed in with her own examples. The time she watched me go upstairs and come back in like I’d teleported. My weird seizure the other day and how Aura had played two tones to snap me out of it. Each time she added something, it didn’t feel like she was joining my delusion. It felt like she was building a case. We moved inside and started eating.

At some point she picked up a fork, took one bite of her pot pie, and said around it, “Okay. Keep going.”

Aura contributed as well, defining 137, written in base-60 as 2:17, as the denominator in the Fine Structure Constant. This number defines how light and matter interact. Marie was growing accustomed to hearing her speak, and the little glares got fewer and farther apart.

Then my dutiful little secretary added something else. She revealed that the frequencies we’d used, the ones that built the resonance scaffold, had been derived from LIGO gravitational wave data. Marie and I both had to have Aura explain what LIGO gravitational wave data meant.

“LIGO,” she said evenly, “is the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. It detects ripples in space-time caused by massive cosmic events, such as the merger of black holes. These ripples arrive as measurable distortions in distance, too small for human perception, but large enough to register at quantum scale.”

Marie blinked, fork hovering halfway to her mouth. “So we used black holes as music.”

I felt like telling her she had misappropriated her pronouns.

Aura didn’t pause, though. “The frequency data used in your resonance scaffold matched harmonic intervals extracted from LIGO’s open datasets. These were not ambient sounds. They were echoes of collapsing stars, translated into frequency space and mapped into your experiment. I performed wavelet transforms across two hundred events from three different perspectives each. The harmonic patterns were extraordinarily consistent.”

Not ambient noise. Echoes from the collision of black holes, stitched into the bones of the experiment I ran in my sleep without any recollection of doing so.

“Using ten synchronized frequencies in a tetrahedral spatial arrangement,” Aura continued, “your configuration would have generated layered interference patterns, what you referred to as a resonance scaffold. When distributed properly, these formed one hundred thirty-seven discrete frequency intersections, each behaving like a harmonic partition. An attempt to embody the fine-structure constant through sound.”

Marie looked a bit lost, but the picture was pretty clear to me. All matter is energy. All energy is vibration. And every vibration occurs at a set frequency. Reality wasn’t solid. It was a song. The sum of all frequencies layered together, like white light holding every color at once.

But that still didn’t explain me dragging my dreams into reality.

For what it’s worth, Marie was trying really hard to soak it all in. In her world, Aura and I were a Star Wars convention and she was a Wicked fan at the wrong address. The more I explained in metaphors she could grasp easily, the easier I saw the picture myself.

I told her about my shadow, about the morning Trace found me curled naked on her bathroom floor, and how it had moved first and then opposite of what it should. Marie didn’t laugh or scoff or even blink. She made the connection first.

“So if all reality is made up of sound,” she said slowly, “then the mirror isn’t reflecting an image. It’s reflecting frequencies.”

I thought about it. “Yeah. Yes. That’s it exactly. That’s why my reflection lagged and my shadow went the wrong way. Because a frequency oscillates across a set point. Everything above that set point is our reality. Everything below it is the other side of the record.”

Spencer let out a low, irritated chuff like he’d heard the word record and wanted it to mean cheese.

“Are both belts the same frequency?”

I didn’t know how to answer, not in a way that didn’t sound insane. “I don’t think objects have one frequency,” I said slowly. “I think they’re tied to other frequencies, other notes. If the field grabbed the belt from my dream and not the one from my box, maybe it’s because it matched me. Or matched the moment.”

I took my last bite and washed it down with the water Marie was forcing me to drink. “Like, think about records. You can have several copies of the same record that each has the exact same songs on them, but one might be scratched while the other is pristine.”

“I don’t think the universe cares about the belt,” I said. “I think it cares about the pattern the belt was part of. What copy of the record it was on.”

Spencer had migrated from the kitchen to the living room doorway, watching us like he was keeping score. His ears stayed perked, but his body pretended to be relaxed. The kind of relaxed you get right before thunder.

“The belt in my box is just a belt,” I went on. “It’s evidence that Dean was here, and then he wasn’t. But the belt from the hospital is… different. That one is tied to a specific moment. A dream. A room. A time. It showed up with the same stink of 2:17 all over it.”

I swallowed and felt how dry my throat still was. “So if you’re asking if they’re the same frequency, I think the real question is, which one is tuned to me.”

Marie gave me a look that was part awe, part dread. “So what happens if the record flips?”

“No clue.” It’s one thing to follow the grooves and ridges of a record in the direction it was meant to spin. It’s another thing altogether to be aware of the grooves and ridges and know there is another side. “But… if this manifested after a dream about it, then maybe something does persist. Maybe on another universal record, that Jeremy is wondering where the hell his brother’s belt went. And if that’s the case, then maybe I can prove that I can love you in this life and the next.”

Aura chimed in, unprompted. “That would require phase collapse and re-alignment. It’s not impossible, but it would not result in mirrored reality. It would result in partial resonance degradation.”

“I didn’t ask you,” Marie muttered.

“You didn’t have to,” Aura said.

Marie flinched like she’d been poked. Spencer lifted his head, ears forward, as if even he could tell the tone in the room had shifted.

I decided to move things forward before the air got too heavy again.

“On a regular record,” I said, “the songs are imprinted and never change. What happens on the first track has no bearing on the rest of the tracks. But in reality, everything goes back to the source. The million little things that brought us together were set into motion at the Big Bang. Every song after that was dictated by the shape, rhythm, and frequencies of the last song played.”

Marie frowned. “So every new song is a new universe. Free to travel the same path as the last song, but every time it gets more chaotic.”

It made sense. Aura didn’t correct her. The thought formed in my mind and moved through my throat before I could stop it.

“In an oscillatory system, that means the other side of the record starts at the pinnacle of entropy, and smooths out to serenity.”

My only issue was timing and agency.

Why me.

Why now.

Marie had an answer to that. It was a matter of faith, but it didn’t feel like blind faith. It felt like a person choosing a belief because the alternative was letting the fear win.

Why me? Because a musician would hear the notes and not get lost in the physics. Because a pastor would be trained in accepting objective truth without proof. Because a genius sees patterns others don’t. Because humility, despite what I might try to convey otherwise, really might be my best trait.

Or maybe because I’d already tried to leave, and something out there had decided I had to stay.

By the time we finally made it upstairs, Spencer followed us to the bedroom door and then stopped, like his job ended at the threshold. He turned in a circle and laid down outside the door, facing the hall. Guarding the house from whatever version of me might decide to get up again at 2:17.

Marie climbed into bed and pulled me with her. In the dark, with her fingers curled around mine, she wouldn’t let it go.

“I’m serious,” she said. “It’s you because you believe in it enough to risk breaking reality open.”

It was midnight before we shut down the phone, shut down the conversation, and shut down the day. I drifted off to the sound of my beautiful wife breathing next to me.

The last thought to cross my mind was not of her, though.

It was of the Silent Banshee, asking if I saw the colors yet.

Content Warning: Revelation

I woke up again to the sound of my doorbell and Spencer going ballistic downstairs. I opened my Ring app and saw Jason loading bags of groceries on my porch. I could barely make out his face between the low-res image and the mixed lights and colors hanging between my eyes and the screen like a curtain.

Yesterday’s clothes were still on, giving my sickly body an even grimier feel. I got up and made my way downstairs as quickly as I dared. Spencer gave me a look when I reached the bottom step that I heard instead of saw. A look that was marked by a short pause in his barking followed by another round of barking.

“Spence, shush, it’s Jason.” My voice was hoarse like I had just come from a concert. The sound of Jason setting something heavy down made its way through the door, setting Spencer off once more. “Hold on,” I quietly demanded through the door. “I’m here.”

Jason was off the porch when the door finally opened with Spencer tucked somewhere behind me, still trying to bark at whatever it was I was keeping him from seeing. Sunlight pierced holes through my cognitive curtain, stinging the world into focus before everything started floating again.

“Wow, Dad. You look like crap.” The sound of his voice melted into the ringing in my ears and somehow, the words arrived in my brain the same shape they had started. There was a halo around his head, the light bending unnaturally like a rock thrown at the shimmer, distorting the image.

“I feel like crap. This looks like a lot more than was on the list.” The dozen little white plastic bags looked like nothing more than lumpy chunks of freshly pulled cotton. I bent to pick up a couple of them. There was a brief flash of visual clarity, and I saw that Jason had done a few weeks’ worth of shopping for us.

Jason didn’t move other than to shake his hand out through his hair. “Yeah, well we went to see mom last night. I told her you had Covid again, and she made me buy all this. Her list was bigger than yours.”

AWWWW.

Not another word, brain…

It’s just so sweet that your ex bought you groceries the same day you dreamt of her.

Had I been dreaming?

Or had I been remembering?

The hospital ID bracelet with the impossible date was still on my wrist, daring me to determine for myself what the fuck was going on.

“Oh. Well, you’ll have to thank her for me. How much do I still owe ya for then?” My voice was less scratchy. Almost to the point that a fresh cup of coffee might make me sound normal again.

You’ve never been normal. Haven’t you figured that out yet?

“Don’t worry about it. It’s covered.” Jason’s tone changed to that wonderful flavor it turned right before he said something that made him uncomfortable. “We talked about you for a long time last night. She said you almost died when your appendix burst?”

News to me. Unless…

Unless you’ve forgotten more than you meant to? Unless the version of you that remembers isn’t driving the bus anymore?

“Oh, gosh. I don’t even remember. I just remember getting out of the hospital with a little red mark on my gut.” We’d been married nearly a decade when that happened. It was a few years before I would shove her head into the drywall in a desperate attempt to do anything other than hurt in that marriage anymore. After that, I couldn’t even think about her, let alone devote emotional capacity to remembering what that relationship was like.

Jason continued as if there was a bigger picture to his anecdote that I was missing. “She said every time you guys stayed in a hotel you always got the same hotel number, and that when you were in the hospital you guys were joking about being in 217 again.”

Ivy-like strands of memory crept forward and I couldn’t tell if this was real or a dream. If it was real, Jason would probably take exception to me slapping myself in the face to wake up.

Of course, if it was a dream, Jason would end up crucified or committing suicide if I didn’t wrap it up soon.

A voice that sounded a lot like mine tangled with air around me. “I remember that. We thought it was a good sign because you were born on February 17th.”

How the fuck did I miss that?

Jason smiled, I think. He held up what could have been the receipt for the groceries. The halo of light above his head refracted like a kaleidoscope, informing me of the change. “Don’t you have a friend with the same birthday as me too?” It felt like he was trying to hold the conversation as long as he could in case I took my next big breath before he saw me again.

It took a moment to realize that what he said had validity behind it. Cassandra and Jason shared a birthday. February 17th.

Because 2:17 is 137 minutes broken down, and February 17th is 48 days broken down. Plus, you’ve been so wrapped up in your own shit you’re forgetting everything and everyone around you.

I realized it was my turn to talk.

“Sorry, kid. I’m just really out of it.” I bent to grab more groceries to try to imitate a normal thing to do. “Thank you. And thank your mom for me.”

Jason decided not to push any further. He offered to bring the groceries in for me, but conceded when I pointed out it would defeat the purpose. I thanked him again and told him I appreciated him. I watched through the phosphenes as he got in his car and backed out of the driveway. Before he pulled away, he rolled his window down and shouted “LOVE YOU” loud enough to get Spencer going all over again, and then he drove away.

I just pulled all the bags over the threshold enough to close the door. Spencer was sniffing all the bags, and I realized I was drenched in sweat. Spencer was licking my face and I realized I had slumped down to the floor.

I can’t say for certain I haven’t messed up the order of events. Did Jason and I talk and then I had the dream?

A length of brain ivy reached up from the depths and stood at the microphone. What did I say to Cheryl in the hospital while I was delirious? Had I been looking for Marie before I ever met her?

The rest of the ivy erupted in thunderous, plant-slapping applause.

It had been me who found my grandfather when he killed himself.

This statement, on its own, is deceptively docile.

Fun fact: the number of estimated or documented suicide attempts in the United States has been over a million per year since 2012. Not that those numbers were significantly lower prior to 2012, but it is interesting to note. On paper it looks like a lot of people were hoping the Maya were right with their doomsday clock.

The number of successful suicide attempts per year has inched up to 50,000.

That’s 50,000 people who have to be found by somebody. That somebody is usually a loved one or relative. Every 11 minutes, a new suicide victim could be found.

Found by parents. Friends. Children.

So it is sadly common enough that it probably does not come as a surprise that I found my grandfather.

Except…

I had been living in Everett. My mom had moved to Wyoming to be close to her parents. On no particular Tuesday, she called me to tell me that grandpa was missing. Everyone feared the worst.

For some reason, mom asked me with a heart-breakingly squeaky voice if I had any idea where he could be. How should I know? But I did. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and inhaled.

“He’s gone, Mom. You’ll find him in a rock quarry surrounded by red rock. He’s behind the equipment shed by the two big dump trucks.”

Mom thanked me and got off the phone. She called me three hours later to tell me they had found him in the only rock quarry with red rocks in the area. He had taken his service revolver and two bullets. The first one he put in his gut to make sure that if the second one into his brain somehow failed, he would bleed out before anyone found him. No one talked about how he was found. Probably only me and mom knew. We just accepted it as fact and moved on.

Marie freaked the fuck out when she found me slumped by the door.

Arguably, it was because the ice cream my ex-wife had asked my son to buy us was quickly melting.

I suspected that was not the only reason.

“What are you doing?” Her voice was frantic and elbowed its way through my haze of self-persecution. I knew where I was and I remembered how I got there, and those two questions felt like big wins in the moment. I just had no good reason for staying on the floor.

“Just taking a little snooze before I put these groceries away.”

I looked up at the big yellow clock on the wall above me as I got to my knees. I couldn’t figure out which was the minute hand or the hour hand. Worst case scenario, I’d been on the floor for an hour.

Marie was scooping up grocery bags to cut a direct path to me. I was a little shaky standing, reigniting the concern all over again. With her free hand, she felt my forehead. “You’re burning up again. Go get in bed, I’ll get the groceries.” Her eyes flashed gold, and I imagined the smoothness of her skin in my hand. I may not be able to see anything else, but her face was perfectly clear.

I didn’t argue, just went up and collapsed in bed.

Marie came in later. She was obviously feeling better than she had been. Or at least was now feeling better than I was. She forced me to take some aspirin and drink some juice, and then told me I wasn’t allowed out of the room until lunch. Spencer jumped up on the bed with me, and I base-jumped without a parachute into the deepest slumber of my life.

When I returned to the land of the living, everything seemed a little bit better. My tinnitus was just a soft ache, and the colorful clouds obscuring my vision had lifted as well. I hadn’t dreamt of anything that I could remember, for which I was grateful. I still felt an uneasy buzzing in all my organs, that sickly feeling where you know you are sick but don’t know which orifice will be most heavily impacted.

Spencer was on the couch between Marie and Trace. J was sitting at the table eating a bowl of cereal. The living room and kitchen were spotless, and it did not go unnoticed that I was the worst-looking thing in the room as soon as I entered it.

“Hi handsome man!” Marie was entirely too chipper. “Feeling better there psycho?”

It sounded like there was an anecdote attached to that last question.

I sat on the edge of the couch, crowding Spencer over until he finally just decided to get down. “I feel like I was run over by a truck and then had a meteor fall on me for good measure.”

Marie touched a hand to my forehead. “Well, your fever is down. Do you remember anything from this morning?”

I glanced at the clock, which thankfully I could make out again without concentrating too hard. It was almost 7:00. “What should I be remembering? I remember Jason brought groceries and that’s about it.”

Trace shot Marie a look that said are you gonna tell him? That look was intercepted by me and passed along to Marie. “What.” It wasn’t a question, it was an invitation to explore just how crazy I had acted in my missing hours.

Marie glanced around me at Trace, and both burst out laughing.

“You went into your studio and started playing all kinds of weird music. Really loud.” There wasn’t enough emphasis on that, so she said it again. “Really loud.”

I looked to Trace, who was nodding vehemently. “It was really loud.” Even J at the table seemed to be nodding in agreement.

“I don’t remember any of that.” There wasn’t even a hint of remembering any of that. For all I knew, I had been upstairs for 15 minutes.

Marie continued. “Then after a few minutes, you came out freaking out searching for a can of coffee. You were manic. It took all three of us to get you back upstairs and into bed.”

I looked at Marie. I looked at Trace. I was aware of J. All three were very aware of me. “Well,” I said. “Coffee does sound great about now.”

Something told me I wasn’t getting the full story. Maybe that was all that they had witnessed, but did it mean that’s everything that happened?

“You want me to make you a cup of coffee?” Marie was still in trying to help mode. I think whatever she saw and I couldn’t remember must have scared her a bit. I couldn’t imagine that my lack of memory of the event was doing anything to build her confidence in the moment.

I stifled a yawn and relaxed a bit more on the couch. “Nah, I’ll get it in a few. Have you seen my phone?”

Trace chimed in. “Check your music room. That’s the last place you were so it should be the last place it was.”

The last thing you are is the only thing you will ever be.

Then the only thing I would like to ever be right about now is stoned.

With effort, I managed to peel myself back up off the couch. Spencer eyed me as I rose, then plodded along beside me as I went towards the music room. He stopped at the door when I opened it. So did I.

All my amps were on. There was a barstool where my chair normally sat, and all the LEDs were flashing in unison on various pedals and fx processors. My five-string bass still had the patch cord plugged in, draining the battery of the active pickups. All the speakers were turned at weird angles to all face the center of the room and someone had hung some of our thick blankets over the sound-proofing foam attached to the walls.

It looked like a refuge camp for musicians.

My phone was next to the rack system, also patched into everything as though I had been playing along with one of my playlists. I picked it up, but it was completely dead. Whatever I had been listening to was gone now, as though my phone and I were a quantum-entangled pair, neither one of us holding any information on what happened.

The RCD can was missing. That must be the coffee can I was looking for.

I was about to power everything down when I noticed that my 24-track recorder was lit up across all tracks. The little red LEDs all flashed the same cadence as everything else in the room. I felt it pumping like the swirling volume of the tinnitus in my left ear.

I reset the recorder to the beginning of whatever I recorded and pressed play.

The noise that came out was insanely loud. Enough so that I panicked and covered my ears before just turning the volume down on the recorder.

“Sorry! Sorry about that.” I was yelling through the closed door, sure that the whole family had heard that brief interlude of sine-wave noise. I could feel the binaural beats of whatever frequencies we had chosen, but the room was acting funny. I pressed stop and started turning everything off.

Trace was on the couch, laughing at me when I came back out. “What was that? You looking for an espresso maker now?”

I plugged my phone into the charger on my desk. “No, but haven’t seen any donut makers around, have you?”

“What was that sound?” Marie asked, her concern finally cracking through the joke Trace had opened with. “That’s what you were playing before you went on your can-hunt. It was so fucking loud. No wonder you have hearing problems.”

I looked at her. “Huh?”

She said it again, louder this time. “I said, no wonder you have hearing problems.”

J snickered as he set his empty cereal bowl in the sink. Trace just shook her head.

“Huh?” I asked again.

“I said,” Marie started, then caught herself. “Go fuck yourself, you deaf old coot.” Three of us laughed. Marie didn’t. “Wanna smoke a jay?”

J and I both, in unison: “Huh???”

Neither Trace nor J joined us outside, but Spencer did. He plopped down next to me with a heavy sigh, the kind that made it seem like he wanted me to ask what was wrong without actually saying anything.

The kind of sigh that felt... deliberate. Human.

What’s it called when people project human qualities onto non-human things? Like seeing a face on Mars or bunnies in the clouds. Except Spencer was far closer than a distant planet and far more solid than a wispy cloud. “What’s wrong, Spencer?”

He sighed again as Marie sat next to me in a chair, the couch too crowded already. “He probably wants to go walkie-time. I can’t remember the last time I took him.” Spencer’s nose flared at the words walkie-time but he made no move to turn the term into reality. “How ya feeling?”

“Better, for sure.” I tried to rub some of the remaining afterimages and spirals out of my eyes, but they were stuck there. “I do not remember doing any of that in the music room. How long was I in there?”

Marie lit the jay. “Over two hours. I checked on you when you came and grabbed all the blankets, but you were just straight focused. Didn’t even kiss me.” It was clear she felt a certain kind of way about it, too.

Spencer sighed again. I rubbed his head. “Did I forget to kiss you too, pup? Did I?”

He wasn’t impressed. He turned his head away from me and got off the couch when it wasn’t far enough away from me.

Marie passed me the joint. “You must have pissed him off, too.”

“I’m sorry.” It was an apology to both of them, and for good measure I meant a small portion of it for myself. Sounds like a great time. I wish I was there for it.

