"We're working under the a.s.sumption that this Talleagle fellow is one of the survivors of the ma.s.sacre of 1899," Sal said. "And if there are more survivors, or if he had any offspring, the super-admin genes are floating around out there."

"No more embodiments," Skinner said again.

A cold wind off the lake dragged dead leaves in circles on Main Street. Skinner imagined Chiho worrying in his absence. She didn't need his bulls.h.i.t, though she'd been putting up with it since day one. Their courtship. One afternoon in a sidewalk cafe, in the days after armistice, Skinner sat across from an agent from Microsoft. Contractor like him, guy with hair like a 1970s presidential candidate and a grin so wide you could have spread a qwerty keyboard across his dental work. Name was Dan Thomas, something nondescript like that. Thomas wanted Skinner to accept an offer to work on the MS private security force. They drank coffee out of ceramics and talked about stock options. Dan Thomas fake laughed at one of Skinner's half-jokes. Thomas described the benefits, the unlimited free soft drinks Skinner could expect when he pledged to MS. As Skinner opened his mouth to say he still had two years on his current contract with Boeing, the guy's head exploded. Or not exploded exactly. More like cleaved down the middle as per a machete whack to an upright watermelon. An eye on one side, an eye on the other, in the middle a canyon of brainy gristle. Skinner hit the deck, unsafetied his Fresca, and tried to locate the a.s.sailant through the chaos of legs both pedestrian- and furniture-related. No second shot arrived. They must've gotten their target. A crew showed up, all bomb-squad helmets and flak jackets, and Skinner was hustled roughly into the back of an armored minivan inside of which he was briefed by a higher-up a.s.shole at Boeing. What it boiled down to was: this Dan Thomas f.u.c.ker had been about to a.s.sa.s.sinate him. "We had one of our guys liquidate him," said the higher-up a.s.shole. Skinner thanked the higher-up a.s.shole and asked who the sniper was. "Cla.s.sified," the higher-up a.s.shole said, and they dumped Skinner out a couple blocks from his apartment. One of the crew was so kind as to have retrieved Skinner's partially eaten blueberry scone from the scene.

Then there was a series of half-seen interst.i.tial memories: raids, bad guys beaten against cinder block walls, Skinner jamming a coat hanger heated up on a stove into an informant's ear ca.n.a.l. It just got ugly from there, nothing this old man trudging down the main drag of his hometown a century removed from the horrors had any right to be proud of, all these acts predicated on fear, that epic wedge between the virtues one imagines oneself to embody and the barbarity of how one survives.

For a time Skinner kept finding himself in the company of folks who just keeled over in his presence, their viscera suddenly externalized by a silenced bullet fired from a discreet location. Outside a Krispy Kreme as he bit into a cla.s.sic glazed, an approaching businessman jerked like he was performing a dance move but it was a round pa.s.sing through his rib cage. While he was in line at a coffee shop, antic.i.p.ating that cinnamon mocha, a guy came up behind him reaching into his suit jacket for the b.u.t.t of his firearm when out popped his eye followed by a gurgle of blood. Once, as he walked across the street, a pa.s.sing car's windows crinkled and webbed under a volley of rounds; later the authorities identified the driver and pa.s.senger as paid killers toting unregistered OfficeMax semiautomatics. In each instance Skinner swallowed hard and scanned the surrounding office buildings for telltale glints of muzzle. But she was too fast, too economical. She had probably already compacted her rifle into its components and blended in with the last-minute Christmas shoppers a block away. Skinner came to consider the sniper his guardian angel and fell in love with the idea of her even though he had yet to discover she was a she. He wanted to believe it was a woman who was saving his a.s.s. As if to extinguish this romantic notion, Chiho one afternoon missed and took a chunk out of Skinner's left calf.

