You’ll double-likely walk.  Think I’m crazy.  Nobody.  But stop.  Bang.  Listen a minute.  For a dollar.  Twenty.  I have things.  You should hear them.  Or self.  You regret.  Not you.  You!

Imagine me.  I can’t.  It’s like dreams.  Here is money.  Take it.

Righteous and wary.  But I saw your eyelids.  Not now.  Another time.  After the past.  I don’t know you’ll take it.  I can save you.  Make you live.  Not trapped.  Dollars, minutes.  I was shade.

I found papers.  The headlines nice.  Coffee.  Went to barbers.  Soup.  All the time.  In a warren.  I’m trapped.  Not you.  Think I’m funny.  Like I’m wrong.  In a fact-check.  But wait.  Monday, June eight.  You will die.  Think I’m wrong.  Like I’m funny.  I found coffee.  Played a fuck.  Sat around.  A witch.  A witch a witch.

I think there were cymbals.  Doesn’t sit.  I was you!  Not you.  Not you.  You!  Walking.  Stumbling.  The word.  Off.  Saw a cat.  Not a cat.  You.  But different.  Had eyes.  She asked for a scarf.  I hated the cymbals.  A bad mind.  Like a whelk.  Not a whelk!  The sound.  Like juice. Different.  I liked soup.  Some people didn’t have enough.  The cat asked.  A funny joke!

You will be poisoned on June.  Not me!  I can change.  Not me.  Not a joke.  How I believe.  No.  How I.  A scarf for my brain.  Twisted like stumbling.  No Samaritan.  Wild horses and thunder.  PG-13 or R.  A waiting room to past.  Retribution.  The cat had fangs.  No.  A witch.  Thunder I laughed.

Here is money.  I believe you.  Not you!  Take my hours.

A Trotsky.  I perish the farm. Not me.  You!  Listen when you can.  Not me!  I know not now.  Now is past.  Stefan Laird.  See how I know almanac.  Born August four.  Died June eight.  Not!  Might.  You!  Met with Yui.  Rode horses.  Studied space.  Space between.

Graduated May twelve.  Now I hate coffee.  Now I hate soup.  But in a fact-check.  The difference is none.

I drank and ate.  Like a dog’s niece.  In a house.

Where it stops.  When you ask.  I know Brussels!  I know Rosso.  Cat was funny.  Like a game.  You will go.  Miss the game!  We tied bundles.  Had so many.  You know Sylvie.  July plus one.  August one four.  Ricin.  Not Sylvie!  Not me.  Gone like osprey.  Through the fold.  Now I wish free.  Make a hard dream.  The place to be.  Rewind replace.  Eager template.  You would die.  If I laughed.  When a witch.

You look nice.  Be wary strangers.  Fainting pilgrim.  On a ship.

Tell you this way.  Imagine egg-cups.  A burning restaurant.  Stop.  Replace.  A funny thing with leaves.  Races to the table-top.  I would eyes.  Buried over.  Milk and bolts.  I lied bolts.  Coming often.  Never present.  Bolts I miss.  Not like tubes.  Split a pair.  Lock it in.  I was your house.  In the morning.

They will kill you.  When I fail.  Like a scarecow.  In a marsh.

I think it was five or six years ago when I first met him.

No, it was five. At the airport. O’Hare, in fact.

The nausea was unbelievable, there were so many people. So many different people; families, men and women in business suits, brightly-uniformed kiost workers on break, and so on. So many people going so many directions that I thought my mind would explode and I’d forget everyone I ever met. That’s not what happened, though.

What happened was: I saw Alberto.

There he was, plain as anything, standing right in front of me. Three paces and I could’ve tapped him on the shoulder or shaken his hand.

What I first noticed was his wristwatch–a shabby, beaten Rolex that at one time was probably gold and shiny, and that undoubtedly used to tell the proper time. And the watch was on his left arm, but there was a thin band of lighter-colored skin around his right wrist, as if he’d been wearing the watch there all summer. He had on ragged corduroy trousers that had seen better days, a black t-shirt, and muddy brown tennis shoes.

None of those details in and of themselves troubled me particularly much.

What troubled me was that I was Alberto.

And yet, there he was, standing in front of me. Not a reflection, not a drug-induced hallucination, not even a lively resemblance. There, standing right in front of me, was me.

Alberto stood there, his mouth hanging slightly open, his eyes blinking in disbelief, and said nothing.

Like a bad dream, we both looked around to see if anyone else was catching this.

Needless to say, they were not.

It occurred to me much later that it would have been a spectacular idea to have captured the meeting on film, video or otherwise, as I realized that no one would ever believe me if I told them. Not to mention anything of lost trust. What most struck me afterwards, however, was how little I looked like I thought I looked. Which was what first threw me off–and what took me by surprise when I discovered the truth. Now, as I think back, I envy the brilliant opportunity I had, something most people can only dream of.