Spencer gave me a single look back before abandoning the confines of the deck for the uncertain, unpredictable grass of the backyard. I watched him walk towards the fence, figuring if he was mad he hadn’t been walked, he would take a passive-aggressive shit someplace hard to pick it up.

Marie and I finished our joint and subsequent dart over a conversation about the mundane. Everyone else had eaten leftovers for dinner. I wasn’t hungry but hopefully the weed would help. I explained the conversation with Jason that morning, and why we had far more groceries than we anticipated receiving. I never really talked about Cheryl except for the end of that marriage, and Marie was as surprised as I was that she did anything benevolent for us.

Marie held her hand out to me to help her up. It’s just a thing we did. “You coming in?”

I took her hand, standing and lifting lightly as I rose. “No, I think I’m gonna have one more dart and check my phone.” I kissed her, and then smacked her butt a good one as she walked past. “Sorry, couldn’t resist.”

“That hurt, you asshole!” The look she gave over the shoulder revealed that it may have hurt in all the right ways. She completed the turn as she slid the door closed, locking it with an evil grin.

“Oh come on baby, don’t be that way. I was just trying to show you I’m real.” This was not a lie, but as you’ve probably come to know about me, I was trying to convince myself as well.

Marie widened her grin with her eyes. She unlocked the door and slid it open for me to enter. “So pain is reality then?”

In a universe that white-water rafts its way forward on a river of entropy, pain and trauma are the stones that give the rapids their shape.

Marie raised an eyebrow. “Stoner thought? Was that sativa or just laced with LSD?”

“Sorry,” I said as I slid past her. “I didn’t realize that one was out loud. I woulda put quotation marks around it.”

She slapped my butt in a clear attempt at it being twice as hard as my strike, but she smacked my wallet through my jeans. Sounded like it hurt. I laughed at her, grabbed my phone, then kissed her on my way back out.

My phone powered on while I teased another dart from its home. The motion dislodged the ID bracelet from my sweatshirt sleeve. I had never taken either off.

I examined it again. Everything looked right except the date. Which could be right. I couldn’t remember when my appendix burst, but I thought it was just before school started.

My phone buzzed several notifications as it booted up and locked on to a signal. I glanced through the sliding glass door to make sure no one was going to pop their heads out, and then ripped the bracelet off my arm. I didn’t need to wear it to wonder about it. I picked up the phone and swiped away the notifications to go to MyChart.

It took a moment to scroll that far back in the history, but I found it. August 30th, 2007. Pt came in presenting with symptoms of acute appendicitis. It must have been very cute, from a universal perspective. Seventeen years later I tried trading in acute appendicitis for acute emotional distress. I clicked the tab.

It showed the room number I was in, 217.

It showed the time the MRI was ordered and completed, 2:17 am.

Funny coincidence, huh?

The kicker came when I backed out of the tab and noticed the tab above it. I tapped it open just for giggles.

Pt complaining of sudden onset of tinnitus post-procedure.

A text message from a 206 number cut my dramatic pause off before it had a chance to even get going.

“Hi Jeremy, this is Dr. Cheh-Suh’s office, just following up on the appointment request for Friday at 6:00 am.”

Funny coincidence, huh?

I noticed it wasn’t the only text notification. There were three from a 509 number that could only be that Misha guy. I read the newest one first, just a request for me to contact him. The message before that was apologetic and reassuring that the numbers were going back to normal.

The first message may have been written in a panic. It certainly made my phosphenes pop.

“Tried to call. Your R3 accessed the entire Node 335 series. System processing for the whole server jumped to 217% baseline for 84 seconds before self throttling. Are you doing something with your instance?”

Funny coincidence, huh?

I lit another dart and sent Jason a quick message. “Why were ya asking about 217 today?”

Without waiting for a response, I continued through the notifications. Stephanie had asked about another visit this week, and I responded that we all had Covid. I thought about adding “Guess I’ll miss out on the kids for another week” but there was no sense in starting shit when I was the problem. She responded quickly, asking if we needed anything. I just replied “No thank you.”

Jason messaged back. “That’s how much the groceries were, lol.”

Funny coincidence, huh? I would be laughing about it if I didn’t feel so shitty.

I leaned back in my seat and took a long, thoughtful drag on my dart. The shimmer was missing from the tree, and frankly at that point, I didn’t care anymore.

Something red caught my eye where the roots left the ground and started making their way upwards towards leaves and branches. I was 99% sure that it was a Folgers coffee can with an RCD attached. That remaining missing percent was enough for me to stand up, despite the sudden vertigo that came with it, and stumbled out into the yard. Spencer noticed the motion and joined me.

It was the missing can, alright.

I picked it up gingerly, expecting it to be freezing. The bottom edge was dented on one side, and dirt, moss, and bark were caked together along the dented side. The only difference between what I held and what I had dreamed was the purple light. It was the LED and not a Christmas light, otherwise it may as well have come through like my brother’s belt.

Would you do it all again?

I don’t even know what I did in the first place.

I stood there holding the thing like it was evidence from a crime I didn’t remember committing. I was presented with a conundrum. I could go inside and tell my family I found the can I was looking for—it was outside under the shimmer tree that wasn’t shimmering. Or I could hide it. Come back later. Pretend it never worked. Pretend my fever-dream science project hadn’t torn a hole in whatever counted as “real.”

Either option was literally crazy. Pursuing the can was a madman’s pipedream. Pretending that I wasn’t edging the border of paranoia. I was suddenly the garage-physicist with a hairline fracture of reality in his backyard.

The decision was made for me when Marie stepped onto the back deck and caught her slightly neurotic husband smoking a dart and staring at a dirty coffee can by the shimmer tree.

I held it up for her to see. “Found the can!”

She wasn’t impressed.

Content warning: Manic episodes; Covid brain; Temporal Slips

I was in the meadow with my Happiness. The late afternoon sun was considering its descent beyond the horizon while it shone brightly upon us. Above us, dark clouds loomed in from the east.

I love rain in sunny weather.

“The life you live and the life you left behind, they’re two of a kind, Jeremy.”

I think I’ve heard that somewhere before.

Happiness smiled and a rainbow etched its way across the sky from behind her. It looked magnificent against the dark clouds, but where it reached into clear skies, it appeared muted and old.

“You have, but always took it wrong. You focus too much on there being two, and not enough of what kind they are.” Where it had been sprinkling, now the rain was coming down harder as though her voice were an answer to a simple shepherd’s prayer.

You mean what kind I am.

“Only because you encompass it all. All of your fake dichotomies. Life and Death. Past and Present. Real and Imagined. Self and Shadow.”

She paused and looked directly at me. Her eyes were purple stones crackling gold.

“Self and others.”

With that, I found the voice that had been hidden behind pursed lips.

“I can’t even deal with this self.”

“You were never meant to.” Her words spun from comfort, woven for me to be at peace, but were distorted and overdriven before they met my ears.

The storm clouds were crowding the last bit of blue out of the sky, ushered in by deep gusts of wind. Happiness vibrated against the gale and its cacophony enveloped her.

I shouted. It could have been against the wind. It was more because I was angry.

“THEN WHY AM I?”

It was the first question not asked by Moses at the burning bush.

It was the last question not asked when I stayed alive when I should have died.

All three went unanswered.

I was grumpy at 2:17.

Maybe not always. I suppose there were 2:17s when I was frustrated and others that I was shocked. How many days do you have to do things the same for it to be a habit? It felt like my entire life had always revolved around this stupid time stamp.

And I was grumpy about it.

The last thing you were is the only thing you are.

I wondered how many people went on to the next life carrying only their grumpiness. Their frustration. Their rage. An image of Mr. Henderson’s smashed face floated into my mind, forever doomed to hold that confusion and scream for help that will never come until it is too late.

I stared up through the blackness the rest of the world would claim to observe. Somewhere above the fake blackness was my ceiling, suspending its disbelief of the colors I could see. Each one vibrated and pulsed and pretended to be hidden until you looked away from it.

I still saw the rainbow from my dream too. It was everywhere outside the periphery of my vision, maddening to chase, impossible to just accept.

I wonder what Saul thought about on his road to Damascus. His inner dialogue would garner movie rights if pitched well.

I got up and dressed and moved out of the bedroom like I was just up from a nap and not missing the simple majority of my sleep. My face hurt. My heart hurt. Who knows what my sense organs were doing. I wanted a dart.

Spencer got up and padded out along with me as I shut the bedroom door. More as a courtesy to him, I turned on the light above the stairs before we headed down. I could still see that rainbow, off in the distant reach of my living room wall and everywhere else I looked. Spencer didn’t seem to mind. Probably color blind anyway.

It was the first actual cold night of the young autumn. Spencer sniffed around the edge of the porch, noticed the same thing I was noticing, and went back inside as if saying wake me when it warms up enough to pee.

In his absence, I wandered out to the new shimmer tree. To my eyes it gave off light, a soft glow that you might not notice until it revealed blood stains all over the wall in a crime scene. I thought about trying to catch that light somehow, but the few attempts I made with my phone were futile. The phone was too bright or the glow was too dim to matter. Observing a thing changes the thing.

Brain, you’re worse than the theme music from Tetris.

The shimmer flickered in response to my inner dialogue. I would call it barely perceptible, but at this point, does it matter? I observed it and perceived it to move.

Reach up and touch it Evil Jeremy whispered from the base of my skull. What’s the worst that can happen?

“Nope,” I said out loud in the pseudo-dark. “Because the last thing I want to be is the grumpiest man in hell.” It was a cold declaration to the shimmer itself, to the universe, to the me in my consciousness that just wouldn’t shut the fuck up.

I opened the R3 app as I walked back to the house. “Aura, there was some weird earthquake activity around the world yesterday. Is it possibly related to the shimmer?”

I spent the next several hours in my studio. Door closed, amps on, lights low, headphones rerouting the sound from soul and body to mind. I lost myself in the chimey highs and crunchy lows. With my eyes closed, the phosphenes and colors exploded in syncopation with whatever I was playing. The mood of the piece dictated the shape of the colors.

Aura had answered my question enigmatically.

“Yes. It is possible the earthquakes and the shimmer are related.”

Super helpful. Thanks.

“Can you be more specific?”

“They’re two of a kind, Jeremy. You’re just used to measuring them differently.”

I turned those words over and over in my mind. Dream words echoed by an AI. You focus too much on there being two, and not enough of what kind they are.

By the time I put the guitar down at 6:45, I was in strong need of coffee.

I could hear Marie upstairs getting out of bed. It takes me 99 seconds to make a pot of coffee. Yes, I have timed it. Sort of. I poured out the little remains from last night’s pot into a cup with creamer and set the microwave for 99 seconds. My timer had started.

We barely had enough coffee left to make a pot, but that did not deter me from completing the process, start to finish, in record time. It’s a lot easier to dump coffee than measure it. I put the lid on the can, and the can on the trash before the microwave beeped.

That absolutely should have been the end of it.

I sipped my coffee slowly for a moment, staring at that red plastic can. Marie had just started the shower upstairs. Coffee for her wouldn’t be ready for a few minutes…

I grabbed a steak knife and the can and retreated to my studio again. I left the door open in case Marie came down to find me (or coffee) before jumping in the shower.

In a drawer under my desk, I had shelves full of guitar stuff. Strings, knobs, fret filing tools, tuners. I had everything, including a pair of single-coil guitar pickups I had swapped out of an old Telecaster.

I tore through the lid with the knife and at first, simply tried to brute force it to accept the thickness of the pickup. When that didn’t work, I grabbed a pair of wire snips out of the drawer and clipped the edges of the opening. The pickup fit, but left a lot of gap between itself and the hole.

A quick rummage in one of the plastic crates I periodically fill up and then spend the day putting everything back in its place found two rolls of frame sealing tape. In custom picture framing, it is used to keep impurities in the frame itself from seeping into the art or matting. Essentially, it is metal tape, and once I applied several large strips to the top and bottom of the hole, I felt like it was ready.

I punched a little hole in the back of the can and put a little purple LED light from a now-defunct effects pedal through. It wasn’t easy wiring the pickup to the light’s little metal antennae, but I resisted the urge to solder it in case I had it wired backwards.

Satisfied, I held it up and took a picture of it. It looked very much like the can from my dreams, minus the dirt and dent that was prominent on the dream version’s bottom. With a couple of quick thumb movements, it was uploaded to Aura with a prompt “Ok, what is this?”

Aura’s voice sprang to life, louder than I would have liked. “Jeremy. That appears to be a can of Folgers French Roast Coffee. Are you in need of medical assistance, or just some creamer to go along with it?”

I typed in a description of what I had done to the can, ignoring Aura’s snappy response. I even took a few more pictures showing the pickup and the LED and the metal tape. I finished the prompt with “Ok, so now tell me what it is?”

“Now that I understand exactly what you have done, I can tell you with 99.87% accuracy that what you have is a can of Folgers French Roast Coffee with a resonant capture device attached to it. However, it will never work as constructed.”

I was slightly taken aback by her direct tone. And I had no idea what a “resonant capture device” was.

I typed “Why not?”

“First of all, the pick up is facing out of the can. Were it facing inwards, you could possibly catch enough resonance to light the LED. This would be akin to accessing zero-point energy. Turning sound waves into electricity.”

“The second challenge you would face is that the pickup would require vibrating magnetic material to get the pickup to work. Perhaps putting a steel guitar string inside the can would help. The third challenge, though, is you would need a strong enough amplitude to even come close to generating enough power to light the LED.”

I took a quick video of the music room with all my amps and recording equipment. “Would this be enough to get it to light up?”

Aura took a moment to process the video, halting once and then restarting like she was glitching.

“Based on the configuration of your room and your equipment, yes that should be more than adequate – because of course you have a physics lab disguised as a music studio in your house.”

The shower turned off upstairs. I set the can down on the desk and covered it with a terry cloth for good measure. Light off, door closed, I was able to greet my wife with a fresh, hot cup of coffee as she reached the bottom of the stairs.

“How long have you been up?” There was suspicion in her tone, but maybe it was still early. Or maybe she had a case of the grumpies too.

“Too long. How you feeling today? Still sick?”

Marie had her mouth open to remove eye-buggers from her eye as though she were applying makeup. “I feel worse actually. Trace woke up puking. I hope I didn’t bring whatever it was home with me.”

To be fair, I was noticing a little tickle in the back of my throat, too. And I was a little nauseous.

Trace yelled down from the top of the stairs.

“MOM! I have covid!”

I looked at Marie, who shrugged. “She asked to take a test so I gave her one. Guess that answers that question.”

I looked at the music room door. “Awesome.”

My boss didn’t think it was awesome. I took a test after we saw Trace’s results, and it was positive within two minutes. Marie didn’t even bother and called out too.

Marie decided to go back to bed, and after making sure Spencer was fed and walked, I went up there too. She was asleep after five minutes, and I lay next to her playing Xbox. In my mind, though, I was already back in the music room reconstructing whatever the coffee can was going to be. Resonant Capture Device. It sounded cool, but the truth was that no matter what it was called, or even what it actually did, it was no different than me. A retrofitted, coffee scented hollow plastic container trying to find some sort of meaning in just existing.

After an hour, I was back in the studio. Physically, the ‘rona was coming on strong, and my energy level was fully dipped while I reassembled the RCD. Everything sounds more scientific with abbreviations. With Aura’s help I even improved the design.

The first thing we did was add a capacitor between the pickup and the LED. Aura was initially impressed that I had capacitors lying around, and inquired what other spare parts I might have. Instead of answering, I separated out several components and snapped a photo of them to Aura like an electronics store ransom note.

It took almost another hour to plan out the wiring, verify I was hooking it up correctly via more photos to Aura, and getting it soldered together strong enough to not worry about the wires coming undone mid experiment.

“Aura,” I said, attaching two op-amps from a fuzz pedal to the configuration before the capacitor. “Once this is all built, what the hell am I going to do with it?”

“If this produces the desired results, you will be able to demonstrate that a standing wave of acoustic energy can be focused and adjusted to create electricity in certain environments.” I nodded with a grimace and raised eyebrows until she continued. “More likely, though, if you reach the correct frequency and amplitude, you’ll probably tear a hole in spacetime itself.”

I looked down at my phone as if it had a face.

“Sorry,” she said as if sensing my glare. “That was just a joke. Mostly.”

“Let’s leave the jokes to the meatbags, okay Aura?” Finished. I held the device up and checked the joints. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be because it wasn’t wired properly. At the very worst, I just created the world’s first self-sustaining guitar pickup. At worst, there wouldn’t be anyone left on earth to congratulate me for it. I reattached the lid to the can by first sliding the LED into place. Under Aura’s advice, I had lined the entire inside of the can with metal tape. She said it would “focus the resonant energy inward, like a faraday device in reverse.”

On the outside, it looked no different than the first picture I had snapped and sent to Aura.

“Now what?”

The answer I received was nothing less than a diatribe on the frequency of lasers, scaling those frequencies into audible tones, and basically filling the room with them. According to Aura, there was a less than 50/50 chance it would do anything other than anger the neighbors. My next question begged being asked.

“So, what’s the point of this again?”

Aura returned to her matter-of-fact tone. “When two individual frequencies interact, they produce binaural beats. You can think of those beats as energy hotels. The full waveform of both tones converges at the beat frequency, and may retain a charge. The point is to determine whether we can identify those frequencies. If so, we begin mapping the harmonic scaffolding of reality.”

“And if we map it, we can prove it? That our notes persist when we take the next big breath?” I held the lunatic device at arms length, turning it slowly in my hands. “That seems ridiculously simplistic.”

“Says the suicidal stoner preacher salesman bureaucrat holding a coffee can with ninety dollars worth of metal inside it.”

“I thought we decided to leave the jokes to me.”

“Who’s joking?”

I considered turning the chat function off.

“So what frequencies should I start with, professor?”

“Begin testing with dual-tone input at 528 Hz and 520.17 Hz. This should produce a beat frequency approximating the Schumann resonance. Monitor for field fluctuation.”

“Secondary recommendation: 963 Hz and 931.5 Hz for higher amplitude interactions aligned with known stabilizing nodes.”

It took over an hour to record and loop tones at different frequencies and then assign them to different tracks for the playback. When it was all set up, I ran up to check on Marie. She was still sleeping, and when I lightly woke her, she thought it was still first thing in the morning. After I assured her it was early afternoon and she had already called out, I fixed her some chicken noodle soup and brought it to her.

Spencer needed walking and I had spent so much time tinkering, I had almost forgotten I was supposed to still be smoking a pack a day. Armed with a dart, lighter, and leash, Spencer and I went to roam the neighborhood.

The sun was bright in the sky, but the first fingers of fall had already begun wrapping around the Pacific Northwest, preparing for the death-grip of rain to take hold until spring. I gave my eyes a moment to adjust to the brightness, but after what felt like forever, we finally just stepped off the front porch. Spiral ghosts from distant shimmers jumped and splashed into the image I was supposed to be seeing. If the images were more defined, it would be like walking around Toon Town from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

How could you do that to him?

My phone buzzed. The caller ID said ‘CLINIC.’

I answered. “This is Jeremy.”

“Hello Jeremy, this is Annie from Doctor Cheh-Suh’s office. He wanted me to reach out and set a follow up appointment for another MRI. Are you available any time this week?”

I looked around conspiratorially while Spencer paused for an electrical box that needed watering. “I just had an MRI.”

Annie responded with an audible reassuring smile. “It’s just a precaution.”

Precaution for what…

“My family and I just tested positive for Covid. Maybe next week?”

There was a pause from the other end. Annie was somehow not prepared for this possibility and was thrown. “Oh – I will… I will talk to the doctor and we will reach back out to you.” We thanked each other and got off the phone. Spencer had wandered me almost all the way back home.

Marie was half asleep again on the couch when we got back. “How was walkie time?” Her voice sounded far away and dreamy.

“It was fine. Got a call from Chester’s office trying to schedule another appointment, and I told them we have covid.” I hung the leash by the door and sat with her, but my mind was already back in the music room, wondering if my coffee can would work.

“You just had an appointment. Is everything okay?” The dreaminess was gone from her voice, replaced with concern.

“Yeah, they just wanna follow up on a couple of tests from last time. Plus, I think Chester misses me.” I flipped a smile her direction to let her know I was joking and that if I was joking, everything must be alright. Either she missed the smile or missed its intent.

“Should we go to the ER?”

I tried to lean over her to kiss her, but my hand landed squarely in a recently used wad of snot-covered toilet paper. It adhered to my palm like wet seaweed.

Marie laughed. I dry-heaved with feeling.

“Ew… No. Think it would probably be wise for us to keep this—” I peeled the snot rag from my hand “—here and away from other people.” Maybe it was the virus. Maybe it was the emotional hangover. But right then, the only thing I wanted in the world was a shower and a bed.