The scene was a crowded city park, now in full-terror mode, with kids being s.n.a.t.c.hed up by parental types-adults whose legs wobbled as they screamed and fled. Skinner had become intimate with the cobblestones, each one imprinted with the name of a person or organization who'd given the city fifty bucks so it could buy some new playground equipment. And this was a ridiculous detail, but Skinner's ice-cream cone was melting and upended out of arm's reach. He was embarra.s.sed that the sniper had seen him walking across the park eating an ice-cream cone with sprinkles on it. Of all the wussy things to eat. Not only that, a strawberry one. (Why were folks always trying to whack him when he was enjoying sugary treats?) But he couldn't stare too long at that sad and abandoned confection because the a.s.sa.s.sin, a guy who basically appeared to have bought his outfit at a men's store called the a.s.sa.s.sin's Clothier-black jacket, pants, sungla.s.ses, white shirt, black tie-anyhoo this a.s.sa.s.sin'd been merely clipped as well, or rather a round had obliterated his right hand, the hand he typically used to fire his gun, but unfortunately he was ambidextrous and as he reached for his pistol, part of his neck disappeared and it was like anatomy cla.s.s in the park with the wailing people and the melting high-fat dessert. And don't forget that Skinner's calf was spraying blood in a sort of fountainy arc, and dammit he'd really been enjoying that cone! Then, within seconds it seemed, Skinner's guardian angel descended from her cloud and was hauling him up over her shoulders in a fireman's carry, wearing his 250-lb. body like a stole, sprinting toward the door of a van opened to reveal a couple guys with headsets shouting frantically into throat-lozenge-shaped microphones in front of a wall of surveillance gear. Chiho tossed Skinner inside and scrambled on top of him. He got a good look at her. She had a bob hairdo like the ancient actress Louise Brooks (though Skinner didn't know to make this comparison himself) and a vinyl catsuit adhered to her body. This woman, this sniper, his future wife, screamed motherf.u.c.ker this and motherf.u.c.ker that at the two surveillance techs and it was clear here that the deal with the calf, with the bleeding and the fractured tibia? That had been an accident. Whose accident it was was not immediately clear but Skinner, though in a great deal of woozy pain, just frankly didn't feel in the mood to a.s.sign blame. Then he vomited and there was that to deal with, so long story short, Chiho hung up her sniper rifle and retired, visited Skinner at the hospital, and before you knew it they were watching comedies together and sharing pieces of cheesecake. Then the marrying part, the kids, Arizona, and now this. A ghost town.

I am the reptile brain, acting out my dumb violent s.h.i.tty themes, Skinner thought, stepping over trash. He came to the house where he'd grown up and pa.s.sed once more through the living room, muttering, "Please kill me now." He climbed the steps and pushed open the door to his old bedroom. This time he found only a moldy place where, it appeared, pigeons had enjoyed some good times. Nothing furniture-wise but a dresser. The light-switch cover was shaped like a baseball mitt. Peeling wallpaper. He stepped across creaky floorboards to touch some artifacts collected on the dresser. A baseball signed by a long-forgotten minor leaguer, an empty DVD Amaray case. His hands gravitated to a smallish wooden box. He pulled back the lid. Well what do you know, it was still there. He'd forgotten about it: his first memory kit. Back then these things were only toys, the Apple console an ugly chunk of plastic. Skinner turned it over and found a card still inserted in its slot, a dormant childhood memory. It seemed almost too tidy to him, that he should find a memory waiting for him here, that perhaps the hidden motivation for his journey to Bramble Falls was the retrieval of a pivotal, forgotten event. Perhaps the card stored memories of the exquisitely horrific series of tortures and executions that had twisted him into a warrior for Christian America. Or maybe there were memories of his mother. He couldn't engage the memory here. Too risky. Plug in a sequence of the killings he'd carried out as an adolescent and his brain was guaranteed to enter a permanently f.u.c.ked-up zone. He needed Chiho or Carl to sit beside him and manually disengage him if the memory pulled him too deeply into the depths. He stashed the box in his backpack and left the house, half expecting it to go up in flames or crumble into kindling behind him. But it remained silent and inert, a hideout for squirrels.

Skinner mounted the marble steps of the library, lost in thought. He called out the names of the Vacunins upon entering but got no answer. When he entered the main reading room he thought he heard voices coming from the direction of Periodicals. As he rounded a shelf displaying magazines of long-expired topicality, the voices grew louder, more animal. In an instant, he saw the scholars, fornicating. Then, of course, there was the noise, the skin thwack of the man's pelvis against the woman's backside, providing a sort of percussive audio layer overlaid with their urgent grunts. This act they performed on a table piled with open tax ledgers, bound issues of regional magazines, topographical surveys, and the guest books of hotels. An open bottle of chardonnay tipped over and glugged its contents on volumes of city council meeting minutes. The Vacunins turned their heads simultaneously and regarded Skinner with slack-mouthed expressions that could have been surprise or simply a midcoital relaxation of facial muscles. Skinner sprinted from the building.

