PLANTING FLOWERS IN THE FROST   Anymore I feel as though, rather than having lived my life up to this point, I’ve actually only just scribbled it down, the bulk of it being in a frantic rush to get it all in before particularities disappear. Accounts become fumbled, tumbling over themselves, effectively compacting to the point where it’s all quite an effort to sit with. That the script is in shorthand is part of the huge problem of why it’s a lost history, because I don’t understand shorthand. I can’t read it, so basically, when I look back on it all, it’s my own lost history I’m struggling to decipher. I’m learning.                    Sometimes however, there is nothing there to decipher and I can see that. Either it’s lapsed time where nothing happened or – more probably – I just can’t read a word of it. But I can remember small parts. Shreds peeled out. It feels like being a ghost, looking in on one moment, over and over again.                     But not really.                     Every so here and there I find myself incapable of remembering the awkward things, because they get wiped out a little by more recent, less detrimental memories, and I hold onto the new ones, which are, in fact, probably just ways to walk around the subject. So I suppose it s  not  a bad thing when I  look back  on  it,  that  now  it  means more. Even if it didn’t happen that way.     But this is all happening exactly like I think it is, which is bewildering, to say the least.                     I don’t struggle to get through anything, though I’m quite sure at times that the tense feeling in my stomach has a lot to do with struggling. Right now, comprehending more than I want to, I realize how small and useless I am. Standing on a sidewalk in the neighborhood, taking everything in, I feel like I could reasonably squeeze myself into a crack in the sidewalk. Towering up above me, to prove this point, an ageless tree that is encompassing the entire width of my vision, soaking through peripheral perimeters just a tiny bit in the process, is the scariest thing I can think of right now. This tree has been alive so much longer than I have. But I’ve been more places than it has and I’ve seen more of the world. I’ve made more decisions and I’ve solved more problems. Yet standing here, doing virtually nothing, I get the creeping feeling that it’s done an astounding bit more in one day of its vast life than ever I could in the whole of mine. This thoroughly bothers me and begins to unravel all those supposed decisions and all those problems I’d once thought I’d solved.                     I’m all alone out here on the sidewalk. There is nobody outside, because it’s wet and freezing out. And the unforgiving, nearly accusatory solitude makes me wonder why I’m trying to do better than a tree. Then I grasp that this notion is merely effort on my part to try to offer an excuse for myself. It’s off-putting. And I now feel terribly dizzy.                     I take one last look up into the branches. Thick boughs push outward of it like great arms, taking in miles and miles with gigantic, knotted eyes right at the top of the stem where the wood starts to split. Two massive arms spreading silently, gigantic and superior. Meekly, I peer down at my cold, pink hands. These are useless claws, I sigh to myself. With effort, I gulp. And without having another look at the stationary monolith, still as death before me – doing more, better, mystifyingly meaningful things than I ever have – I shove my hands back into my pockets and continue the walk home. Frustration tags along, pecking at the nape of my neck. Shooing it away with my hands would make me look like I’m crazy, so I keep the hands in my pockets and try to think of anything at all besides.                     In a few hours, Alice will return home to me and hopefully I will forget all of this.                     Since her departure, I’ve been colder, more alone than ever. The emptiness in me has become an immeasurable void since she stepped out of town to attend her mother’s funeral without me. It’s not a silly thing to miss somebody this much, especially considering the alternative to being with her – this terrible, isolated frustration. And it took me this short yet draining week to realize that without her I simply do not exist. It’s caused a hollow rift that has yet to show signs of a measurable depth, and I agonize for her return in justly pitiful ways, beckoning a sealant to this yawning loneliness.                     Coming to depend on somebody for contentment does not feel as pathetic as it would otherwise sound to me if I’d have heard it coming from someone else’s mouth, in line at a supermarket or something. Anything I was before her has been made insignificant and though I still think I mean nothing with her, I let the shaking pass, disregard it regally and take her word for it. And I don’t question it. And I enjoy the love and the trust, the friendship and the mere proximity of Alice. This girl that stepped literally into my life one unassuming day when it fell upon my duty as a citizen to escort her across the road on a rainy Christmas afternoon, amidst a sea of traffic.                     At Pill’s Haberdashery, I push a quarter across the bar and Old Arnold – who has been employed here since it was owned by Pill and had still specialized in men’s ties – pushes back a few dimes and a nickel. I take only a dime and when I’ve lost that to the telephone booth to check if Alice is home yet – she isn’t – I take a seat at the bar and Old Arnold slides a dark glass my way. And I bite my fingernails, watching static on the overhead television, imagining tiny sharks in my belly swimming and thrashing about in roiling tides of stomach acid, gnashing at my stomach walls, trying to get out.                     I met Alice in college. Or while she was in college, rather. I was a young gardener. It did not take long before she wanted always to be around me and I couldn’t remember what in Hell I was ever doing before we started dating.   Six feet from approaching her, shuffling through piles of crisp, red and brown leaves out in the courtyard at the university, without turning around she says, happily, surprised, ‘Oliver.’  She knows my footfalls well, which comforts me in a way I can’t explain, especially in that ever since I woke up I’d felt that nobody could see me. It’s a dark feeling. But I forget about this, the nearer I get to her. Her legs are crossed and she is hunched over a small typewriter. I sit down in front of her, crossing my legs and putting my hands on her knees. She is warm through her jeans; momentarily I picture a fire I would’ve liked to set, anywhere, burning anything. Early on I found that I liked the way her bones feel; they seem to fit inside my every hold on her as if I were a merely a socket; something Alice was specifically designed to connect to. I think of fires again, of electrical fires, of the heat in our bodies and the heat in hers that I want to touch in every way possible. She looks like something out of a nightmare, in a way; something too provocative, too interesting to want to be part of my sullen, effectless life; something I made up. But for the cylinders of Hell I shoved myself through all those times when I couldn’t help but to think it, she does want to be a part of my life. It astounds me. I feel grateful, though. In some ways I felt that maybe I meant something after all, truly. It astounds me every moment, her. And in a lot of ways that confuses me, but like always with most things I regularly shrugged it off and tried just not to do anything that would fuck the whole thing up. It was taking the pathway to grace, if grudgingly, feeling blindly along on the way, just letting things happen.                     A silent kick to the backside to say to myself ‘Just don’t.’                     Because those who question miracles are a distinctly needy bunch, and far from it, I chose always to let the world happen. To let her world happen to me and make it our world.                     Her eyes are closed, lips pursed. It’s the kisses that get to me when it’s not that silent touch at night, when it’s not the way she worms her hands around me like the bones moving under her skin are made of insects. From behind me, I hear somebody screaming but I don’t look up. Neither does Alice, whose hair is long and straight and black as dead bodies underground. When she leans in to kiss me without opening her eyes, I close mine and wait for her face to draw closer. I can feel the heat from her lips before we touch, but when our lips do actually meet it doesn’t feel as hot as I seemed surely warned of.                     When she opens her eyes, they see practically nothing except for a single blank layer that I would at first say is black, but for the fact that she doesn’t have a sense of color and so I shouldn’t exactly guess what it is her eyes are coming up with in the wake of having nothing to draw upon.                     She reaches toward my face, fingers splayed. My eyes draw closed again at the nearness of her hand, until she touches so very lithely the lids of my eyes. ‘What have you been doing all morning?’ she asks softly, feeling tiny half-revolutions that my eyes are making to benefit her touch.                     ‘Well,’ I sigh. Unexcitedly, cynically ‘I’m starting to come close to nearing the possible conclusion that perhaps I am maybe beginning to somewhat find a distinct displeasure in the understanding that what may come next in life is certainly just probably a more accurate way of surely deciding that whatever it is that’s needing a good look into is absolutely and quite effortlessly and positively the greatest collection of astoundingly carelessly compiled re-arrangements of tidbits and selections of droll inaccuracies that the world itself has ever, if I should dare say, known. Know what I mean?’                     She laughs and all my cares are torn to shreds, turned to confetti. Her voice is a party. A welcome-home celebration.                     ‘I really don’t know,’ she says, laughing, pulling a cloth over the keys of the typewriter. To myself, I feel better knowing she’s going to stop working on her papers to be with me. I snicker at the typewriter, mouth the word Goodbye to it. Half-heartedly, I begin to raise my middle finger toward the typewriter, then feel embarrassed for myself and I stop, but still glare at the keys hidden under the cloth.                     ‘I’m tired of that kind of thing,’ I say matter-of-factly but with little seriousness. ‘If people can’t get through their days without waking up, then what’s going to happen in a few years?’                     