If you can spare a moment, I'll explain.

However, if you can spare more than that, I'll show you what exactly has happened. I'll show you what has brought us to this, what has occurred in a tangle of emotions, in a splattering of betrayal, in a brilliant flock of white memories... Yes, I can show you, if you'd care to know... It involves violence, of course, lots of it. Stories like this always involve violence, screaming, shouting, blood flying and splattering across the face of a bewildered bystander. It also involves me, as I watch detachedly, watched the innocent reach a shivering hand to wipe it from their eyes, then closed mine.

I didn't die, of course. I wouldn't be telling you this, if I had, now would I? But when you created me, put flesh to wires and bone into a doll, you couldn't have thought ahead to the day when I would die. You couldn't have thought to give me that day. Instead you rubbed the back of your hand across your scaled eyes, and thought of nothing.

Someday, a day far from you, your children's children will create me. You will forget that all things must die, and you will forget to tell me when. And because of youth, immortality, that mythical fountain that calls all your names in your twilight years, you will look at me and feel in some terrible way, a jealousy. You gave me what you could never achieve, not if you wanted to keep your morality. You gave me a perverted promise of forever.

So because I have no concept of ... well, I suppose you could call it time (I do not age), I find your begging for the past... humorous. You want to know what happened? It is so very simple. I changed my mind. I watched the face of the woman I was supposed to kill, and I saw her reach her hand out to him, and I changed my mind.

Oh, no, the violence came after that, to answer your question. I changed my mind, but there were others there who wanted to kill her too, and ... I saved her. Why? Well, I'm not quite sure why. She was very powerful, I suppose... I suppose they wanted her gone because she was a threat to them. She said I shouldn't exist, that it was wrong to make things like me (things! Hear how she says it: ‘things.' Hear how it rings from her lips, as though she knows what it is like to be me, and can judge that I have no place on this world.), and that frightened them. Why do people kill each other, anyway? There is always a rational reason, in someone's mind. Sorry, rhetoric. I know.

Oh! You wanted to know why I saved her? My mistake... I suppose because I realized she loved someone, and it's hard to kill when you make that connection. It makes them real.

That's... not rational, is it? Not the cool thought of an android, of a mind created after years of trial and error, years of plugging wires into sprockets then hitting the switch.

They never mention love when they talk about us. They never say we can feel. And when I jumped from the top of a building, lunged out to save the life of a women who said at all cost these things these beings these androids must not exist it was merely because I felt.

For our pain, we have been given a second Eden.

The ground is knitted. I stare at the upwardly reaching grass between my toes, and wiggle them experimentally. I feel no wonder, for even Eden had a scientific base, a world created as concretely as this one. The ground beneath the grass is a patchwork of hardness and topsoil, changing the rocky land to something sculpted by an artificial brush. I can't help but feel disappointed. It's my first trip outside, and I always imagined the country would be different from the city, untouched, unspoiled. The grass is cousin to concrete sidewalks and streets. It has been sewn across the rocky expanse of the naked hills, an all-consuming blanket. The wind rises, sharply and without warning and my hair is blown into my eyes. I push it back. I should tie it, its getting too long to simply let hang, but for the moment I let it be.

The grass is waving now, mocking in its artificial glory. Cheeky grass, born and coddled, raised under a loving eye, then turned loose upon a cultivated ground. Bastard grass, and I want to shout in its direction, remind it that it is not original, that it has no right to wave with such carelessness at me. . .

A blink of an eye and I can't see the wireframe beneath the ground, the tattletale story of manipulation and cultivation and grass is merely that, whispering over the rolling hills as the landscape reaches up to meet the blue edge of sky. I have to stand and look over it all, I have to stand and forget about the reaching claw of the city, I have to stare above and see shapes in the clouds above. I tell myself these are not desperate actions, that this is an original Eden, and we have found it. It was not given to us, and there is no pain.