Outside, he leaned against the masonry to collect his breath, complicated somewhat by the fact that he was laughing. As his laughter mellowed into chuckles, he scrawled out a note on the back of a flyer for a long-ago concert, thanking the Vacunins for the wine. Bramble Falls had delivered what he'd come for. He figured he could make it beyond the narrow ridge tonight and set up camp in the woods. Only a few hours remained until sundown so he had to move. He pushed on out of town, up the switchbacks, through pines, the sun molten and rotten over the hills. He came to the narrow ridge and steadied himself with his walking stick, taking it slow. The emotional algorithm he'd been processing when he departed Seattle had lost some of its power over his thoughts. His own problems looked small, the cloning of his son more a curiosity than anything. Every few minutes his mind replayed the scene with the Vacunins and he laughed again. It was while laughing that his walking stick slid out of his hand. Bending to retrieve it, his feet slipped on the pebbly trail and he found himself momentarily suspended in the air. This state didn't last long. He fell hard on his face. Then, though it took him a few second to understand this was happening, Skinner rolled and slid down the east side of the slope, his descent slowed a little by scrub pines that struggled to stay rooted in the grade. He swore, heard the gear jangling in his backpack, tasted blood on his lips, smelled dirt, and beheld the surfaces of the earth chopped up and spliced together, intercut with bursts of cloudless sky. Coming to rest in a dry gully full of smooth stones, he lost consciousness for long enough that when he woke he was shivering in darkness. He struggled to get to his feet but the lower half of his body wouldn't cooperate. He slapped his thighs and felt nothing.

"This is some deep s.h.i.t," he said aloud. He managed to take off his backpack and unfold his thermal blanket, find his phone. No service. Next he found the first-aid kit and clicked the key fob Bionet transmitter. The little blue light took its time growing to full brightness. He turned his eyes to the night sky, hoping to spot one of those pinp.r.i.c.ks of light moving in orbit. He pointed the device south to a section of the sky where he thought a Bionet satellite might hide out.

Within five minutes, the device spoke in a woman's calm voice. "Welcome to the Bionet. What is your ailment?"

"Paralyzed from the waist down."

"What is your hoped-for resolution?"

"I want to walk again," Skinner said.

The transmitter appeared to ruminate on this, modemy scratching sounds issuing from within its plastic sh.e.l.l. After a minute or so, it said, "We're sorry. We cannot complete your request at this time. Do you wish to report another ailment?"

"Full physical."

More scratching, like there was a rodent in there working gears. After some time the device reported Skinner's heart rate, blood pressure, endocrine levels, sperm count, and a variety of other vitals. It all sounded miraculously within the range of normal, but then again this was an old model of transmitter and these things were known to be buggy. He was just relieved to hear there was no internal bleeding. His body produced an ever-present corporeal throb. He asked the transmitter for painkillers and within moments his hands went numb.

"Chiho," he blubbered futilely in the night.

Skinner pulled his body about fifteen feet to the base of a gnarled little tree and wrapped his thermal blanket tight around his shoulders. Focus, m.o.f.o. Comprehend the situation. He was trapped in this alpine divot, its sides too steep to scale even if both legs had been operational. Some sort of spinal injury had shut off the lights below his waist. The transmitter was really only good for menial diagnostics and over-the-counter wireless pharmaceutical dispensing. He figured he had enough food for three days. His phone might as well have been a rock. He could use his thermal to create a lean-to of sorts next to this little tree. He had guns.

The next morning clouds rolled in. Colder. It appeared he had p.i.s.sed himself. He pulled his boots off, then his socks and pants and long johns. These legs were like dead sausages connected to the living meat of the rest of this body. Hard not to consider this as anything but distressing. He cursed into the transmitter, then was polite enough to receive another dose of painkiller. He plugged the tip of his p.e.n.i.s into the opening of an empty water bottle and secured it with duct tape-a poor man's catheter-then pulled on his other long johns and pants. The whole process left him exhausted and frustrated and sore. He requested and was denied more painkillers. He hurled the Bionet transmitter then crawled to retrieve it, spitting and cussing the whole way.

"Chiho!" he called, her name catching in his throat.

The sun pa.s.sed behind clouds.