But as I was standing there looking at him, him looking at me, we suddenly went our separate ways, I don’t know why. I couldn’t tell you whether he or I was the first to walk away; who knows; maybe we parted in a mirror image. I suppose that might make sense. But we were there, and then we weren’t.

If that wasn’t anticlimactic enough, I then boarded the plane and went home. It was six months before I could think about the meeting and not think I was crazy. Which is not to say, of course, whether or not I was. Maybe six months is how long it takes someone crazy to convince themselves they’re sane. After six months had passed, I found my thoughts wandering back to Alberto, to me. I wrote a song about it, in fact, but you’re probably not interested in hearing it. I’m not that great of a song-writer anyway.

For my thirty-forth birthday I got a check in the mail from an aunt of mine in Idaho. That and a number of other largely insignificant things.

So I used the money to hire a private investigator–a private detective to find me. It was quite a large gift, from my aunt, so I could afford a top-of-the-line gumshoe. The best of the best.

You’ll probably laugh at me when I tell you what he told me, several months later: he told me that I didn’t exist.

Naturally, I was skeptical, and thus I went to the public library. And then I went to the town hall. And then I went to the bank, to look through a safe deposit box where I thought I’d kept important sorts of papers.

No matter where I looked, though, I couldn’t turn up any proof that I existed. No deeds to my house, no birth certificate, no social security card, no papers of any kind, nothing. Returning home, I found that I had no home, and that there was a large junkyard where my house used to be, if indeed I ever had one.

I started to retrace my steps, to visit every place I’ve ever lived, hoping, I suppose, that someone might recognize me. As was becoming painfully apparent, no one did; everyone was a stranger, every place less and less familiar.

And then something strange happened: I found a place that I recognized, where I recognized people. It’s probably painfully obvious to you, but as I stood there in my only pair of pants, a battered pair of brown corduroys, wearing a black t-shirt, I chanced to see someone who looked strangely unfamiliar, a younger man whom I knew had to be Alberto. The people all around didn’t care about us; they were too busy rushing to catch flights to meet relatives, friends, lovers, and didn’t care about us, much less notice us standing there across from one another. A puzzled expression sat on his face, his mouth gaping, eyes wide in disbelief.

I turned and walked away in disgust.

The general sense of things was, dinner at 8, entertainment afterwards. It wasn’t clear what kind of entertainment, but no one worried about a pitiful minor detail like that; we figured Magahet’d have something up his sleeve. I won’t say I exactly anticipated the dinner with bated breath, but I didn’t dread it, either. Walking home the night before I calculated in my head the exact sequence of events prior to the dinner, figuring out to the second what moment I’d like to arrive at the manor; figuring that 8:00pm on the nose would be too exactingly precise, as would 7:59:00 and 8:01:00 and even 8:05:00. I eventually settled on 8:02:45 as an ideal entry-time, not too late, not too precise, and probably not too early.

But my whole schedule was thrown into disarray when I got distracted watching a spider spinning a web in the lowlands, only beginning to realize what time it was as the sun set, reddening the capillaries in my face. Intentional lateness I didn’t mind as much as accidental lateness, which, whether anyone knew it or not, was going to be the spirit of my own late entry.

But no sense in not going.

Running and stumbling up the walkway to Magahet’s place, I realized how truly late I was, and how everyone else (doubtless) had already arrived. What was fortunate was that there was one seat left for me. Not the seat I’d had in mind, but an empty seat and so I took it. I was situated across the table from Yserone, whose name I didn’t know was Yserone until picking up on some cross-talk, intersecting conversations that sallied up and down the table.

I apologized for being late (to everyone in general but to Magahet in particular), and then commended Magahet for doing such an incredibly decent thing, having this dinner. Everyone agreed, yes, it was an incredibly decent thing of him to do. We didn’t quite do three cheers or anything, but did probably the equivalent for our group, all of us agreeing how decent it was of Magahet.

My major ulterior motive in this, naturally, was to distract from my lateness by introducing something so ostensibly selfless. My other ulterior motive being to make a positive impression on Yserone, who I’d immediately taken a liking to. She maybe wasn’t anything particularly special as looks went, but had an uncannily lambent expression. I thought: this is a face you can read by; this is a face you can use to look for things under sofas and tables. She was quiet, mostly, but had a deft way of using her fork to point at whomever she happened to be talking to, when she happened to be talking, rotating the utensil without any obvious effort (or even movement on her own part). One time she splattered Oubastet with a bit of sauce, but mostly she kept her indications clean.

What everybody else knew but which took a while for me to realize was that Yserone had no legs. More accurately, she’d had legs at one point in time but lost them, though not in the simple unemotional matter that you might lose, say, a pair of keys. This I didn’t initially know, but as details went it was a relatively minor one in my mind, Yserone’s lack of legs not mattering much to me.

