- 5 -

* * * * *

         A mechanism counts the segments with dispassionate precision. Circuits oversee with diffident calm. A predetermined number of segments signals a electronic pulse. The pulse arcs, closes, touches a switch that’s too small to be seen. The count starts again.
         The numbers on the clock ticked forward one increment. His eyes had gone dry from staring at the face. Seen from too close the numbers threatened to become little more than a collection of short, straight lines, abstract figures devoid of all meaning. Too often he found his eyes drawn to the black spaces between the lines, the shadows cast by the LCD somehow three-dimensional and deeper than anything he could stand. He had to pull himself back. It was all meaninglessness surrounded by the abyss. But that was wrong. He knew it was. It had to be.
         He was lying on the bed, still in his clothes. His arms were wrapped around his shoulders, almost hugging himself. The covers were thrown off to the side, skin peeled from muscle. The pale red light of the clock laid bulbous fingers on his face, giving it a wasted, unreal quality. The only sound in the room was his labored breathing, a ruffian forcing violent air into unwilling lungs. He couldn’t remember how long he had been here, on his bed. Hours, maybe. But he didn’t want it to be hours. Every time he tried to focus on the time, it blurred, wavered, slipped away from him. He was trapped in a void of null-time, but that was only sad illusion. It was stumbling along, and he couldn’t stop it.
         He tried to keep his breathing to a regular rhythm but it only gave him a reason to count the seconds, a task that caused a tight, hollow feeling in his chest, a chain reaction that led to sharp, rapid breaths, culminating in deep gasping gulps of air, silent pleas for a thing he couldn’t name to stop.
         When it finally happened, he had let the pressure isolate him so much from the world that he barely noticed. A faint ringing in his ears was the only clue at first, a brief flicker of arclight that registered the same way snow did on a bathroom scale. There was the smell of ancient stardust, a stench scooped from deeptime, followed by the weight of a presence so dense that a teaspoon carelessly dropped might fall through the mantle itself and not stop until it escaped gravity’s thrust, somewhere on the other side.
         It coated his room like the flash from a camera. It was standing on the other side of his bed. He knew that, without looking. He knew a lot of things now. Voices whispered diverse facts to him with mathemathical fondness. None of that made any difference in this moment. He even knew what it was going to say. He vowed not to listen, as if that might make it less real.
         Perhaps he heard it take a short, deep breath, as if nervous. But that made no sense. They didn’t breathe. It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t hear.
         “I just wanted to tell you . . .” and that mannered, oddly accented voice cut right through his imposed deafness, “. . . that’s it over.” The flatness of the tone struck him in the gut.
         He responded despite himself. “Over? You mean . . .” and somehow the words forced themselves through the dry tightness of his throat, “you mean she’s gone?” What was growing in his gut was threatening to spread into his chest. There was no room. He couldn’t keep it all in.
         “Yes. Gone.” There was a brief pause, as if the man thought he was leaving something out. “I’m sorry.”
         Something sour tickled the back of his throat, but he clenched his teeth tightly together and clamped his eyes shut, pressing his face into the all too yielding sheets of the bed, trying to shut out the world, turning away from the mocking clock and the silent man, seeking a place where the past was the future, and all the bad things were locked into a place you could never venture and never hope to reach.

* * * * *

         But Tristian knew that place wasn’t possible and he had to uncurl himself and reenter the world. It was hard. The tightness in his chest refused to go away, the sensation of his heart being compressed by too many contradicting forces. She’s gone. The words were beat into his head by the arms of a tireless man, eager to bludgeon its way into the center of his brain, not caring what he destroyed to get there. She’s gone. He couldn’t wrap his mind around it. Nothing was real. Even dreams weren’t real. Any second now he would dissolve and be nothing more than dust swirling in the wake of a speeding vehicle. That’s all life was. Invisible motion. But why couldn’t he move now? Dread inertia had taken hold of him and all he could feel was the jagged sickness of fatal words ricocheting inside his body, cutting him with each touch.
         Somewhere he found the strength to speak. “How . . . how long ago . . . did it happen?”
         “What do you mean?” The voice was distantly curious, asking the question only because it was expected. The man could read him like a ruptured novel, there was no need for words. But it made him ask anyway, because he had to work for his answers, apparently. That was his theory, at least. They never said.
         “What are you . . . talking about?” His voice was full of nails, they were scratching his throat. He was tumbling without moving, falling backwards into the man, caught in his subtle gravity.
