You, me, into infinity

  Sam came out of the bedroom and saw him standing there, gun drawn on high alert. She smiled at him in a way that made him feel like an idiot, but he didn’t move. She ughed quietly and mimed eating out of a bowl.

  Oh. The food.

  As she stepped into the entryway and disappeared behind the wall, fear cracked and splintered in his head. He saw her opening the door to a cluster of gun barrels and falling in a roar of guhe vision propelled him down the hallway, stepping as quietly as he could. The sound of the locks sliding open skipped towards him like the sharpening of knives. He stood at the er and leaned out with his gun hidden.

  Sam had the bag in one hand and the other in her jacket pocket. The delivery guy said something to Sam as she took the bag of food. His words were lost in the rain, but had the tone and ce of banal normalcy. Something like “Hello, hope you enjoy” that he had said twenty times tonight and might say awenty before he went home. His voice stuck out against the electrifying atmosphere that Gradie was submerged in, this world of fractured reality, gunfire and violence, sexual hunger aential instability. Like a fax mae spitting out cover sheets in the middle of a fantasy battlefield.

  A part of Gradie jumped at the sound and begged to be let go. His Self pleaded for mercy as the delivery guy disappeared dowairs.

  Sam shut the door with her foot and looked back at Gradie and ughed.

  “Why are you lurking in the shadows like that?” She handed him the bag and locked the door.

  “Just being careful,” he said.

  “Zoey has eyes on this pce. She watched him walk up. Also, if he had seen you, he probably would’ve called the cops and told them I was being held hostage.”

  “Ok ime I’ll just sit on the couch then,” He took the bag down the hall.

  “Oh my god, just don’t be so obvious about it!”

  They id the food out oable. It steamed into the ceiling and was the brightest thing in the room. The nee sau Sam’s chi, the electric yellow pineapple ks, marker red pepper squares, soft white of the steamed buns. The smells exploded over the sts of old ash trays, solder, and dust.

  The meal kicked up memories from his Self of all the ese food he had ever eaten, and his life blossomed out of it, like a rea. Dates, nights alone, friends he had fotten he even had. The act of satisfying a physical hunger gave the Self pave the memories life and threaded them into the flesh he had ed around his Spirit. For the first time, he felt this world was the domain of the Self, and he was just a visitor.

  He paused with a final piece of steamed bun in his fingers and looked over at Sam. She ate without any signs that it affected her at all, but he was overe with a o remind himself that this was a Hardworld.

  “In the real,” he said suddenly. Sam looked over at him with a noodle hanging out of her lips.

  “Are you a petitive shooter or anything like this?” He waved in the general dire of the wall of certificates. Sam finished her bite and smiled at him shyly.

  “You’re not supposed to talk about the Real.”

  “Why not?”

  “Boss didn’t tell you?”

  “You’re the first person I’ve asked about it.”

  A stunned expression fshed across her face, and she looked back down at her food.

  “Well, for ohing,” she said “When you’re in here, you ’t remember the Real very well. Haven’t you noticed?”

  He shrugged and picked up the st half of his pork bun, trying to preserve her earlier expression in his memory forever.

  “And if you start to realize how far away it is, your mind will freak out and look for something to repce it, and that’s how you drop out. Your mis attached to the Self because there’s nothing else to get attached to.” She forked more chi.

  Gradie reached out for memories of the Real, and found them just as distant as they always were. It hadn’t felt strange before. He had assumed they were just lost beyond all the novel sensations of training and the Hardworlds. But the more he tried to get to them, the more they drifted away. A brief moment of terror took him, but fshed into nothing again just as fast, and his mind shifted to other thoughts.

  The Allcity rushih him. The responsive energized texture of the Otherworld, as if it was stantly reminding him that he was alive. EP gring in her mask. Michael’s story. Philip hunting him through the clubhouse. The twins running him through the vault and geeking out with him uns. Though to the Self they were just vivid dreams, to him they were more real than anything in his memory. Somewhere out there, was another him that worked another job and slept in another house and had a slightly different job, but it didn’t seem anything of lethal importance.