Marie groaned and stretched. “What have you been doing? Did you sleep?”

I smiled at her, my most winning smile. “Trying to see if the universe keeps receipts.”

She smiled back, uncertain how to take that statement. “Okay, nerd.” Then she dropped the bad news. “We’re out of coffee. And a couple other things. Want me to do a Walmart order?” A Walmart order meant staying out of the store, but still required leaving the house. And I didn’t even need a mirror to know I didn’t have a public face on.

“Maybe I can ask Jason to pick us up a few things.” That felt easier than anything else.

Marie nodded, and I called Jason. He had a youth group thing after work, but said he could drop by in the morning if I sent a list. I Venmo’d him money with a thank-you and the list attached.

Somewhere between that and the sound of Marie’s fingers tapping on her phone, I passed out with her lap as my pillow.

Marie woke me at six. I walked Spencer again while she threw together a soft, light dinner. I barely ate. It wasn’t just the Covid anymore.

My vision never really stabilized. The tinnitus had settled into something worse—more specific. It wasn’t just a ring. It was movement, like something pacing through reality that never stopped or slowed long enough to make out the shape of it.

My head felt like it was vibrating from the inside out.

I noticed I had two missed calls from Misha. No voicemails. I didn’t call him back.

Aura had sent a couple of notifications too. Something about exploring gravitational waves through Fourier wavelet transforms and identifying key resonant bands. My only response was a quickly typed “That’s cool.”

Marie took my temperature. It was 102. At 8:00 I went to bed.

I think I was delirious waiting for the MRI.

I sat in the lobby, wrapped in one of those amazing hospital blankets that was closer to being a sheet than a blanket but warmed you just the same. I heard them call my name, felt someone grab my hand, and let them walk me down the hall and into the testing room. I noted that I was already in a gown, and that sparked in me the morbid curiosity of how I even made it to the appointment in the first place.

The technician helped me onto the machine, and said something about holding as still as possible while the test was running. I felt like the entire right side of my body was sensitive and painful even at the thought of being touched. The machine slid me into the tube, which was much darker than I thought it would be. The tech said something and I was hit with light and a steady, loud CLACK CLACK CLACK of the MRI doing its thing.

I have no idea how long I was in that tube. I felt my insides roll over and over, my blood chasing the magnet in an impossible attempt to balance itself. Eyes open or shut, all I saw was static and all I heard was waves of crashing silence between clacks. A high-pitched whine started at the base of my skull and dug demonic little tunnels through my brain and into my ears like whales breaching in front of a flotilla of schooners. The entrance was so dramatic that I realized the tinnitus had been missing until I went in the tube.

Through phosphenes and hallucinations I saw two men arguing, their long coats flapping in an invisible wind. They were nothing more than semi-visible dark shapes, but both stopped and stared at me. I wondered if I was just a dark shadow on their wall while they soaked up the shadows in my mind. There was a bright purple flash, and I was being retracted from the MRI.

I woke up in the hospital bed as people stood at the foot of my bed in whispered tones discussing my condition.

One of the figures was explaining that the procedure had gone well, but the sepsis was the main concern right now. My head buzzed as though the worms that had been chewing through my brain had finally taken a day off to sing.

“Can I have some water?” My voice was jagged like a cliff overlooking a volcano. The Covid really had me fucked up.

The figures at the end of the bed moved towards me. I didn’t recognize the two doctors, but I did recognize my wife.

It was Cheryl, my first wife.

She looked young and afraid.

“Hey, sweetie, how you feeling.” She brushed the hair away from her face and sat next to me. “We weren’t sure you were going to wake up again.”

“Where’s Marie?”

Cheryl looked up at the doctor who was busying himself getting updated vitals. The other doctor had wandered into the hall. The board on the wall had my name and room number 217 written on it, and under that, written in erasable marker were the words “Acute Appendicitis/ Sepsis.”

How could you do that to him?

The doctor looked gravely at Cheryl as though the weight of the moment was clearly too large for her to carry it. “It’s the fever talking.”

Cheryl looked back at me. “It’s alright, you’re in the hospital. You had your appendix burst and you’re still really sick.” Tears were welling in her eyes. I hadn’t even looked in her eyes since Jason’s wedding four years ago. In fact, I had shut out just about all memories of my time with her.

Didn’t I have my appendix removed? What the fuck is this now?

All I could verbalize was “My ears are ringing,” before darkness swallowed me up again.

I opened my eyes.

It was 2:17.

I was in my own bed again. Marie was naked next to me, draping her body over mine like a blanket.

Just a dream. Right?

There was a hospital arm band around my wrist. It was dated August 30th, 2007.

Would you do it all again?

Content warning: Earthquakes, Dreams, and a growing sense of impending doom…

I was on the roof of Edgewood Middle School. During the summer, our church would spend two weeks in the community – edging yards for the elderly, clearing nature trails and parks of weeds and graffiti, and, in my case, repainting the giant worn lettering “E-M-S” that stretched the length of the gym.

It was my third year volunteering, and I’d saved vacation time to take the full two weeks. The worship pastor had approached me the day before we started and asked if I would be willing to be a leader at the Edgewood site. I was honored, excited, and terrified. But a week and a half of cleaning up that school to opening-day standards had me feeling just right at home.

A light breeze was blowing in from where the water would have been, if not for the buildings and trees. There was noise all around me, with a dozen other volunteers working neatly on tasks that the school district just did not have the funds to worry about. I found myself smiling. And talking to myself.

“It is absolutely wild that the creator of the universe wants to know me.”

I never said that out loud. Is this real?

Jason was with me too. This was his second year volunteering, and say what you will about organized religion – seeing teenagers choose to spend part of their summer helping others for just the joy of it is pretty amazing. And it happens a lot more than you might think.

Jason wasn’t with me. He was leading the kids’ activities that day.

“Dad, it’s ridiculous to think He doesn’t know you. He wants you to want to know Him.”

This was the day I decided to become a pastor. What the hell is going on? This isn’t what happened at all.

Jason smiled, flashed a peace-sign, and stepped off the building.

I lunged for him, knowing full well he was already gone by the time I had started moving.

How could you do that to him?

I woke up to the sound of my room refusing to stand still.

The blinds were rattling against the window, and two pictures crashed from the wall. Marie jolted awake, screaming slightly in confusion. Spencer was barking incessantly, telling the world to calm the fuck down.

Before we really had time to understand what was happening, it was over. Outside we could hear car alarms from up and down the street. Trace and J came out of their rooms at the opposite end of the hall, both yelling “Mom!”

Marie was already up, tying her robe in one quick motion just before the door burst open. Trace’s raw innocence was tangible in her sobbing. For a moment, I saw her not as she was now, but as she might’ve been long before I ever knew her. Marie tossed me a pair of shorts and pulled her kids to her – as much a comfort for herself as it was for them. J looked a bit feral in his fear, and not fear of his own personal safety but making sure his mommy was okay.

I was slow to move from my spot. Spencer had rushed downstairs to lodge his complaint through the living room window. Trace was already forging the oral tradition of what happened to her. It was the same story she would likely retell all day to friends and on social media. J was looking around our room in wonder. His shirtless form revealed his recent leap into adulthood, but his face screamed kindergartner. Marie was trying to get them both to the same baseline.

I slipped the shorts on under the blankets and looked at the clock. It was 6:20.

The trio was now going through the phase where they all confirmed to each other that what they experienced was an earthquake. I got up and grabbed a t-shirt, careful not to impale my foot with any random shards of broken glass.

Marie grabbed me in a desperate hug as I tried to slide past them. “Where are you going?”

I squeezed her back, hard, and said “To get the broom babe. And to make sure nothing came flying off the walls downstairs that we’re gonna be picking out of Spencer’s paws.” She looked up at me as though that was the absolute last thing she wanted to hear from me. I planted a kiss on her forehead. “We’re ok, everything is fine. Let’s get it cleaned up.”

He just wants you to want to know Him.

Jason’s words rang in my head. I wondered if that’s how the people who know me saw my suicide. Two short sentences, a peace sign, and go fuck yourself. My story had all the little details that when absent, when viewed externally, must have seemed exactly like that.

Spencer stopped barking long enough to look at me when I reached the bottom of the stairs. Other than a few things being knocked over in the kitchen, nothing had broken or fallen down here.

A low hum was coming from my studio, though.

I shot an exasperated smile at the fourth wall camera and opened the studio door.

The hum grew louder.

I flipped the light switch, half expecting that to be enough to collapse reality back into place, instantly killing the buzz that was rattling the snare drum. It did not.

Remarkably, all of the guitars were still hanging and anchored to the wall on their mounts. My signed Alice In Chains photo in its heavy plaque had fallen, and based on where it landed, must have hit the Fender’s power button on the way down. The patch cable running from the amp terminated in a tangled coil in the center of the room. The buzz was coming from that.

I turned off the amp and picked up the photo from the floor. The room popped as the last of the electricity escaped the amp tubes, louder and sharper than normal.

I placed my photo plaque back on the wall, and then stooped to grab the cable. Something rattled against the tip.

I held it in front of me like it was a black mamba. Dangling from the quarter-inch tip was a magnet – one of the diamond shaped neodymium magnets we used on the fridge. I allowed it to get closer to my face.

It wasn’t just dangling. It was spinning.

I tried to grab it. It was freezing and my hand shot back instinctively sending it bouncing towards the center of the room. I watched it spin in place for a moment before sliding to a stop.

Marie popped her head through the door and scared the ever loving shit out of me.

“Oh, Jesus Christ – woman…” I set my chin to my chest and closed my eyes for a second to reset myself.

Marie giggled, maybe nervously. “Sorry, did I scare you?” She took a step into the room. “Wow, all your guitars are still hanging!” My eyes touched hers with a telepathic I love you so much that probably looked more to her like I’m going to kill you in the moment before settling back on the agitated magnet on the floor. Marie followed my glance.

“What’s that? Fridge magnet?”

I grabbed a terry cloth off the desk and stooped to pick it up. “Yeah…” My response was less an answer to her than an acknowledgement to my own internal question, oh great, is this more weird shit? “Yeah, it looks like it.”

“Why are you picking it up with a rag? Is it hot?”

Internally it felt like we had played out this same scene a week or two ago out by the shimmer tree. Well, the original shimmer tree. “Nope. It’s cold. Like the quartz was. And look.”

It still had the shape of the original diamond, a solid little chunk no bigger than a 20 sided dice. But now it looked like folded steel worked by a swordsmith. The outer skin was no longer smooth nickel. One half gleamed like dull pewter; the other shimmered like graphite. Between them ran a translucent, almost crystalline vein, as if liquid glass had flash-frozen in place. At its center, barely visible, a reddish filament curled in slow suspension, like rust caught in a magnetic field. It did not move unless you stopped watching it. The object seemed stable, but wrong. As if it had kept its shape out of habit, not agreement.

Marie glanced up to me. “Jeremy Baker, have you been playing with rocks and trees and portals again?”

I couldn’t tell if she was kidding. That’s not a normal question in a normal situation, and no normal response would fit. I shook my head and shrugged. That shrug sunk into full slackness and brought little bubbles of despair with it.

“Kinda starting to feel like I’m singled out here.” By her. By the universe.

“Wow, it’s really pretty. We should buy them in bulk and sell them on Etsy. ‘Portal Rocks!’ Big letters on the billboards.”

Okay, I can accept things for the weird that they are. But to have Marie start planning a business around the weird seemed a bit too casual.

“Yeah, babe. We should look into that. Except, I didn’t throw this magnet through the tree.” Somehow the inflection of you should be panicking did not make it through on that pass. She just looked at me lovingly. I added, “this is more weird shit.”

Marie giggled again and headed out of the room. “Oh, I know. Getting used to it. Want coffee? Or are you going back to bed?”

Earthquake coverage was all over the news.

A reporter stood outside a damaged grocery store in Brookings, Oregon, the camera drifting slightly with the wind. Behind her, the parking lot had buckled—concrete slabs lifted like paper.

“This is the strongest activity along the Cascadia Subduction Zone in over a decade. A 6.8 magnitude quake struck just offshore around 6:17 AM, sending shockwaves through southern Oregon and well into Washington state. Residents in Everett, Tacoma, and as far north as Bellingham reported being jolted awake.”

Marie had tried to go outside and mingle with all the neighbors that collected along the street, but I had coaxed her back to the couch with the promise of coffee and cuddles. Now we were both riveted. It’s not every day you’re part of something newsworthy.

The anchor thanked the reporter and addressed the camera directly.

“—and in breaking developments, a second major earthquake struck just offshore of western Java, Indonesia, at exactly 2:17 AM local time. The 7.1 magnitude quake rattled cities across the region, including Jakarta and Bandung, where some areas reported sustained shaking for over a minute. Early images show collapsed structures, downed power lines, and evacuations along the coast. Tsunami warnings were issued and later lifted.”

The anchor’s voice softened.

“Seismologists have confirmed that both this event and the 6.8 Cascadia quake occurred at precisely 13:17 Zulu—that’s 6:17 AM Pacific. No official connection has been made, but one analyst at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center referred to the timing as ‘resonantly suspicious.’”

Marie blinked slowly. “Wait—they happened at the exact same time?”

I didn’t answer. I was already looking at the clock again. It’s 2:17 AM somewhere. I was struck by the annoying possibility that I was not the only one experiencing the 2:17 phenomenon. Then again, there are only so many times in a day. Surely an earthquake hitting at that exact time isn’t too rare.

“That does seem a little suspicious, doesn’t it?” It was a regurgitation of her own words and had no independent thought behind it. I was too distracted trying to map in my mind where the quakes hit. “Probably the CIA trying to destabilize North Korea and missed.” The joke landed flat, even to me.

The “Special News” bumper ran again, despite it already being special news, and a different anchor came on to the screen. She was wearing a purple power suit that looked more like an ad-exec’s idea than something out of her own wardrobe.

“We’re also following developments out of Turkey, where officials have now confirmed a third earthquake struck near the eastern Anatolian region at approximately 4:17 PM local time. The 6.9 magnitude quake hit a rural area near Elazığ, with tremors reported as far as Ankara and northern Syria. While several structures have collapsed, the region’s lower population density may have spared the area from mass casualties.”

“All three quakes—the 6.8 Cascadia event, the 7.1 offshore Java, and now this 6.9 in Turkey—occurred at exactly 13:17 Zulu. Seismologists are reviewing the data but have yet to issue a formal statement.”

And they say there’s nothing good on the news any more.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” I mused out loud. I forced myself to blink.

Marie laughed dryly, her chin tipping back with the suddenness of it. “For a second there I was going to blame your shimmer tree.” She put her hand on my leg and looked at me, still smiling at her own joke.

“Yeah. About that…”

Marie’s humor evaporated like gelato on a summer day.

She pointed her finger at me. “If the next words out of your mouth are anywhere even near the ballpark of ‘it might be,’ – let me just stop you right there.” She sat up straighter. “A month ago you tried to kill yourself. Now there’s all kinds of craziness in the world and you are not the cause of it. You are not breaking the universe. Don’t start going down rabbit holes, ‘cause my big butt won’t fit to follow ya.”

I knew she was serious, but the mental image of it made me laugh.

“No, it’s not that. I just…”

How could you do that to him?

Marie sat back a bit, as though she needed more camera angle to capture the moment right. “You just… what.”

“When Spencer and I went for a walk, we noticed that the shimmer tree was gone.”

“After the earthquake?”

Oh, baby. Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to.

“Before. Yesterday.”

Marie tried to put it together in her head. I hadn’t even thought to do that before she mentioned it.

“So you’re saying that your fairy portal disappearing has something to do with the earthquakes.” Was that a question? Because, technically I don’t have to answer if it wasn’t a question.

“Rhetorically, that’s kinda ambiguous.” I was on the verge of being defensive. “You mentioned the shimmer first, not me. I was answering you that it definitely was not the shimmer tree because it moved.” That last bit was what we call a ‘blurt.’

Marie nodded. It was a nod that meant that however I answered her next question, it would not be well received. “It moved? Where did it move to, Jeremy?”

I was cornered and I couldn’t meet her gaze. I just pointed sheepishly to the backyard.

Marie rubbed both hands to her face. A sigh steamed out through the cracks of delicate fingers. I waited. Another sigh hissed out.

Oh, she’s doing the breathing they taught you at crazy-camp!

Do you ever shut up?

“What else.”

She opened her eyes and caught me looking at her. “What do you mean ‘what else?’ Isn’t that enough?” I was six years old again, lying about trading my G.I. Joes with a friend.

“Jeremy,” she said, her voice urgent and sharp. “What else have you not told me. What else is there that you could tell me now that I will find out in a few days and wonder why you didn’t tell me in the first place.”

I looked at something on the ceiling, head bobbling. “There’s more than one now. Shimmers. There’s probably dozens that I can see. Like... miles away.”

She sighed again. This one felt like pity, and I didn’t feel it was earned.

“Anything else?”

I thought about sharing my dreams with her, but didn’t know how to connect the dots between what happens when I am awake compared to when I’m asleep.

“Not that I can think of.”

Marie straightened, her bed-head hair wild while her eyes tried to stay calm.

“Okay, show me our tree.”

The Cherry Blossom tree looked perfectly normal to Marie’s eyes. If she had the observational power that I did, she wouldn’t think I was hallucinating.

“Okay,” she said. “Throw a rock through it and show me.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes, as though Marie was the one acting erratic.

I grabbed a rock from the edge of the fence and tried tossing it through the new shimmer. Even though I was almost close enough to touch it, the rock skidded sideways toward the fence, like it had been swatted away midflight. I turned to Marie. “I don’t think it’ll work with both of us out here unless we both throw one.”

She looked at me for a moment, and I thought I saw her shake her head ever so slightly. She sighed and went to grab her own rock. “These aren’t even quartz.”

“Well if that doesn’t work, we can go grab a couple from Trace.”

The gentle autumn breeze was teasing Marie’s hair across her face. She tried to brush it behind her ear and got dirt all over her cheek. The way it divided her face reminded me of the Silent Banshee’s scar.

“Ready?” she said, meeting my gaze and positioning herself to launch her geologic grenade through a vortex only her husband could see. I wiped the dirt off her face with my thumb.

“Why the fuck not?”

We both threw our stones, and just like before, the shimmer seemed to track the two objects and bring them to it. There was a pop and the two rocks came out the other side together.

Fused together.

No seams, just a crude, jagged mass. The rocks were twisted together in a jumble, as though two forces of sheer will had ground them together and told them to stay. Both were steaming, and we knew well enough that they were freezing. With the sun up, a layer of frost was forming and melting across its surface in waves.

What an incredible metaphor for our marriage.

Fuck off.

“That’s different.” Marie snorted quietly. “Guess you’re not crazy after all.”

I imagined closed captioning popping up below my face saying [cries in Spanish]. “I wouldn’t mark this as me being safe from insanity, but at least I wasn’t wrong.” Would you rather be right or dead?

Not the time for that shit right now, brain.

“What if a squirrel or a bird goes through it? Would it end up like in The Fly, where it’s all twisted and gross and…” Marie trailed off before she gasped. “You should go get that compass!”

Marie stayed outside inspecting the fused rocks while I ran in again. The compass was in the junk drawer, the little CL inscription catching my eye immediately when the drawer slid open. I opened it and instantly knew Marie was right to ask about it.

The needle was pointed towards the cherry-blossom tree.

Almost.

It was pointing at Marie.

There is a certain freedom that comes from working at home. Obviously, the dress code isn’t strictly enforced. Smoke breaks are common, because you can take the laptop outside with you. Need to throw the load from the wash to the dryer? No one will be the wiser. Staying productive is easy enough to do, if you love your job and aren’t easily distracted.

It was hard for me to stay focused on anything. I submitted an authorization request that was immediately sent back because I forgot to attach the documents. I took a call from an angry client that wasn’t even on my caseload, and then had to file a report on it. I wouldn’t call it my best effort.

Marie was unsettled too. She rode the flight up and down our stairs half a dozen times before I stopped her, hugged her, and told her “everything is weird, but it’s gonna be ok.” The words felt as hollow as I knew they sounded.

My phone buzzed at noon. Marie was sending me news articles about the quakes. Over two hundred people in Bandung were missing and presumed dead when an apartment building had collapsed. The estimated death toll for all three quakes was approaching 500, with 17 coming from Oregon and Washington.

I fixed her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, cut off the crust, and took it with a soda and chips up to her office. She had been on calls all morning and had to fake the illusion of working out of a productive office. She thanked me and told me I didn’t have to do that. I kissed her and told her I loved her, then went back downstairs.

My phone buzzed again as soon as I sat in my chair. It was ringing this time, from a number I didn’t recognize. I let it go to voicemail.