         “Her heart stopped four minutes ago,” the man said matter-of-factly, “a minute and a half after that her breathing ceased. A minute ago I witnessed the last spark of brain activity. It was a fragment of a note of a symphony she might have written, had she any musical inclination.” The voice wasn’t clinical, but it was relentless, laying down the facts with calculated ease. She’s gone. That was all he heard. That was all that mattered. “I just wanted you to be more specific, that’s all.”
         “Oh God, shut up . . .” he breathed, shifting his arms to cover his head, realizing that it made no difference. She’s gone. “Just, please, just . . . don’t make this any harder than it already is.”
         “That’s something that’s entirely up to you, I’m afraid,” the man replied easily, and Tristian had the sense that somehow, the man was enjoying this. It wasn’t any kind of humor he could possibly conceive of, but it might have been amusement all the same.
         Make it stop. He didn’t know what he was referring to. His stomach wouldn’t stop churning and he felt cold and empty. “Oh God,” he whispered again, shuddering before he could stop himself. All of a sudden he could feel the weight of the sword at his hip, pulling him down. She’s gone. Abruptly, he sat up, swinging his legs so that his feet touched the floor. The loss of contact with the warm sheets caused another chill to course through him. The numbers still hovered tantalizingly before him, even as he ignored them. He didn’t care what time it was.
         “Did it really happen?” he asked nobody at all, his voice numb. Running quivering hands through his hair, he took another deep breath, feeling his heart beating in a suddenly hollow space. It didn’t make sense. This day was wrong. The darkness was textured nothingness, a box adrift in the void. His eyes refused to accomodate to the loss. “Is she really . . .”
         “I can take you there, if you want.”
         The edges of his soul were tingling. “No!” he shouted with a quiet rasp, the effort hurting him more than he realized. “I don’t . . . I don’t need to see, I just . . .” He rubbed his face with his hands, the skin far too hot and slick. He couldn’t be like this. She’s gone. He didn’t know what else to do. From behind his hands, he tried to bark, “Get an ambulance there. I don’t want her to be there like that until . . .” the words almost refused to emerge, “until someone finds her.” His voice was too compressed, crumpled and small.
         He thought the man would argue. They always seemed to enjoy taunting him through the guise of innocent questions. But instead all he said was, “Very well,” and that was that.
         Silence reigned for a few seconds. It was torture. His brain wouldn’t stay quiet. She’s gone. The refrain tried to leave marks but there was nothing to grab onto. He let his arms fall onto his knees and stared straight ahead, trying to find something recognizable in the monochrome darkness before him. It was a chore to breathe.
         “Did she suffer?” he asked the man suddenly. He hated the cracked, frayed quality of his voice. He felt constricted, wrapped in a sheathe of air too tight to move, unable to do anything but watch the limitless motions of those around him.
         “No . . . not that I’m aware of,” the man replied. He paused, perhaps to think about that for a second. “No. I don’t believe she did.” There was an odd tenderness to his tone. He was so far away. Everyone was just too far away.
         Including her. She’s gone. Detached, the thought managed to bridge the gap. “That’s . . .” Tristian started to say, and didn’t finish. “Oh God . . .” he snarled, digging his nails painfully into his palms, the hollow feeling in his stomach growing, a stain threatening to envelop him entirely. “God damn it,” he said, his voice breaking at the end until it was nearly a pathetic hiccup of a phrase. She’s gone. And she deserved better than this weak-willed mental flailing, but he didn’t know what else to do. The ground was constantly shifting, tilting the room beyond repair, and his ribs were converted to shards of jagged glass, stabbing into him with every ragged breath. He had to move. Stagnation would be the end of him. Inertia had a convincing grasp.
         With a muffled grunt he tore himself from the web of his own creation, flailing at invisible hornets, nearly tripping, spinning himself around in the process so that he was facing the other man. Nothing in his room looked familiar. He slept here nearly every night and he couldn’t recognize any of it. Tristian and the man stared back at each other across the blunted gap of the bed. The man’s face was almost lost in the layered shadows, his body ramrod thin, hands tucked casually in his pockets. Something in his eyes both glimmered and absorbed. Tristian didn’t need to see any of the man. He knew what he looked like. Every time he saw a mirror, he knew.
         “Why did this happen?” he asked hoarsely. “Why did she have to die?” He spoke the words, but it belonged to another, distant man who lurked in bad place, where things like this happened, where people died for no good reason.