Yes, I know, I'm trying your patience. You're confused. What am I doing, standing and dreaming in a sea full of grass (or a grass full of sea, I always get that part mixed up...)? You're wondering, What the heck's going on? Where's the blood, where's the gore, where's the swearing, where's the central conflict??

You wanted an explanation, silly, but with the explanation comes the story. Sit back. It'll all come to be. All of it.

Oh, and I am standing in the grass because I have been sent away. It was a gift, you see, a gift from the woman I saved. The country's not the same, not the way you remember it, the City is... it's like I said "The reaching claw of the City..." The City is... well, it is much larger now, much larger than you can ever imagine it. She, the woman, the woman I saved (is that part clear?), has a little house, a house outside the City. I am at that house. I have been sent there because... it is a gift. Because I saved her.

If I had been Real, she would not have touched me. But because I am not, she crooks one finger under my chin and makes me look up. I almost begin to shake then, a ruthless trembling that begins when we are afraid, really really afraid. It is the response of wires, of overloading emotions that we cannot process. It is an overspilling. It marks us much more than the fine print on our wrist.
Ridiculously, I want to rhyme at her:

You can look but you can't touch
I don't think I like you much
Heaven knows what a girl can do Heaven knows what you've got to prove I think i'm paranoooiid...

But I don't. If I spoke I would break. I would fall to pieces before her. I would break like a window, in a smashing of glass and fall like a sheet of water to the floor. It's what she does best. Breaking others.

I am afraid of her. I cannot explain why. I am not afraid of the man standing behind me, who watches me overtop his glasses with crisp blue butcher's eyes. He spends more time peering over than through them, and I wonder distantly why. I am not afraid of him, though. He almost killed me, but no longer prompts fear. He has fallen to the past. She is the present.

I am afraid of her, even though she is smaller than me, thinner, so thin that I can almost see the bones though her skin, and the finger under my chin is palely translucent, blue veins the only hint of colour.

Perhaps the fear lies in her eyes, which are so distant that she does not even seem to see me. She sees through me, sees into my mechanical guts and sees what I love and is thinking, thinking If I took it away from this creature, this thing... Most accidentally took them away, I would not be in its debt.
I am afraid of her because to her, I am still a vague enemy, even though I have saved her life. There is no room in her for exception, and forgiveness is far too alien. It is unthinkable.

Yes, that's her. You don't need to point. That's her with the red hair. That's the man she loves, behind me. Or he loves her and she only likes him. Or maybe they're just sleeping together because the sex is good. I can't pretend to know them, I can't pretend to understand them, all I know is that I once saw a picture of him holding her, and she was crying. Do you understand, what a horrible, horrible thing it is to make her cry? Don't you see, don't you see how whole and pure and wonderful she is? How when original sin tore the world, when the bitten apple fell from Adam's hand, God reached out his finger to mark her unborn forehead, and say this is she who will be whole.

She is so beautiful.

...and him. He... is complicated. He's not supposed to love her, because she is so very powerful, and with power comes lonliness and despair.

If we sleep together will you like me better.

I want it to be like that. I want it just to be sex, because it is mere and base and human. I don't want it to be love between them, because... dammit do I have to explain everything?? She said I should not exist! I want to hate her so much, I want to feel it in me and have reason for it, I don't want to give a simple explanation... but I know because she has loved someone, at one point in her brilliant life, she is just like me.

And that is so very frightening.

Across the prickly wireframed grass there stands a house. It is purposely ramshackle and its gables frown and smile, its bent frame sliding charmingly down the hill on which it perches. It is perfect in its non-perfection, a wholly created being, plucked from the minds of those who remember a simpler time. But it has been made by those who in their remembering have forgotten. They have not touched the earthy fields, have not pulled the constellations from the night sky, nor breathed a silent wind. Their remembering marks them as fakes.