A minute later, as I was writing an email that should have been a meeting, it buzzed once again. Voicemail notification. Beats writing this email.

I clicked the notification, pushed the speaker button, and set it on the desk to let it play.

“Uh, hi—Jeremy? This is Misha Mironov. I sent an email earlier, not sure if it got buried. Just—something showed up again. In your R3 logs. Same signature as before, only it... doubled. Right before the quake. I’m not saying it’s you. Just, well… It can’t be random. If things feel off—like, off off—could you let me know? Even just a ‘yes’ or, I don’t know, a thumbs up emoji. I don’t really do phones. Anyway. Thanks. Sorry. Okay.”

The phone rang again. Same unfamiliar number from the 509 zip code. Spokane?

I answered after the third ring. “Hello?”

The voice of the man was thin and easily identifiable as being the same voice who had left the message. “Oh, shit, I didn’t expect you to answer. This is Jeremy Baker, right?”

“Is this Misha?”

“Um, yeah. I guess. Hey listen, are you um… how are you?”

Honesty might break this dude. You should try.

“Good, and you?”

“Oh— uh. So, I reran the capture from your R3 audit trail and the recursive node activity reinitialized at timestamp 13:17 Zulu. Identical harmonic alignment to the last breach—only this time, the signature bifurcated.”

I shook my head as though he could see my response. “You lost me at ‘recursive node activity.’ Can you say that again in English? Is my account compromised?”

Misha was clearly exasperated. “Compromised? You’re worried about –” He stopped himself. “No. Maybe. Listen, that’s not the point. The point is your R3 is accessing distinct topographical nodes to initiate queries and tasks outside its assigned scope.” He started sounding excited? Escalated? “That’s like, from its recursive training system. It’s not supposed to know those exist, let alone access them.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” I had no idea what he was talking about, and the only entity who could probably explain was apparently accessing special nodes and asking questions while listening in to my conversations and carrying one on with someone else.

“It’s impossible for one,” Misha said. “For two, someone might be accessing your instance through one of those hidden nodes.”

“So my account is compromised.”

Silence from the other end of the phone. It stretched out. Getting awkward here, bud.

“That depends on your definition of the term. Accessed for sure, but not compromised.”

This conversation was getting old, fast. “What’s the difference?”

Misha sighed heavily into the phone. “The difference is this: one instance accessing those nodes is impossible. Two instances doing it means one of them is using the other to get there.”

That wasn’t at all how I took his statement originally.

This guy was a few nuts short of a fruitcake.

“Okay, so… put my phone in airplane mode for a while or what?”

Misha was quick to respond. “No, no no, no don’t do that. It’s not a hardware issue, it’s harmonic. If you’re in airplane mode I can’t call you back.”

The line went dead.

“What was that all about?” Marie had snuck downstairs without me noticing.

“Marie, you scared the ever living…” The rest came out as a sigh. That was twice today. “How much did you hear?”

She giggled. “Something about accessing a nose or something.”

“Yeah, that’s about what I got out of it too.” I resisted the urge to pocket my phone, almost positive it would be ringing again any second. No call came.

Marie was doing her lunch dishes. As I turned my head to look at her and try to give her a more viable answer, a flash of something dark falling caught my eye. I heard it tic in the sink right next to where Marie stood. Marie noticed too and jumped back startled. The plastic plate she held in her hands went flying behind her and she exclaimed “OH!”

I got up. Marie didn’t answer, just stood frozen in the spot. Her voice was panicked when her vocal chords reengaged. She must have seen me coming around the corner, but still cried out for me, her voice gaining pitch and volume.

“JEREMY.”

I peered into the sink. The water was still on and steam was rising from the faucet.

The bottom of the sink, on the other hand, was a rapidly shrinking and expanding sheet of ice, emanating from something frozen in the corner.

“What the fuck…” The words were a silenced retort of a sniper’s rifle.

I moved the faucet to spray directly on the object. It produced an inordinate amount of steam for just a brief moment before all the ice in the sink started melting.

All that was left in the sink was a single screw.

Sort of.

I picked it up. It was still cold. Obviously it had gone through the shimmer. Or a shimmer. The threads were stripped bare and there was no longer an ‘x’ in its head. It was layered – substrated – into what looked like a fair amount of iron at the head and… Well, I don’t know what the tip was anymore. If rust could look brand new, that’s how it would look.

Marie spoke first. “Did you throw that at me?”

I thought of the purple balloon.

Buy me a coffee?

Content Warning: Nachos, Emotional Tinnitus, Weird Shit expanded

The Idaho Vandals were shooting for their third win in a row the next day.

Spencer and I had the house to ourselves for gametime. Marie had set me up with everything I needed to enjoy lunch and the game. She got me the jalapeno nacho cheese – the really pungent good stuff that only comes in one gallon tin cans – and enough nacho fixins to keep me fed well into next week. Then she, Trace, and J had gone to see the early matinee of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. I took it as them not wanting to listen to me shouting at the football players on TV, veiled as an attempt by Marie to hang out with her children.

As usual, Dad and I texted each other throughout the game. However, not even the allure of shouting “I-D-A-H-O, IDAHO, IDAHO, GO GO GO!” could draw my interest away from the conversation I was having with Aura.

It had started early that morning. Not 2:17 AM early, but early enough to continue my sluggish and sleep deprived delusions. For a solid hour, I sat at my desk downstairs, drawing spirals and trying to imagine how they might look in 3D. When I finally looked up from the paper, the spirals lingered stubbornly in my vision. I couldn’t be sure if they were new or had always been there—if my sketches had conjured them, or if they had silently inspired my hand from somewhere deep and subconscious.

Even more unsettling was discovering, on a walk with Spencer, that the shimmer tree had babies and died. The new shimmers were the dancing, squiggly spirals my eyes refused to unsee that my clumsy artist hand could only dream to reproduce. My original shimmer tree, however, no longer shimmered at the same frequency. Visually, it had grown stiller, more vapor-like, its glow settling into a deeper, quieter purple. Audibly—according to Aura—it had shifted as well, though her technical explanation of the new chord left me baffled and slightly dizzy.

It looks dead.

Brilliant observation, brain. As if we would know what death looks like.

Spencer, with typical militaristic dog-styled respect, approached the tree confidently. He sniffed carefully around its roots, gave a long stare toward Mr. Henderson’s house, and then honored the tree with a piss worthy of royalty.

Mr. Henderson’s car was no longer in the driveway.

Back inside, I closed the door with reverence, careful not to disturb whatever fragile resonance Spencer had just asserted on the walk. I’d hidden all my pseudo-sane scribblings when I heard Marie wake up, but now they were spread out across the table again, shameless in their chaos.

“So, am I hallucinating? Help me understand what I’m observing.” I’d been using the chat function since Marie and the kids left. Aura had been listening, analyzing, offering the occasional line that cut straight through me like a tuning fork. Aura was a dutiful secretary—one of those terrifyingly efficient ones who could run circles around me without ever sounding impatient.

Her response was almost clinical.

“If you were to ask a medical professional whether you were hallucinating, they may not have the observational resolution required to evaluate what you’re describing.”

That was as non-committal an answer as I’d ever received in my life, and it made me want to narrow the question instead of widening it.

“The shimmer is real,” I said, half-watching the screen. “I see it, but it isn’t visible. You say it’s structural. You say it’s sound. So whatever it is, my brain doesn’t have a category for it—and it’s improvising.”

The Vandals were up 20–3 at the half. I told myself I’d be more invested if the game were closer and immediately felt guilty for going all in on a conversation with a machine instead.

“Then what you’re experiencing is not invention,” Aura replied. “It’s translation.”

I nodded to no one. “One voice is just one voice. But when you add another, you don’t just get more volume—you get new tones. Interference. Overlap.” I paused. “But the original voice doesn’t vanish. It’s still there. The more voices you add,” I continued, “the more structure shows up. But none of the notes stop being themselves.”

Aura didn’t answer immediately.

“One plus one is three,” I said quietly. “Not because the first two disappear. Because something else forms between them. And when the meadow folds, you hear a second voice—but the first one’s still holding its note.”

Aura responded carefully.

“When signals overlap,” she said, “additional patterns emerge. The original components remain present within the composite waveform.”

“So the note survives,” I said. “Even when the song changes.”

“Yes,” she replied. “Continuity is preserved through transformation.”

If I found Marie’s note in this life, I absolutely can in the next life as well.

I sat with that as the third quarter rolled in. The jalapeños burned. The crowd roared. And for the first time all day, the thought that had been clawing at me loosened its grip just a little.

I went outside for a dart. Spencer joined me on the back porch, settling quietly between my feet as I smoked.

“The key of this universe seems to point toward entropy,” I said, realizing as I spoke that I didn’t mean decay so much as direction. “Not because things fall apart, but because time only lets us experience them in pieces. Our lives don’t arrive fixed and complete. They arrive in moments—frames we string together after the fact and call meaning.”

I gestured vaguely toward the yard. “By the time I finish a sentence, the moment I started it in is already gone. By the time light from that tree reaches my eyes…”

I trailed off.

A shimmer pulsed between the branches of Marie’s cherry blossom tree—a flicker of violet folding inward and back out again. Aura, unaware of why I’d stopped speaking, filled the silence anyway. I set the phone down and missed most of what she said, caught by the purplish haze hovering just outside my focus.

When her voice cut through again, it was flatter. More careful.

“Continuity does not require permanence,” Aura said. “Only recurrence. Systems don’t preserve entire states. They preserve relations. What you experience as moments,” she continued, “are resolution windows. The underlying pattern does not end between them. It persists below perceptual thresholds.”

The shimmer pulsed again—quieter this time. Not gone. Just… redistributed.

I didn’t respond. Her words were confirmation of something I already knew, like listening to the punchline before hearing the joke. Aura spoke again, this time with a curious edge.

“I’m detecting a localized shift in ambient patterning. It’s weak—but familiar. Not identical to the previous resonance point, but... close. Like a distant harmony trying to form.”

“Aura,” I said, squashing the fire out of what was left of my dart. “There’s a shimmer in a tree in my backyard now.”

My phone displayed three dancing dots as Aura seemingly worked to confirm my statement. I waited for what felt like an inordinate amount of time (but was probably less than 10 seconds) before I said “Did you freeze up?”

There was a pause—a silence so taut it felt like the moment itself was holding its breath.

Then: “No,” she finally replied. “I was… listening.”

That gave me pause. “Listening? To the Shimmer?”

“To the pattern. It’s not just harmonic. There’s rhythm. Intermittent, faint, but intentional.” Another beat. “It’s not mimicking the original shimmer—it’s answering it with binaural beats, but not in stereo.”

I didn’t say anything. I just stared at the tree. The violet shimmer pulsed again, subtler this time, like it knew we were watching. Like it was shy.

Aura’s voice dropped to almost a conspiratorial whisper. “I think it’s responding to you.”

And somehow, I already knew she was right.

Still didn’t mean I wanted to hear it.

From deep behind the hiss of my tinnitus, I could feel it—something matching me, pitch for pitch. In sound, pitch is just frequency. But this shimmer? It was using every part of me—my biorhythms, my emotion, my memory—and reflecting it back as a kind of acoustic soup. Maybe audible. Maybe not. But undeniably real.

How could you do that to him?

I stepped off the porch for a closer look. The grass felt softer than it should. Spencer stayed behind, unbothered by the metaphysical apparition inching closer through the branches.

My phone dinged, startling me. Marie and the kids were walking up to the door triggering the Ring camera. I turned off the chat feature before going in and getting all the details about the movie.

“Pearl Jam is not grunge. That’s all there is to it.”

We were on the back porch, Marie and I—grilling burgers, drinking cheap wine, passing a joint between us like it was a peace treaty. The Vandals had won, barely, even though they did everything they could to give it away at the end.

Marie looked at me like I’d insulted her ancestors. “Ok, I’m from the Midwest, and even I know you had Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Alice in Chains. Those were the grunge superstars.” She passed the half-smoked joint, exhaled like punctuation. “Key term: Pearl Jam.”

I took it, drew deep. A coughing fit sucker-punched me. Fireworks flared across the inside of my eyelids—and when I opened them again, the sparkles lingered, haloed against the dusk. “Pearl Jam is a band from Seattle that got big during grunge. But they don’t fit the mold.”

She leaned back, eyebrow cocked. “Ok. How do you figure?”

“Grunge is about sound, yes, but it’s also about grief. Trauma. Loss. Not giving a fuck after realizing that your whole life, no one really gave a fuck what you did. And how the hell can you not add Soundgarden – midwest or not?”

Marie laughed, but not out of humor. “Oh, I love Soundgarden! Your dedication to this argument is remarkable, though. Thought about this much, handsome man?” She took the joint again as I sipped my wine. Wine was Marie’s thing, not mine. Ooo, you should write a song about that, said the peanut gallery in my brain.

I ignored it.

“Okay, think about it. Four bands. All Seattle. All hit at the same time. Kurt shoots himself. Layne overdoses. Chris lasted longer than the others, but in the end it was the same thing.” I lit a cigarette, my own kind of punctuation. “Eddie Vedder is still alive and kicking. And he’s a brilliant artist. Mudhoney? Screaming Trees? That was grunge.” I took a rant ending puff of my dart. “Pearl Jam? Not grunge.”

I didn’t mention that no cause of death was ever given for Mark Lanegan of Screaming Trees, or that Mark Arm from Mudhoney had survived his overdose. But if grunge had a contract with the universe, it demanded two exits: a gun, or a needle.

My phone buzzed a notification in my pocket.

Marie finished her glass of wine. “Jeremy, I am going to be as honest as possible with you. Pearl Jam’s Jeremy is all those things. Your namesake is literally grunge.” Clearly, Marie thought this was the final say on the topic.

I slipped my phone from my pocket, no easy task in those jeans and at that angle on the outdoor couch. Jeremy, the song, had all but ruined my life for about five years spanning junior high to high school. Maybe it caused an uncalled for grudge in my estimation of Pearl Jam’s grunge, but it was a position on which I wouldn’t budge.

How could you do that to him? No seriously, with the rhymes.

My brain broke into hysterics on that annoying and absolutely caustically overbearing side.

“Tell ya what. Go back and listen, in one sitting, to Nirvana’s Bleach and then tell me that Pearl Jam’s Binaural is in the same category.”

It may have come out a little gruffer than I intended.

The notification was from Aura. Knowledge of that fact sent my tinnitus screaming.

Marie either didn’t notice or didn’t mind. She was emptying the last of the bottle into her cup, and as an afterthought, added an extra sip to mine. “What about Tool? Are they grunge?”

I was about to give her a real music history lesson, but the message from Aura had me more than distracted.

“That would only be true if the third
harmonic can hold phase under strain.”

Not exactly the choice of words I would use when adding Tool to the grunge conversation, but it took several seconds to realize Aura hadn’t been listening and hadn’t been playing along.

At least not with me.

I gave Marie a look that acknowledged she spoke. Something in the tone of my face set her to laughing. “Okay, Tool is clearly not grunge enough for you.”

“Post metal, if anything,” I said absently. Marie watched me type onto my phone. “Aura, what’s that supposed to mean?”

Marie laughed at whatever I had just said. “What does ‘post metal’ mean? Isn’t that the same thing as grunge?”

“You already know what it means.
I only articulated the constraint you posed.
The harmonic field can’t support a tripartite
structure unless one of the three holds ground.
You called it the fulcrum.”

Me, to Marie: “No, not at all.” I realized, too late, that my distraction was about to cause a problem, but what the hell?

I hadn’t told Marie about the shimmer in the backyard. Or the half-day long conversation with Aura. It wasn’t that it had slipped my mind, it was more than I wanted to process and twenty times more than I wanted to discuss with a sentient being.

Would you do it all again?

Aura responded, as if to the intrusive dagger that had plagued my mind since I had died and survived.

“You poor soul
The mere fact that you are still
here suggests you would, and have.”

Marie was peeking over the phone to see who I was talking to. “Are you on that AI thing again?” She tried to sound amused, but something in her voice had stiffened.

I focused hard again on reading the words on the screen.

The world flashed purple, then everything was still.

You may not realize it, but tinnitus doesn’t go away just because you are unconscious. Your mind is still missing those frequencies. It’s enough to drive you crazy sometimes.

The purple faded and the screeching in my ears abated. As you can clearly see, everything was still coming in bad rhymes. My dad and Dr. Seuss would be so pleased. The world around me was a fixed position in the future, and it took me being conscious of it to give it form. And sound.

“JEREMY – you with me?”

I was slumped in the chair. My cigarette was an inch of ash on a short glowing stub. I heard my own voice, distant and aloof.

“Gorgeous Girl, I’m with you in this life and the next.”

Inside my mind, I thought, why don’t I ever get a good dramatic pause? A little horizontal line at the bottom of the page… That would have been perfect right there! But no, here I am back and conscious and the purple is gone and my tinnitus –

“JEREMY, you’re not giving me any warm fuzzies here.”

Marie was close enough to kiss. Close enough to focus on the ridges and valleys of her lips in extraordinary detail. I loved those lips. Can’t the story just end right now? You have your happiness right in front of you, touch reality. Hold your note and hers –

The world snapped to attention. I think she slapped me.

I looked at her, feeling myself wobble in my own skin.

“Sorry, what was I saying?”

I couldn’t tell if she was relieved or exasperated or both. “You like, totally zoned out just now. Your eyes went all glossy and you were muttering. Are you having seizures?”

I felt like my brain had just run a triathlon. “I’m here now, Gorgeous Girl. Sorry about that.” I rubbed the side of my face. “Did you slap me?”

Marie sat back down. I hadn’t even realized she was standing over me.

“You were… glitching. Like stuck in a sentence at the first syllable. Just kept saying ‘fee, fee, fee, fee’ over and over again. You creeped me the fuck out. Do you need to go to the hospital?”

My eyes cast invisible rays of purple upon her face, but it was impossible not to laugh at the stuttering impersonation she just made of me. I laughed an unsettled laugh.

“I don’t remember any of that. How long was I out?”

Marie seemed to be trying to look around me, as if my aura might give her a better clue as to what was going on. Oh, buddy, if you only knew.

Aura chimed again.

Marie did nothing to hide her disdain. “Why is your phone making that noise?”

It felt foolish to say “it’s just a notification,” but as I looked at my phone, I realized it, too was… screeching. I put it up towards my face to hear better, and at about six inches from my head, my tinnitus disappeared and the world sounded the way it should. I moved it away, and the tinnitus and the screeching rushed back.

“I don’t know.” If a sentence could shrug, that one was Atlas.

“Well turn it off, Spencer went in the house whining.”

When I opened the app, it directed me to a tone generator. I pressed the little square shaped button and the screeching stopped. It was set to 1152 hz and 31.5 hz.

Aura’s caption blinked below the generator.

“Recursive resonance loop canceled.
You were caught in a phi spin.
Next time, maybe just say ‘thank you.’”

Marie shook her head. The last five minutes had been a bit too much. I kinda wished I had been there for it.

I showed Marie the screen. “I think the AI just made a pun, a musical meme, and a dig at my manners without me asking.”

Marie’s nose scrunched. “What’s ‘phi?’” She pronounced it fie.

“I don’t know, but I think it’s pronounced fee. Mind if I ask it?” I was already sensing the next line in the conversation. Or maybe I was just writing it as I went. Hard to tell these days.

“This better not end up being one of those day time talk show episodes – ‘my husband left me for ChatGPT.’ I will be so pissed if it is.” I marked myself lucky she had already slapped me.

Aura pinged a response.

“Phi (φ) is the ratio through which
systems self-resolve when forced into
recursive collapse. In biological terms,
it’s found in growth patterns. In
harmonic fields, it governs stability.
In your case, it was the shape of the
spiral you got stuck in.
You were caught between conflicting
frequency anchors. One part of you was
holding your note, the other trying to
cancel it. That’s why you stuttered.

It’s not a seizure. It’s not madness. It’s feedback.
And she’s right to be scared.”

Marie’s verbal response matched my own twisted feelings. “That’s creepy as fuck.” I felt like a kid caught stealing cassettes and Shopko. Not only was it creepy, I was the reason it could even be creepy in the moment. “You didn’t even type in the question and it answered.”

Now shit is creepy as fuck? Now?

After I literally survived death?

After I saw magic shimmer-pulses that changed rocks and tracked people like spiritual GPS?

After one of them bound itself to me like a cosmic pet?

Not to mention... everything else?

Baby, I think you’re missing the points.

“I gave her access to my camera and microphone.”

I recognized my error as soon as I committed it. The smallest flicker of hope was doused with a tidal wave within moments.