         “Because life,” Agent One said, “is inherently fatal, and-“
         ”Stop doing that,” Tristian snarled, his left arm moving in a sharp, slashing motion. “Stop giving me these . . . direct answers, these pat, one line answers when I’m trying to ask you an . . . an honest question . . .”
         “But you’re not,” Agent One replied with cool certainty. He hadn’t moved at all. “Oh, your question may be honest but its intentions aren’t.” His eyes narrowed slightly, his lips drawn into a tight line. It was all for show. Everything was just theatre to them. “You don’t want a direct answer. You want a fantasy response, you want to be reassured that there was some special reason that she had to die, and you want me to tell you that because you’re under the mistaken assumption that when I say it, it means something.”
         The Agent’s words gutted Tristian, laying him open to the air. He was unable to speak for nearly a minute, and when he did he was more more subdued, as if he was already tired of fighting. “You told me she was going to die,” he said sadly. “That meant something.”
         “It did because it was true,” Agent One told him, his voice strangely gentle. “But I will not tell you untrue things simply to make you feel better.” The Agent looked off to the side briefly, raised one hand to his mouth as if stifling a cough. “And you know that. You’ve become an adult now, you can accept the truth about things.”
         “And the truth is that she died a meaningless, pointless death?” he asked harshly, his heart sinking even as he spat the words out. He kept picturing her in her bed, eyes closed in sleep, face composed serenely, not breathing at all. She had never known. She would never know. He couldn’t stand it. “Her heart just stopped and she died and there was no . . .” he ran a trembling hand through his hair, the strands too gritty, his face coated with a slick weariness, “Jesus Christ, she was my age . . . she was just as healthy as I was, and to just . . .” He let his arms drop in resignation. “And it was pointless. I know what you’re saying.”
         “You keep saying pointless,” Agent One said, “as if the only notable deaths are grandiose, bloated things . . .” he shrugged, dismissing the concept, “and you fail to realize that a simple death is just that, a simple thing, no more useless than a sunrise.” The Agent peered at him closely, even as Tristian circled around the bed, feeling more and more like a stranger in his own house, his own skin. “Because of what you are . . . what you’ve become, you tend to define things in terms of their degrees of drama. A heroic, sacrifical death is the only one that has meaning.” A smile twitched at the Agent’s lips. “To you, at this point, to expire quietly in one’s bed is almost a sin. But not everyone wishes to die with an oath on their lips and a bullet in their gut.”
         “Most people don’t wish to die at all,” Tristian pointed out coldly. The Agent only returned his hard gaze with a stare of cool detachment, daring Tristian to try and rattle him. But it was useless. This was a thing that willingly stepped into imploding stars.
         “Most don’t,” the Agent admitted calmly, after a minute. “But they eventually do anyway.”
         She’s gone. The thought hit him again, catching him right in the throat, a barbed rapier spilling out all his words, leaving them unspoken and forgotten. He tried to imagine her laugh and when he did, fleetingly, he desperately tried to hold onto it, knowing that one day the sound would fade from his memory completely. “Ah . . . oh God,” he gasped, leaning against the same wall the Agent was resting against, his head touching the cool surface, one hand pressed against it, the skin a dirty pale in the darkness. “Oh my God. I was just talking to her a few hours ago and now . . . now she’s . . .”
         The Agent merely watched him, saying nothing.
         Slowly Tristian’s gaze shifted to meet the Agent’s again. “How long did you know?” he asked softly. “You told me this morning, but . . . but you had to know.”
         The Agent didn’t answer immediately. He sniffed, rubbed his nose with one hand while keeping the other in his pocket. “When you were very young, maybe five years old. It was around Christmastime, it was my first direct visit to your home in some time, several years I think. I had been away, partly because of pressing matters and partly because certain elements were stepping up their observation of you and my being nearby was like a beacon to them.”
         “The year my mother broke her leg,” Tristian said quietly, his eyes staring directly into the featureless wall. “It had to be then. She had to have surgery and everyone came to our house for Christmas that year because she couldn’t leave.”
         “I saw her there . . . she stuck a bow to the back of your shirt when you weren’t looking,” Agent One noted. “Everyone laughed at you and you noticed and took a swing at her, nothing serious, just kids playing and . . . she jumped up on your couch. I happened to be sitting there, content to observe when . . . I saw she didn’t have much time left.”
         “You saw?”