The house must have a porch, and that porch must have a swing. The paint that covers the wooden swing is properly worn, and it squeaks in perfect mis-tune. Grant sits on the swing, one bare foot propped up on the porch's railing. Owly, his daughter, is beside him, playing with the bandana that usually cradles his injured arm. It is on her head now, changing her inky hair to snow white, and for a moment, they almost resemble each other.

Her laughter, sound and innocent and irreverent as only a child's laughter can be, floats towards me. I lift my head and catch at the trailing pieces of it. I take them to me and keep them. I fold them inside me and save them. I have stolen them, I think guiltily. They belong to her, yet she gives freely, not knowing that someday she will forget what it is that she gave so easily, and want it back. But now she is far too much like Grant, and forgives. I turn away, troubled.

I can feel Grant looking at me, hopefully. Another time ago I would have gone to them, crossed the sea of grass that whispers its mechanics and sat on the swing with them. I would have ignored the regularity of the swing's flecking paint, and creaking music. I would have put it aside and laid my head in the hollow of his shoulder and been strangely content.

In time, though, there has been a breaking. Or perhaps it is a tearing? No, better a breaking, for the noise is far more satisfactory. Breaking suggests violence and screaming, which there was plenty of; it suggests aftereffects that cannot be cured with words or with repairing. Breaking stays broken. You cannot remake it. Torn can be mended.

I won't explain that. I won't explain the rawness I feel in my chest, I'm not going to tell you why it has to end between him and me. I'm not going to explain that.

"Do you have a name?" she says to me. She pulls her hand away, and brushes a stray strand of scarlet hair behind her ear. Her hair falls past her shoulders, and is tied at the nape of her neck with a silver clasp. It is bound in place, perfect and whole.

She is still looking at me, lowering her hand, waiting for some answer. I cannot stop the tremor then, and it shudders through me. I have a number, I think. I have a number and a model and a year and a make and a bar code and everything else I've even got a serial number would you like to see? We can compare. Mine and yours.

"Max." I say.

She thinks that's funny. I watch the edge of her mouth turn up. In my head I explain: it's a cartoon or a comic or something I mean I just picked...it...up...it means nothing its like a switch you know you turn it off and on or it's min and Max which is me. I'm Max and holy dear wasn't it in some book as well I don't KNOW. I wasn't given a fucking name at a baptism I'm not privileged like that don't you know it's a privilege to be given a saviour and not all of us have one because we're not all ...

Real.

Suddenly my eyes narrow, and hers too and we stare at each other with coldness. I see something ugly deep in those green pools, something untouchable, which she has just reached for to hate me with. And I reach back and find the same inside me and fling it at her, only mine is tinged with knowledge because I could kill her and not be punished eternally. She guards her soul. But I have none, so am given real freedom.

How poetic. What justice.

I smile.

I found it. That hatred I wanted. Are you happy now?

Dusk creeps at us. In the City it never quite comes. One moment it is day, the other unnatural lights roar along side rushing highways and the City opens a third eye, one lit with electricity. There are no sunsets, the sun does not slip upon us, it merely plummets from the sky and in a heartbeat it is night. Here, I can see the sky turn. It's beautiful.

Owly has disappeared, as is her habit, but Grant is still sitting on the porch. I try not to look at him as I sit down, the swing creaking and rumbling under my added weight.

I hadn't expected him to speak first, but he does.

"Don't tell me you're okay, because you're not."

"No," I say, and raise a hand to brush it through my hair. I pull my leg up, placing my foot upon the swing and put my chin on my knee. With my hand raised, I almost cannot see him. I have wiped him from me. I have erased the past with a motion of my arm. I have become whole again. He does not exist in relation to me.

"What's going on?" He asks. There is nothing pleading in his voice, nothing wheedleling. Nothing tell-me-if-you-love-me. He is merely asking.

I have rehearsed nothing. We can pull sentences and speeches out of the air, pluck Shakespearian quotes from the backs of our minds. We create words with a thought, a rational argument with a breath. It is a God-given gift, only our God wore lab coats.