Alice puts her hands on my knees, softly laughing so that only I can hear her.                     ‘Oliver, what the hell does that mean?’ she sings.                                     I have no idea. ‘I don’t know. Forget about it. Want to go home?’                     ‘Classes,’ she concludes, rhythmically apologetic.                     ‘But you always have classes.’                     ‘That’s because I’m a student. That’s what students do when they’re at school. You don’t hear me getting bitchy with you when you’re busy snipping flowers, do you?’                     ‘Hey, baby. Drop out. Let’s drop out of our classes and let’s leave this whole city.’                     ‘Oliver, you’re not in school.’                     ‘Let’s burn this place to the ground.’ I am hardly kidding.                     ‘You’re hopeless,’ she says, smiling, and then kisses me. Sometimes I pretend that darling face of hers is instead fitted with a shark’s jaw and that her teeth are several rows of razors from a shark’s disgusting mouth. Just a little experiment to try to fool myself into seeing her as ugly for a second or two right before any intimate moment, like kissing or sex. A hammerhead shark, because those look awful. A hammerhead shark’s head and shoulders on a decomposing woman’s body, plastered over a table at the morgue. A hammerhead’s face and an even larger shark’s open maw. I would do this because I wanted to see if I still needed to kiss her as badly as I usually did. And always, as it were, the shark thing never worked, because I wanted her so badly I could picture her as just about anything and it would still be attractive. A dead bird. A gutted pig. Some trash outside of a building. Anything. The bulging tongue of a man long hanged but newly discovered. Or the bites carved into his neck from the rope, now green and deteriorated. Alice was that pretty.   I wait at the station for over an hour, unable to recall when her train is due but scared to ask anyone at the ticket booth for fear of having missed its arrival. It had felt like worms in my stomach when I put Alice on that train and sent her home alone, because her mother was dead and the funeral was something I didn’t want to be a part of, at all. I’d have driven her there to Pellborough myself, but somehow she’d have ended up coaxing me into staying for the duration of the trip. She was only gone a day when I started to feel like I’d let her down immensely.                     Another train comes crawling from the blackness beyond and it nestles itself into the unloading dock under hot white lights. I can’t remember what train number she’s on, but when the whistle blows and the speakers in the lobby crackle ‘Pellborough From St. Bell Isle’ my body nearly falls from relief and I collapse down in a bench to catch my breath, an angry, vengeful tension mounting in me, against me.                     My fingers feel icy. My feet are encased in cement. I wring my hands and shake my legs out, but it won’t break away. I wonder what her family must think of me, after this week.                     When I chance a look up, a sharp pang of guilt sticks in my belly and Alice is walking across the platform to the luggage pick-up, skipping behind her antsy seeing-eye dog Pyramids, who is dragging her away from the train, no doubt stifled from the ride.                     I’m dreading what she will say to me and I hope her voice is not tinged with hidden disappointment, because I know that if she’s angry I put her on a train instead of driving her, that she was left to go through the funeral alone without me, she’s not going to tell me as much. She’ll hide it and try to forget it. But Alice never forgets anything. Sometimes, I want to trade heads with her so she’ll be using my own paltry thought capacity, for then without fail she’ll surely forget all that I do or have done that is not heroic. And then when I switch back, we can be on good ground, again. I don’t think I have ever really disappointed her much before – at least not in any grand way – but something about this one scares me. My head spins. I picture that huge tree, again. It’s holding massive arms out for Alice, beckoning, rustling leaves off from the branches, silently suggesting ‘Come to me.’ Trying to get her away from me, using as bait all the great things it’s done as a tree, using this unfair lure by noting all the things I haven’t done.                     For a split second, I find myself cursing that goddamned tree yet again, but switch instantly to cursing myself for not being able to get a goddamned tree out of my thoughts. It’s excruciatingly embarrassing to realize I’m feeling jealous over a tree.                     I’m wandering…                     If I were to jump in front of one of the slow-moving trains and only hurt myself a little, I know she’d put her anger aside. The proposition becomes a definite consideration in my head. Diverting her attention is not entirely below me at this point.                     But I still don’t even know if she’s upset about it yet, so I should just stay calm. I’m hoping maybe the overwhelming sadness of her mother’s death will eclipse it, anyway. In fact, that’s what I feel like praying for, but I don’t want anybody to see me on my knees right now, praying in a train station. Pyramids will come running up to me and he’ll start barking. The dog doesn’t ever bark, actually, but bad things can happen at anytime.                     They don’t need a history.   The night before she came  back I’d spent the evening at her house, staring dutifully at cobwebs forming in the garage, the spiders making it look like some kind of inhuman lair, thinking to myself that if I’d only try hard enough, for once just concentrate, they’d shift forms, turn themselves into butterfly nets and capture me, kill me, swallow me, lose me. It was getting warmer by the moment and so still I could feel my skin gathering dust. More dust settled on the old dust, already there.                     The film reel image of the subway train windows galloping by in the tunnels blinked in my head, for a little bit. Fast footage of everyone doing nothing but letting time pass. All those people, staring, yawning, or already sleeping as the train pummeled the tracks. It wracked my head. If, in one of the frames, someone had a fat shark’s fin stuffed into his or her mouth, pushed against the back wall of the train, with their jaw employed as the handle – their head a weapon, breaking the steel binding over the windows – if that was what happened when the bones in my legs disappeared and I staggered toward a bench behind me to sit, rest and nod off, if that was what happened when I hit a cement beam instead and righted myself, acting as though it never happened. Wobbly, still gazing at spider webs, I dash from the garage, into the house.                     I needed to get out of the house, though. Being there without Alice was beginning to make me sick. Or afraid. Something I couldn’t understand or put a position to. And I wanted desperately to forget whatever it was.                     Later, drinking at Pill’s, I realize I haven’t slept in days. This fact hits me with a supremely horrific chill that I’m sure has left claw marks on my spinal column – if not pushing a few of the discs askance. It also dawns on me that instead of sleeping, replacing the dark hours when my eyes should have been nailed shut, that I’d been in the subway, watching other people doing it – sleeping – on benches, or leaning against the passenger windows as trains chugged by, hacking the tracks in a click-click-click click-click-click lullaby. Before the sun would rise, I would find myself at my own place, between the two large hedges outside my apartment, looking over how the last stragglers from the street would pull in after dark, pop a light on somewhere up in the house and then promptly take it away again, fast asleep in a matter of moments while I sipped from a glass of beer in the darkness, watching dust motes settle on the moon, with my head whirling, dizzy from lack of sleep.                     Not a single table out of the ten or so at Pill’s is occupied. I walk between tables and empty chairs, up to the front.                     The bar is sleek and black, lined with polished chrome, all the way down. In the glow of a television set, there are small spatters of cigarette ash and handprint smears. I rest my bare elbows on the chrome, watching my reflection distort in a red glare from the murky overhead lamps.                     When I sit down, a small lady hobbles over from where she’s been rinsing out glasses. The front of her neck is wrinkled well into her shirt, skin folds concealing more wrinkles in the shadows. ‘What’ll it be, kiddo?’ And just like that, skipping reels, several drinks later my mind blinks like the subway film reel, but there is no color and no people occupy the trains and my body goes from a pained rigidity to being formless as jelly, in seconds, sliding down over the stool. Relief coils around me until I pass out cold.                     When I woke, it was at a small table by the wall. Had I been picked up and nestled into a seat? I don’t remember. I was passed out.                     But the booth I was in now was not unoccupied. Someone else was resting his head in the chair at the other side of the table, passed-out, too, looking to be in the shape I’d just woken from. Actually, sleeping in the same position I was, too. His short, wavy hair had fallen into a mess over his head, haphazardly covering his face. I looked around. There was still nobody at the pool tables. Three people up at the bar, though. The same small old lady, rinsing shot glasses. She didn’t look up at me when I stirred. From the looks of the occupants of the table – myself and the other – I deduced maybe this happens here every night.                     Fumbling through my pockets for some cash to pay the tab, I scrutinized the young man sleeping in front of me. Something about his coat looked familiar. And his hair. Perhaps I knew him.                     Still quite drunk, but reasonably amplified by the mysterious spasm of being jolted from such a sudden catnap, I reached over and gave him a soft pat on the shoulder. For a moment only, his torso expanded with the intake of a heavy breath, soon let out. The breath of his sleep then returned to a quiet pattern. I patted him again, using slightly more force, but he could not be roused from his dozing.                     I’d known such slumber myself, once or twice before. Tonight, as a matter of fact. Better to let him wake up on his own or when the barkeep was ready to close the doors and call it a night.                     ‘Have a good one,’ I whispered to him.                     