  Apparently, his Spirit didn’t mind the loss of his memories of the Real.

  “Max told me its good not to think about it too much,” Sam said. “He pared it to pying the game. You know? If you think about the game, you lose?”

  Gradie nodded and chewed, trying to put on a face that implied he was equally disturbed by this dilemma of identity, while w to himself.

  What does it say about me that I be ok with being cut off from my past, from who I am? Is it who I am?

  “He was kind of being serious when he said you being stupid like Luke was a good thing,” Sam said.

  Gradie looked at her and she rolled her eyes.

  “You know what I mean.” She kept eating and Gradie wondered again what she was like in the Real. The question was so intoxig that the words rolled out.

  “So, are you into cars and shooting in the Real?”

  She bli him.

  “What did I just say?”

  “I mean, do you only do this stuff when you’re on a job, or are you actually into it?”

  “Why?”

  “Just curious. How much it’s possible to ge about yourself, I guess.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible I’m this cool in the Real?” She smiled this time and Gradie ughed.

  “If you have this many guns in the Real I’d be impressed.”

  “What about you? Are you like a o-five office guy?”

  “Oh. My life in the Real sucks.” It was easy to say. That other him may have blushed, out beyond the void, beyond the edge of the Otherworld, stung by Sam’s redu of his existeo a few words, but he felt powerless, a fossil.

  “What’s so bad about it?” Sam asked.

  “I work a shit job, rent some shitty apartment, probably have like a few hundred in my savings.” Looking at it all from far away, the problems seemed so feeble, the solutions so simple.

  “So your job doesn’t pay enough?”

  “It’s not really that. Money just dissolves for me.”

  “Drugs?”

  “No. Food mostly. And books. Some games, I guess.”

  “That sounds normal.”

  “I guess that’s what sucks about it.”

  She stared at him aried not to notice.

  “You don’t like anything about it at all?”

  The hours staring at ss, paper, notebooks. All the stories that never found an ending, all the worlds that never found a plot thread. Uo describe the truth, he chose the closest lie.

  “I like imagining I’m somewhere else.”

  “Hmm.” Sam looked around and motioned with her fork.

  “Not like this,” Gradie said. Sam shrugged and fihe st bun.

  “What about you?” He said, finding her eyes with his. She sat up and watched him while she chewed. He didn’t look away, but there was something other than just awkwardness in it.

  “Are your one of those people who’s always trying to figure out eople are like in the Real? Max said—”

  “No, hought about it before tonight.” He looked her right in the eyes. She blinked back.

  “Really? You never wondered if April is a killer?”

  “I bet she’s an office manager.”

  “No! She’s too cool for that. I bet she’s an artist. Or like one of those traveling Instagram photographers.” She rolled bato the couch.

  “She’s an office mahat’s poisoning her boss,” he said. Sam ughed a it through the couch, a strange closehat set something afme in his chest.

  “What about Luke?” She looked at him over her beer as she asked, as if there was a taunt in it.

  “He is probably exactly the same.”

  Gradie took a cigarette out of a pa the bottom of the coffee table. Sam agreed that Luke robably the same in the Real, guns and all, but she thought Michael was a shy nerd.

  “He’s alying that DS and we used to talk about games too mud piss Max off. Oh, what about Max?”

  “Used car salesman, divorced.”

  “Oh my god, leave him alone. He’s not as bad as he seems. I bet he’s a coach or something.”

  “I see him screaming at kids.”

  “Ok fine. What about, uh, Ashley?”

  Gradie saw Celeste boung along with that smile. Like a parody of sexuality. He realized it instantly.

  “I bet she’s nothing like that.”

  “Quiet weeb or something,” Sam agreed. “Probably takes a lot of selfies but never goes outside.”

  “Exactly. Who’s left, other than you?”

  “EP.”

  “Well, there’s no way she’s that cute in the real. It’s impossible.” He paused, but there was only silen his hears. He caught Sam blushing before she could raise the beer to hide it.