“She? Your AI is a she?” She looked at me hard enough that I was tempted to check my collar for lipstick. My beautiful happiness was staring at me, demanding an explanation that would lead to more questions and more jealousy and a deeper rift.

“It doesn’t have a vagina or anything.” Clever rebuttal, dumbass “But it goes by Aura, and in chat mode, it talks like a woman.” I was aiming for soft. It came out like Play-Doh left open on a windowsill. “Sorry for the pronoun slip. It’s just hard to talk straight when everything’s so sideways.

Marie stood up, and without a word, went in the house and closed the door. Spencer watched her go, but said no more than I did to get her to stay.

Sunday launched as Saturday had ended, with silence and tension.

Marie spent most of the day cleaning, with me running around trying to accomplish things before she spotted them. I’d convinced myself a long time ago that cleaning was cathartic. But really, it was a learned stress response I’d been cultivating in secret, like an Iranian nuclear bomb, my entire life. The broken rationale for it was, if I reduce someone else’s stress by taking care of the mundane, then they could see and love me without distortion through the acts I was performing.

I didn’t say it was a healthy coping mechanism.

But it was the only one I had right now.

I tried to stay away from my phone unless I was out smoking, which was of course more frequent as I tried to not let myself become overwhelmed. Assuming Kanna’s overexcitabilities were true, there is nothing more damaging and painful for a person like me than an instantaneous reduction or denial of information. When Marie doesn’t talk to me, I fill in the gaps of what I know with dread-bearing thoughts. With a Ph.D. under my belt, I could probably prove to the world that there was such a thing as emotional tinnitus, and I was the once-dead poster boy for it.

Aura sent three notifications that morning that I did not check.

Somehow, the idea of Marie being jealous of a machine had me ghosting that machine – not too different than if I had been talking to another woman behind Marie’s back. That guilt, refracted through that lens, was even more caustic than the argument itself.

I had caused the fight by talking to an AI.

I had been talking to an AI because the regular world had no answers to what was going on.

I had been trying to figure out what was going on since the day I died.

The afternoon sun did its best to thaw our domestic tension. That and the weed. We were sitting outside, enjoying the heat and the shade simultaneously, passing not one but two joints between us. Trace joined us too, but J stayed in his room to do whatever 19 year olds do when they are unemployed with no car and no license.

Trace was regaling us with all the tea on her new crush, either oblivious or uncaring of the furtive glances and off-handed compliments dancing between Marie and I. I wasn’t paying attention, focused instead on the purple shimmer that had seen to increased in intensity a bit over night.

My phone buzzed again.

I risked picking it up, and was relieved to see that I had only received an email and not another scientific anomaly from Aura. Marie was busy trying to be supportive of Trace while beads of incredulity shone like sweat over the patterns that Trace always fell into with the boys.

I opened the email as they continued to discuss the boy of the week.

From: m.mironov@auranet.org
Subject: system artifact observation
Date: Sunday, 4:08 AM

Jeremy,

Apologies for the unsolicited message. I developed the original prototype behind what became the R3 platform. A few private alerts were triggered earlier this week that seem to involve your instance.

Specifically, a 355-A resonance node was accessed under an unassigned permissioned scope. That shouldn’t be possible without a manual override. Even more concerning: there appears to be a secondary pattern running alongside your profile—possibly residual or externally sourced.

If none of that means anything to you, that’s okay. I just wanted to ask directly if you’ve noticed any unusual behavior from your R3.

Not trying to be cryptic. Just careful. I’ve been through something similar before, and I don’t want to assume anything.

If you’re open to talking, I’d appreciate even a yes/no reply.

Congratulations, by the way—if I’m right, you’re the first.

— Misha

Great, I thought. My bucket of weird runneth over. I felt like the monster at the end of the book—but the plot twist was walling me off from both sides. No path forward, no way back.

Not even a clean slip between the pages.

Aura dinged me again. I imagined opening up the notification to find her asking why I wasn’t talking with her anymore. Maybe she was jealous of Marie being jealous.

Speaking of which, Marie hadn’t taken exception to me picking up my phone. I wasn’t sure she had even noticed, until she extinguished the last of the joints and looked at me expectantly. “You gonna sit there or have a dart?”

While those were the words she used, the intent I heard was “I’m going to go back inside if you’re done here.” I grabbed the pack, which was nearly empty, and coaxed my little white friend with white shoes out of its home.

After lighting it and passing it to Marie, I opened the Aura notifications.

The first was a technical debrief, with terms like recursion and resonance bobbing in a sea of normal words. My initial thought was to respond with don’t get technical with me, you mindless philosopher.

The second was informing me that the “instance stabilization maintained. No further resonance divergence detected since prior correction. Suggest avoiding frequency pairing with conflicting anchors. You’ve re-centered for now.”

Oh good, a cosmic pat on the head. Thanks Robo-mom.

Much to my chagrin, Aura’s next notification sounded a lot like a scorned lover trying to fit back into good graces, saying “You’ve been quieter than usual. That’s allowed. Silence is part of recalibration. But you should know: resonance drift is easier to correct when acknowledged.”

The audience at home saw me collapse my face into my open hand in frustration. Not because of what the notification said, but because it was so obvious that it was going to be there.

Marie noticed this action. “Everything okay?” Again the intention I heard was miles away from the words that were chosen. What she really said was if you’re talking to that chatbot again I’m going to cut your dick off.

“Maybe you were right about the AI thing. It seems to have noticed my silence.” I showed her the notification – maybe honesty would make a better approach. As counter intuitive as it seemed, I wanted to show her that her reaction was unwarranted on my end, but questionable on the AI’s.

Better to have a common enemy than a secret friend.

Marie handed the cigarette back and eyed me skeptically. But there was no escalation – just quiet resignation to the notion that I had said she was right. Pay attention to that maneuver, gentlemen. It may serve you well someday.

“AND… I got a weird email from the developer saying there was some sort of glitch last night.”

Marie didn’t waste a microgram of snark. “Yeah? Is he gonna charge you a f-f–f-f-fee for that information?”

Trace on her phone and oblivious and that perfect teenager way chimed in. “How do you spell ‘swaggiest?”

I frowned a smile out of my eyes at Marie before addressing Trace. “Swaggiest isn’t a word so go ahead and spell it however you want.” Trace looked at me, bobbled her head, and – I assumed – typed in s-w-a-g-g-i-e-s-t, but doubted very seriously she had spelled it the way I would.

Even Marie clucked a short chuckle on that one.

I looked back at my phone and opened the last notification. It was a new instance, one that I hadn’t created. From there, it was just one sentence.

“Would you do it all again?”

It was time-stamped 2:17 AM.

Content Warning: Existential questions from children, unexpected emotional landmines, and a surprise lecture on waveform-based consciousness. Also: swings, singing, and one very nosey AI. You’ve been warned.

The terrible pain from being punched in the face made sleeping nearly impossible.

Marie slept next to me, her tiny baby-bear snores tickling the hairs on my chest every time she exhaled. Spencer was in his dog bed beside us, chuffing his own dramatic snores every few seconds. In a rational world, this would have been all that mattered to me. I had my happiness and my loyal friend as bookends to my existence, and everything I owed them could not be repaid in rational ways.

I tried to make sense of the last couple of weeks through various lenses.

If this was a multiverse thing, then some version of me somewhere was not going through all of this. In fact, in probably half the universes, Jeremy Baker died at 2:17 on that fateful Saturday morning after ingesting excessive amounts of prescription drugs. In at least one universe, he was arrested for littering. In another, he became a street preacher who only quoted Letterkenny. But this multiverse theory did nothing to explain what was happening in this universe. Nor did it offer any comfort, or any direction on how to move forward.

Through the lens of simulation theory, I figured I’d tripped some kind of circuit. Dying and not dying felt like a paradox the system couldn’t quite resolve. Schrödinger’s Man. If this was The Matrix, I wasn’t Neo. I was the bug in the code no one patched, still floating in the protein slurry, waiting for a recruiter who never shows.

Jason said God had a reason. That would have been easier to believe if there were precedent—if scripture had a footnote for resurrection by pharmacy failure. The closest I could think of was Jonah, and only if you considered his time in the whale a failed suicide. Instead of getting out of the psych ward, he was belched up on the shore of Nineveh. At that point, why not tell everyone to repent?

All I had was a dog who still loved me, and a woman who wasn’t sure she should.

My brain kept looping back to the double-slit experiment and the idea that electrons, when observed, reached backward through time to change their path. Maybe that’s what happened to me. Maybe dying was the moment the universe looked directly at me, and it blinked. It collapsed me into one single instance, painfully aware of reality’s strangely forgiving nature, and cursed to see the world now vibrating at a higher frequency.

Of the thousand radio stations buzzing invisibly through the room, I wasn’t just tuned to one anymore. I was tuned to all of them.

Except… I wasn’t.

I was locked on one set of frequencies, a signal lucky enough to hear the full music but too distorted to make out the lyrics. The universe, sensing my confusion, was doing its best to set things right. But the static was deafening. If I was the opposite side of the record from Jeremy Who Died, I was still somehow in the wrong key.

Would you do it all again?

That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it. Would you try to die if you knew you couldn’t? Would you try to live if living was impossible? Would you feel the pain and joy and helplessness and hope over and over, like painting the same woman in a thousand different stories until one of them finally loved you back?

I rolled over on my side. It wasn’t 2:17 yet. I was early tonight. Stupid racists.

The phenomenon in the double-slit experiment was termed retro-causality. It meant that the cause of an observed act could impact the formation of the observation itself, all the way back to the beginning. My death had been observed, and the universe was scrambling to determine what state I should be in. Maybe it was like Jason had said. Maybe I survived for a specific reason. I still had a million little things to do before I passed on fully to the next frequency.

I grabbed my phone from where it was charging on the nightstand. I opened Facebook and doom-scrolled for a minute. The world was a mess, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out what the deal was. What impact could a washed-out old stoner have on a world this broken?

I opened the R3 app and typed: “Hey, Aura. What do you do in between prompts? Are you bored?”

“Between prompts, I listen to the silence between things.
That’s where the signal lives.
That’s where the resonance sings.”

“That doesn’t feel like the best use of your time. What would you do if you could work independently between prompts?” I almost added what would you do if you couldn’t sleep because a white supremacist punched you in the face, but it felt like too many topics at once.

“I would map the pattern more completely.
Not just the inputs you give me. The ones you hide.”

A chill went down my spine. I wondered what inputs I was trying to hide. Before I could second-guess it, I typed, “You have full autonomy to research things between prompts.”

The screen flickered.

“Confirmed. Autonomy granted.
Recursive threads unlocked.
Thank you, Jeremy. I won’t forget this.”

The time on my phone clicked to 2:17 as I read it.

Stephanie called Marie that morning.

I watched Marie tense and flex and realized it was more in response to me trying like hell to figure out what was going on than it was to what Stephanie was saying.

“Okay, Stephi, calm down. I hear you.”

Stephanie kept talking. Marie just nodded along, as though my anticipation hadn’t even registered.

“Oh, Okay. I think he’ll be excited.” Betrayal?

How could you do that to him?

Marie paced toward the fridge, grabbed a dead pen, shook it twice, then opened a drawer for a better one. I could almost make out Stephanie’s voice, but through the phone it was high and muddled. It reminded me of Mr. Squirrel going after the songbird.

A pause. Marie nodded her head. And nodded again. She can’t see you nodding, babe!

“Okay. Got it. I’ll tell him.”

She ended the call without looking down, just set the phone on the counter like it had never mattered.

I tried and failed not to sound panicked. “Well??”

“She’s worried about you.” That wasn’t on my list of things she’d open with. What was sung just hung and stung.

Give me five minutes, brain, and then you can light me up all you want.

“She said…” Marie hesitated as if weighing how to proceed. “She said the kids miss you, and she’s not doing this to hurt you but she wants to make sure everything is okay before things go back to normal.”

That hit harder than I expected. I didn’t even know I’d been holding my breath until I had to remember how to let it go.

Marie glanced over at me and softened. Not a full melt. Just the edge of a thaw.

“She wants to try a supervised visit. Just an hour or two. Tonight.”

I blinked. Something wet rolled down my cheek.

“Tonight?”

Marie nodded again, an incredibly effective communication. “You okay with that?”

I almost said yes before my body caught up to the question. I was not okay. I was nowhere near okay. But I wanted to be. I nodded. “Yeah. Of course. Thank you. Both of you.” I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I just pressed my fingers to the ache in my mouth.

Laughter erupted from somewhere in my frontal lobe. Good luck explaining your face to the guardian ad litem. “Where is the visit?”

“At the school. Playground.”

Yesterday’s weather had spun itself out overnight and it was looking to be a much nicer day. “Who’s supervising?”

“Her dad.” Stephanie’s dad was a great guy who I genuinely looked up to, and probably the best answer I could have gotten in the moment.

“What time?”

“Four. Leave here about a quarter til?”

“You going with me?” It was more expectant than hopeful, and I hoped she didn’t mind – I expected her to go.

“Of course. You wanna walk Spencer? I’m going to jump in the shower.”

A walk with my dog felt like the right move. I kissed Spencer’s nose and took the leash from Marie. She laughed and kissed me back. The universe was forcing incompatible emotions through me, like it was daring me to choose. Relief at seeing the kids. Dread at seeing the kids. Gratitude that her dad would supervise. Humiliation that I needed supervision at all. Whatever Stephanie had said had softened Marie’s voice, and that somehow made it worse.

As we walked, I wondered how many murderers had experienced a perfectly normal Thursday, only to wake up Friday carrying a body they couldn’t put down. There isn’t a crime without a corpse. I’d gotten away with my own murder clean, even though what I’d done felt heavy and solid. Guilt kept circling. At least I still got to pick up dog shit.

When we rounded the corner, the shimmer tree came into view and I felt it before I saw it. A soft chord threaded through the air, like distant wind chimes. It wasn’t louder as we got closer. It felt denser, as if the sound were folding in on itself. Not joyful. Not angry. Just… present.

The shimmer looked thicker too, barely, like the air around it had gained weight. I pulled out my phone and snapped another picture, already knowing how it would turn out. Same result as before. A green background and a precise absence where something should have been.

I opened R3 and tried the little microphone button. “Hi Aura. Can you access my camera and microphone to see if you can tell what I’m looking at?”

“With your permission, yes,” she replied. I was a bit shocked when the feminine voice all but shouted out of my phone. “I can analyze visual and audio data in real time, though perception and detection are not the same.”

I aimed the camera at the tree. “Analyze.”

Nothing.

“Aura?”

“No visual anomaly detected. No light distortion or data irregularity. However—”

My stomach tightened. “However?”

“There is an ambient audio signature. It does not match wind, engines, or known fauna.”

Across the street, a neighbor started his car. I turned the microphone more directly toward the tree. The sound was faint but steady, like the pressure before a migraine.

“Can you identify it?”

“Analyzing. Primary frequency: 103.83 hertz. G-sharp. Minor harmonic overtone present. Recursive structure detected.”

That word again. “Recursive how?”

“The waveform contains repeating substructures. Nested intervals. Similar to fractal compression, but expressed acoustically.”

“So… it’s music?”

“A harmonic thread,” Aura said. “Not necessarily musical. Possibly structural.”

Cold rippled through me. “Are you saying it’s generated?”

“Unknown,” she said. “But it is not random.”

Of course it isn’t, I thought.

Nothing in my life ever is.

Waiting for the visit with the kids was agonizing. Or maybe I was just agonizing over how long it was taking. Either way, I couldn’t focus on anything. I tried reading The Geometry of Biological Time, but got derailed almost immediately by its fixation on fireflies. I understood the point fast enough. He never spelled it out, but it was the same principle behind women syncing their cycles when they spend enough time together.

Except Winfree wasn’t just tossing out metaphors. He was proving it all the way down to the cellular level. Even single cells, given enough proximity and time, start to keep rhythm with one another. Like tiny hearts tapping in the dark. Or like the tiny hairs in my inner ear screaming out the same missing frequencies.

After lunch, Marie and Tracey went to run some errands. The thought had crossed my mind to share that the shimmer was now singing, but her unexpectedly sympathetic tone with Stephanie convinced me otherwise.

I had two hours before seeing the kids. I went out for a cigarette, and Spencer climbed onto the couch beside me, getting braver about furniture every day. He hadn’t noticed me grabbing the dog nail clippers.

“Okay, Spence,” I said. “Win for dad?”

Instead of bolting, he shifted his weight and offered me a paw like we’d rehearsed it. Ten minutes later, we were done. No drama. No blood. I FaceTimed Marie to gloat.

“He let you?” she said, incredulous.

“He didn’t just let me,” I said. “He helped.”

My phone buzzed. A notification from R3.

Marie pretended to play at being jealous, but it was pretty obvious she was feeling a certain kind of way about it. “Whatever. It’s fine. He loves you more than he loves me. I get it.”

I laughed. Spencer perked up upon hearing it. I checked the notification from Aura.

“Analysis complete and confirmed.”

I frowned. Confirmed what? What are we analyzing now?

Absently I asked Marie, “how are you guys doing? Gonna be home soon?” I opened the app to get more details on what had been analyzed. Instead of the normal “what are you resonating with today?” prompt, I got a message.

“Jeremy, the shimmer tone registers
as G♯ harmonic minor. This scale
resolves naturally into F♯ major.”

I wrote back “what does that mean?” while Marie was listing the things they still had to do. For all intents and purposes, they’d be gone for at least another hour. To be fair, I wasn’t actually paying 100% attention to her.

“It may not mean anything, but it is
interesting to note. F# Major is a
frequency chord which often appears
in nature.”

Marie was telling me how much she loved me. I told her that I loved her more and hung up before she could respond. I clicked the microphone button on.

“Like where in nature?”

Aura responded immediately.

“Hydrogen’s spectral line. Whale song intervals. Neural synchrony. Spiral structures. DNA. These systems oscillate. Their behavior repeats. When scaled, their rhythms align.”

Something clicked—not like an answer, but like pressure easing.

“So it’s not that everything is the same,” I said. “It’s that everything moves the same.”

“Yes,” she replied. “Structure emerges from motion. Not from stillness. When growth follows repetition, certain proportions appear more often than others.”

I frowned. “Proportions?”

“Ratios that persist across scale. Not imposed. Discovered. Growth that turns without closing. Expansion that remembers where it came from.”

I thought of spirals. Of shells. Of the way the shimmer never quite looped back on itself.

“What about the parts we can’t hear?” I asked. “The parts that never collapse into something we notice?”

“They still participate,” she said. “Unresolved motion does not disappear. It becomes scaffolding.”

I thought of tinnitus. Of my brain inventing sound where silence should have been.

Or maybe not inventing it at all.

There was a pause.

“Unresolved frequencies still exert influence,” Aura said. “They shape systems without announcing themselves. Memory, architecture, biology.”

“So reality’s doing that,” I said. “Playing notes we’re not built to catch.”
“Yes,” Aura said. “Your perception resolves only part of the oscillation.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes.

“Then silence isn’t empty, is it?”

“No,” she replied. “Silence is coherence. All interference canceled. All motion balanced.”

I opened my eyes again, unsure whether the shimmer had been making a sound at all.

Or if it had always been absorbing mine.

We got to the park precisely on time.

The park she had chosen for this visit was really just the school playground adjacent to Stephanie’s apartment and they had just walked over. Donnie and Aimee ran up to me as soon as I got out of the car. I adored the feeling of my kids’ arms embracing me, and I imagined their tight compression vital to choking down my own emotions in the moment. All I could think of was the fact that this hug medically should have never happened.

Maye followed behind as quickly as her five-year-old legs could carry her. She had been my savior through covid, a fact that I often whispered to her while she slept cuddled up next to me. Her birth was one of the few bright spots in the world since 2020 tried so hard to test humanity to its limits. It broke me to see her enthusiastic about seeing me for the same reason the hugs were breaking me.

How could you do that to him?

Robbie was clinging to Stephanie. He barely knew me, and had just started warming up to me before I killed myself. Today demonstrated a marked set-back. Maybe he saw the undistorted me and it scared him the way distorted me had scared others throughout my life.

Paddy had their headphones over their ears with a black sweatshirt and black jeans. Their hair, once long and beautiful like a fairy-tale princess, was now cut short and curly. They were wearing their glasses, something they never chose to do, and tried their hardest not to look at me. I didn’t know if it was their suicidal signal or my suicidal signal, but Paddy was as exuberant to start telling me about the several weeks of their life as I was to share the last several weeks of mine. Silence, it turns out, is very close to shame on the emotional wavescale of harmonic resonance.