         “The human heart is a . . . finite thing.” The Agent seemed somehow uncomfortable with explaining this. Tristian felt the hollow feeling loom within his stomach again. “As you already know. And if you look just right it’s possible to see . . . how much is left.” The Agent shook his head, apparently bemused by all of this. “To this day I’m not sure what made me look. It’s not a habit, trust me. But I saw that there was so much less remaining than there should have been, for someone of her age.”
         “But why?” Tristian asked, not even putting any effort into the question, already able to mouth the answer even before it entered the air. But answers didn’t matter. She’s gone.
         “I don’t know,” the Agent replied, predictably. “It’s not something I particularly dwelled on . . . I made a mental calculation for when it would run out and stop working entirely and . . . that was it.”
         “Until this morning,” Tristian said numbly. “Until you told me that she was going to die.” He kept feeling random stabs of pain into his chest and stomach, the sensantion that his breathing had halted for a split second. Every time he reached out and accepted the reality of the situation, his mind pulled back, afraid of staying that close for too long. She was dead, but he couldn’t let her go. Not yet. Not without explanation.
         “Yes . . .” the Agent said calmly. “And as it turns out I was only off by ten seconds, in the end.” He didn’t seem proud, or smug, it was simply a fact, with little extraneous emotion attached to it.
         The tone, neutral as it was, still rankled Tristian. “So why didn’t you do anything about it?” he asked, knowing he was lashing out unreasonably and not able to stop himself, not really caring either way. Was it because he knew the Agent would merely take the verbal abuse without striking back? Or did he simply need to scream at any target that presented itself, regardless of relevance.
         “I did,” Agent One said simply, brushing at his sleeve. “I told you about it, and let you decide what to do from there.”
         Strings tugged at his breathing, wires trying to pull him down. His brain swirled, he’d been awake for far too long. Everything was taking on the hazy, splintered quality of a disintegrating dream. The Agent’s voice came at him in lazy waves, bottles bobbing in a viscous ocean that defeated his efforts to reach out and grasp. Maybe he wasn’t getting everything. Maybe he missed the part where he was told that she hadn’t died. It was all a rumor. All a dream. Every word was screwed up, twisted to mean the wrong things. “Ah . . .” he started to speak, but bit his lip painfully, not wanting to say any more.
         The Agent scraped at something under his fingernail. For all Tristian knew, an entire Universe could be trapped there. “And I know it hurts and I know you don’t want to believe a single thing I’m going to say . . . but I just want to say I think you did the right thing, going to her.” He rubbed his hands together, cracked a single knuckle. It was a gunshot in the silence. “And you’re doing the right thing now, not asking the tedious, obvious questions . . . demanding why I didn’t heal her or put her in a stasis or go back in time and change history or something equally ridiculous when you know as well as I do that I would not let an innocent die for twenty years if I could do something about it.” He shrugged, placing his hands against the wall and staring at his feet. “You know as well as I do, even through your pain, that unpleasant things happen. People die young for no reason.”
         Tristian gritted his teeth, made a soft sound, air being sucked through a cracked straw. “. . . time . . .” he seemed to mumble.
         Without looking up, Agent One raised an eyebrow, “Come again?”
         “I said . . . what time?” Tristian suddenly roared, leaping from his spot to stand maybe two paces away from the Agent, who didn’t move an inch. “What time am I supposed to die? Can you tell me that?” His words stumbled over each other, a stampede possessed of too much haste. He was outrunning his breath. “Or my friends, can you tell me how much time they have so that when I look at them I can just . . . just count down in my head how much they have left.” He spun away from the Agent, putting both hands in his hair, clenching them tightly, as if he might rip his brain from his head. “Ah . . . I can’t . . . I can’t take this . . . you guys, you find new ways to . . .” he closed his eyes tightly, “it’s supposed to be random . . . you’re never supposed to know when you die and now you tell me that you know, if you wanted, you know when someone will die, down to the minute?” His voice swelled, threatened to crumple completely. “Why . . . why stop with just her . . . just let me know about everyone so I don’t have to wonder anymore . . .” The Agent’s face was expressionless, his demeanor completely ignoring Tristian’s rigid posture, the quivering of his anger. “Why don’t you just do that, if you’re going to do anything at all? Huh?” He started to take a step forward, though he really couldn’t say why. “Why don’t you-“
         ”You know, I don’t think you even want to be content with anything,” a hoarse voice called from somewhere behind him. Startled, Tristian spun around to find yet another twin of his sprawled in a wide chair near his bed, one elbow resting on the chair arm, the finger pointing lazily at him. Previously, the bed had been the only major piece of furniture in the room.