  “Oh, I thought she was listening,” he said

  “She’s always listening,” Sam said, and looked for something unseen in the ceiling. After more silence, she rolled her eyes.

  “Ok, girl, sure.”

  She finished her beer and stood up.

  “All right, enough getting to know you, I’m going to sleep. The couch folds out, so just—”

  “Shouldn’t I sleep in your room? If someone breaks in, I’ll have to open your door anyway. Might not get there in time.”

  For a moment the only expression on her face was nervous anticipation, but it passed so quickly, repced by weary annoyahat he thought he imagi.

  “Oh, well, I guess that’s a risk I’ll have to take.” She stomped off to the kit and dumped her takeout tainer irash.

  “Bs and stuff in here.” She poio a door in the wall without looking at him.

  When the sound of her bedroom door smming shut had faded in the fry-oil sted air, he slid the coffee table across the room and tried to figure out how the pull-out worked.

  Sam’s door opened before he was done and she marched towards him like she had a job to do. They locked eyes. His brai into overdrive preparing for her kiss, for the fug afterward, strategizing and fantasizing and—

  She dropped a pair of gloves on the couch.

  “If we have to use the window rope tonight make sure you have those on.”

  He gawked at the gloves while his brain caught up with what happened, and by the time he looked back, she was halfway to her room.

  “Goodnight,” she yelled.

  He didn’t get a reply out in time. She had ged into sweats and a crop top, and his brain had colpsed from the whipsh. The fantasies and sarios pyed themselves out in his head as he fumbled with the fold-out. Whe it halfen and saw how thitress was, memories of sleepless nights at friend’s houses shook free at the sight of it, and the squeak of the metal frame made his back tense reflexively.

  He put it back together and curled up on the cushions with a frayed forter a his gun on the floor in front of him.

  The rain floated him away towards sleep, but other things got in the way. The sensation of the buds in his ear al. The sweat, kicked up from the run and the long talk, stig behind his knees and elbows and other pces. Fshes of Sam’s curves, echoes of her voice, EP’s booming shout about her nakedness, and a million other fragments of the day, harassed him as he tried to sleep.

  Usually, in training, unsciousness meant leaving the Hardworld behind food. But now, on his first multi-day mission, he had to be careful. Propofol or any other sedative was too much of a risk. His body had to be ready in a fsh. But he couldn’t just let dumb sleep take him. In dreams the Self was at its most lethal. He had to make a trolled exit from the nd of waking.

  He closed his eyes and trolled his breathing. Stay present, the twins had said. His Self had been primed as an experienced Lucid dreamer, with an affinity for the WILD method. He trolled his breathing, released all the tension in his body, ahe hypnagogic images py before him, looking for ohat could lead him into the dreamworlds with his Spirit aware.

  He saw Sam and his mi wild, and soon he was lost in daydreams, far from the realm of sleep.

  He got ahold of himself and tried again.

  “Don’t force it, but don’t miss it,” the twins had said. Or had he read that on a lucid dreaming forum? The two memories danced in his mind, without one superseding the other. Here, iranquil twilight betweeies, there was no structure to separate the tradictory, no differeween dream and memory.

  He focused on a floating, falling, scrap of shadow, waiting for it to reveal itself. It was a man jumping out of a phe rear of a C130 or some other kind of cargo pook murky shape around him. The man wasn't Gradie, but when he jumped out the back of the pne, into the lightning ringed rainstradie took on his point of view, and became him, and saw the glittering city lights rising up to catch him.

  The feeling of falling sparked a fear in him, a sensation that he was missing something.

  Did I fet something on the pne?

  Everything out beyond his immediate senses dissolved, and he couldn’t remember what he had been trying to remember. Maybe he had fotten his parachute. Did he even know how to use—

  The kno the door shot him off of the couch.

  “Police! Open up!”

  He was ed up in the b, his ow fighting against him as he tried to push free. His pistol dug into his hip through the b. Useless.

  How would you feel if you lost yourself? Relieved? Terrified? ime, Cooper slips into the nd of dreams, where knowledge a wait to jump him with a vengeanext episode, Mouse Trap.