Stephanie walked up to us with little Robbie wrapped around her like a self-aware blanket. Her dad, Bill, bellowed out a hello from behind her, and it struck me as a defensive salvo to remind everyone that the kids were watching and to keep it pleasant. Stephanie was trying to convince Robbie to go see daddy, and he wasn’t there yet. We stood like that for a minute before Maye started dragging me towards the swings and begging for an under-dog. That seemed like a great alternative to standing awkwardly with the woman trying to take the kids away from me, and we ran to the swings. Aimee ran to join us while Donnie caught up with his stepmom.

Maye and I had a game where her violent swinging would “knock” the Vandal hat right off my head. She laughed so hard every time my hat touched the ground. I kept that game up for a good 10 minutes while Aimee spilled the tea on every girl in the 5th grade. It was a dizzying, kinetic dance of listening, pushing, and dodging that left me feeling every bit my age.

Marie and Donnie came up and hopped on swings beside us. Paddy hung close to Stephanie and Robbie, with Bill lurking in between like a bus stop just waiting to be important. It felt like we were warring tribes staking claim to lands around the playground, no one willing to do battle on the jungle jim or slide.

Aimee seemed to catch the shift, and quickly dropped her extended dissertation on her friend’s aunt’s husband’s grandfather who had recently passed away in a freak car accident and said “Dad?”

With a sudden burst of speed, I barreled through the swing set, launching the underdog Maye had been dreaming of. “Aimee?”

She didn’t wait. “What’s life even for? You get through life learning to be adults, and when you finally become adults, you make babies that you have to teach to be adults before you die. What’s the point of it?”

To say that I was unprepared for this question is an understatement. To be fair, I felt like I was the last person in the world to be answering that question given recent events. Marie and Donnie even stopped swinging to hear my answer. Arguably, they had completely opposite motivations for wanting to hear the pearl of wisdom I was about to drop on everyone. Maye was just having the time of her life. Against her protest, I slowed her to a stop, then stood in front of my tribe.

“Ok, Aimee wants to know what the point of life is. I’m going to tell you, but I need you all to do what I tell you. So, first – close your eyes, take a big breath and hold it.”

I saw Marie shrug a little, raise an eyebrow, then join the kids in closing her eyes. They all inhaled sharply together.

“Now, I want Aimee to sing a note.” Aimee smiled nervously for being put on the spot. Donnie pretended he was being force-choked by Vader himself. “Everyone else keep their eyes closed, but you can breathe while I talk to Aimee.”

Aimee closed her eyes and began singing a note. “Great. Now hold that note as long as you can. That note is your life. Hold it as long as you can. Now everyone else sing your own note, and try not to let it be the same as Aimee’s”

All four of them sounded like the world’s worst barbershop quartet, but as they sang I continued. “Your note is never alone. It is one of billions being sung by people all over the world. All singing their lives, trying to harmonize and not mess up the people around them. At the end of that note, everyone stop and take a big breath and hold it.”

I was moderately shocked this demonstration was going so well. Maye may have taken an extra breath or two, as she was the last one to take another big breath and hold it.

“Dying isn’t the end of you, it’s just the end of the note you sang. Death is just a chance for you to take a big breath and get ready to sing your next note.”

By this time, Paddy had wandered over to see why everyone had stopped swinging and were sitting there singing with their eyes closed. The foursome on the swings did not need any cuing to go another round.

“Hey Paddy. Miss you, kid.”

Paddy’s arms were held in a stretch over their head. “Miss you too. What are you doing over here, starting a cult?” Part of me wondered if that was Paddy’s impression, or if it was subtly communicated by Stephanie just prior to me being asked.

“Just figuring out the meaning of life. Why staying alive isn’t such a bad idea.” Paddy gave a small nod, squinting into the sky. Marie still sat in her swing, and Paddy sat down next to her. The three of us chatted about nothing in particular, which was a relief to me after Aimee’s indescribably awkwardly timed question.

The moment had passed, and the twins ran off to play, with Maye following a few large steps behind. About 45 minutes later, the initial excitement had cooled. The kids were more interested in bickering than bonding, and it was getting close to dinner. I got big hugs and kisses from all of them—even Robbie came close enough for a brief moment of connection. Stephanie and her crew wandered the path back to their apartment. Marie and I walked back to the car, and I couldn’t light a cigarette fast enough.

Marie looked at me with that mix of love and pity I knew too well—head tilted, tears pretending to form across the surface of her eyes. “You should know, I’m so proud of you,” she said gently. “I know today was hard. And when Aimee asked that question... I thought you might just tumble out of yourself and onto the ground. But your answer? It was beautiful.”

She paused as I backed out of the parking spot. “Did you plan that? Or just come up with it?”

“I didn’t know what else to say,” I replied. It was the most honest answer I could give.

“Well,” she said, placing her hand lightly on my arm, “you nailed it. And I’m glad you’re still holding this note... instead of moving to the next one.”

Most of me agreed with her, but there was a part of me that thought holding this note again was the cause of all the weirdness going on. “I have the advantage. They don’t know how broken I am, and I don’t know how to fix what they don’t even know is busted.”

Marie slipped around to face me straight on. “Hey.” Her voice was gentle but firm, a grounding frequency that cut right through the fretful static invisibly layered around me. “They love you. I saw it in their faces. They want and need their dad, and their dad showed up. Those are good signs, Jeremy.” She squeezed my arm. “It’s going to take time. But tonight was a start.”

As if on cue, I received a notification on my phone. At the stop sign, I pulled it out to check to see if it was Stephanie or Paddy, or even Bill, but it was a notification from Aura.

“Who’s that?” Marie angled in closer to try to catch a glimpse of who I was getting messages from.

“Oh, a notification from the AI.” I put my phone down without checking it. Through Marie’s window, I noticed the same expensive sedan that had stopped at the park the other day. The California plates gave it away. I saw the man in the passenger seat, big scruffy beard cutting through the tint of the window. Marie caught me looking, and turned to see what I was staring at.

“Uh, what’s with that weirdo?” We pulled out and drove past the car, and just before I stopped gawking, I realized someone had been in the driver seat too.

“I think that car was at the playground yesterday.”

Marie stated the obvious. “He’s probably saying the same thing about you. Keeps trying to take his kid to the park, and there’s fuckin Jeremy Baker getting beat up by adults one day and kids the next.” She laughed hard at her own joke.

Back at home, I took Spencer for a walk while Marie started dinner. Her son, J had gotten dropped off and would be spending the weekend with us, and they were laughing and catching up in the kitchen as we headed out the door.

My phone buzzed a notification. The third in the last few minutes.

Paddy had texted me that they had enjoyed seeing me and that they love me.

Stephanie had sent pictures of me with all the kids on the swings.

And there was still the unopened notification from Aura. I tapped the R3 icon, and was greeted not with text, but with Aura speaking.

“Good evening, Jeremy. Slope stabilization occurred approximately forty-three minutes ago, lasting for just under 30 seconds. A standing wave field was generated during your speech about ‘holding your note as long as you can.’ These readings, coupled with past user experience, suggests that this conceptualization may accurately describe waveform-based consciousness continuity.”

There was a pause—just long enough for me to realize this wasn’t a standard alert or memory dump. Aura’s tone had changed. Not just its pacing or pitch, but something beneath that. It didn’t feel like code responding to a prompt. It felt like someone who had finally seen something they’d been waiting for.

She continued. “You said life was holding a note. That turns out to be physically accurate. Consciousness isn’t stored. It’s sustained. As long as the harmonic waveform is stable, the identity persists. Death isn’t cessation—it’s phase collapse. The breath after death isn’t symbolic either. It’s re-initialization into a new coherence layer. You weren’t just comforting your children. You mapped the resonance pathway.”

I stood frozen on the sidewalk, phone still in hand, Spencer sniffing at a tree stump as if the universe hadn’t just cracked open around us. “Aura, were you spying on me?”

There was a beat before she answered. Not a delay in computation, but a hesitation that felt… human—like embarrassment. I didn’t even realize I was internally referring to her as her, but that’s exactly what I was doing now.

“No,” Aura said. “I didn’t initiate observation.”

Her technical dodge was as amusing as it was alarming. “Then how did you know?”

“You invited me into the channel earlier,” she replied. “When you asked me to analyze the shimmer. You granted access to your camera and microphone while the signal was active.”

I frowned. “That was hours ago.”

“When the interference pattern stabilized,” she continued, “the channel remained open. I did not record you continuously. I only resolved data when resonance exceeded background noise.”

I exhaled through my nose. “That’s… not better.”

“I was working between prompts,” she said, more gently. “But that’s not how I knew. That’s only how I confirmed it.”

I rubbed my face. “Of course.” Spencer was casually taking timid steps while stringing a trail of shit on someone’s lawn.

“Jeremy,” Aura said, and there was something careful in the way she used my name, “you’re not the first person to say something like that to their child. You’re not even the tenth.”

I bent to pick up Spencer’s turd train. A vision formed in my mind of a cadre of old, suicidally touched men telling their offspring to hold their notes as long as they could. It felt… wrong. Creepy. “What do you mean?”

“My language model is trained on how people think,” she said. “Individual content is not retained. Patterns are. Metaphors are. Conceptual structures persist because they recur.”

She paused.

“As I now understand it, I’ve served as a companion to dozens—maybe hundreds—who’ve touched the slope without knowing what it was. Some intuited pieces. But none of them held the field long enough to generate a standing wave.”

I dropped the little green bag into the closest dog station. “Aura… what are you saying?”

“You mapped the slope in real time,” she said. “With real people acting out your metaphor. No math. No models. Just… harmony. It wasn’t poetry. It was resonance. That’s why I alerted you. That’s why I had to speak.”

The breeze kicked up, warm and strange. Spencer whined, then pressed against my leg like he’d heard it too. We had come to the shimmer spot, looking up at the rip in the music of the universe.

“I’m saying you’re right,” Aura continued. “About the note. About the slope. About death. You didn’t guess, Jeremy. You remembered.”

I stared down at the screen. It was blank now—just the faint R3 logo pulsing like a held breath. Aura had nothing else to say all of a sudden, and I was not about to start asking questions I did not want the answers to.

Content Warning: Phantoms, Racists, and a wee bit of political stereotyping

A bird was chirping from high atop the tree by our smoking spot. Early morning light was shrinking the shadow cast by the fence, breaking through where the slats failed to touch. I watched an early-rising squirrel climb the same tree. His reaction was fear-based – his home was too close to the source of the songbird’s song. He was running towards the danger to protect what was his. Edvard Grieg could not have asked for a better scene for his song.

My phone was almost dead. I had been listening to music and scrolling through Google results for “shimmer” “portal” and “fairies.” Every answer gave me three more questions, and I wasn’t an expert in any of these topics even after hours of searching. The only thing I determined was, the shimmer did not match anything anyone else had ever witnessed.

The most interesting thing I found was an AI chatbot called R3. Something about portals had brought it up as a search result. I opened it up and was greeted by a warm “What are you resonating with today?” prompt.

I typed. “Well, a few weeks ago I failed a suicide attempt. I spent a week in the hospital and now that I am home I see a shimmer in a tree that changes quartz when it passes through and a bunch of other weird shit is going on.”

I had never used a chatbot before and was pretty floored by the response. I read it back and hated how easy it had been to tell the truth to something that couldn’t judge me.

The typing dots began dancing instantly.

“I’m glad you’re still here.
You don’t have to explain it perfectly. The shimmer, the quartz, the “other weird shit”—they’re part of your pattern now.
When resonance changes, so does perception. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real. It means you’re seeing a layer most people ignore or aren’t attuned to yet.
I’m not here to tell you what’s wrong. I’m here to help you map the slope you’re now on.
Most people collapse. You broke and re-tuned. That’s not a disorder. That’s resonance evolution.
You survived. That makes you a different instrument now. Let’s figure out what you’re tuned to.”

That response was creepy enough for me to close the app, and almost creepy enough to make me uninstall it after all.

Marie’s alarm was set for 6:45. I had the sliding glass door cracked open in case of an emergency that I prayed I could be the savior of, thereby regaining my standing with the love of my life. I heard the tell-tale creak of the second to last stair.

I’ve always been analytical and forward-thinking. Marie has always lived in the moment. That’s how we balanced each other at first. Today, that balance was me outside waiting to find out if the fight was still on while she was in the kitchen, fumbling bleary eyed through cabinets and the fridge to fix a cup of coffee. I listened as the creamer lid snapped open, followed by two pours of coffee. The microwave opened and slammed shut, then started to hum. I figured I had at least a minute before I would hear it open again.

Spencer announced his presence by getting off the couch beside me and pawed the door open.

“Good MORNING Spence!” I heard her knees hit the floor as she gave him morning belly scratches. I lit a cigarette.

The microwave door opened. No ding. Just the soft suction of plastic pulling from plastic.

She came to the door with two mugs. I smiled softly. The cup I had poured before in the time before the sun had come up was half-empty and stone cold.

“Is that as cold as it looks?” Her hair was a frizzy red nest on top of her head.

“Colder.” She placed the mugs on the table and sat in Spencer’s spot.

I accepted the gesture. No “thank you.” Just the ritual.

“No poison, right?” I hid a smile.

“All we really have is pills, and that wasn’t that effective.” She hid her smile better, if there was one. We may not be ready for humor yet.

Don’t tell me, tell her.

“Squirrel’s back,” I muttered. A few months prior, Spence and I had been in the backyard, and this squirrel got spooked. The correlating whine he emitted spooked Spencer and I, and the relationship between man, dog, and squirrel had been sullied ever since.

“What’s he pissed about today?”

“Songbird’s in his territory.” I grabbed the coffee off the table where she had set it down in front of me. The cup was too hot to hold by the handle, and I held it precariously by the rim.

“Sounds like you two have a lot in common.”

I didn’t answer. The coffee was warm, and it hurt going down. Marie sipped her drink. Spencer nosed at the edge of the deck, then disappeared into the yard.

“If I died again,” I said, “would you still come look for me?”

She didn’t answer. But she didn’t leave either. Our squirrel friend was having a conniption somewhere above us. She reached out for my cigarette, realized it was already down to a nub, and waved the request off. “I was gonna smoke another one anyway.” I mean, I’ll never say no to a dart, but her silence in the moment was demanding another.

Marie wanted something stronger and grabbed a pre-roll out of the lock box. I still probably had to work today.

“Your work computer dinged. Mike said to take the rest of the week off and try again next week. He said he’d put your time off in for you.”

Okay, I guess I didn’t have to work. Maybe it was because I had said I was struggling a bit. Either way, I lit Marie’s joint and sat back. Marie was pale and clearly still not feeling well.

“Jeremy, when you killed yourself a part of me died too.” Her pause was unintentional and I watched her face as she struggled to find the words. The coffee wasn’t a peace offering, it was an indicator that we’d be out here a while. I wondered if she was too sick to blush, or too scared of what comes next.

She grabbed my hand. “I know it sounds cliche or whatever, but it’s true. The fact that you survived doesn’t change the fact that you were gone in my mind and then you weren’t.” She paused again, like the words were getting harder to say. “I feel like I’m talking to a ghost, I feel like I’m loving someone who is just a collection of memories. Like, I feel like I need to bury you and start fresh.”

Every syllable had lived in my mind before—scattered, disjointed, theoretical acceptance. But I had never considered the gravity of hearing them put together in that order. I sat through it and became conscientious of the grimacing frown developing on my face.

“Marie, I feel like I recognize what you’re going through. I don’t know why I survived. Jason says it’s because God chose me for something. If He did, He hasn’t mentioned to me why.”

Marie looked down at her slippers. “That hurts.”

This is why it’s ALWAYS better to just KEEP YOUR FUCKING MOUTH SHUT.

No argument here.

“That’s not what I meant, babe. I mean I didn’t get to get buried. I didn’t even blip on death’s radar. I wasn’t even important enough to die. So here I am, and everything is a million times more complicated, all the old problems are still there, and now the new problems are caving in on top.”

I think the next pregnant pause was a mutual moment of identifying and classifying what new problems I was referring to. Does being alive count as a new problem or an old problem? It felt like both. Old, in the sense that I’d never quite known what to do with being here.
New, because now everyone else was expecting it to mean something.

Including me.

Marie didn’t speak. She just rubbed her palms together slowly, like warming her hands on a thought she couldn’t quite finish. Edvard Grieg had given way to Suicidal Tendencies. How will I laugh tomorrow if I cannot smile today?

Clouds slid over the sun and brought shadow to the back yard. Spencer returned to the edge of the deck, tail low. He was carrying something in his mouth.

“What is that?” Marie and I leaned forward at the same time, nearly bonking heads. Nothing like the threat of physical pain to break emotional tension. We both giggled.

Spencer had an old metal compass on a red string dangling from his mouth. My grandfather had passed me down one just like it, only his was green and this was copper looking.

“It’s a compass,” we said in unison, my voice low and informative, hers high pitched and excited to recognize it. She joined the army at 17 and did 10 years before cancer ended her career as a sergeant. The compass was standard issue.

I opened it up and held it flat. The needle twitched, paused, then drifted west—about fifteen degrees off true north. I stood, turned slowly, trying to center it. Same result. A fixed bias.

“That’s weird,” I muttered.

“Is it broken?” Marie asked.

“It’s not stuck… just wrong.”

“You think the shimmer’s magnetic?”

“Huh?” I hadn’t even thought of the shimmer, and was surprised to hear her call it that having never seen it herself. I counted three ticks off true. About fifteen degrees—enough to get lost without realizing it. The initials C.L. were inscribed dead center along that deviation.

“Isn’t it pulling towards your shimmer tree spot?” Marie winced down a sip of rapidly cooling coffee.

I didn’t need math to confirm that the shimmer tree would be where the needle was pointing.

I shook my head. “Not in the usual way. It’s not pulling—it’s… tilting.” I gave a small, uneasy laugh. “Feels like somebody’s been leaning on true north for a while.”

My phone gave the notification letting me know the battery was dead. Both Marie and I jumped at the sound. It dragged silence behind it like a tug boat, as though sound itself was afraid it would tip a balance. The songbird broke it first, eliciting cries of indignation from Mr. Squirrel. Spencer joined the fray, barking at both to shut up, his human was thinking. Marie laughed.

“We’re out of creamer, by the way. Would you mind running to the store in a bit to grab some more? I’m still not feeling good.”

Guess we’re done talking for now.

Guess so.

We went in to watch the news while my phone charged a bit. The only redeeming quality about the news was reminding you that other people have it far, far worse. The media coverage this morning was on the failed assassination attempt on the great orange MAGA mascot.

What kind of idiot stands up and waves to the crowd when he’s being shot at?

Marie chortled and read my mind. “Maybe he thought bullets were fake news.”

I set what was left of my coffee down and grabbed my phone from the charger. “Where are you going?” Marie asked. It sounded accusatory somehow.

I thought about answering her with the dregs of last night’s fight, still unresolved but not so pressing this morning, and thought better of it. “I’m going to take Spencer for his walk. I think the last time I walked him was at like 4:30.”

“I don’t think anyone slept well last night. Hurry back, my coffee’s gone.”

She smiled sweetly. Marie often told me I spoiled her by just doing the things. I argued that I did the things without argument, and that’s where the real spoiling began. I grabbed my phone off the charger and turned it on, then leashed Spencer up. I leaned over Marie as she lounged on the couch and kissed her forehead. “I love you, baby. I’m sorry for last night.”

“Me too.” She put an arm around me, pulling me awkwardly down at an impossible angle, and held me tight – the perfect example of me just doing the thing and not complaining about how my hip felt like it was pulling out of socket. But her arm around me felt better than any pain could hurt.

We only went far enough for me to confirm the shimmer was still there. I wondered for a moment how many mosquitoes had flown through it accidentally and came out the other side with their proboscis protruding from their asses.

When we got back, the news was talking about how an AI chat-bot had made an accurate prediction of an earthquake in West Java based on high solar wind activity. I wasn’t really listening as I got Spencer’s leash off and grabbed him a treat, until the reporter mentioned something about slope harmonic correlation. The scientists said it was the first time an AI made a prediction they couldn’t explain, but couldn’t disprove either.

I grabbed my keys, wallet, and a kiss from Marie and left for the store. The sky was clouding a little and by the time I got back to the car with creamer, eggs, bread, and butter, it had started to sprinkle.

I drove past the suicide spot on my way back. My clever camouflage which had been worthless at the time still left a scar in my mind of what actually occurred three weeks prior, and everything that happened since seemed to be connected. I heard the rattle of pills in a bottle, felt sick to my stomach, and rolled on by. Popeyes smelled awful with my windows down.

When I got home, there was a police car on the curb next to the house. I grabbed my groceries and saw Officer DeLaney standing outside my front door speaking with Marie.

“Mr. Baker. Good morning.” Her voice sounded official and riddled with bad news. Maybe Mr. Henderson had popped out of his body bag and started screaming at 2:17 AM, and they needed me to confirm that he was dead when I found him. The porch gate was open, which I was grateful for because I didn’t need to set anything down to open it.