He gathered wood and built a small fire and watched sparks rise and disappear against the backdrop of stars. He faded in and out but the sky never seemed to get any darker or lighter. He remembered the man on the mesa with his refrigerator filled with beer, stacks of books, and stuffed animals. Maybe that place was some sort of Bardo, maybe he'd pa.s.s through it on his way to the afterlife. Crazy talk, Skinner. He tried to shake the thoughts out of his head. Because the one thing he wasn't going to do down here in this gully was die. There'd be no check-in procedure with the great beyond. He was going to get out of here and get back to his wife and daughter and grandson.

"You really think you're going to see Chiho again?"

Skinner drew his Coca-Cola and thrust it in the direction of the voice. On the other side of the fire an impossibly old man in buckskin and ripped denim, with raven feathers appearing to grow from his long gray hair, poked embers with a stick. His lips curled over toothless gums.

"Identify yourself, old man."

The Indian shook his head. To speak he just looked at Skinner and thrust the words out of his head with his eyes. "I won't fight you."

"You're Talleagle."

"I'm a dude pa.s.sing through. That is what I do. I pa.s.s through."

"I'm dreaming this."

"You're in a laboratory."

"This land, it's infected with hallucinations."

"We asked you to reproduce, and your offspring was murdered. Now you're on your way to s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up your second chance."

"Who was that man on the mesa, with the refrigerator and piles of things?"

Talleagle barely shrugged. "The Last Dude. I walk my path, he constructs the message. That's our arrangement."

"You need to help me get out of here."

"Why do you expect me to help you," Talleagle asked, "when you murdered my kin?" The Indian opened his buckskin jacket to reveal a sunken chest. With a great deal of effort he pushed his hand into his abdomen, releasing trickles then gouts of old black blood. After a moment of struggle Talleagle grunted and pulled out his liver. "Eat me," he said, handing the organ to Skinner.

"I . . ."

"In my flesh is the medicine that will make you walk again."

Skinner took the b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.s and considered it with disgust.

"If you want to walk, you will eat my flesh."

Skinner gnawed off a bite from the liver. Talleagle told him to chew and swallow. As soon as the meat hit Skinner's stomach his nervous system lit up in electric pain. Talleagle's eyes burst into flames.

Stars. Tears. Aloud: "Don't f.u.c.king kill yourself, soldier. Don't f.u.c.king kill yourself. Don't f.u.c.king-"

The sun rose and the fire dwindled to a cigarette's worth of smoke. The bottle connected to Skinner's p.e.n.i.s was full of urine. He disattached, emptied, then reattached it. He allowed himself three sips of water and a couple bites from an energy bar. A smattering of rain forced him under the thermal blanket where he shivered and clutched his belongings. After a coughing fit he consulted the transmitter again.

"Bionet. What ails me?"

"You're getting a cold," the transmitter responded.

"Well, no s.h.i.t," Skinner said. "More painkillers, please. And give me something for these f.u.c.king hallucinations."

"Sorry, that's kind of out of our area of expertise," the transmitter said. Did it sound sad? As the pharmacological haze suffused his body Skinner dug through the backpack. The memory console. This would be his treat for getting out of this mess-indulging in some memories from his childhood: a happy trip to an amus.e.m.e.nt park, a birthday party, building a tree fort with his dad. The beautiful tropes of a boyhood were hidden here, he hoped. When the rain ceased he set the console on a rock to recharge its solar battery. He spent the afternoon watching the indicator light turn from red to orange to green and thought about how useless it was to be angry at anybody about an abstract principle. He'd really f.u.c.ked it up with Roon, probably for good. All the anticlone propaganda he'd swallowed-what had it left him? How could any idea that drives a man away from the people who love him be considered sound? A rodent scurried across his line of vision. Woodp.e.c.k.e.rs tapped paradiddles into tree trunks, sending echoes down the walls of the gully.

Skinner unholstered his Coca-Cola and set it on a rock within arm's reach. "Soldier, kill thyself," he said aloud, then growled, "Shut up, you sack of s.h.i.t."

When night fell the Bionet transmitter died. Skinner smashed it against a rock and tossed the five broken pieces as far as his weak arm could. He added a few more sticks to the fire and ate a meager ration of food, enough to keep his body awake. The rain picked up. He cradled the memory console against his chest, and, suspecting he was about to die, pressed ENGAGE.