Rising to get the tab taken care of and also eager to head back to Alice’s house to find if I could actually sleep the whole night through again like I hadn’t done in days, I took one last glance at the sleeper before parting ways. I couldn’t pick out why, but he looked awfully familiar in a very peculiar way, although I could not catch much of his face other than a cheekbone.                     The way his arms curled inward and overlapped as he slept was too fucking familiar.                     The impression was uncanny, giving me a sharp chill. And for some reason, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if he was someone I knew, this would perhaps be something I would not want to know.   The closer she gets, the more I am charged. Grief and longing disappear and all I want to do is touch her, to set all this agitation at ease. To kill it. Her complexion is waxen but bright in a way that means she is thrilled to be with me again – which I am now happier to embrace than I ever thought I could be. At her lithe touch I get the sense that she is teaching me a lesson about sticking by her side, because gradually the hollowness drains from my body with her hands on me. The skin cells on my face and arms instantly begin a rejuvenation process. In the reflection of hers, the settings of my eyes don’t look so much like pits.                     My body is weak. I can hear the bones in my shoulders creaking under the stress of her touch. My chest and lungs, filled with good, pure air, scented as lavender from her hair, they surge, and my knuckles seem to gain color as well as the power to hold her as tight as I should.                     With tears threatening to pour, I look into her soft green eyes, at a small circle of blackness in her pupil, at my reflection, and I think to myself Inside there . . . is where I want to stay from now on.                     An eternity passes in seconds, galloping along subway tracks, blinking past me in dark tunnels. The drive home is a blur. I am surprised at myself, but not surprised at all. I don’t really even know myself, nor do I really want to. Everything seems fine now that Alice is home again. Before I know it, we are kissing against the kitchen sink, her hands at my hips while I steady our balance with my elbows propped across the counter tops.                     I try to picture a fat gray walrus at the zoo, sucking down on the head of some hyperactive child who has hopped the rail, while his hands scrape madly at the creature’s face, trying with grand, endearing futility to get away. His flushed little hands scrape at the fat gray rubbery face, pulling at the tusks until he is neck-deep in its mouth, slumping down lifelessly after a sharp crack of the neck. The back of his shirt is soaking red against the last few death spasms that ignite and then suddenly flare out.                     Alice’s skin is so soft. I expect to find a pair of angel’s wings pushing from her back when I pull her shirt off, but she is only soft and smooth, with small bumps in her spine protruding from the skin, and I run my fingers up along her back and down again.                     Later, when we are both watching the moonlight trace shadows around tree branches across the ceiling, it is warm in her bed. And when her touch fades, I know she has fallen into sleep. Gradually, my lids become heavy and it feels astoundingly new and perfect. My body is warm with a sense of peace and the fingers I run along her smooth arm start to lose direction, the power to guide them losing substance as I follow her into sleep.   That was the last nap I had for four days. It would also be the last wedge of sleep I would know in twice as many.   A pair of hedge clippers trail off excitedly in a direction I did not push them. With two fingers nicked, thick washes of blood paint my hand and the clippers take a while to rip through my pants and saw a trench into my leg. The blood feels more profuse than it really is and I am able to drive to the hospital and walk out an hour later, with spider webs of stitches in my hand and leg. I decide to take the rest of the day off.                     The doctor said my eyes were too round and weary, that I should get some sleep. He prescribed some pills to help me achieve this. I don’t know where the insomnia came from and at first I didn’t even know that’s what it was. I figured I was just getting sick, that my body was too hot, that my blood pressure was boiling, that my body sought to – temporarily – betray me. Or that I missed Alice so much. Or that I was worried about how she felt about the death of her mother. Or that she was hurt I didn’t want to pay my last respects to the dead woman. Or that she was hurt because I wasn’t by her side during such a tragic moment in her life. Or that I let her down. Or that I was getting sick.                     But during the second night, dead tired, I realized I had almost no real thoughts in my head. Everything was mushy, like marrow. No faction of subject matter stayed in my head for more than three seconds. Empty, feeling hollow, I tossed myself around to every corner of the bed, rolled myself into a host of promising positions but could find no comfortable purchase. I lay there prone, solid cement with fixed eyes staring at the ceiling, wearily attempting to blink as the tiles began fuzzily changing shape.                     The darkness played tricks with my eyes, but it could not and would not push me asleep.         So I got up and went for a drive into the city, where I parked my car before an expired meter and crawled into the hot earth to ride the subway underneath town for hours and hours.                     When other train cars passed the one I was in, going in the opposite direction, I could see very fragmented scenes cutting up and splicing themselves together in the disproportionate film reel that I’ve come to recognize as a metaphor for how I am living my life. And then it seemed there was a plot to all this that wouldn’t be hard for me to grasp if I could only sit up and pay enough attention. In the green neon of the train cars, stale-looking people stood with the hoods of their sweatshirts pulled up over their eyes. Some of them were gazing at nothing, resigned and tired. A few of them – most of them – were chatting with other passengers. Tired, rubbing their eyes for want of sleep.                     Some of them had their heads against the glass, already dreaming.                     When I got back home, the sun was almost up. The world was getting light blue. I wasn’t necessarily tired anymore, but very weak.                     Alice calls to tell me she loves me, and that feels good. My head swirls. I despair to think of her at the office, doing something important, drafting plans she can’t even see while I have the whole world at the edge of my eyes and I have yet to see a real goddamned solution to anything my entire life.                     Then it occurs to me, like a rock to the face, that while I don’t necessarily care so much about me, that although it seems I have no ambition in life and no direction, this is not entirely true. For Alice is my ambition, it now seems. And she’s my direction. To be with her is my only real goal in life.                     The thought feels too easy. But I can’t find a way to prove it wrong.                     Marveling at this, feeling proud that I really do have a goal in life after all, that I want to do something great and I am working for it all the time without even knowing it, simply by wanting to be with her and for her to be happy, I crash against the side of the tree. Chips of bark rain down on me. I catch some of them and throw them into the eyes of a couple of squirrels standing about, nibbling on acorns. My newfound ambition is a heavy feeling and for it I feel the express need to sit.                     Squirrels scatter as I take a few steps forward into this new life.                     There’s a thin walkway between a thick rise of bushes to either side, mounted behind two tiny benches that stare at each other like mirrors. Lowering myself into one of them, sliding down so that my shoulders are practically supporting me against the back of the bench, I cross my legs and bury my hands in my jacket.                     And – miraculously – I nod off.                     Peacefully. I actually sleep.   Thunder grumbles calmly in the sky, almost cooing the clouds. Behind my eyes I can see those clouds, gently sliding across the sky, black and gray but not menacing. Thunder hushes the bustling little city and people start to pack their things and head for cover, warned.                     Smiling, in a dream of even calmer floods soothingly washing over a crowded town square as heads disappear in the murk, random hands grasping at the sultry air above the black spiraling floodwater, I am suddenly jolted awake.                     Alarmed at the abruptness of springing up, but instantly calmed for such an invigorating and sudden nap, I smile at the first light sprinkling droplets of soft rain, letting the gentility of it cool on my face. I sit there with my hands in my jacket pockets, relaxed. Who’d have thought sleep should come to me so effortlessly? And here, on a walk, of all places. I am feeling good. Really ready to go out there and not let the whole world seem so crowded and ruthless. I am going to walk to a flower peddler on the street in the park and I’ll buy the largest bouquet of the sweetest smelling flowers he’s willing to let go of and I’ll tip him what’s left of my money and I’ll walk the flower bouquet to Alice’s office myself and place them on the table because she loves the smell of fresh flowers and…                     This is when I see the person on the other side of the thin walkway, opposite me. He is slumped down into the bench opposite mine, still sleeping even as the rain picks up. The sounds of traffic and rainfall around me are rough against each other, like stones slowly scraping together.                     I stand, jarred. With his legs crossed and his hands cuddled into the pockets of his jacket, a sweep of hair covering his downcast face, I recognize him instantly.                     It’s the same guy from the bar that I’d woken to find sleeping across from me at the small booth the night before Alice came back.                     It seems absurd. But, yes. It’s the very same man.                     A small attempt to get closer to him stops me dead in my tracks, as I realize that not only is it the same guy, but he’s dressed in the same clothes that I am.                     