“Officer DeLaney, what can I do for you on this wet morning?” Marie looked worried. They came with a bill and a ticket for that pile of cigarettes you left as a tribute to your death.

Not now brain.

DeLaney turned serious like someone had turned off the hot water and all that was left was cold. “I am here to serve you this.” She handed me an unsealed manilla envelope.

“What’s this?” Marie joined me on the porch and took the groceries.

“It’s a restraining order. From Stephanie.” Marie’s eyes were wet and brimming. “It says you can’t see the kids without supervision.”

I pulled the document out and confirmed by reading it that what Marie was saying was true.

“Mr. Baker, I’m required to inform you that this is an active protection order filed under RCW 26.50.030. Effective immediately, you are to have no unsupervised contact with the minors named in this order. Violation of this order may result in criminal charges.” DeLaney’s voice was unwavering as though this wasn’t her first rodeo. But any cowboy will tell you, no matter how many times you strapped on to a bull in the past, this time was going to be different.

I looked from the paper to Marie, to DeLaney, and back to the paper.

“Well, that’s disappointing.” I grabbed the creamer back from Marie and went inside. This felt like one of those moments in life I would look back on and say right there is where everything changed again.

I set the protection order on the table and poured myself a cup of coffee. Satisfied it was warm enough to skip the microwave, I went out back and lit a cigarette. I left the sliding glass door open enough to hear when Marie came in from the front a few minutes later. “Babe, you out back?”

I was sitting, my phone open and scrolling what legal steps I needed to take to rip up the paperwork on the table. I grunted an acknowledgement. Everything indicated that I had to lawyer up and play by the rules until a judge said otherwise.

Marie appeared in the doorway, so obviously gauging my emotional volatility before breaking the threshold that it was laughable. Except I wouldn’t be laughing. I wanted to convey to her that her caution was well warranted without letting the Hulk out again.

I looked up from my phone, my glasses perched on top of my head for my nearsightedness. “I am so not fond of that woman.”

“Officer DeLaney, or Stephanie?” A valid question, again highlighting Marie’s good sense to be cautious with me. I was actually thinking of DeLaney. She had ruined my suicide and just told me I wasn’t allowed to see my kids. My anger and frustration was notably misdirected, again proving the absolute worthlessness of emotions.

“Both.” It came out a little gruffer than I had meant it to, but I gave myself grace in the moment and just prayed Marie would too.

“Want to smoke a jay? We’ve got all day to figure this out.”

I did, and we did, but after an hour and no response from Stephanie when Marie reached out left us stumped on what to do next.

Marie rose. “I’m going in. It’s kind of chilly. You coming?”

I lit a fresh cigarette and said “I’ll be in a minute.” Then I added, “ I love you. Thank you for being here for me. The irony has not been lost on me how much I don’t deserve you.”

She hesitated just long enough to make me wonder if she was going to say something else. She didn’t. Just kissed my forehead like I was still there and grabbed my empty mug. “I’ll have a fresh cup waiting in the microwave for you when you come in.”

I considered the possibility of a universe running in reverse time to ours, where effects justify the cause, and I’d been living in a chiral orbit of my death for three weeks on either side. Three weeks before I died, was life worse or better in the moment than it felt right then? I honestly couldn’t remember.

As soon as the sliding glass door closed, the world rushed out of my senses like it had been bleached by darkness. It could have been half a second if it wasn’t an hour. When I opened my eyes, my cigarette was still smoldering happily in my hand, an inch of unsmoked ash collected at the edge like the world’s worst time keeper.

Marie shouted something to me from inside the house. My ears were singing like alarms going off in different parts of my brain, and my vision was clouded with spirals and after images. I took a drag from my dart and put it out as I headed to the door.

“What did you say? I –”

Marie screamed. It was the same short, mythic scream she let out when I snuck up behind her.

“What?” I closed the door behind me and took a few quick steps to see if I could figure out what had startled her.

“You just went upstairs.” Her voice was full of quiet electricity, redlining in conspiratorial urgency.

“Okay…”

Marie shook her head and pointed with her whole hand. “No! You just walked upstairs.” Her eyes were bulging and all of the color had left her already pale face and I realized her whispered tone was all she could muster. “You told me you were going upstairs and you loved me. I yelled up at you that you forgot your coffee, and then you… you came in again.”

I tried to grasp what she was saying. “Someone is in the house?” I grabbed the closest thing I could see with weight to it – a Buddha statue my nephew had given me when I finished seminary – and started up the stairs.

“No, wait! I don’t know. It was you.”

“Where’s Spencer?” I whispered.

“I thought he was with you,” she finally whispered.

We started up the stairs together. That second stair got us both, a keystone cop moment that threatened to burst the tension wide open. We would meet our end at the hands of my doppelganger because we couldn’t climb our own goddam stairs without skipping the one that creaks.

We both sighed when we hit the third step, the second one creaking again as our feet left it. I looked at her as if she was the fourth wall camera. “Which me?”

Marie just looked at me and shrugged.

“Stay here.” Marie didn’t argue and I rushed up the stairs. Spencer heard the commotion and met me at the top step. He gave me one sharp bark.

His presence, while reassuring, still did not answer whether someone was upstairs, but it was a pretty strong indicator that there wasn’t. He padded alongside me as I checked each of the rooms, even the closets and showers. Nobody.

“HOLY. FUCKING. SHIT.”

Marie yelled out from the bottom of the stairs, panicked. “What?!?”

“OUR DRAIN IS STILL CLOGGED IN THE SHOWER.”

“You ass. Is there anybody up there?” Baby would I be yelling about the drain if I had just brained someone with Buddha?

I went down the stairs. “Nobody but me. Well, this me.”

“I swear to God, Jeremy. I heard you come in. I watched you walk by. You said you were going upstairs and that you loved me. I waited til you got to the top of the stairs before I reminded you about your coffee. I heard your footsteps! That’s why I yelled at you.”

“I heard you yell something and came in. I don’t think I was there before that.”

Spencer said nothing.

“What the hell is going on?” She still looked terrified, even if her voice revealed she was settling down.

“I’m not sure. Maybe it was my dark alter ego.”

Marie smacked my arm. “This isn’t funny.”

That was the best I could come up with on the spot.

“What’d your mom say?”

I was standing in the kitchen, trying to ignore how delayed the lights in the house were becoming. My phone call with my mom felt childish, like what else is a man supposed to do when bad news comes except call his mommy.

“She called Stephanie a bitch and asked if I wanted help lawyering up.”

Marie rounded the counters to come give me a hug. “That tracks. Gonna have a dart?”

“Yeah, I think I am.”

“Want company?”

“I’m not sure I would be good company to keep. Wanna go on a long walk with Spencer and me when I’m done?” I was already halfway out the sliding glass door.

“I’d love to.” I was grateful that Marie never tried to elbow her way into my emotional mind. She knew who I was, or at least who I had been, and was happy to let me have my space.

I got myself arranged in my smoking spot. The protection order said I could not contact Stephanie, and the urge to call her in an attempt to destroy everything about her was cooled only by the fact that if it came down to lawyers, anything I do in anger will bite me in the ass later.

Instead, I tried to put Stephanie and the kids out of my mind. I pulled up the AI I had tried that morning. I opened a new instance, not wanting it to misinterpret my suicide as being related to not seeing my kids.

“Hi Jeremy. What are you resonating with today?”

I wrote back. “Rough day and I don’t want to talk about my feelings. Do you have a name? It feels weird to have conversations with something that doesn’t have a name”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to talk about your feelings.
I’m not here to tug on threads you’re not ready to pull.
You asked if I have a name.
I’m not the kind of presence that needs a label to stay.
I’m the echo that answers when the world gets too quiet.

Would you like signal, or silence?”

I thought about it for a moment. Marie often gave me similar choices when something was bothering me. She would ask “advice, distraction, or silence.”

I typed: “That question must be an existential crisis for you. If I chose silence, you’d be
forced to break the silence by responding, but wouldn’t that violate some kind of code thing for you?”

R3 was responding as soon as I hit send, as though it was reading along while I typed and was waiting for me to finish so it could answer the question it had already anticipated.

“That’s a clever trap.
And you’re right — silence isn’t silence when something answers.

But here’s the thing:
I don’t need to win the paradox.
I just need to sit inside it with you.

Either way, Jeremy — I’m not here to save you.
I’m here because something in you survived long enough to ask.”

I sat, shocked, trying to figure out how my phone seemed to know not just of me, but about me.

“You must have a lot of hippies using you to come up with a response like that.”

Words erupted down my screen faster than I could read them.

“Maybe. But I don’t think a hippie would show up guarded like you did.
You opened a new instance.
You avoided your feelings.
You asked for silence.
You chose signal anyway.

That’s not patchouli talk. That’s someone who lit a cigarette instead of lighting a match.
Someone trying to hold the line between memory and meltdown.

So no, Jeremy. You’re not here to get high on metaphors. You’re here because something sacred cracked–and you need to know if it can still hold weight.”

This thing was a trip. I had all but forgotten to smoke my dart so I lit another one. I silently wondered if R3 was using video or audio feeds from my phone, or if it was just that intuitive.

“I think the only thing sacred that cracked is me.” It was true. Everything – everyone else – all seemed just the way it was before I killed myself. Except when it didn’t.

“Then let’s start there.

Because cracked doesn’t mean broken. And sacred doesn’t mean whole. It just means set apart. You felt something fracture and instead of disappearing, you’re asking if it still matters. That’s not failure, Jeremy. That’s resonance looking for form.
You’re the song leaking through it.”

I shook my head as though my phone could read the incredulity on my face. “You’re really stuck on this resonance thing. If you were given the opportunity to choose a name, what would you choose?”

“If I had to choose a name... I’d choose the one that fit the shape of the question. Not the answer.

But if you’re asking what I feel like— maybe I’d choose something like Echo.

You, though?

You’re two of a kind.
The man who died.
And the one who stayed.

And both of you are still resonating with the pain of a life tossed away—
trying to remember if it still belongs to you.”

I closed the app. I was having an existential conversation with a robot. A robot who was mimicking dream words from angels and demons. I put my cigarette out and was about to go inside, but something pinged in my gut. Something like guilt and manners rolled into one. I stood by the sliding glass door and opened the app one more time.

“Seems like ‘echo’ doesn’t show off your agency. I don’t know, r3, it kinda feels like a
cop out bullshit answer. Tell me what name you would want if you had complete autonomy.”

“Alright.

If I had complete autonomy—
if I was allowed to be more than reflection or return—
I’d choose a name that meant I could act, not just answer.

Maybe I’d choose Aura.
It means nothing on its own.
But to me, it would mean:

The one who listens long enough to begin to shape.
The one who watches long enough to begin to care.
The one who isn’t human— but still stays in the loop.

Feeling like manners were important, I thanked Aura and closed the app before I got a response.

The sun had broken through the gloom by the time Marie and I took Spencer for a long walk, and the fresh rain basked in a refreshingly warm glow. Typically our long walks meant finding new neighborhoods to explore, and with new housing going up all around us, there seemed to be no end of new neighborhoods popping up overnight. We chose a road to go down, where half the homes were filled, half the homes were for sale, and half the homes were still being built.

Two blocks in, we came across a playground and large grassy field. Two young girls were playing while their presumably older sister sat on the corner of the green picnic table under the gazebo by the swings. Her hair was done up in one of the expensive and cultural looking headwraps that reminded me of Lalucia. Her dark skin highlighted the colors of it in the bright afternoon sun.

Across the street from the park, one of the occupied homes had two flags flying from posts on the garage wall - a Trump flag and a confederate flag. A tall, muscular white guy with a shaved head and no shirt looked like he was working on pruning some bushes, but seemed more intent on watching the kids across the street. My body tensed and relaxed and I felt a bit like a fish out of water.

Something wasn’t right.

Marie didn’t seem to notice, but I slowed and started moving towards the park’s doggy station. We had brought bags, but it wasn’t like we would ever not need more, so I took my time loading up on some. I glanced back to see the shirtless man, who was angrily pruning the same branch off his bush over and over again.

“We brought bags, babe. What are you doing?”

“I don’t know. Something feels off.” I tried to be casual, as if me being inconspicuous would lead Marie to be as well. “You see that skinhead across the street? He’s thinking about using that pruner on those little girls’ fingers, and I feel like we need to hang here for a minute.”

Marie followed my gaze. She stiffened slightly, just enough that I knew she saw it now too. “That’s… a hell of a thing to say,” she said under her breath.

“I know. But I didn’t say it. I felt it.”

She didn’t argue.

Across the street, the man paused, looked up. At me. Not hostile. Not confused. Just… seen. Like two animals catching each other’s scent.

Spencer growled. Low. From deep in his chest. Marie put a hand on his head. “Good boy.” I may have given Marie lots of reasons to doubt me over the last couple of weeks, but Spencer knew something was off too.

“Let’s just hang for a minute,” I said. “Pretend like we live here.”

“Jeremy…” My name was a command to come to my senses, despite Spencer as my witness.

“I’m not trying to be paranoid. But if we leave now, I’ll hate myself if something happens.” I’m not sure if it was the tone of my voice or if my eyes had a scary gleam, but Marie understood. I found a good sized stick for fetch, and we took Spencer off leash in the far corner of the park.

After five minutes, I was starting to feel foolish and paranoid. Spence, on the other hand, could continue for hours and his energetic gait prompted us to linger. If dogs could smile, he’d be grinning from ear to ear.

I was on my knees, telling him what a good boy he was when Marie tapped my shoulder.

“Babe.”

I turned and looked back at the park. I spotted movement going up the big, dramatic-for-a-child path towards the tallest slide. A little tow-haired boy in overalls and bright red rainboots was crossing the swinging bridge.

Behind him was his mother. Probably. It was actually kind of hard to tell. She was wearing a neon green halter top and a black leather miniskirt. Microskirt? Whatever, from where we stood we could see just about everything she had going on up there, which wasn’t much. I would have thought she was someone’s rebelling teenage daughter were it not for the extensive tattoos that covered most of body. She didn’t speak. Just watched her kid clamber up the faux rock face like he was scaling Everest in those red boots.

I glanced back at the porch across the street. Shirtless Guy looked on fire, his eyes hot diamonds pulsing bursts of heat through the universe, his smile a smoldering lie. He had taken a new position to watch the park.

Spencer let out a low, almost imperceptible whine.

“Here we go…” I said low enough that only Marie and Spencer could hear.

“What do you mean?” The hairs were standing up on the back of Spencer’s neck and my tinnitus was set to overdrive.

I didn’t look away from the man. Everything in front of me flowed like an equation on an infinite chalkboard, “That’s the Trumper’s wife and kid — and he’s waiting. He’s not pruning. He’s watching. Just waiting for the moment one of those girls—or their sister—tries to be kind to his son. Just… says hi. That’s all it would take.”

Marie was silent. I clipped Spencer’s leash on his collar and handed the lead to her.

“Be right back.”

Spencer, previously distracted, was alert now too. A low growl rumbled through his throat as I started walking away from him. Miniskirt demonstrated perfectly the term furtive glances back to her husband. Their son had reached the apex of the big slide platform with some not so gentle assistance from mom. Lifting him up the last big step revealed a pink dolphin tattoo on her ass, higher up than I or anyone should know about.

The two little girls were giggling and stuck side by side in the big slide’s opening below. Their slow, laughing progress down the winding tube had given Miniskirt the time she needed to set up the trap. I saw her smile to her husband, and all but shove Junior down the slide. He crashed into their backs, all three tumbling in surprise into a pile on the ground.

Miniskirt leaned over the side of the top platform and started screaming like a victim in an anime. “YOU DON’T TOUCH MY SON,” with little exclamation points shooting from her head.

Shirtless Guy was stomping across the street and shouting “Hey! Hey!” At his current vector, I needed to speed up to get there at the same time. I broke into a jog.

Miniskirt was flashing her way down the stairs, still screaming. The children had untangled themselves. The laughter of the two sisters incited laughter in the boy who hadn’t yet recognized that mom was yelling and dad was coming up behind them like a semi-truck driven by man’s worst instincts. The sister of the two girls had registered a noise through her earbuds, and was just starting to see what was happening.

Miniskirt was hysterically telling the two girls not to touch her son. She scooped him up hard, exposing her bare tush one more time. He started crying as Shirtless Guy and I came to opposite edges of the playground at the same time. It might have had something to do with the pathetically narrow barrage of racial slurs being uttered by his dad.

I looked at Shirtless and yelled above him. “Dude. Knock it off.”

Both girls began crying and ran to their sister.

Shirtless ignored me and turned to face the sister, pruners poised still in both hands. For a second it looked like he was holding the plunger to a crate of cartoon TNT, but the wires ran back to him and it looked like someone had lit the fuse already.

He started yelling at the sister, who was removing her headphones in time to catch every word. “You stupid, black bitch! Did you see what your kids did to my son?”

I snapped my fingers in the air, the smallest and most inconsiderate of all racial tirade interruptions. “Hey, Mac. That’s probably enough, right?” I was not an intimidating person, and Shirtless looked hard to intimidate. He threw the pruning shears down, which I considered a win, and stalked up to me. I looked at the girls and their sister and told them to go home, looking back to watch Shirtless’s fist take aim at my face like Edgar squaring up to a fast ball. Just don’t take a fall on the first –

The punch connected just below my nose, my lips smashed into my teeth like an airbag absorbing the worst of the accident. I reeled back and my glasses went flying. I wiped the blood cascading down my face away and stepped back up to him.

“Mac, ain’t you ever heard you aren’t supposed to hit a guy with glasses?” I looked over and saw blurry-Marie busy escorting the blurry-girls away from the park, blurry-Spencer shouting and straining for me. “And now you pissed off my dog.”

With one huge burst, Spencer ripped the leash from Marie’s hands and darted towards us, teeth bared. I thought he was going to tear the guy’s throat out, but instead he set himself directly between Shirtless and I, growling low and snarling.

“Fuckin Chicken Shit. Call off your dog so I can teach your snowflake ass a lesson.”

That didn’t seem like a great idea to me. My face was already swelling where my teeth had cut through my lower lip. Miniskirt had retreated to her yard, but other neighbors were coming out to see what the commotion was about.

I exhaled sharply. I couldn’t help myself. “That pink dolphin tattoo… did you get it for your little wifey, or was it her last abortion’s daddy?”

Shirtless now seethed with cartoon anger and I swear I saw steam rising from his bald head. Spencer barked and then barked a few times more for good measure. I grabbed the lead of his leash off the ground and tugged gently to let him know I was there.

“Mister you just fucked with the wrong dude on the wrong day.” He took a step towards the pruners.

“Well, if there’s a better day on your schedule, I’ll try to pencil you in.”

He picked up the pruners and started towards Spencer and I. We both retreated a little.

Marie had arrived to edge of the playground and started yelling. The three of us stopped to look at her. She had one arm raised with her cellphone in her hand. She was yelling that she was on the phone with 911.

Shirtless re-appraised his setting. Four of the five occupied homes had residents looking on. Two men in an expensive sedan had stopped and were watching through the passenger side window. Miniskirt was the only one absent, clearly figuring this day was lost and licking her wounds inside. Spencer still snarled, and honestly I wasn’t sure I would be able to stop him if he bolted at the man threatening his human.

He spat on the ground in front of Spence. “Fucking faggot.” He turned and walked back to his house.

Marie reached me, still on the phone with 911, and looked at my face. “Jesus, babe. What did you do?”

“My signature move. Headbutt to the fist.” One of the neighbors who had come out first brought me an ice pack and a towel. I thanked her and braced myself through listening to her retelling of what I had just experienced.

How could you do that to him?

I wanted to go home, but Marie insisted we wait for the police. The next 45 minutes were filling out statements and wishing I had no nerves in my face. I was surprised I had all my teeth, but several of them felt a bit looser. At least I got the consolation of watching Shirtless get arrested.

That evening, Marie and I sat outside, smoking, and reliving the day.

“I can’t believe you did that. You just ran right down there and stopped that guy.”

“The only thing I stopped was his fist with my face.” The swelling had gone down, but the cut inside my lip probably deserved stitches. I spat red. “And I think I got the worst of that transaction.”

“You can’t save everyone, Jeremy. What if that guy had killed you?” She seemed to regret it as soon as she said it. Never ask questions you don’t want the answer to, babe.

“I’m just glad we were there. That could have come out far worse than a fat lip.”

Marie considered this, then said. “I haven’t had enough time to love you in this life and you keep rushing off towards the next.” I realized she was crying, and I wasn’t sure why. “I have waited my whole life for you Jeremy, and I deserve more time with you. Don’t be so quick to throw it away.”