The memory was so faint that at first it barely overlaid the physical world's darkness and fire. Yet if Skinner squinted he could make out faded green gra.s.s in a yard, a stuffed bunny with one ear lying on a hardwood floor, a bowl of Cheerios. The memories were choppy, sputtering, not entirely visualized, struggling to connect to his consciousness through the ancient console. The software had a tendency to render memories in greater resolution in response to feelings of empathy and tenderness. He packed his belongings and prepared for a long hike. Wait, he hadn't moved from this spot under the tree. The packing belonged to the first-person narrative loading before him. Someone else's memories had gotten tangled with his own. c.r.a.p interface. The rememberer shaved in front of the bathroom mirror and said, "Memory console calibration. Remember this now." The memory card didn't contain Skinner's memories at all. These memories belonged to his father.

Skinner watched the courtship of his mother through his father's eyes. A coffee shop, afternoon light through the windows, the sound of a burr grinder, this woman who would carry him knitting with red and yellow yarn and occasionally sipping from a cup of Earl Grey. The next memory was a moment or two after lovemaking, the stickiness of belly sweat and a house fly b.u.t.ting its head against a pane of gla.s.s like a frustrated nugget of static. Skinner watched his parents hiking through an alpine meadow, coming to a ridge overlooking a swath of western Washington, breathing hard. His dad brought a pair of binoculars to his eyes and swept them across the horizon, finding a distant city in flames.

Skinner watched his own head emerging from between his mother's legs, felt with his father's hands the warmth of his own seven-pound body, smelled a wet diaper, heard wails coming from the direction of the crib in the next room, then watched his infant self suckling from his mother as snow fell outside. He saw wisps of hair sprout from his head, turn into brown curls, saw his own first steps, saw himself smack wood blocks together and stuff blueberries into his cheeks. Through his father's memories he witnessed himself vomiting all over himself, eating a pancake, pushing a toy ambulance, feeding a dog a potato chip, pointing at squirrels, crying at a loud noise, tearing apart a magazine, falling asleep in the crook of an arm. He was snoring, crawling, babbling, laughing, drinking from a cup, using a crayon. Skinner watched his father's hands smoothing, patting, clapping, b.u.t.toning the b.u.t.tons on his clothes, wiping a tear, opening an envelope, maneuvering a spoon into his mouth. As he grew older the memories sped up, a slideshow of skinned knees and sandwich bread, fishing tackle and wood grain. Running to catch a matinee. Learning how to change a tire. Chasing each other with a football. Blowing bubbles with bubble gum. Boyhood! He ached witnessing it again through the eyes of the man who'd loved him most. As the rain came down in an angry hiss, the broken soldier shivering alone at the bottom of the world mouthed the words, My son.

Q&A WITH LUKE PIPER, PART 5.

We were supposed to meet Squid outside the buffalo enclosure at Golden Gate Park. He would be disguised as Chewbacca and was somehow going to fix Erika's writer's block. It was one of San Francisco's pea-soup foggy days. The three of us waited in the mist on the bench as we'd been instructed, with Squid's painting of Kirkpatrick's academy, drinking our coffees. Then, after some time, around nine o'clock, came the steady procession of a marching legion. At first we could only hear them, boots stomping the earth in unison. Then they materialized out of the fog-storm troopers, hundreds of them, in formation. Just like in Star Wars, with the glossy white armor, laser blasters. I turned to Wyatt and said we really needed to chill out with the pot smoking. But this wasn't a drug thing, it was something else. A parade. A convention. Following the storm troopers was a high school marching band playing the Imperial theme. I laughed-it was pretty cool. Then the Jedis appeared, all these nerds with their lightsabers, then other a.s.sorted characters, Boba Fetts and Han Solos, here and there an overweight C-3PO, the bikini version of Princess Leia, stumpy Darth Vaders, some sand people, someone's dog dressed as Yoda. And Wookiees. Dozens of them. We had no way of knowing which Wookiee was Squid. As the parade marched past blasting its theme and waving its weapons one Wookiee broke off from the group and approached us. Really authentic-looking costume, about the same height as the real Chewbacca. When he spoke, though, it was a normal black guy's voice.

He said, "You people are really screwed, you do know that, right?"

There was so much I wanted to ask, so I just started firing questions at him. Where was the Kirkpatrick Academy of Human Potential? Did he know Nick Fedderly? Why was he named Squid? What could he tell us about the weird doc.u.ment Erika had channeled? But he'd have none of it. He just shook his head, in a way you'd imagine a Wookiee would, I might add. Wyatt turned the painting around and asked if he'd painted it. Squid the Wookiee did a little hop as if we'd startled him. He asked us where we'd gotten it. We told him about stealing it from the cafe restroom and how the cafe owner had killed herself. I sensed that our ownership of the painting was a mistake. He told us we needed to destroy it immediately. I could tell he wanted it but Wyatt was holding on to it pretty tight.