Not completely without reason, I am paralyzed. All except for my head and neck, which I crane from side to side in an attempt to situate myself, gazing in every direction possible to make sure I am really here. The park is empty. The rain grows insistent.                     It becomes a downpour, but the man sleeping before me is not stirring. His chest rises and falls rhythmically, pushing his chin up in short feats of movement. That short-cropped wavy hair – uncombed yet not threatening to become a mess – that is a very familiar haircut. It is one I seem to know very well, as if I see it every day.                     The rain is now pouring so hard that I am forced to make a choice. Either I stand here and stare at this . . . stranger, or I make a break for it and get out of the cold before I become sick.                     ‘Hey man,’ I shout. ‘It’s raining. You’d better get up.’                     There is no response. The sleeper is unprovoked from his slumber. He moves not a muscle, except for the slow and steady rising of the chest with intake of air. It is when I start to give another shout that the full comprehension that he is wearing the same brown slacks and pale yellow button-down that I too am wearing hits me. Hard. That he is being kept moderately warm, if not entirely dry, by the same kind of coat that I am wearing. Not merely this, but that his pants are not simply the same design as the clothes on me, but the very same shirt and pants and jacket, too. Right down to worn patches and loose threads. It is when I realize this person is a replica of me that I run. And the park becomes a fading yet doggedly insistent memory at Pill’s, where I pound two shots of bourbon before buying a round for Old Arnold – who declines. Downing his refused shot myself and then buying a round each for two strangers staring glumly into empty glasses on either side of me, I lose track of the beers I am drinking. Easily. It becomes round after steady round after round.                     When I arrive later at Alice’s office, waiting for her in the lobby, it is awful to realize that I am unerringly, gravely sober.                     My body feels like an empty shell when she scoots directly toward me across the carpet in the lobby, feeling me there, knowing exactly where I am. She can feel my presence and though this should – and would, regularly – come as a resounding comfort, instead her embrace seems to make me flinch. Though I am, by now, quite dry, she says ‘Christ, Oliver, you’re shivering.’ She touches my neck with her lips. ‘Oh my God, you’re freezing, baby.’                     I want to sprawl out across the backseat of the car, or at the least just huddle into the passenger seat and cower as she drives. But I’m always the designated driver – naturally – and while she sits comfortably beside me, gently squeezing my knee, I fight hard to act normal. And though what I would really like to do right now is pull over to the side of the road and go running off into the woods to disappear, I smile at her. She can’t see me, but I get the sense she knows I am smiling at her anyway. And yes, she smiles right back at me, leans forward and kisses my neck. ‘You’re still so cold, Oliver. Are you okay?’                     My hands are trembling and I can actually feel the stitches in my leg worming around like a pile of ants in and out of my skin and I’m not even half okay, which makes me even more nervous, knowing that I should feel okay with Alice here. I try to picture the lines of cars parked at the sides of the road as beached whales baking in the sun, but when it changes nothing, I realize there’s no reason at all to be doing this. But it’s no good. I keep driving past shiny, chrome and steel beached whales that do nothing but serve to freeze me yet more and I can’t stop pretending because I want this all to be made instantly better.                     I can’t for the life of me make any sense out of procedure at this point and I race through a few red lights, which despite the situation being as eerie as it truly is still makes me feel bad, since I’m supposed to be the responsible one here in the car. Pyramids is in the backseat, eyeing me, seeing what Alice thankfully cannot. And though he’s not growling at me, for the first time I wish he would. It’s just too quiet in the car.                     ‘Yeah, baby. I’m…’ I struggle to complete the sentence, but I’m too cold. I’m too fucking tired to make sense. ‘Fine,’ I finish, sucking in a deep breath.   I didn’t find sleep during the night. The approach of a spider or cockroach crawling across the bed in the moonlight would have been a welcome discomfort, but Alice’s house is always kept immaculately clean. Tonight it seems the house is hollow, with nobody in it and nothing else. I am unable to hold her when Alice holds me. I am still an empty shell and I’m thinking about the other body. Not the beautiful one purring next to me, but that other sleeping one at the park.                     Worry washes over me so profoundly I sweat myself into a small pool on the bed. Thankfully, she is asleep. I can’t get it out of my head, turning over what was possibly in Alice’s thoughts right now. I kick myself a thousand times, trying to get to sleep.                     But it will be days before I can do so.                     I’m supremely thankful Alice cannot physically see what I look like, because I think I must resemble a proper bag of bones. A weary hitchhiker. A ghost haunted by other ghosts. She touches my eyes in the morning and asks me if I have slept okay. I tell her fine. She doesn’t believe me, but I sound confident about it – which surprises me – so instead of lying it probably just sounds like I had a nightmare and chose not to babble on about it. She makes breakfast and I read the ingredients on a box of pancakes, thinking it sounds like a recipe for making quicksand. I picture slipping through the sand, with one hand left clutching empty air. Breakfast feels silly. I try to shrug off yesterday. Remarkably, it half-way works. And by the time I’m out under the fan of a shade tree, pushing heaps of mulch around a bed of gorgeous green lilies, I smile. The effort it takes to do so is not lost on me, but I continue, thinking, deeply wishing that Alice could see this. I wish she could see me do this. It may be a worthless little flowerbed, but it’s a small fragment of the world that I somehow managed to make attractive and I suddenly wanted and desperately needed her to see I was capable of doing this.                     Sharp is the knife of regret that cuts through me when I am humiliated here in the garden, alone, by the thought of Alice gazing down at these flowers. Who am I kidding?                     Of all that she could use her eyes on if she were to suddenly, magically gain sight, to think this shitty little nest of green flowers should mean much? I cannot decide whether this is selfishness or mere nit-picking, but it’s obviously a black cloud.                     Lunch becomes half of a half-sandwich, washed down with snowstorm-cold glasses of beer. In the heated bar, the ice that falls down my throat sort of freezes my mind.                     I push out all recollection of the garden. Gone too are the grumpy barflies and the buzzing of traffic, filtering in from outside. I allow myself to grow numb to all feeling and without knowing it, the pain and nervousness and the humiliation all disappear. From a booth in the corner, I hail the bartender and have two more drinks set before me. But before I can guzzle down even half of one, the comfort I feel is so miraculous that, while still sober – however impossible that should seem – my forehead nuzzles the warm oak finish of the table and I simply . . . pass . . . out.                     Two glasses of beer fly through the air and crash down on the floor beside the table. The terrible, guilt-drenched sound it makes is deafening, yet nothing is stirring in the bar. It was as if a pin had been pulled from me and I exploded like a bomb.                     How it’s possible to smash glasses in a quiet little bar and still sit here without attracting attention is beyond me, but whimpering like a dog, panting in fast, helpless gasps, I wish to trade the entire world for just a little company. Anybody. Somebody to come over here and see this. But nobody is looking in my direction. And so nobody is seeing what I am seeing, at this booth.                     What made me panic when I woke was that I was not alone in the booth upon waking.                     Sitting across from me, positioned exactly how I was, with his head back just a little, just like me, though with his face somewhat hidden behind the shoulder, was me. There was no mistaking it. Dressed exactly as I was. But even if he weren’t wearing my clothes too, it was still me, beyond any form of doubt. The man sleeping across from me was a mirror image, mimicking in his slumber every last concrete detail accurately, incontrovertibly particular to me. Even the stubble on his face, how it was thicker at the chin and under the nose.                     Nearly falling over myself, I somehow carry my body to the bar and speaking now like I’m crazy, I openly suggest the bartender have a look at the smashed glasses and the spilled mess at the booth. Pulling to the side to gain a better view, he glances over my shoulder at the broken glass and the beer soaking into the booth and into the floorboards, then back at me, curiously, visually disappointed but obviously not surprised. He says to me tiredly ‘Better call it a day, pal. That’ll be ten bucks.’                     I lean in toward him. ‘Don’t you think you ought to have a look at the booth, though?’                     Squinting at me, he leans back as much as I’ve leaned forward, unsure of what I am getting at. ‘For . . . what?’                     ‘Maybe there’s something in the booth you ought to see?’                     The second he puts his two hands on the bar and leans into me, staring hard, no longer mystified or curious but now teeming with anger, I realize this is going to end right now and I’m going to pay my tab and never come to this bar again. Walking faster and faster toward the door, I chance a look back over my shoulder and the bartender is still glaring at me. My flight is halted when I hit the side of my face against the doorjamb and the handle digs into my stomach. With an exaggerated cry of alarm, I turn toward the bartender again, who looks like he’s ready to make a move if I don’t leave.                     The last thing before I am out on the street again is the bartender grumbling, still with hands on the bar, to no one in particular ‘Goddamned asshole drunks.’                     But the thing is, I’m not drunk. Sure, I want to be. But I’m not.                     