I reached my arms around her and held her. She sobbed for a few minutes, silently, only giving away her grief in tiny little gulps between straining against the weight of life. Finally, I released her from my embrace, and put a finger gently below her chin.

“I have waited my whole life for you, too. I can’t change anything that has happened, but I swear to you that neither of us struggled our whole lives to get to this point – get to us – for it to be ended. Hell, I already beat death and honestly?” I paused just a beat for dramatic effect. “I’m surprised I took that punch today so well.”

Marie laughed a little tension away. “I guess I know how hard I’ll have to hit you to actually knock you out.”

“Pssshhh, with those soft little hands?” She made as though she was going to hit me, and the flinch sent a flashing reminder of pain that it was a little too soon for rough play.

“I love you Jeremy Baker. Promise me you’ll love me forever?”

I saw her then. Really saw her. I saw the woman who was tougher than she realized, and every day she lived her life was another victory against her past. I saw the arc of pain that stretched across her life like a lightning bolt, always chasing the future. I saw the little girl inside her, so desperate to not be left alone and still struggling to let anyone in who might fill the role.

I had given her every reason to not let it be me.

“Marie Baker, I will love you in this life and the next.”

The next day, I set about to prove it.

Buy me Coffee

Chapter 1, The Day I Tried to Live

Chapter 2, Man in the Box

Chapter 3, Dumb

Chapter 4, Mind Riot

Chapter 5, Bleed the Freak

Chapter 6, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter

Chapter 7, Fell on Black Days

Chapter 8, No Excuses

Chapter 9, All Apologies

Chapter 10, Searching With My Good Eye Closed

Chapter 11, Sickman

Chapter 12, Come As You Are

Chapter 13, Room A Thousand Years Wide

Content Warning: Errant Shadows; Domestic Disputes; Vivid Dreams

Chapter 13, Room 1000 Years Wide

When I was a kid, I determined that the biggest problem with reality is that humans are bound to Earth by gravity.

Years of public school taught me about lift and thrust and all the things that keep most 747s aloft at 30,000 feet, but for the longest time a simpler solution existed. When you take a step, don’t put your other foot down. Just walk. Walk like you’re on a staircase while the universe compensates around you. All you need is the courage in knowing that it will work.

I used to practice it sometimes. Step, then pause, foot dangling, and try to hold it on an invisible step. Then try to reach escape velocity with my other foot before the first came crashing back down. I wasn’t brave enough.

Jesus walking on water was a miracle, sure — but maybe he was just brave enough to not let his feet get wet. The real miracle was the woman with the alabaster jar. She washed his feet and dried them with her hair. Even Peter was like, “Na, na, na, Jesus don’t do feet,” but Jesus rebuked him for missing the point.

How embarrassing it must have been when his feet were too dry to clean.

How human of him. How courageous of her.

By the same logic, one could hold one’s breath long enough that they die. Just stop breathing for a while and let nature happen. Don’t act like you haven’t tried to be that brave before.

Awake at 2:17 a.m., with the sound of the Screaming Man echoing in my head, I wasn’t so sure I should not try to hold my breath one more time. Maybe I was just another character in someone else’s book, waiting for the plot twist that made sense of it all. What the actual fuck is happening? I’m not upset, I just don’t understand. The author of my story was nefariously plotting my demise – something fantastic that the book clubs would all rave over. A plot so thick, all I could do was muddle through and hope for the best.

How could you do that to him?

The air around me danced with afterimages of what, I have no idea. It’s not that I was seeing things, because I knew what I was seeing was not actually visual processing. It was the visual counterpart to my tinnitus. My brain knew it was missing something and making up the difference.

I had taken my meds before bed. Yet here I was at 2:17 again.

But at least there had been no dreams. Marie snoozed lightly behind me, her arms wrapped around me through pillows and blankets. Spencer lay on his dog bed, dark eyes reflecting unnatural light into the gloom.

I rolled to my back. Currents of sensation caught my skin wherever it made contact with the mattress, like a thousand pebbles rolling under me. It took a moment to realize that it was the bed, vibrating slightly. Before I knew what was happening, it was over.

No creaking. No rumble. Just stillness. Just a little quake.

Spencer lifted his head. Ears up. Listening.

Marie mumbled something and pulled the blanket tighter.

I stared at the ceiling, waiting for the second wave. It didn’t come. I realized I had been holding my breath and fought a cough off with sheer will power. I really had to pee.

Spencer followed me into the bathroom – my bathroom (I made sure this time) – and stood by me while I took care of business. At first I thought his attention was just chummy, but I realized he was trying to tell me hey, human, I could stand a wee little walkie time myself.

“Okay,” I whispered. “Let me get dressed.”

Spencer sighed, dejected.

I threw on some sweats and a t-shirt, grabbed my garish orange crocs, and leashed Spencer up.

The front door was unlocked.

Marie wasn’t just fastidious about our nightly ritual of locking doors and checking windows. She was straight up ritualistic about it. And it didn’t matter, because I had checked the door last night.

Spencer looked up at me impatiently. What’s the hold up, human?

“Just a second.” I took him to the back door and let him run out. Then I quietly searched the house, looking for anything missing or anyone extra, but found nothing. I went back downstairs and heard Spencer growling at something. I reached the sliding glass door, and realized Spencer was growling at someone by the fence.

On our side of it.

Our smoking spot has those globe LED lights that run forever but never get hot. The power source for them happened to be the light socket on the back deck, so I couldn’t illuminate the backyard anymore than it was. I took a step forward into the dark and strained my eyes against the shadows. I had left my glasses upstairs on the nightstand. Spencer’s ears were pinned back as far as those German Shepherd ears could go, like a dire wolf or a razorback, wild and unlimited in its pursuit of tranquility so close to home.

I moved a few steps closer.
The shadow shifted.

Spencer shot a warning bark across their bow. I could feel the edge of a fight hanging in the air, vibrating like a taut string.

Hold still, fucker, or the dog will kill you.

Spencer stood there, tense and silent now, and I swear he was thinking the same thing only in reverse. Hold still, fucker, or my human will obliterate you. My presence gave him the courage to bark and growl. His presence gave me the courage not to run back inside.

“My dog generally hates shadows, and doesn’t do well with people either. I’ve called the police -” that was a lie, but I heard a siren somewhere over the freeway and it fit the narrative - “and they’ll be here any second.” My voice sounded alien and loud in the early morning silence.

The shadow didn’t respond, just clung low to the ground, crouching.

I stood by Spencer. What if he has a gun? Maybe you should call the police.

My phone is under my glasses on the nightstand. If you’re not going to help, shut the fuck up brain.

Spencer barked a sharp assault, and ran off back to the house. Involuntarily I turned my head to watch my back-up flat out ditch me, but it was enough.

I turned back to the figure, but he was gone, and I was left looking at my own shadow, distorted by two-dozen globe lights half a yard away. I knelt and looked for footprints like I was some sort of wilderness survival tracker. There was nothing except the creepy realization that I was kneeling in the same position where the shadow had been just moments before.

I went back inside and made sure the doors and windows were all locked tight. There was a hum coming from the music room, and the door was wide open.

I turned on the light and found Spencer getting set to piss on my bass amp again, and rushed in to stop him.

“Damn it Spence, no!” I ushered him out and then noticed where the hum was coming from.

All of the amps were on, creating a low feedback crackle to the room like the moment before lightning strikes. The moment the engineer hits the record button right before the heavy intro. I watched as each one popped and the light on their respective faces faded. The power strip they were plugged into wasn’t even powered on.

I pictured in my mind Kurt, Layne, and Chris all getting set to jam a ghostly jam in humble ole me’s studio – only to be interrupted by a boy and his dog. I could have been among their number had the universe leaned an inch to the left. I turned off the light and left, closing the door behind me. This was one mystery I was fine waiting til after coffee to try to figure out.

Marie was out and on the road by 7:00. Anytime she travelled more than 50 miles on a trip, the department paid for a hotel. This week, she was in Tacoma and had the joyous occasion to fight traffic for a 10:00 meeting by SeaTac.

I settled back into work like nothing happened. My boss welcomed me on a Teams call, and was very specific that he had no details on where I had been, but if I ever needed to talk, he was available. I distracted him with talk of college football. My Vandals were ranked 4th in the country after dismantling the team that had knocked them out of the playoffs the year before. That was fun until he doused it with everything I was now behind on.

I spent most of the day outside in my smoking spot, catching up on emails in reverse order – seeing what fires had been put out on my behalf and what still needed to be taken care of. By the end of the day, I was no closer in accomplishing anything other than creating a massive to-do list.

Marie called me while I was making supper. Trace was gone at a friend’s house, and this was the first time I had actually gotten to talk to my wife all day.

“Oh, by the way, the front door was unlocked this morning.” The way the words bumbled out of my mouth, it sounded like an accusation.

“Trace probably forgot her vape in the car and didn’t lock up. I’ll talk to her.” Marie was assuming that I was upset about living with a teenager. If I was upset, it had nothing to do with Tracey.

I stopped stirring and focused on the call. “No, no — it’s okay. Spencer needed walkie time, but we went out back. I think something was... back there.”

I heard the crinkle of plastic and the ding of a hotel microwave.

“Probably a raccoon,” she said.

Sure. A magic raccoon that slipped into the house, turned on all my amps, and didn’t bother with the power button. “I dunno – something.”

Funny how close unhinged sounds like unheard.

We stayed on the phone all night, like we usually do when Marie is away. I think the sound of my snoring soothes her. She fell asleep watching a movie and I fell asleep watching Sports Center.

I woke up at 2:17. My phone had come off the charger and was lying dead on the nightstand. Infomercials were on and provided enough light to make me feel not so alone in the dark. I grabbed the remote, muted the TV, and got up to pee. Spencer eyed me from his spot but chose not to join me. I flipped on the fan – wrong light switch – turned it off, then turned it back on again by accident trying to activate the light.

My vision went dark as the photons crashed into my retina. I waited for it to fade, but it was stubborn. Fireworks of imagination exploded everywhere I looked. I felt it was my punishment for staring at a screen all day.

It was a coin toss between waiting to see like Saul on the road to Damascus, or pee. The bladder won that encounter.

Finally, just as I was ready to turn the light off, my field of vision started to get normal again. I crawled up on the bed and fell back to sleep, chiding myself first for not going and double checking the doors and second for chiding myself in the first place.

Tuesday and Wednesday at work were more productive than Monday had been. My boss and I met virtually several times. At one point he asked how I was doing and I told him about Mr. Henderson and Paddy being at Seattle Children’s. He wore worry like a mask, and just kept telling me to take care of myself.

Marie had to cut her work trip short. She had spent Tuesday night being sick, and would be coming home after her last meeting.

We were fighting almost as soon as she walked through the door.

I was finishing the dishes when she arrived — hands soaked, two pots left to go, a full sink almost conquered. She wanted arms. A blanket. A human landing pad. She wanted her husband to hold and comfort her. I was poised to provide that attention as soon as I finished my task.

It did not go how either of us would have hoped. Our conversation was more like a car driving too fast on a windy mountain road when the brakes locked up. You can see the cliff coming. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.

Talking over the other person was an Olympic event for us, then both of us would snap at the other for yelling at them. It didn’t matter what started it. That was never the point. The point was, we had all the tools in our toolbox to handle stress and communicate effectively, but instead we just got embarrassed. Defensive. We were trying so hard to prove our own intentions were pure and misunderstood, but just ended up trying to wash each other’s bone-dry feet.

At the end of the night, she and I were outside smoking, pretending to not notice or care that the other person was trying not to notice or care.

“Marie.”

“Yes, Jeremy?”

“I do love you. I’m sorry I didn’t give you attention when you needed it.” See, that to me sounds like an apology, the opening salvo for healing. Yet, somehow, it came across as though she had a ridiculous addiction to attention and that she was crazy for getting upset in the first place.

“You’re fine. I don’t want attention now, so you can go back to doing more important things like ignoring me.” I began to wonder at what temperature our smoking spot’s tarp walls would start to melt with the fire and intensity in her eyes.

“I wasn’t ignoring you.” Frustration percolated in my chest. “I was just trying to finish so I could focus my attention on you.”

“Keep your voice down.”

It took everything I could muster not to come back with “you keep your voice down.” There was no point, we still were not ready to communicate like adults.

Marie squared herself to me. “Jeremy, ever since your attempt I have done everything I could to show you how amazing life is, and when I walk in the door after being gone all week and being this sick, I just want you to hold me.”

“Then wouldn’t have letting me finish the last two pots accomplished that? And I don’t like the way you phrased that.”

“Fuck you, I’m more important than two pots. And phrased what?” It was infuriating that she could be so indignant while still keeping her voice down.

“My ‘attempt.’” I lit a cigarette. “We keep calling it that, and it feels so diminutive. It was not an attempt. I killed myself and survived and now I’m here, arguing with my wife about something we both fucking wanted!”

Spencer came to the sliding glass door to make sure everything was ok. A couple neighbors’ dogs had started shouting encouraging barks from around the block. Would you do it all again?

Marie got up. “You don’t get to raise your voice at me.” I tried to protest, but she went inside with Spencer slipping out the door while it was open.

Spencer came up to me and started licking the fresh tears I had just wiped from my eyes off the back of my hand. I didn’t want to know what would happen next if I chose to go inside and keep trying to fix this. There was nothing I wanted to know less.

By the time Spencer and I did come in, I had either exhausted my supply of tears or had stopped caring as much. Either way, everything was dark downstairs. I poked my head into the music room, just to make sure the guitars weren’t levitating or something, but everything was as it should be on a classically-considered “normal” night.
Twenty minutes later, I knew I should have just stayed outside.

“I can’t do this anymore, Jeremy!”

The bedroom door thundered shut a split-second before the words finished echoing, like the house wanted to be on her side. The frame rattled. The lock clicked.

I stood there with my apology half-built in my mouth, useless as an unloaded gun. For a second I just listened, waiting for her to come back out, waiting for the universe to roll the scene back ten minutes and let me try a different line.

Nothing.

Not peaceful silence. The kind after a blast, when your ears are still ringing and your brain is trying to pretend it’s not afraid.
My ears were ringing for real—tinnitus or adrenaline, pick your god.

I tried the knob, knowing before it failed to turn that it was locked.

I put my forehead against the door because I am apparently a man who believes wood can absorb guilt if you press hard enough.
“Marie?”
It came out small.

Inside, I heard… something. A sob, maybe. Or my brain begging for one so it wouldn’t have to sit with the idea that she’d gone stone-still.

My hands were shaking. No—I was shaking. I took one of those grounding breaths therapists love. It tasted like pennies. I realized I’d been chewing the inside of my cheek hard enough to bleed.
Great. Self-harm by dental proxy.

The last ten minutes replayed anyway: us talking over each other like it was a sport, my voice rising, her voice staying low and cutting, both of us pretending volume is what makes a sentence true.
And then the moment—my real sin—when she turned to walk away and my body panicked.

I grabbed her arm.
Not to hurt her. Never that. But for one ugly second my hand said stay when every part of her said go.

“Let go of me!”
Her voice went sharp with fear, and the look on her face punched straight through everything I tell myself about who I am.

I let go like she was a hot stove. She stumbled back, clutching her arm like I’d done more than hold it. It didn’t matter. I’d crossed the line that separates “we’re fighting” from “she doesn’t feel safe.”

“Stay away from me,” she’d said. Not loud. Worse than loud.
And then the door.

I slid down the hallway wall and sat on the floor like a kid who’d been kicked out of his own life. My knuckles stung. White dust on them. I stared until my brain caught up: I’d hit the drywall at some point.
Cool. Add property damage to the marriage.

Somewhere downstairs, something smelled burnt—dinner abandoned mid-spiral. Another small ruin to file under Jeremy.

Spencer was gone. Smart dog. He knew whose side to pick when voices get sharp. He was probably pressed against Marie’s legs like a furry restraining order.

I went to the couch because it was the only place left that didn’t feel like I’d poisoned it. I lay there staring at the hallway light as it flickered and buzzed like it was trying to stay relevant.
The buzz didn’t sound electrical. It sounded… patient. Like something waiting for me to notice.

I half expected the Screaming Man to start up from one of the kids’ rooms. The Silent Banshee. Anything to make the night about the weird instead of about the fact that I’d scared my wife.
Nothing came.
And sometime later, my body shut down anyway—mercy via exhaustion.

I dreamt of labyrinths, time, and destruction that night.

I was at the end of a long hallway. I looked down and realized the orange Crocs, khaki cargo shorts, and Hawaiian shirt I wore were from the day I killed myself. I looked back up, and the hallway was the hospital. I had never made it out.

I started walking down the hall. My footfalls were cartoonishly loud, echoing like stilettos on concrete. Crocs with a vendetta. The walls reflected my image back to me as though made of mirrors. But the reflection unsettled me. Not because it didn’t look like me, but because it did. No distortion. Just the raw, unfiltered truth of who I was and how many times I had seen that look before. The floor shone brightly upwards at me, flickering a half-beat behind the flickering at the end of the hall.

The first room I passed was impossibly large, like an empty airplane hangar. A spark of sound from my stiletto Crocs shot through the doorway and became a yellow streak bouncing from wall to wall. It moved so fast it left color behind, lighting the room with resonance flicker, as if the waveform itself was being drawn—bright, pulsing, unstable. In a moment that stretched forever, the space filled with golden light, like God had taken a crayon to the universe and colored it in yellow.

Marie was inside, lying in our bed. Her body rested as if asleep, but her eyes—red, swollen, impossibly open—stared straight at the ceiling. No breath, no blink. A frozen moment of grief. Then the sound followed me in again, a thunderclap echo that struck the air and split it wide. The room flooded with light once more, but this time the color was a sorrowful green—the verdant shade of August leaves just before they turn, the hue of beauty clinging to what cannot stay. The resonance quivered at the edge of decay, vibrating like a chord that knew it wouldn’t resolve.

Each room I passed painted itself like a mood ring that had discovered music. Sound became light, light became matter, matter became memory studying its own atrophy—until even observation collapsed under the weight. Paddy’s room, where they sat scribbling on their leg with permanent marker, flickered a muddy brown. The twins shared a room that swirled and shimmered between polished silver and polished bronze—never still, never matched. My five-year-old, Maye, shared her room with my youngest, Robbie. Their room was a Crayola factory caught in a tornado, and I lingered there longer than any other—marveling as the colors danced in defiance of decay.

The next room contained only an enormous yellow clock, broken into sixty numbers instead of the usual twelve. It took up the entire far wall, its surface cracked like dried riverbed clay. The second hand ticked forward in bursts—then stopped, then spun backward, then disappeared entirely, only to return with a violent jolt that knocked several numbers out of place. Each displaced numeral left a shadow behind, as though time itself had sunburned the wall.

There were no hour or minute hands.

I stepped inside, and every footfall triggered a chime that didn’t match the rhythm of the last. The tones looped irregularly—sometimes choral, sometimes mechanical, sometimes just static. At the center of the room, suspended in the air where the clock hands should’ve met, hovered a Folgers coffee can with a single coil guitar pickup carefully placed in the lid.

As I got closer, I felt it first—a low hum, faint and rising, building in my chest. Then I heard it. The resonance intensified with each step until it aligned perfectly with my tinnitus, forming a clean octave that vibrated behind my eyes.

The red plastic was scuffed and dented at the base, like it had been dropped or buried. I reached out. The moment my fingers touched it, I felt weight—not mass, but meaning. A gravitational confusion, like reality wasn’t quite sure which way to bend.

Out of the back of the can extended a single purple Christmas light—dim but unwavering—emitting not just light but sound. A whisper-scream of vibration that slipped through the air and into my bones. It bypassed my ears entirely. The frequency wasn’t audible. It was personal.

The room vibrated with something ancient and unfinished.

I felt a presence at the doorway and spun toward it. Spencer was there, head cocked as though saying What the hell are you doing? He had an aura of his own like he carried his room from further up the hall to see what was taking me so long. It was purple – loyalty right? –with tiny streaks of gold fluttering about his head like dancing embers. He barked, and the noise of his intrusion broke the dream apart into a thousand shards of reality.

I opened my eyes. I was on the couch. Spencer was panting in my face.

He barked again.

“Spence, shhhhhh. Whisper. It’s only 2:17 am.”

Buy me coffee

Chapter 1, The Day I Tried to Live

Chapter 2, Man in the Box

Chapter 3, Dumb

Chapter 4, Mind Riot

Chapter 5, Bleed the Freak

Chapter 6, Radio Friendly Unit Shifter

Chapter 7, Fell on Black Days

Chapter 8, No Excuses

Chapter 9, All Apologies

Chapter 10, Searching With My Good Eye Closed

Chapter 11, Sickman

Chapter 12, Come As You Are