         Risking a glance backwards, Tristian saw that Agent One had vanished.
         “If we didn’t tell you,” the man continued, “then you would whine and moan that we somehow knew and just kept the information from you.” The man rested his head on his hand, casually amused. “So instead we do clue you in and is that good enough? Of course not. You want us to supply you with a laundry list of all the misery in the world . . . why? So you can stare at the wall and torment yourself with something you already knew.” Agent Two sat up straight in the chair, both hands flat on the arms. “People die, Tristian. This is not a new thing. They die young, they die old, sometimes they die for no reason at all.” He sniffed derisively, hopping up from a sitting position so that he was crouching on the cushion, balanced on the balls of his feet. “So if you want to slit your wrists every night because the idea that people suffer makes you sad inside . . .” he spoke the words with mocking sympathy, “Well, that’s a load of crap and we both know it and if anyone is going to bother to tell you that, it might as well be me, you know?”
         Tristian didn’t answer immediately. Slowly, his movements suggesting a man shot in the gut, he went over to the edge of his bed and sat down. Folding his hands together, he rested his chin on them and stared at the floor. He let a long breath emerge from his body, a man deflating. The shadows rendered his face blank, his features hidden.
         “So are you going to give me a hint, at least?” he asked, his voice deadened.
         Agent Two tilted his head to one side. “About what? I don’t think your team’s even in the series this year.”
         Tristian’s gaze flickered up to the Agent, but he let the comment pass, even as the Agent gave him a beautific smile. “No . . . when I’m going to die.” Hands still folded together, he let them drop to his knees as he stared directly at the Agent. “I’m sure either you or your brother figured it out at one point, it seems like the kind of thing the two of you would do . . . am I ever going to get fair warning or is it going to come as a surprise, however brief?” It was hard to keep the bitterness out of his voice, he felt like he should be coughing up embers, his words clogged with dusky smoke.
         Agent Two somehow managed to swear and laugh at the same time. “Christ,” he spat, moving so that was perched on one arm of the chair. A second later he shifted his feet so that he was sitting across the chair, both feet against the other arm. “Who the hell tells you these things?” He shook his head in an exasperated fashion. He looked past Tristian, to a place somewhere behind him. “Do you want to explain this, or can I continue?”
         “You’re doing an adequate job so far . . .” Tristian spun around on the bed to see Agent One floating several feet above the bed, crosslegged, his head only inches from the ceiling. A moment later he uncurled gracefully and moved like a diver toward the floor, feet first. “You’ve been avoiding your typical scattershot style, which is somewhat heartening. I was beginning to fear you’d completely abandoned lucidity.”
         Agent Two smirked in response. “I like to think of it as draping myself in metaphor.”
         “Perhaps. If your metaphor is a tarp.” The Agent touched down without bouncing, stuffed his hands into his pockets and stood nearly at attention, feet close together. “So maybe it’s best we speak plainly here, for his sake.”
         “Works for me,” Agent Two noted. Shifting his gaze to Tristian, he said, “Tristian, you’re being a fool about this.”
         One leg resting on the bed, Tristian watched the two of them with wary eyes. The two Agents exchanged quick glances, sharing a mutual shrug before directing their attention back to Tristian.
         “O-kay,” Agent Two said. Taking a second to clear his throat, he added, “Tristian, you’re being a damn fool about this.”
         “I heard you the first time,” he answered flatly. “I don’t see what I’m-“
         ”What if the girl got hit by a bus?” Agent Two blurted out, launching himself off the chair to land right in front of Tristian. “What if on the way back home she was mugged and raped and had her throat cut and and she bled out on the sidewalk with strangers tramping through her blood?” Agent Two was pressing forward, his gestures sharp, claw-like things.
         “What are you talking about-“ Tristian tried to say, sliding backwards onto the bed, flinching away from Agent Two’s frantic motions. Agent One merely stood by and watched, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes hooded and hidden.
         “Or if she tripped on the stairs and fell down and broke her neck?” Agent Two was bending over Tristian at an impossible angle, his body oddly hinged. “Or even, hey, what if a swarm of meteors hit her apartment a half hour before you got there and leveled the entire building? What then?”