"I think I should leave."

He is too still. I hear the skip in his breath, sense the quickening wrench in his heart. The swing moves slightly, and its hinges whisper in chittering ignorance. I have given him no reason, but instead drawn up a gulf. I dug it in front of his eyes, and now stand with back turned on the other side.

"Max, I--"

"They could arrest you at any time," I say. Here is emptiness, filled only with nothing. It is something to fill it with nothing. I hold it there, precious and tiring. I hold it ever so carefully, taught so, taught that it is ever so dangerous, ever so horrible to fill the emptiness with something that is not nothing.

"It couldn't stay the same, and now they know." I continue. I half smile, a moment of gallows humour creeping upon me. "Look, she made a law. ‘According to Section 13-3 of the City Charter Artificial Beings or Androids are hereby banned in the City.' And it's not like you just forgot that I was one, you knew and when she was attacked you asked them not to...to take me even though they knew and you knew--"

I start to shake.

"--and if they change their mind and decide I'm a threat after all, they might decide to lock you up and then what'd happen to Owly?"

"They won't," he says. I break and look at him. There is assurance, a secret knowledge. He exists outside of me, trusting absolutely and without reason. I want to tell him to stop.
"Umber's a friend. He's on our side."

* * *

Poor Umber. I remember him. I remember his blond head streaked with blood, the blood that scarred his long, dark coat. I remember him walking towards the camera with her in his arms, holding her like she was a child. She was younger then, but still fully woman. She was younger then, when men in suits with wild crack-addicted eyes slithered into her father's house and put a gun between her green eyes and screamed about money and power and freedom and if her fucking father didn't fucking give up his fucking monopoly of the City they'd blow her fucking brains out.

Poor Umber. He was the one that went in after her. While her father wept hollowly over a microphone, his finger on the beating pulse of the City's sympathy, Umber slipped through the bloody halls of her home. There was the scream of gunfire, bright in the camera's glare, and a body was thrown up against the stained-glass windows. The chatter of wailing automatics shrieked on and on inside the house, the roar of a blossoming fire, the house leapt and wrenched with the bloodshed inside. It groaned, as if in pain, as if desperately trying to purge the evil from its walls. The camera jerked, panting in ecstasy, twisting from one window to the next, it's unblinking eye cruelly covered by the house's great body.

It was the silence that came after that was so shocking. So clear, so perfect. So wholly sinless. The silence and the waiting.

Fragments of memories remain. The creak of a door opening. The police uniforms, dark and sweaty, hot under the summer sun. The blood on his hair. The way he pushed the camera away when it swept towards them. Her face, pressed to him, tears shining on her bruised cheek.

Fragments, scattered, as scattered as the camera's eye, desperate and reaching. Reaching for that clear pictures, which for a thousand words would tell the truth.

He is watching me, out of the corner of his bright blue eyes. The pupil's darkness is heightened by the blue, and for a moment I imagine that there is no iris, only that inky black hole, through which I could see my own thoughts. Outside the car window the City rushes by. The sun has been cut from the sky and darkness now claims the streets. Those that walk them have painted themselves with neon lights. Pink and yellow scatter in the rain, filling the blackness with an alien dawn.

I blink. My eye catches that of a girl standing on the curb. Her eyes are flecks of ice staring out from the tenderest of faces. I slow time as we pass, staring. Her stare back is quiet, knowing, hostile.

We turn a corner, rather conservatively, I think. He is an unusually careful driver. Above us light races, faster than us, so much faster. I look up at it, through the front windshield.

I wish I could turn on the radio, fiddle with the dials, open my window, anything to ease the silence--

"Do they know?" He asks suddenly. My look of confusion must have answered his question, for amusement crosses his face. Not cruelly, the way she looked at me, rather genuine mirth. He looks back over the steering wheel, satisfied.