I’m not even near drunk. What I am is tired. That catnap was nothing. And how the hell am I expected to sleep much, anyway? I mean, look at this. Look at what’s happening.                     I could find another bar easy. A dark one with tiny, shadowed booths. But, no. That’s obviously a bad idea. But, I can find a dark, lowly little place too small for privacy or even booths and I can sit at the bar and I can stay there until Alice gets off work and I can call a cab for her and meet her at her place and tell her I was experiencing problems with the car and that would be that and we would have dinner and maybe watch a movie and then we’d go to sleep – I would toss and turn while she dreamt, sure, but I’d be safe with her. And who knows? Maybe I just might actually really fall asleep, tonight. And I’d stay that way until the sun crawled up. I am certainly tired enough to do just that. I need only to relax my body and let it happen. Alice, if nothing else in the world, can do that for me. She’ll cuddle up against me with her soft body filling the void between me and the icy air and I would be gently rocked into sleep by her breath. Her chestfalls would lull me.                     I walk the whole way to her place and call a cab from the telephone in her kitchen, hand over the fraudulent story of the dysfunction in the car, we have dinner on the couch while watching television, I stare at the screen, I speak but don’t hear a word I am saying, she whispers in my ear and laughs but I don’t hear a word she is saying. I feel scared. A warning seems to try penetrating me, but I am too numb to accept it. We slip into bed and our hands map each other out and at the back of my head I am being told that the small, creeping feeling I’m trying desperately to grasp is pleasure – or possibly safety. But it may really be dread, because I’m not sure if I am lying to myself or not. But Alice falls to my side and it feels too quick and I know something odd has happened and she turns the light out and the way she nestles against me is something like a search for a comfortable position that is not personal and she is sleeping before the clock hits the top of the hour and I watch, horrified, as the top of the hour turns into the next and one more later, until it is midnight. With a fully developed unease, I turn my head away from the clock while it climbs two more hours, then three. And I am staring at the closet doors in the dark, until slowly the outlines of the wood paneling become clearer as the sun begins to rise, the slats on the doors moving fuzzily as I stare helplessly at their repetitions. And at six-thirty, her alarm sounds. I snap it off before she is roused and wake her manually.                     This scenario happens for a couple more days, until I start turning her alarm off almost as soon as she’s nodded off. And unable to take my eyes from the clock for too long at any one moment during the night, I spend the entire night in bed regarding the numbers on the clock as tiny monsters. I wake her up on my own, by pushing lightly against her shoulder and saying her name.                     She takes these actions a different way, however, finding it sweet that I should rise before her just to wake her up. Like this is all purposeful.                     God bless her.                     How sweet it is that she should not know what dreadfulness I hold from her during the night. How dark the sunlight looks when it becomes apparent that distinguishing between night and day is, stressingly, maddeningly, simply not necessary anymore.   Deciding once again to call it quits for the day – even though I still have more than a few yards left to address before the weekend is over – I’d clapped my hands together and brushed the dirt off hours ago, as if a job well done had been completed. Exceedingly far from the truth, as I’ve truly been really shitty about my job lately.                     But I feel like black clouds are roaming at the dome of my skull. I sit at a bench outside a smallish diner near the train station and doggedly, completely focused, I watch the front doors for a few hours.                     When the only people to come out of the building for a long while happen to be other people and not anyone that looks exactly like me, I grow antsy and tired. And not wanting to accidentally fall asleep again, I get up and stretch. That this should not be happening, right now. I should still be at work, planting yellow roses. This is not lost on me. And the embarrassment is only held in check by the humility and the paranoia that follows it. Robotically – every move punched in on the machine I am now – I cross the street through a minor snow flurry and slowly enter the diner, making my way sluggishly toward the back with a determination that I feel might be a little premature, though I’m absolutely unable to help it. And I walk steadily toward the corner table – where I’d sat earlier in the day and passed out – to see if the sleeping body that appeared upon waking is still there. Or if it’s at least awake, now.                     Chills encompass me and I actually shiver there in the corner of the diner, even though it’s not at all cold, because hunched in the table, in the precise position he was in when I last saw him, is me. Sleeping. Another me.                     It’s a replica of me, fast asleep at that table. Down to the same fucking shoelaces. But it’s not me. It can’t fucking be me. I cover my mouth to stifle a scream, momentarily impressed that I’m even this composed, considering what’s going on. I’m nearly paralyzed with dread, but then an altogether separate energy in me propels me toward the sleeper and I shove him, hard. ‘Get up,’ I say, loudly.                     But the figure does not stir. He sleeps on, unmoved.                     I shove him, again. Then again, even harder. ‘Get up,’ I plead, forcefully. But he does nothing. Still scared, still feeling like I’m crazy, but unable to turn around to see if somebody is staring at me, I first punch him in the back of the head and then push him right out of the seat and his body falls heavily to the floor, with his head propped up against the wall. I gasp, because this is the first time I’ve seen its whole face – his face – and that face is mine. There is no longer any seed of doubt and the worry and horror becomes titanic. So I start kicking mercilessly at the body, screaming ‘Get up! Get Up!’                     Hands are now pulling at me. There are angry voices spitting in my ear. And I am being pulled from the table. A fist is hailed repeatedly at my face, with a warning for me to stop or he – the speaker – would break my whole face. But I keep kicking that unwaking version of me who is slumped down against the wall under all of the commotion.                     ‘Get off him, man!’ somebody shouts. ‘Leave him alone!’ another.                     ‘Get him out of here!’ somebody else adds.                     ‘But fucking look at him!’ I scream, screeching ‘Let me go!’ Wild, now. Flailing. ‘It’s me! It’s me!’                     A fist is sunk into my stomach, the powerful blow effectively silencing me. Falling back, I reach to grasp out for a chair or anything to balance myself, but hit the wall and lose all certainty of balance. Somebody’s shouting, but the words are all accusatory and thankfully I am too distracted to understand what it means. I still pull a little, trying for release, but it is no good. And I am dragged from the diner and pushed out onto the sidewalk. People are staring at me with expressions ranging from horrified to amused. It’s exactly what I pictured happening, all the other times when I was afraid to point attention to the fucking twin sleeping its soundless, ghostly sleep next to me. There’s some fat, frazzled cook standing above me in a white undershirt that’s draped with a stained white smock, waving his thick spatula at me and kicking me, too. The spatula is one of those heavy steel models that does not bend and he swings it deeply through my face, slicing the cheek open while it spits grease at me and he’s screeching, all the while. I don’t understand what he’s saying. But somebody else kicks me in the ribs to back him up on it, saying if I don’t leave I’ll be pulverized. I am kicked a few more times. I no longer understand anything in my life. Tears are filling my eyes up like clogged drains and everyone who is yelling at me starts to shimmer and swim around. When somebody kicks me in the face the water is emptied from my sockets and I see everyone fine again, but the tears keep coming and soon they are all drowned and shimmering, and I’m glad I can’t see this.                     How can nobody have witnessed what really happened? Didn’t anyone notice how I pushed that guy against the wall and he still did not rise from sleep? Or that, worse still, he was dressed the same as I was? And that his face was my mirror image? Didn’t anyone see that?                     Do people normally get knocked around like that in this restaurant without waking up to defend themselves? Jesus, they can’t have seen him. Maybe it was a ghost.                     But I’m not dead. It can’t be a ghost.                     If all of this is in my head, then I have to keep this from Alice, at all costs. She can never know that I am seeing these things, or else it is the end of us. But this is really happening. Who else can I go to but her?                     This whole situation could mean that something more awful still is about to happen and that these horrific events are just mediocre premonitions of something even worse. But who could I possibly confide in but Alice? And how could I possibly explain this to her?                     Rubbing my eyes, limping, I head for the subway, hoping the noise of trains will distract me.                     It doesn’t. But I still feel better here, where there are lots of people all around me. I haven’t been to a bar in weeks, thinking the fragmentation of mind or the hallucination of waking up to find myself beside myself, sleeping, may actually be alcohol related. But it’s not. No matter how much I try to drink – as an experiment – I cannot help but to remain morbidly sober. And yet those things appear whenever I am pulled from the few sudden, restless bits of sleep my body is awarded with. And what a fucking reward it is, after all. My body is wracked from exhaustion and every effort I take to appear like a regular human being when I’m around Alice feels to me as forced as a high school play. She must surely know that all is not well. But yet she keeps this from me. She may not be able to see, but Christ, she must see this is happening somehow.                     