         “She’d be dead, then . . . is that what you’re saying?” Tristian yelled at the Agent, rushing forward to try and shove him away, only succeeding in nearly falling facefirst into the chair as Agent Two stepped deftly aside. Tristian recovered just as gracefully, his hand involuntarily going for the sword, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet to try and keep his balance. “Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Is that it? Because I already know that,” he sneered. “She would have died, the same way she did tonight. She’d be just as dead.”
         “And that’s the whole point,” Agent One interjected quietly. “She would be just as dead, Tristian. And it wouldn’t have mattered what we told you.” He paced a few steps to his left and stopped, staring quite fixedly at something on the floor. “You’re an intelligent man, Tristian, but like most people when put under stress they tend to narrow their focus substantially. And quite often, they focus on the wrong things.”
         Tristian looked from one Agent to the other, feeling like he was trapped in one of the rooms where you tried on clothing, where your reflection stared back at you from infinite angles, endlessly condemning. “She died because her heart stopped . . .” he whispered, the muscles around his eyes taut. “Isn’t that the only thing that matters? It’s the reason she’s gone.”
         “But it could have been something else . . .” Agent Two hissed. “And that’s what we’re trying to say.” With a quick movement he stabbed at Tristian with one finger, poking him right where his heart lay. Tristian’s arm was halfway to blocking the motion before the Agent’s hand had returned to its original position. “I could tell you, right now, just by looking at your heart that you might live to be ninety five. You might,” he added, “if we kept you in a nice clean cage and fed you and washed you and treated you decent . . . sure, your heart would eventually give out at a ripe old age.” With one liquid motion he stepped back and sat down, crossing one leg over the other. “I could tell you that,” he continued, his voice muted, staring down the bridge of his nose at Tristian, “and it would be a true thing.”
         Tristian returned the gaze evenly, uneasily. “But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”
         Agent Two ventured a thin smile. “You’re starting to get it, son.”
         “So, you’re saying, there’s a . . . there’s a limit to a person,” Tristian said, crossing his arms loosely and staring at his knees. He laughed without humor, his lips twitching. “So I guess that brings me back to where I started, right? You never know. You never know when the day is going to come.” He sighed, letting out a long exhalation. “I know she’s dead, guys, but I don’t feel it yet. Every time I try to think of her I’m just . . . I’m just numb . . .” He looked up at the Agents. “We’re not supposed to die this young. Not for no reason at all.” He lifted up one hand, made a fist, opened it slowly. “It’s not going to hit me, not right away. She was my cousin and I only saw her a couple of times a year but . . .” He closed the fist suddenly, tightly. “Just like that,” he murmured. “What do you say to a person, when you know it’s their last night alive?”
         “You tell us,” Agent One said, his voice stripped of any archness. “What did you talk about tonight?”
         “Just . . . stuff. It was just . . . small talk, that’s all.” Confusion reigned over his face for the briefest second, barely enough time to leave an impression. “I told her about you guys and I tried to catch up with her and . . . it was like I was racing against this giant, looming clock, and there was a million things I wanted to talk about with her, just stupid, silly things, about her life and my life and in the end, I . . . I barely got to any of it. I couldn’t fit it in.”
         “Did you really think you could?” Agent Two asked.
         Tristian thought for a moment before shaking his head sadly. “No. Not without telling her. It wouldn’t have been possible.” With a muffled grunt he rose to his feet, swinging his arms in loose circles, pacing in a jagged line of his own devising. “I don’t know, it . . . it bothers me that we knew each other for, for almost twenty years and there was so much I didn’t know. And I’ll never know. Not from her.”
         “And how is that any different from any other death, from any other loss?” Agent One asked quietly, pointedly. He had wandered over to the window but his voice hadn’t left the spot where he had previously been standing.
         “I thought, hoped that because I had some warning it would be . . . be different somehow, that I could say all the things that you never get to say, all the things that afterwards you regret not mentioning.” He stopped pacing, stared at the featureless wall. Agent Two watched him without speaking. Agent One stared out the window, perhaps regarding the back of Tristian’s reflection. “But it didn’t matter, in the end. She died anyway. It was all lost. Everything we said to each other, is gone.”
         “Sound never stops travelling, Tristian. It just keeps going, until it’s caught and heard again.” Agent Two said that. His lips didn’t move. Or maybe they did, but that wasn’t what he said. The Agents were too heavy for this reality, they were the balls dropped on the rubber sheet, warping everything that was connected. And everything was connected.