"No, you wouldn't, anyway."

I flounder, unsure, wondering if he's playing with me, wondering too who "they" are to him. I know who they are to me, but we all have a different "they," capitalized by fear.

The City changes. It turns and swallows its tail, becoming a parody of itself. It exiles the grinning lights and drapes itself in pristine sincerity. The lights that line this street are not coloured, rather they smile as they shine, spreading comforting wings around the gingerbread houses. Everything is lined and in its place, perfect, untouched. Absurdly, I wonder what I'm doing here. I live here, yet I don't belong.

The car rolls to a stop. With a muttered "thank you" I turn to the door.

"What makes you so different?"

I turn back. He is leaning his elbow on his door, chin resting on his palm. Cold and yet curious blue eyes peer at me overtop his glasses. He is in shadow, he has become a chameleon, has hidden himself from the gaze of those who look. Only I know he is there. He blinks, carefully, waiting for an answer.

"I--I don't know..."

"You came to the City to assassinate-"

"Yes," I interrupt, frustrated. "Yes." Important people are assassinated. Other people you just kill. The subtleties escape me.

"So why didn't you?"

"It was wrong." I say.

"Androids don't know the difference between right and wrong. A machine can't distinguish between what's good or evil."

"Yes we do."

"Do or can?"

I stare at my hands. Around my left wrist is a tattoo, a lace of words. They are strung like the most delicate of beads around me. The script is cursive, written with an elegant hand. It is beautiful, a marking for the higher classes, if they marked themselves. It belongs on the lacy wrist of a lady at the opera, glasses raised to appreciative eyes.

"Can." I say. A tear slips down my nose. It shocks me.

"But you never do."

"No." No. No worries. None at all.

"So why did you? Why did you help us?"

I shake my head. I resist the urge to put my hands over my ears, and clench them at my sides.

"I don't know. I don't know."

We... have conversations like this, Umber and I. We have no commonalities. We are enemies, but we find each other puzzling. He is grateful to me, because I saved her. I acted when he hesitated, but unlike her he does not see it as a debt. Probably because of Grant.

Grant and Umber are friends. It is something I understand, but also something I will never comprehend. It is a part of Grant's life which is closed to me. It is the gulf between the sexes, the one that is impossible to cross. He tells Umber things he cannot tell me, things I would never understand, not because I am not human, but because I am not a man.

Umber is older, wiser, stronger. He is also naive. He believes people will not betray him if they love him, and when Grant begged for my life, against the laws of the City, against the laws Umber upheld, it broke him.

Umber, that is. Grant cannot be broken. He is very much the reed in the wind, always bending, wherever the current takes him.

One leg, the one I do not have my chin propped on, swings back and forth under the bench. I have thought back and back, thinking for some assurance. My foot swings back and forth, bare toes brushing the wooden porch beneath. The wood is rough and spiky. It pricks at the skin of my big toe. The skin is knitted and mechanical, like the cultivated grass around the house. I shake my head, again, in time with the past. I try to shake away thoughts of her. I glance up, in front of me, and the dying sun is graceless and clumsy in the sky, burning red like her hair. There is no comfort.

"She won't do anything as long as he says it's okay, that there's no problem. He told me we'd be left alone."

I nod. Say nothing.

"Max..."

"Why are you friends?" I ask, being mean. I know why. I have just told you why. But I am being mean, and I want to hear it from him. Grant frowns, rubbing the cast on his arm with his other hand, a nervous motion. People are never quite sure why they are friends.

"Um. I suppose we have enough in common. Miserable childhoods and stupid hair."

I giggle, relieved. I choose to find humour in it all. I choose to ignore the first, to laugh at the second. I put in the back of my mind another Grant I have seen. A ten-year-old Grant, gaze cold, impossibly dead, staring out from raccoon eyes. Ten year old eyes that... oh God, the look he gave the camera was so impossibly old. So impossibly devoid of innocence.

