In the pause betweehs, are you dying?

  The radie woke up to the sound of his arm. In his dreams, he had eaten at a Laotiaaurant with a woman with long purple hair, red at the roots. Afterwards, they had goo a thrift store in a strip mall that had once been a grocery store. The nd behind it dropped away into dense woods, and they had driven around back to look at it, w if there were any trails down in the brush.

  Most of the dream fell away with the sheets, washed off in the shot broken apart and diluted by the flow of moments p into the new day, but strands remained, like dust on the eye. He saw the woman as he drove to work, tried to gather the shuffling buzz of her fato a defi of features, and failed. At work, near lunch, he started to see the fried somethings they had eaten, the small dots of red heat floating in the soup, the shafts of lemongrass. He tried again to see the woman, but by then there was only the memory of his attempts to remember her.

  The rain from st night steamed off into clear skies through the day until the st bits lingered in little clouds and shimmered in the cracks of crete. Evening e spread like somethiing over the parking lot and darker rain clouds gathered at the edges far out past the low bows of highway ramps. He stood there o his car, led in the first moment of real pea nine hours, listening to the wind blow in the rumors of more rain. Then a silent car ride. The eight hours of work fell out like a hard mass of oxygen-starved flesh, un remembered, leaving no mark on any part of him, only evidenced by the hole it had left betweewo periods of being alone. An utter and plete waste of time.

  The stillness of his apartment had turale during the day. He beat life into two alcoves in the dead air; the cleared space of carpet in the living room where he pounded out weighted push-ups and ab wheels, and the e of light around the puter where another short story cracked into a few thousand words, but was then dropped into a folder ahere to cool, though the other rough globs of prose waiting there whispered that the hammer and file would never e.

  Near midnight, he y down with music pying too loud in his headphones. As he drifted off, he tried o time t back the face of the woman with the purple hair, but only saw a colge of coworkers, porn stars, exes, and a few fuck buddies, one of who smiled long enough for his brain to remind him she had OD’d st summer, before she dropped away to some unseen darkness, or maybe flew off to some uy’s dreams.

  The dreamless sleep was never broken, but somehow, from some other pne, a tact was made. The e sted no time, and thus measuring zero in duration, could be said to in the world with the sleeping Gradie, but the world oher side knew how to use moments that had no measurable size. It could be said to be made of them.

  The arm tone came in through his earbuds. For a moment, the Self rose up and a great wordless, groan racked his head; a ment against missed work and capital murder charges, a squirm against a life thrown away. It sted until Gradie traced the shape of a soy sauce tainer oable, and walked his Spirit through other memories, of Sam and their versation, until it rolled over the Self and dropped it back down into that still silence.

  “I’m up,” he said to the empty living room. The arm stopped. A soft m light tried to wiggle into all the ers and gaps between things. As he y there, the Gradie in the Real faded to less than memory, an echo buried beh the Self

  His hands were greasy from sleeping with the repel gloves on and he pulled them off. Ihroom past his feet, the shower was going aared at the golden light leaking out of the edges of the door while picturing Sam inside, soapy and glistening.

  The vision made his heart rad seeing her in fantasy made his memories of her blend into it. What had been real? Their talk st night he could remember clearly, and the meeti as solid as a dream could be, but the Otherworld was a dream now days old, the meeting in Lucy’s astrarium already curling at the ends like a drying thing that only held its image whe and new.

  As for the Real, it was less than a dream, less than a memory. There was an idea of a him far away, living another life, but the pieces didn’t ect. He could see the offid an apartment, but the fragments blended in with other pces from this other self.

  That other him had been falling away ever since his first day iherworld, and now, he thought about him as little as the Gradie in the Real thought about the sun rising every m. It was just something that happened.

  The office of that distant Gradie meshed with the bre he had worked in years ago, the other apartment blended with Sam’s, as if his mind was trying to rebuild the life of that other him out of pieces of this ohe ceiling flickered in faint shadows. The shower sounded like it might have been running sihe beginning of time and showed no signs of ing to any resolution. In the diseess of it all, he couldn’t find himself. Couldn’t be sure what he remembered and imagined.

  “An.”

  Michael’s voice rang in his ears, and instantly, everything rolled into pce. While his own past shifted like a dream in his memory, and even the rest of the team felt different in the Hardworlds than they did iherworld, Michael was the same no matter what reality he was in. Still, after all these months growing into his Spirit, Michael was his anchor, his stant.

  It was as humbling as it was frustrating, and Michael's overly ed tone didn’t do Gradie’s ego any favors.

  “Yep,” Gradie said.

  “Do you remember why we’re here?”

  “Yeah, trying to get a off this guy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we’re dimension hopping astral projeg people from the Otherworld, and going into a Hardworld is what we do. That good enough? I’m fine.”

  “Don’t get defe’s normal to feel uhered here. The longer you do what we do, the more distant the Real starts to feel. Hardworlding is, by its nature, depersonalizing”

  Gradie had opened his mouth to say he was fine again halfway through the little speech, but it had started to scare him. Being cut off from the other him, from himself, felt like it might be a kind of dying. He remembered all the other things Michael had told him about going into a hardworld and it took on a new danger, like looking bad seeing hidden bdes on a path already taken. Dropping out, getting lost in a Hardworld, thinking this Self was who he was. Not being able to remember the real, maybe not even reach the Otherworld. Forever?

  But he remembered the desire, though brief, he had felt the night before, to be rid of his Real self food. Would it be so bad?

  “An?”

  “Yea. I’m fine. I got it.”

  There ause and Gradie realized the water had stopped. He wao think about Sam in there dripping and nothing else. Michael sighed softly.

  “All right then. See you out there.”

  If you subtract your self from who you are, who are you? ime, Gradie risks it all to look good. episode, Threads.