Squid said, "Look, I'm not trying to be a d.i.c.k. You guys just need to know it's not safe for you to be digging into all this s.h.i.t. Just leave it alone and walk away."

I said, "I think you're full of it. There's no shady organization involved in some weird conspiracy. I don't even really care about finding Nick anymore, to tell you the truth."

Squid said, "We're all in danger, dude. I'm putting myself on the line just talking to you. Do you want your writing back or not?"

Erika said yes and Squid/Chewbacca opened one of the compartments on his utility belt and handed her a tin of Altoids.

"It lasts about half an hour. He'll know who you are. He's expecting you. Just be humble and grateful and he'll take care of you," he said, then he blended back into the crowd, into a pa.s.sing contingent of other Chewbaccas. We lost him. Erika opened the tin, which contained a single Altoid. To think we thought it was plain old LSD.

What was it?

I still don't know. I guess some kind of custom, lab-made psychedelic. Back at the house, the three of us sat at the kitchen table staring at the Altoid for a long time. I was worried it was a trap, something poisonous. Wyatt suggested we take it to a chemist. Erika thought that was too risky. Finally she declared what the h.e.l.l, she was going to take it. We gathered some pillows and went out back to our garden. Erika had planted all sorts of flowers out there, installed a bubbling fountain. We put the pillows down on the flagstones and sat in a triangle. Erika placed the Altoid on her tongue and the three of us linked hands, following Huxley's advice, making sure the setting was peaceful and the people involved were loving and supportive. We sat there for a good five minutes waiting for something to happen. Erika closed her eyes. Wyatt and I watched her. After a bit she opened one eye and snorted and said nothing was happening. "Maybe it's just an extra-minty Altoid," I said and we all laughed. Then Erika's head snapped back and she was gone. She didn't respond when we spoke or when we gently slapped her wrist. Wyatt checked her breathing and her pulse. She was breathing a little fast and her pulse was up but nothing too crazy. Kind of like she was on a run. Wyatt asked her what was happening but she just shook her head and waved him off. Her pupils were huge. I kept my eye on my watch. Ten minutes pa.s.sed. Twenty. At thirty-one minutes she gasped a huge breath of air. Her eyes fluttered and she squeezed our hands really tight and then leaned over and vomited in my lap. Actually she vomited several times on me, squeezing my hand so tight I couldn't pull myself away. Meanwhile Wyatt was squeezing my other hand so I was basically trapped there, one corner of a triangle, a vomited-upon hypotenuse. After about four blasts of this, Erika let go of our hands, wiped her mouth, and said, "Wow!"

What was her demeanor like? Was she still tripping?

She was completely normal. After she said "Wow," she confirmed that whatever it was she'd dropped was definitely not boring old LSD. Of course, I wanted to hear all about the trip but I was covered in puke, so I stripped out of my clothes and went back in the house and took a shower. When I got out, Erika and Wyatt were holding each other on the couch in the living room. The scene radiated a supreme aura of love. Not love in a s.e.xual way, particularly, but a profound energy field of acceptance and celebration. When I came into the room, Erika saw me and smiled, gestured me over, and hugged me. Then she told us the story.

The trip began with a vortex opening in the sky, like a tornado but made of shadows. This swirling portal summoned her and she let herself rocket up through the atmosphere into s.p.a.ce. She traveled at an unfathomable speed through the sponge-like structure of the universe, a structure she sensed to be omniscient and acutely aware of her past, present, and future. She felt she was being watched with curiosity or amus.e.m.e.nt, like a human watches an ant b.u.mbling along its path. The universe revealed itself to be unbearably and painfully gorgeous, to the point that she feared its beauty might kill her. Gradually she decelerated and the foam-like structure of the universe reconst.i.tuted itself into stars and galaxies. Floating in front of her was a cylindrical object, a craft of some sort, as long as the earth is wide but about the same proportions as a soda can. As she approached she observed its worn exterior, scuffed and pocked by asteroids. She came to a metallic orifice, an a.n.u.s-like portal into the vessel, pa.s.sed through it with little difficulty, and found herself floating through a long tunnel toward a pinp.r.i.c.k of light. As she told the story to us back here on earth she said it reminded her of a drawing of Persephone emerging from Hades that she'd seen in a children's book on Greek mythology. When she emerged she was sort of coughed up onto a field covered in the most spectacular wildflowers. Looking at each petal, each bud was like falling madly in love. Above her stretched a horizontal shaft of what appeared to be sunlight, threading the cylinder like yarn through a bead. She figured this craft must have been not unlike the one in Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. I wasn't familiar with that book so she drew a diagram for me, like-can I have a piece of paper?