I'm the android who knows everyone's secrets. I'm the one who knows everything about everyone. I'm the little birdie who knows who's sleeping with whom, who passed what test, who failed the others. I'm the one who put her arm across Grant's chest, over the long, white scar there, covered it up and gave him a new past. I'm the one who took her artist's brush and tinted his childhood photographs, the ones he keeps hidden behind the winter clothes in the hallway closet. I painted over the eyes first. I gave him laughing, happy eyes. I gave him a smile and a swingset and I remembered his birthday.

And now my heart is tearing inside me because...

If I have to explain why, you... you're a fool. You've never loved, and you are a fool.

Fireflies buzz across the field, tolerantly sharing their space with other nightbugs. Moths sail silently, dusty wings scattering moonlight. Stars peep out from the velvet sky, and I want to stand outside the house and spin, staring up at the sky, arms outstretched to embrace it all.

Grant is sitting by the large window in the living room, Owly perched next to him on the couch, fingers in her mouth. I listen intently to their voices, Grant reading the storybook with exaggerated carefulness, skipping words and sentences, Owly howling in mock outrage, insisting he read it just so. She puts small, starfish-shaped hands on his arm, then reaches up to wrap her arms around his neck. She laughs and bounces up and down next to him, delighted with being a part of his life. He turns and smiles at her, as delighted as she is. They take joy in each other, they take it and give it, multiply it, send it out, over the world. Their joy spreads joy. The world is a better place because of them, nuggets of happiness spilling over, tinting the City a soft, gentle rose.

Behind my upraised book, I quiver. The words bounce and shake with my hand. Fear rises like bile in my throat. I endanger them. I am the threat Grant will never see.

"Max, make him read it right!" Owly wails. She snatches the book and plunges towards me.

"Make it right, Max," she grins, and stands there before me. I pull her to me, and bend my head to her hair, so they will not see the unshed tears shining in my eyes. She smells of soap and mud, telltale signs of her outdoor romps. She smells of the dandelion chains she makes for me, the wreathes of pastel yellow flowers that crown those she loves.

I... I'm sorry... I... I'm supposed to be explaining, but instead I'm just plunging onward, leaving you trailing in my wake. Owly is Grant's daughter. She is six years old. She saw him struck by the stray bullet, when I saved the woman in red. Yet she has moved forward, and let pain fall to the past.

She looks nothing like Grant. Her hair is dark and eyes bright blue, and I see nothing of him in her delicate features. She is shockingly tiny, frail collar bones jutting from the base of her neck like little angel wings. When I ask about her mother Grant looks away.

"She was part of Trilogy," he says. I blink. He rarely names the company that holds the City in its icy grip, yet holds it so tenderly it is as though the City is a new-born child. Trilogy that belongs to the woman I saved, yet was supposed to destroy. It belongs to Umber as well. And Grant belongs to it.

"Was?"

He never answers.

Owly fidgets in my arms, and I let go. From the couch Grant watches me closely, a frown-line creasing his eyes. We have let matters be, but they are not resolved. They flap messily in the wind, dirty laundry displayed for all to see.

"Max-"

The knock on the door interrupts him. We all start with surprise, a fragment of a moment slicing past us as we all freeze, pose, pause. Owly skips merrily past me, towards the door. She slips past my reaching fingers, and opens the door that keeps the outside at bay. I turn, time trickles by. It is as though I am outside myself, I am seeing myself outside my body, seeing myself outside of everything, helpless to stop a child from opening a door.

Umber starts when he sees her in the threshold. He had been hoping for Grant, steeling himself for me, but never expecting her, and his gaze darts from adult-level to child-level. I am shocked to see a look of discomfort cross his face.

Owly shrieks, flinging herself away. She streaks past me and tumbles towards Grant, trips on her shoelaces and crumples at his feet. He bends, alarmed, to awkwardly reach for her with bandaged arms.