On the train, shooting through tunnels under the city, the cars are very dimly lit, and my bones hurt from lack of sleep and also a discomforting malnutrition I’ve been nursing since I stopped drinking and stopped feeling like I have my head screwed on right.                     Whatever is happening to me is well beyond my capacity to understand. And it’s been occurring enough for me to not fully find myself so much surprised as shocked and steadfastly, unspeakably horrified. My throat tightens and to utter a single word seems an impossibility. The steady click-click-click click-click-click underneath the subway train, surrounding me on all sides, envelopes me and I tap my fingers against the inside of the window as limitless darkness unfolds between well-spaced haunches of fluorescent-lit cement and crowds of sleepy travelers hustling to and from work, to and from homes. And I don’t feel like I have a home, anymore. Since I can’t fall asleep like a regular person, my apartment has become haunted. The bed looks and acts like a monster. When I touch the mirror, it is icy against my fingertips, fogging up. When I call Alice from the telephone, her answering machine picks up and that constant message – I’ll get back to you, as soon as I can – now is a direct threat to me.                     Or a curse. And yes, maybe a warning too. Maybe everything is a warning, now. Being a target is easy for relatively few, so I take what solace I can in that and don’t feel too bad about how I’m handling this so far, remembering that erosion is something that takes time to occur, and I compose myself – if fraudulently – like a half-real human being. The picture painted on my face is that of absolute normalcy. Despite the black, swollen pits of my eyes, the gaunt cheeks jutting out at the bone like distended icebergs, and my lips being sore and chapped from licking them nervously, I think I’m doing rather well acting as if none of this is inherently wrong. Just to get through the day. I mean, I can still go through the motions of preparing a salad at the cafeteria salad bar under the offices Alice works in, and the looks I get seem to reflect that I’m acting right, like a real person, and when I put coins into the telephone booth, my hands don’t shake like I’m a drug addict.                     So I’m getting along fine, I think. At least as far as other people are concerned. I have to go back to work sooner or later, or I will lose all of my gardening accounts. I have to find my way back to something.                     There is something I must reclaim, this much is true. What that is, I’m not sure. But I’ve been stolen from. Some kind of regularity has been ripped from me that I can’t understand. Some kind of human right has been denied me. Perhaps the right to understand day and night? The right to a dreamless sleep? The right to any amount of safe sleep?                     I want to stop calling her place, especially as I can no longer distinguish what time of the day I am placing these calls. It’s not that I can’t read a clock, but that the numbers themselves are conscious now, breathing individually of their own will. And they lie to me. Time passes by so slow, that when it’s three in the morning I think the clock must surely be broken, it can’t possibly be that late. If one were to consciously study my actions, in some drugstore or a library or a fast food restaurant, perhaps it would appear to the average person that I have fallen into a state of heavy drug use. Maybe it’s starting to tell on me, after all. To me I look sick, I act sick, I make no sense and can make sense of nothing. It’s possibly the lack of sleep, I tell myself and so swallow a cupped palm of sleeping pills. But they do nothing for me except to swell in my stomach and swim uselessly there, floating and floating and floating. Growing fat as maggots.                     Then I remember it’s not the lack of sleep. It’s the fact that I’m possibly out of my fucking mind. I have to do something. And it needs to be done right now.                     Still tapping the window on the subway train, I pound a fist into my knee, but feel nothing. Pulling a wedge of skin between my index finger and thumb, I pinch it so hard the skin splits and a small spurt of blood shoots across my pant leg, but I can’t feel that either. My head is spinning. I’m so sad about all of this that I lean back and I am fucking defeated. But this does not stick into me so much, because for it, I actually realize that I am falling asleep.                     It’s coming in languidly, seeping through my shoulders and riding my arms down to the elbows, loosening my fists. It feels like rest is happening. Giving up, giving in. Is it finally giving me a chance to sleep? It is. I’m nodding off. But I don’t feel like this is foreboding. Actually, it feels like I could sit here for another week like this. It’s better than it ever has been, this sense of rest. Sitting still, alone in the small row of seats, I let everything go and lean my face against the window and my muscles feel relaxed for the first time in I can’t even begin to think how long, now.                     My mind is worn-out from being knocked back and forth between knowing what is happening and trying to act like I know. And I am falling asleep.                     Consenting and committing to defeat, sleep overtakes me. It climbs my body from below, too.                     Yes, the lids are heavy and my entire frame feels rested. Numb, certainly. And weak, without a doubt. But actually tired too. Tired, with the effect that exhaustion should carry, in that I am nodding off into sleep. A proper sleep. Something I have not known since . . . half a year ago.                     Pushing out any further thought of investigation, I simply let it take me.                     Jesus Christ, it feels amazing. Already my arms are weightless, becoming thin spirits, light as air. My lungs drag breath in of their own accord without my trying at all and my chest is squeezed into a rhythm, so relaxed, soft waterfalls carrying the breath back out, and rhythmically it repeats while I sit there, doing nothing but feeling it.                     My eyes have no want, no desire. There is no reason to open my eyes. The tracks are clicking underneath the train, echoing inside the train car, and I can’t fucking believe it but I am falling asleep.                     …as with most all dreams, I do not know how long I have been living this life, but after a long stretch of hopping gracefully over titan buildings of cold, cracked stone, mid-air, swooping down over what looks to me like some kind of a prison, yielding some fantastically shimmering lake carved into the rooftop, I am conscious of the dream I am having yet not conscious of what I’ve been taken from to be here. I only know that this feels like the first dream I have ever known. And it’s perfect. My body continues to move slowly, taking hard, determined steps as I run, admitting flight when my legs are ready to push the earth away, again. I am not a giant, I am just unstoppable. I clear entire fields of buildings with one jump. So very fucking easily. Over another building. In this dream, I am simply running…                     …there is no destination at all, just some ever forward march. Nothing stands in my way. Not buildings. Not trees. It’s beautiful. The winds up in the sky rock me gently in pillowy arms, whisking me softly along as I sail. Upon closer inspection, every structure I leap over, in contrast to the unshackled life flowing through my arms and legs, is a prison, forcing a distinction between the comfort and the very freedom of what I am doing and what it is I’m doing this over. Me, I’ve been set free. And I’m clearing them one by one, these cement houses, on my way to someplace better. One after the other, all of these buildings are supporting atop their roofs the burden of large, natural bodies of water. Some of the prisons are inscribed with lakes while others host rivers. I continue to run, negligent of time, unable to comprehend fear. The world darts past me and way up in the sky, leaping, free, I laugh at it. On the ground, my steps are ten feet apart. The speed attained outdistances light. The amount of time I spend on the ground is wistfully debatable. It’s just seconds. I could spit at the thought and my saliva would stretch for hundreds of miles as it splashed. It’s useless to measure the time between clearing miles and waiting to hit the sky again. Around the universe in half a wink. The prisons pass under me like pitiable ants. For ages this seems to be, until at last the landscape up ahead shows me a hard fact. It’s a promise. What lies ahead of me is incontrovertible. It is…                     …because ahead of me there is a large, dark green wall. It stretches higher than I am able to see. It climbs into clouds with one vastly flat, valiant grasp, sneering for its entire length across the horizon in either direction. Gathering strength and speed, my stride does not waver as I pitch through the world, leaping that which would seek to bind me, its lakes and rivers below mere twinkles to my eye as I continue racing toward the wall. Leaping prisons. Leaping entire forests. The wall, however, does not appear to get closer. Still conscious of my dream, my courage is nonetheless threatened, and my surety is now just a mask that I’m using to bluff the dream as I pitch forward…                     …nothing matters. I scale entire prisons. Entire countries. Hours pass by like minutes. The wall only appears really close, finally, when I am so proximate that I cannot possibly stop in time to avoid collision. But I’m not going to avoid anything. I am here to clear the wall. Because there is no boundary for me, anymore. And nothing to hold me back. The profound reality of shoving my body over fortresses is practically written before me in cloudlike-typed letters and I will not let barriers loom over me anymore. And I push hard on my legs and I dive into the sky…                     …the wall I am unable to clear…                     …my body smashes into the vast green wall with a devastating clap. The stone is cool and soft, yet hard enough to stop me from cracking it. I do not bounce, but fall straight down. The plummet, the distance, is immeasurable. The ground is worlds away. I know that when I hit the ground, I will wake up…                     When I wake up, it’s instantly the worst day of my life. There are two adaptations sleeping in the seats across from me. There are two. And they are both slumped – fast asleep – in the exact same position I am.   