Sure. Here.

Like this, then.

The inner surface of the cylinder was lined with vast forests, plains, deserts, bodies of water, all rotating around a central axis, a filament that provided light and energy, like a fluorescent tube running down the middle of a larger cylinder. Erika kept using the words "painfully alive" when talking about this realm. Painfully alive, painfully alive. A naked, dark-skinned girl of about ten approached cautiously. In her hair were vines and tendrils that curled and sprouted leaves and bloomed flowers as Erika watched. The girl held out her hand and spoke something in a language Erika didn't recognize. Taking her hand, Erika let the girl lead her down a path into a wooded area, beneath trees unlike any she'd ever seen. The trees were more like pillars of gorgeous, multicolored feathers-reds, greens, blues, purples-about thirty or forty feet tall. Cosmic totem poles. It was all Erika could do to refrain from bursting into tears of wonderment. They came to a rocky hill. Erika sensed that this was where the ruler of this realm lived. The girl motioned for her to sit on the cool moss in front of a cave, then scampered off into the woods. After a moment a figure emerged from the cave, a tall, lurching thing in a long red robe with a hood that obscured its face. Its hands were long, bony, and shockingly white. Erika wondered briefly if she should be afraid but was soon flooded with the absolute rightness of this encounter, like she'd been waiting for it her whole life.

The figure spoke. "I hear you've got a nasty case of writer's block."

Erika nodded. She instantly recognized the voice but couldn't place it. It was neither adult nor child, neither man nor woman. She asked the figure who he was.

"I'm Michael," he said. "Come, I will heal you."

She followed Michael through the forest to a stream over which an old tree bent its branches. From the branches grew fruits like she'd never seen, furry purple ovals. Before her eyes the tree blossomed and grew its fruit, which dropped continually into the stream, which bore the fruit, bobbing, away. Michael instructed her to catch one of the fruits and eat it quickly. She did as instructed, pulling apart the purple peel to eat the sweet, pink flesh inside. She said it tasted like nothing she could even begin to describe. When she finished, Michael took her hand and said that when she returned to San Francisco she'd be able to write again. She grew frantic. She had so many questions she wanted to ask him. She wanted to know if she had really been visited by extraterrestrials as a child. Michael said yes, this was so, and there had been contact between these visitors and earth for tens of thousands of years. For many centuries these extraterrestrials had been working to reprogram the human subconscious, preparing it for eventual interlife form communion. The science fiction genre, Michael explained, was a means by which humans were coming to internalize, through myth, knowledge of the existence of other sentient life forms. By the time this communion occurred, humans would be psychologically prepared to embark on an interplanetary collaboration to spread life through the universe.

The s.e.xual reproduction of life between interplanetary species.

Yes, exactly.

Oh, come on.

What?

I just find this incredibly implausible. Whatever. It was a psychedelic trip.

Disbelieve all you want. What do I care?

Continue.

You asked for my story, didn't you?

I did. Carry on.

I really don't feel like continuing.

You have no choice.

I may not have a choice, but you-you can't f.u.c.k with me like this. You can't- Are you threatening me?

No. No, I'm- Good, because- I need some water.

Here you go. Yes, yes, go on.

Sorry. Okay. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Okay, so let me-okay, so that's the moment Erika gasped and returned to the patio behind the house and threw up on me. Then later, after she told us what had happened in the cylinder, she went upstairs and resumed work on the novel she'd stopped midsentence some months before. The old boxing match with her keyboard started up again. I had these vomited-on clothes that needed washing so I put them in a garbage bag and dumped them in the sink in the laundry room. As I was rinsing out my clothes, something caught my eye amid the chunks of potato and scrambled eggs. A little key, like the kind used for safety deposit boxes.

What did Erika think it was?

Well . . .

You never told her?