         “I feel like I wasted both our times,” Tristian said to no one at all. His words were condensation on glass, rapidly fading into thin air. “I shouldn’t have even been there at all.”
         “And would you have been there, if you didn’t want to go?”
         Tristian whirled, searching for the voice. For a moment, it hadn’t sounded right.
         But Agent One just stared out the window, and if his reflection betrayed a wavery smile, then perhaps the image wasn’t true.
         Tristian stared at the back of the Agent’s head for nearly a minute. Then, with a sigh, he frowned, furrowing his brow as he stared at the floor, saying, “I think you guys should go now. I’m tired and I just want to rest.” Did he believe that? He let a second pass, but neither Agent commented. Glancing up, he added, “But, really, I should thank-“
         He stopped. The room was empty, except for him. It seemed slightly dimmer, somehow.
         He was alone. Turning to the side, he saw that the Agent’s chair was still where it had first appeared. Tristian stared at it for a few seconds and then tentatively, curiously, he reached out to touch it.
         His fingers barely brushed against it when it collapsed into dark motes, fragments of hard light fading into the shadows, invisible and gone. The space was free again. The room was the way it had always been.
         Hands in his pockets, Tristian watched the space, half expecting the furniture to return, his expression tired and wary. A moment later he sniffed, murmured, “About damn time they started listening to me,” and turned away from the emptiness.

* * * * *

         Faceup or facedown all he saw was dark. Nothing but endless dark. He eventually decided to lay on his back because it was more comfortable. It made him think that he was staring at the sky, the boundless air and all the places beyond it, to the walls of Universe beyond his imagination, and maybe to a place that existed even past that.
         He had been tempted to call her house but he knew what would have happened. The phone would have kept ringing. Forever and ever and ever. He wouldn’t have been able to handle that. It was hard enough thinking of her as dead now. Not living. Her voice, silenced. Her smile, erased. Where was she now? Had they taken her away? Her still face, bracketed by flashing red and blue lights, threatening to blind eyes that no longer saw? Did they try and save her, or did they already know it was too late? Tomorrow his mother would tell him and he would have to pretend to be surprised. Maybe he would cry, later, when nobody was around. He didn’t see himself doing such things anymore. What did it matter? A few tears did nothing to lubricate the world. You wept, and people died. Faced it with grim determination, and people died. At the end of the long night, she was still dead. All of them were. What was a long life anyway, but just more time to collect idle moments? You got all the important stuff out of the way early and spent the rest of the days just coasting on the old times. In fifty years she would have wanted to be dead. He imagined her face, ageless and still. Decaying, soon. To dust, then. Not a breath to stir it. One by one they’ll march by, weeping and she’ll suffer in silent decomposition. He’d carry the coffin, probably and she would be lighter than he expected. Of course she would. A life had gone, fluttered to parts unknown. That took the weight with it. He was lighter now, ascending maybe. No, all illusion. Life and death, nothing but a mirage.
         What would you have been like, had you lived? Maybe you would have become old and cranky and bitter and when you couldn’t hear us we would talk about how much nicer you had been when you were younger and how we weren’t sure when you had become so nasty and unpleasant. Once you change, you can’t go back. You just change into something else. He’d been different once. Every day he was losing part of himself, somehow. Someone was surgerically removing pieces of himself at night. She had complimented him on his coat once and asked him where he had gotten it and he had to admit that he didn’t know. Details didn’t matter. He didn’t think he would get old. He didn’t think he’d get the chance. But he would always be older than her. Frozen in time. She was devolving as he laid there. The world was crumbling, the cancer was eating it all away. She would never have wanted to live in a world like that. It was better now, for her not to be here. She could never have been happy. Who decided that? It was part of the plan. There had to be a plan. But the plan hurt. It was sandpaper and it scraped against him and it hurt.