At breakfast, I wash my face with dish soap in the kitchen sink while Alice prepares a pan over the stove. She hums softly to herself as I rinse repeatedly yet don’t seem to get the silky dish soap out of my eyes. Temporarily blinded, I reach for a dry dish rag and cut my hand on a knife on the sink. The thought that Alice would never have done this does not escape me. Miraculously, I don’t make a sound, instead shoving my whole head under the tap and scrubbing my eyelids until the soap is gone, then I wipe my face dry with the bottom of my t-shirt.                     Barely a word is spoken while we eat. I’m poking at the food with a knife, slicing it into ribbons.                     ‘How have you been, lately?’ she asks me, her tone loaded with an icy concern I’ve learned to weed out from the standard gentility. So I don’t answer. It’s not because I don’t have an answer, but that I can’t give her this particular answer. And if I try to hide it by contriving an excuse, or even trying to push the real problem aside. She’ll know anyway that something is entirely wrong. It’s fucking irritating to realize a blind person sees me better than even I do.                     It’s obvious that because I choose not to answer, she picks her plate up, carries it to the sink, cleans it and the pans and everything else she used to prepare breakfast, then silently disappears from the room. My pancakes look like slashes of thorns and barbed wire to me. If I take another bite, my mouth will be shredded.                     My heart sinks when Alice leaves the room, but I am powerless to stop her. I am handicapped. This irony, too, is not lost on me. I feel like taking a nap. The fact that I can’t is also not lost on me.                     What is really lost, as it happens, is me.                     It also dawns on me that, well, what would really be gained if I am found?   Half a couple dozen or more – I don’t know – telephone messages are blinking at me from the screen on the machine. The number of messages is blinking in double digits, but the numbers just look to me like the thousands of clocks I’ve stared helplessly, ravenously at for the past month or so. It’s just a bunch of red, bloody numbers. After so long – and I’m sure I have been standing here for almost an hour – I reach forward to press PLAY.                     That’s when the power cuts off.                     I haven’t paid the bill, so it’s only natural.                     Back under the city, train cars shoot past, round and sleek like water snakes. It breathes in windowed bubbles of sleeping heads, dotting the scales, the windows. When I fall back into a bench, I am heavier than my muscles can best and rather than sigh, I actually crumble.                     Jolted from a deep dark sleep that is – thankfully – dreamless, the bench is full, and my arms are crowded, pinned down at my sides. The bench is not merely occupied by others, it’s literally packed, so that I am shoulder to shoulder. Gradually, I can muster the power to turn my head. To the right, with just enough room to support someone else, it’s me, asleep with his arms pinned at the sides. Swiveling my head to the left, on this tiny bench there are four more semblances of myself, crouched and huddled and wedged on the bench, fast, faithfully asleep. They’re all me. My head rolls back in maddened horror and I push myself forward. With great effort, I am able to free myself from the packed bench and shoot like a rocket, flailing around as I fall to the cement. People are staring at me. Others waiting for the bus are stepping away.                     Pressing my palms against the cold cement, I turn to the cursed bench behind me while attempting to raise myself up again. And there on the bench, with just a small bit of space at the far right where I’d vaulted from, there are five sleeping Olivers.                     The next train squeals to a halt. Helplessly, I spring from the ground and into the car. Nobody else on the platform follows, though I know this is the train they’ve been waiting for. They all just stare, mystified or full of pity as they choose not to get involved. I point across the platform toward the bench I’d just sprung from, screaming ‘Look at them, you fucking idiots! Not me!’ pointing wildly toward the haunting row of dozing replicas.                     A tiny lady hugs two miniscule children close to her, mouth open in disgust, watching me.                     ‘What the fuck is wrong with you people! Look at that fucking bench! Don’t you see them!’                     Some of the onlookers, indeed, finally turn to look at the bench, but the train’s doors slide shut in my face before anyone can turn back to me to confirm anything, eclipsing whatever it was somebody might have said in return upon glancing at the bench. And the train pushes slowly at first, then shoots forward into the dark tunnels.                     I wake up again, collapsed against the doors. When I push myself off, there are so many versions of me pushed against the wall of the train, all facing to the right – how I awoke – all of them breathing in and out in unison, that I can no longer stifle what cries I have left to offer. My lungs become hideouts for restless shrieks all coming out of hiding. I become a wailing siren. The duplicates’ sighs are so collectively loud that I press my hands over my ears and fight to drown them out with my own screaming.                     Bracing myself, I shove the Oliver closest to me and he falls easily, collapsing against the second, toppling the third, who rattles but barely moves the fourth, who is leaning against the wall with a section of seats between him and the third, but he slides slowly against the fifth, who pushes forward and thuds against – resting against – the sixth.                     The doors echo as I pound them, desperate to escape. I kick at the sleeping Olivers. Howl at them and punch wildly. Then I turn back to the doors, still wailing. For a moment or two, I actually claw at them, crazed, inevitably biting the plastic edges of the wall, attempting at all cost to gnaw my way off this train.                     Slowly but surely, the train begins to slow. There is an entire crowd of people at the next stop, which I plan to plunge into. But something in me rages, forcibly calming me, speaking matter-of-factly ‘Slow down. Wait. Wait for the doors to open. You cannot do it by strength. You must wait.’                     So I step back, composing myself. My body is shaking violently. I fix my shirt, tucking it in, smoothing out the collar, running tense fingers through my hair to smooth it out, too. Walking backwards, I hit the bench behind me and fall into it, facing the doors that are about to open. Watching the grim faces of the perpetually tired outside the doors, I yawn. Forcing back the yawn, I slap myself in the face, something which a few of the people outside the now settled train notice. When the doors open, a few of them – naturally – scrutinize my behavior shrewdly and warily, but regardless, they clamor in, eager to make this train. Their sheer tidal mass is too much and I push back into the bench, shoving my eyes closed, flinching.                     I wake up. Literally drowned in people. Some of them are strangers, but more than half of them are, of course, me. But luckily, when I wake again after having passed out a third or fourth time, it’s when the train has come to another stop. And absolutely no time is wasted shoving directly through the crowd, blindly, whoever the fuck they are, bundles of me or bunches of strangers. Met with jeers, I claw past the people, out onto the ramp, up several flights of stairs and into the night, where I run manically down the street, gasping.   Several attempts to plunge a single coin into a telephone booth are met with disappointing backfires, scraping the sides of the slot but never really sliding in. The small enclosure of the booth all around my feet is littered with dimes. I pull the door closed to stop them from rolling out onto the sidewalk, because I realize this uncomplicated procedure might actually take me some time yet and I may need to conserve coins for consecutive second-tries.                     But triumph in this matter utterly eludes me.                     Having uncompromisingly failed in getting a single dime into the machine, I stagger off toward Pill’s Haberdashery, nearly falling into the place as my full bodily weight pushes into the swinging door. It’s only eleven-thirty, but it’s already a packed house due to the lunch-time rush. Most of the faces comprise the same old crowd, but it’s eerily foreign right now. I feel as if I’m a stranger. Like I don’t belong. Everyone looks, somehow, more human than me. Or more accurately, more human than I feel.                     Trying my best to keep composed while I flatten out some crumpled bills, I manage to push several of them toward Old Arnold, who is looking me over like I’ve just escaped from a hospital. ‘You alright, Oliver?’ he asks, legitimately concerned. ‘You look a little pale, son.’                     I am unable to come up with anything good. So I settle with telling him my girlfriend is dead.                     He blanches, lowering his head. ‘Sorry, kiddo,’ he offers earnestly, pushing back the hopelessly crumpled money I’ve given him. ‘This one’s on the house,’ he says.                     And it’s the first drink I’ve had in God knows how long. Old Arnold’s poured it stronger than usual and after the first sip I thank him for it, falling into a stool at the bar, heaving a sigh of relief that washes over my entire body. The sweat on my brow and down my spine is like ice water, but nonetheless warms me as my body regains some of the heat it was naturally meant to harbor.                     There are framed ties on the wall. A pleated pair of dark olive green silk slacks hangs from a frame over a pool table. I listen to balls slap against each other, cracking over the sounds of laughter and camaraderie. All around me, deep voices bitch about jobs, about wives. Laughter tunnels through the room. People cheer. Glasses clink and I hear people yell out for Old Arnold to set up another round.                     The smoke is blanket thick and I am thankful that after a few minutes of it I cannot see too far ahead of me. And wide awake, I down the whole glass quickly and shout out into the faceless mix of the noise and chatter for Old Arnold to set up another.   Fumbling with the key to Alice’s place, it’s nearly half an hour before I am relieved of the racket by a cab pulling up into the driveway. Alice steps out of the car. I nearly crumble to the ground, unsure of my footing. Half-heartedly, I imagine that if I stay still she might pass me by and not notice I’m standing here sweating, unable to manage unlocking the door without assistance.                     