I would have. Just-let me back up. I didn't tell you about the Chinese herbalist. I'd had this rash on my right ankle, a sort of psoriasis thing. I had an MD I went to who gave me some steroid ointment but that didn't do any good. So Wyatt suggested I see his Chinese doctor. He'd cleared up this wicked sinus infection Wyatt came down with one time. So I went-this was weeks before the meeting with Chewbacca-and it was this cramped little place in Chinatown, drying herbs hanging from the rafters, a couple of ninety-year-old Chinese women sitting at a little table in the front drinking tea. Dr. Wu was the doctor, middle-aged man, gla.s.ses. He parted some curtains and had me come back to the exam room and show him my tongue. Anyway, whatever, he sent me home with some herbs that were supposed to be infused into a tea. And by herbs, I'm not talking about basil and oregano. These looked like twigs and bark and stuff dug up from the floor of a forest. Horrific-tasting s.h.i.t. But the rash started to disappear. So it happened that on the day Erika took her trip, I had to go back to get more herbs. By this time it was afternoon, she was upstairs, banging away on her keyboard, and Wyatt was doing yoga or something, so I thought I might as well go do my errand. On my way through North Beach I started to feel like maybe I was being followed, like I was in a movie. There was a big black woman with a kid in a stroller, an old man listening to an iPod, some teenage girls talking loudly on their phones. Then about half a block behind me there was this skinny homeless-looking dude, huge beard, sungla.s.ses, floppy hat. If anyone was following me, it had to be that guy. Sure enough, he stayed behind me for several blocks. I stopped a couple times pretending to look at window displays and he did the same. Then I'd continue on and he'd follow. Whoever he was, he wasn't trained to follow people. I started to wonder if this was Squid, but Squid had spoken in an African American guy's voice, and my stalker was white or Asian as far as I could tell. I made it to Dr. Wu's and got my refill of herbs. When I came out of the shop there he was, standing a few storefronts away, gazing at red-glazed Peking ducks hanging like violins in the window. That's when I did something out of character. I walked up to him. When I was a few feet away he saw me and sort of jumped, then turned to walk away. I lunged and grabbed his shoulder and yanked him around. He fell to the sidewalk. I yelled at him, demanded to know why he was following me. He took off his sungla.s.ses and said my name. It was Nick.

Ah.

I couldn't believe it. He said he wanted me to meet some people. So I went with him. I wanted to ask him so many questions, find out what he'd been doing the last five years. He was both as I remembered him, underneath that scraggly beard, and also someone new, some kind of mad street prophet. He struck me as someone who'd seen things. Things that damage you or at least leave you permanently altered. As I tried to keep up with him he muttered and mumbled a stream of nonsense I just barely couldn't hear. Whenever I tried to stop him and ask him to repeat himself he just said, "You'll get debriefed, don't worry." I noticed he stunk, like he'd been sleeping in spoiled milk. And yet . . . the guy seemed so f.u.c.king alive.

We left Chinatown and hopped on a series of buses that took us to Berkeley. He didn't say much during the ride. Just stared straight ahead mostly. I decided I'd keep my mouth shut and let this play out. I'd abandoned my search for him and gotten rich, found myself unemployed, and now here was the path again, intersecting with my life when I least expected it. We got off in Berkeley and walked for what felt like a mile, into a typical residential neighborhood. Little Victorians in various states of renovation. Dogs and flower beds, barbecues, that kind of place. We came to a red house with a door that had a little slot where the peek hole was supposed to be. Nick texted someone and a few seconds later the little slot slid open and two eyes stared out at us. When they saw me, they widened, and the slot slammed shut. Nick appeared to text someone back and forth for a while, angrily muttering the whole time. Finally the door opened and a guy grabbed both Nick and me and pulled us in. Big dude, wearing a UC Santa Cruz sweatshirt, red afro, handlebar mustache. He dragged us to a door leading down to a bas.e.m.e.nt. As we descended we were hit with these really bright lights and all these voices yelling and arguing. I could only make out silhouettes at first but it sounded like twenty or so people.

The voices calmed down as a woman yelled for them to shut up. Then she said, "What the f.u.c.k do you think you're doing, Frog?" It took me a second to realize that Frog was Nick. Nick unshielded his eyes and spoke in a stammer. He said he'd brought me here because we had taken an oath of brotherhood years before and he knew he could trust me.

"This wasn't the protocol," the woman said.

Nick said, "I understand that, Swan. But the plan had to change. He spotted me."

Swan said, "Well you know he can't go back to his natural habitat now, don't you? Now that you've brought him here?"