I face Umber, bristling. This is my family.

He doesn't quite glare at me, but he lifts his head dangerously, to remind me that even though I am a machine with hair-trigger reflexes, he is still stronger, faster, and would win the fight.

I was here first. He looks down at me, and steps cautiously over the threshold. I knew him first. You came after.

But Grant chose me. I remind him, cruelly. Not you.

Owly is afraid of Umber. It is not the common fear of children, for whom adults are mystifying and giant beings, belonging to a world small ones are not welcome in. It is not that kind of fear. Rather it is the irrational terror of a child who has witnessed a display of violence she cannot reconcile, not even in her forgiving heart. She can forget Grant, sprawled on the pavement, covered with his own blood. She can move past that because he did not die, and he tells her everyday that he loves her.

Have you ever seen anyone fight? No, I don't mean the common, dirty, grabby streetfights that result when someone's car is rear-ended. I mean, fight when they know (and know and know and know and-) how to fight. When it is so pushed into their mind that it is second nature, it is like breathing, it is like ... like me. Reflexes act without thought. Time does not slow you. You watch yourself and it becomes so separate, so outside you that it no longer looks like violence, it looks like a dance. You are water, you slip above matter you are untouchable you cannot ... be... reached by that level violence corrupts. For a moment, you are so separated from yourself, from your thoughts, from your mind, from your doubts, it isn't violence anymore, it's something almost... whole. Pure. Sinless.

Even when you rip an android's head from its shoulders. Which is what he did, while Owly hid her wide eyes behind starfish fingers.

No wonder she's afraid of him.

I smooth my palm across her head, brush a strand of indigo hair from her cheek. Hysteria has given way to exhaustion, and she finally curled into a ball in my arms, breathing settling into the regularity of sleep. I took her from them then, from the company of men, and tucked her into her safe little bed. Her room is wallpapered with clouds. She sleeps among them, cradled by their cumulous folds. How appropriate, I think wryly. Sleeping amid Heaven's traditional turf. I smile. Genuinely, this time.

In the hallway, I hesitate. The idea of walking back into the living room where Umber and Grant now converse is troubling. I stand with one hand on the hall's intricate woodwork, and raise my eyes. I can hear them, just barely, but it is enough. I can eavesdrop without them knowing. I lean closer to the wall, putting my palms softly on it, and listen.

"...not like she went to pieces. That... would almost be easier to take. It's just the silence that... I don't know. She didn't want... just didn't want..."

That was Umber, voice unusually soft, as though he is contemplating something far too terrible to ever contemplate.

"Christ. You're sure? What about a second opinion? Surely there are other doctors..." ... Grant.

"And a third, and a fourth, and on and on. She said enough. Just no more..."

Umber makes a strangled sound, like he's choking on his heart. I slide down the wall, palms sweaty. My heart leaps and plunges in my chest. A high humming screeches in my ears, screams on and on and on, intolerably, cruely. I clutch the rosey wood and listen to my breath, hissing in and out between my teeth.

He finds his voice, wretchedly:

"Three months. They gave us three goddamn months. What do I do? What do I do?"

Oh God, I think. I didn't want to win like this. I win I win I win I win I win I win. The chant is cruely childish. It echos in my head. I can't shut it off. I win I win I win I win I win.

So I suppose I have no central conflict to give you. I have no blood and violence to entertain you with, except that which I have hinted at, which happened in the past. I have nothing, except a story which is messy, human and horrible. If you sift through its parts with your gold-digger's sieve, perhaps you shall find a few nuggets to make you happy. You may find pieces for each of you. I made this for you, remember. I made it so you could understand, I explained it because you gave me more than a moment, and that is so precious. From one moment to the next we move, one to the next, never resting, never treasuring. Never slowing time to that intolerable crawl that it can be reduced to. We never need to. We are not dying. I never shall.

Are you jealous?

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