But the moment she steps out of the cab, indeed the very moment her foot touches the drive port, her head turns in my direction. She comes to me, crouching down, wrapping her arms around me. She calls me Baby, over and over. Her black hair falls in my face, obscuring my vision.                     ‘Oh Oliver, will you please tell me what is the matter with you?’                     Pyramids sits down next to Alice, panting, leaning in to lick at my arms only from a cautionary distance. Snow falls from the sky in heavenly drifts, littering us with white dots, making ice of my tears.                     The clocks tolls above the mantle. By the fire, I am unable to let go of her.                     We listen to music on the stereo and she holds me, all night. She kisses my forehead. I am curled up into a ball, letting her hold me but unable to hold her back. Not even expecting it, when she kisses me I picture in my head a truck-sized jellyfish wrapping me in poison tentacles. But rather than disappearing like it should, changing into something else hideous before clearing to show my beautiful Alice’s face once more, the image of the jellyfish instead grows bigger. Its bulbous head lights up with electrical charges and it has fangs that sink into my head as stingers plunge deep into my skin. Waving good-bye, there are sharks shooting away into the darkness of the black water, unlit by the vast head of the jellyfish.                     Alice sighs, deeply. When she gets up off the couch, the minute distance between her last touch and my shoulders feels like a void so immense in size I actually lose my hearing and can’t tell where in the house she’s headed, or even where it is the couch is situated, anymore. I watch her disappear into the darkness of what I think may be the kitchen, thinking she’s been swallowed, eaten away from me.                     I am terrified.                     Softly, to myself, I whisper ‘Please don’t leave me.’                     The words linger at my lips, becoming trails of smoke. Suddenly, Alice appears from the uselessly bright-lit kitchen, making her way toward me. I feel utterly worthless, but somehow stand up straight. ‘What did you say? she asks, holding me, wiping sweat from my forehead with a cold cloth.                     ‘Let’s go see a movie, Alice.’                     No, Oliver. You said something. What was it? Will you tell me what is the matter?’                     But I don’t know what to say to her and I do not know how to react. Please, don’t leave me, I want to say to her.                     Searching for something, anything. Automatically I think of the dream I had, launching myself over miles and mile of prisons. And I have an idea, but I’m not sure if it’s really an idea. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I say, sounding what I think somebody strong or determined might sound like.                     It’s good enough, I think.                     But when I wake up, jerked violently from sleep, I’m sitting in a non-descript hall, littered with huge oak benches. The sound of my feet stomping the tile underneath me when I shoot my legs out fills the hall with a half-assed reverberation. The sheer pathetic value of the echo as it dies off after just two stomps feels like reality. I think we’re at the train station. The train chugging out of the dock is headed toward Pellborough.                     Staring at the lit window, the heads all look like mannequins. Just useless figures seated into the train, giving the impression of a long good-bye. Without taking in my surroundings, I get up and walk past the people in the benches, feeling good for some reason. Then a smirk crosses my face, because I am dreaming this train station. The smirk is a lie. It’s telling me that the dream is kidding. And I will have to wake up to something horrible. I look around for Alice, but of course she would not be here, would she? Are we at her house? I hope so.                     When I wake up, I’m sitting alone in a booth, in a bar. Alice is not here with me. Something happened at her house. I know it. And I passed out. My body broke and I passed out. She isn’t here with me. And why should she be? Why would we be here, of all places?                     A muted trumpet croons from the jukebox. Smoke stings my eyes. My skin is crawling with distaste and disappointment in myself. Think, think, think. Fuck. What did I do?                     Lodged in next to me, there is another sleeping me. A new restlessly dozing Oliver, disheveled and lost in sweet sighs. For the first time since this started happening, I remain entirely calm and I stare at his exposed face, reaching out to touch it, feeling it waxen yet warm and alive. My fingers touch his cheek and his stubble is rough, like mine is. Suddenly, I dig my fingers into his eyes. But still he does not move. My thumbs plunge past the eyeballs, the terrible sound of tight suction charges at my stomach, until I can no longer see the knuckles of my thumbs.                     The duplicate me does not move as I grasp the inside of his skull. Blood does not come from his gouged eyes. He sleeps soundly.                     I pull my hands away, silenced. From my vicious probing his eyeballs lay open and appear slightly dislodged, as if he were a dummy and his parts were temporarily knocked out of order. Yet still his chest rises and falls, fast asleep with open, fucked-up eyes. Mocking me. Sleeping. Forever.                     Forever.                     A thin trickle of blood starts to run out from one of the sleeper’s sockets.                     I look down at my fingers. Half of them are red. Folding these bloodied hands in my lap underneath the table, I lower my head and sigh. A deep tremble rises within me. The sleeping figure next to me nudges against my arm as he breathes away, lost in sleep. It feels like a whole day passes before I finally lift my head again.                     There, across from me, is another me. But this one is different. He is different this time. And what’s different about him makes all the difference in the world right now. This one: He’s not sleeping.                     It’s me how I am, now. Me awake.                     At all once, my skin is dry as paper and as thin. My lips crack and they peel back in revulsion. Oliver is sitting across from me, mouth slightly agape, hunched back against the booth, staring at me with eyes wide in terror. I try to move, to reach for him, but I am frozen in the exact same position as he is, the both of us staring at each other.                     I can’t even move my mouth. I am trapped.                     We sit still, facing each other for quite a long length of time as the muted trumpet continues to blare from the speakers, unconcerned. Oliver sits across from me, slowly and very carefully moving his hands to grip the table at the edge of the booth. Could I talk to him? Would he respond to me? With a sudden feverish move, he shoves the table into my stomach, unleashing a storm of nausea that stays put somehow inside my throat, roiling and falling back down, enclosed in the capsule of my belly, thunderous waves lapping over themselves. The table prods me, but my body is too stiff to be jolted until Oliver finally shoves the table hard, as far as it will go, making it dig into my stomach as it pins my arms where they already dangle uselessly, doubly immovable behind the constraints of the heavy wood.                     Shrinking back against the booth, he says nothing, spilling his drink over and darting off. What feels like an eternity proves mere seconds as I build enough energy to push the fucking table away. But Oliver is fast. As I begin to give chase, Oliver’s already at the door. Out on the street, the sun shines down like a spotlight, penetrating my eyes with a vigorous repeated slashing. I catch the back of his head turning a corner and race toward the end of the block after him. Pushing past endless people who shuffle aimlessly around the sidewalk like scheduled pawns, I round the corner and catch a mere glimpse of Oliver turning another corner, just a block ahead.                     The alley is thin, littered with trash from the two restaurants on either side. The other me – the one who woke up before I did this time – is climbing over a dumpster and hopping the tall boarded fence.                     With a sharp, razorblade yearning scouring the insides of my veins as blood rushes, I chase him, still coughing from the blow of the table, pulsating, gasping, sweating feverishly as I pitch endlessly forward, under and past the great tree with its branches spread out in a dark cloud. But always I am rewarded for my speed with merely a fleeting and haunting glimpse of the back of Oliver’s head, the crook of his elbow or the heel of his shoe. Always, he is one corner ahead of me.                     I pursue him for blocks. He eludes me for miles.                     Over fences, through courtyards and plazas, small thickets and empty streets. Long before the sun began to set, I started to notice the buildings we have been weaving through were no longer familiar to me. I let it go, not caring where I was or where we would end up, so long as I caught Oliver and held him up to my face and asked him what…                     …and what? What would I ask him? Myself. What would I ask myself if I caught him?                     He flew over the hood of a car just as I crawled up the steps of a project basement we shot through. His body disappears over the car. When I finally reach it, I am able to catch just the back of his head, loose curls hanging in the wind as he shoots around the corner of yet another unfamiliar building.                     My feet are so ravaged I am bleeding through the shoes. The heart inside my skeleton’s chest pumps forcibly, covering the fading footfalls of the other Oliver.                     With every last ounce of blood propelling me, I give chase.                     Sometimes I stop to catch my breath, but it’s not possible to really do so and so relentlessly I recommence, harder and harder until it feels the bones in my legs may splinter at any moment.                     And always, with each constant turn, my arrival is just close enough to seize some mockingly infuriating glimpse of the back of Oliver’s head – my head – as it rounds yet another corner, loops around another building.                     I keep running, because I must find myself.                     My feet pound the sidewalk with as much control, as much solidity and as much permanence, as the falling rain.