         If she had kids, what would they have been like? Girls and boys and boys and girls. An entire branch, withering and dead. When a person dies, a million other lives go with it. Children and grandchildren and beyond. She would have been a great mother. Or a terrible mother. The descending cries of a century’s ghosts haunted him. Did she even have a boyfriend? He had forgotten to ask. Did it matter? Would he even cry for her? And when he was with the next girl, would he think of her, when they were curled up in bed? Or would he stuff it into a compartment and toss it in the corner where all the dusty, useless boxes of memories went? The wedding would have been nice. He’d never been to a real family wedding. But it was getting on in years and they were all passing. The family wasn’t as big. Cousins and grandchildren and aunts were all dwindling. In the old photographs it was always a crowd. There was so few of them now, to carry on. The parties took up that much less space. They had to work so much harder now to fill up what was left behind. Laughter didn’t linger as long, or reverberate as strong. Washed out colors always displayed smiles. What was it like, in those days when everyone was still alive and young and got along? Not like today. These days. Would they even save a seat for her? Probably not. Space was a premium and nothing could be spared. Her spot in the painted was glossed over, changed to the same color as the background. If you don’t look too closely you’ll never see her. He didn’t want to forget and he knew a day would come when he would suddenly realize with cold fear that it had been six months since he had last thought about her. He didn’t know who his great-great grandparents were. How many years ago was that? Less than a hundred? That’s all it took for the world to erase you. She had no time to be imprinted on a generation and her essence would pass into the wind, wispy and weak. The professor asked the question and no hands were raised. Two hundred years from now it would be like none of them ever existed. Pictures crumble, memories fade, letters wilt. He was losing her now, as he laid there tipped on the edge of sleep. She was draining from him and he couldn’t stop the leak.
         Where did you go, where this world couldn’t hold you anymore? Where had she gone? Everybody wanted to tell him of a special place where all the departed ventured. He couldn’t grasp him. He couldn’t believe it. Gone was gone. Each body was a unique moment. No repetitions were allowed. Where had she gone? To nowhere. Dissipated, like snow thrown into a tropical night. You couldn’t even reconstruct, if you even wanted to. Too much was missing. Too much was crucial. A copy was not the original. Memories were useless, pale, wasted things. But it was all he had. He couldn’t let go. He couldn’t see.
         This death, what was it really? She had felt nothing, had no warning, not as far as he knew. Who ever did? A twinge of pain, a flicker in the vision, a brief moment of lightheadedness. Was that all? Was that all you got? Twenty five years just to end in oblivion. If she were allowed an extra beautiful reaction just for a minute, a brief, scant minute, what would she say. Why me? Maybe. How was I supposed to know? Stupid questions. Before you knew it, the minute would be up. Sleep was taking him down. The same way it had grabbed her. Only it had smothered her and kept her down and never let her come back again. This death, what were you? It was so quick and so sudden and so unpredictable. This life, this death. A candle, burning at both ends, rolling for the end of the table. Would it plummet first or simply melt into a shapeless mass? We don’t choose our exit anymore than we choose the entrance. No warning for her. Maybe no warning for him either. What were the chances, of the two of them being taken this fine, brisk night. He tried to gather his thoughts to him, as he slithered down into slumber. Had it been like this? A drowsy pleasant feeling, the world going away, unconsciousness settling? Then nothing. Nothing again. That was the part that tore at him. All sensation lost. You wouldn’t know because you had no time to reflect. Trying to imagine death only gave him impressions of sleep. No thought. No movement. It was all gone. It could happen to him. To any of them. All around the world, the lights were going out. He might close his eyes and be done with it entirely. He’d never know. They never said. How long he had. It could be minutes. His head was pounding. She had never known and maybe that had saved her. A switch going off, the power going out. He’d never know that he was gone. Such thoughts were for the living to ponder. To be left behind. In a few hours she’d be getting up for work. Never again. Blood rattled like slow thunder in his ears. He couldn’t see. Where did you go, God dammit? Where are you now? I want to see you again, but not soon. Not yet. It’s not time. It wasn’t time for you but I don’t want it to be time for me. Is that selfish? Is it? A few missed breaths and she was gone. If she had been awake, would she have lived? Ah God who knows? Maybe she was awake and died gasping, uncomprehending, not sure how this could have happened. Then darkness. And she’d wonder no more. Watching the world condense itself to the finest point. Why not him? Why not tonight. No. It couldn’t be. It was happening. He was going. Away. No. His thoughts, sinking to that nowhere place. No. He couldn’t breathe. Any day it could happen. Tonight. No. A second. No. Darkness converge endless. No breath. No. I can’t. No. Let myself. No. I’m. No. Not. No. Dead. No!
         With a heaving gasp, Tristian sat up in bed, his body hunched over, taking deep breaths, keeping one hand on his heart, listening to it count out the beats in the dark, one by one by one by one.

- MB
March-May 2004
RP

“Such a long, long time to be gone and a short time to be there.”
         - the Grateful Dead, “Box of Rain”