“By the way, Havelock,” Magahet said down the table in my direction, “did you know that Yserone has no legs?”

I admitted that I did not, though I couldn’t see why he’d singled me out in particular.

“Well,” Magahet said, “everyone else was here when Yserone came in. They saw her wheeled in here, disfigured and legless.”

I couldn’t see what the big deal was, I said.

“Well,” Magahet said, maybe well on his way to becoming besotted though who could say, “don’t you think it’s funny?”

Silence broke out like the plague. People set down their silverware and turned uneasily to face Magahet. It was an awkward moment. One person managed a forced laugh, cutting it off when she realize that no one else was going to jump on and make it any less awkward. Which only made things more awkward generally.

“No,” I said, taking issue with Magahet’s treatment of the matter.

All of a sudden—it certainly wasn’t gradual—Magahut’s act of graciousness dissolved away into a cheap spectacle, and for no reason in particular. It was disheartening: the food was without question very good; the company was decent, every one more or less pleased to be making acquaintance with the various strangers around the table; and the table-setting, if not exactly out of this world, was at least competent and, taking the stuffed armadillo into account, at least mildly humorous—all of this and yet Magahet breaks the magic by taking a quick jab at one of his guests, at her expense. The least he could have done, you figured, was refer to Yserone indirectly via a supposedly anonymous anecdote so that everyone could go on pretending it didn’t pertain to anyone present at the table.

And here’s Magahet, saying don’t you think it’s funny that Yserone doesn’t have any legs?

There was simply no salvaging the night. We all left. Because it seemed like the right thing to do—on many different levels—I wheeled Yserone to her house, both of us silent for most of the walk.

“I’m sorry about that back there,” I offered.
“That’s okay,” she shrugged mildly. “There’s something, I feel like maybe I should tell you. Not because it matters, really, but I just feel like it’s something— well, something I should tell you. I don’t even know why.”
“Okay.”
“It’s about my legs.”
“You don’t have to say this now, if you don’t want to.”
“No, I think I should.”
“Okay, then.”
“I lost my legs in an accident,” she said.

“At an amusement park,” she said, looking down at the ground bashfully.
“Really?”
“It’s… It’s not something I tell most people.”

“It was two months ago. But—” she trailed off, giving off a faint but definitely discernible glow from her face, readily apparent under the suffocating blanket of the night sky.
“Yes?”
“It’s not the first time.”
“Not the first time what?”
“It’s not the first time I lost my legs.”

“They grow back, you see.”

“The problem is, I’m forever losing them.”

“I always forget they’re there, when I have them.”

“And I do stupid things with them.”
“I see.”
“So.”
“But…”
“Yes?”
“They’ll grow back?”
“Yes.”
“Does that bother you?”
“For some reason, not as much as it should.”
“Good.”
“Well then.”

What I told Eleanora Pearline Tomasa Billy-Lea was the same thing I told Cloyd—that plain and simple it wasn’t quite the massive problem she was making it out to be, that the straight of it was, rabbits didn’t need pose the same kind of threat to her sanity’s she thought they did. Wasn’t easy, what with Eleanora P.T.B-L. not speakin English proper, but I think I just about got through to her. It was popular understanding in the neighborhood that the long-eared sexmachines pretty much obsessed Eleanora P.T.B-L. and were in her eyes some kind of lèse majesté, to the best of her mental conception. I said, look, they might eat your veggies but they’re not gonna break down your door. But, like I previously broke the news to you, Eleanora didn’t quite understand English, not in any real useful way. So’s like talking to a brick wall. I pantomimed a bit, lookin like I was a rabbit free and easy and not breaking down her door. Ellie (I’ll call her that, so as to not unduly try your tolerance for repetition and all) spoke real slowly and even wrote out her words for me, but it’n just looked a bunch of chickenscratchings anyway, not much use to me. Ellie had like her own private language, not one anyone else could’ve understood anyway. But when she drew a rabbit, crudely as she did, it was still pretty obviously apparent what her intention was, the two-eared hoppin critter just about decapitated on her sheet of paper, its head lopped off with what could’ve been either a machete or a bread knife. She went and left the room and when she came back had with her a pitcher of something like orange juice and a red marker, what she used to finish her work of art. The red marker pretty well made her intentions clear, the rabbit’s death not so much in question. As I came to understand it, her interest was the rabbits dead and buried, if not dead’n burnt. And she wanted me to do it.

What was a mystery to me was how I was to go about taking on the rabbits—taking on, as it were, the long-eared foe. I hadn’t so much as penned a domestic-type rabbit in a cage, much less tracked down and exterminated a wild-type rabbit, much less numerous wild-type rabbits of indeterminate temperament. Fact being I didn’t even know how many rabbits there were. I’d seen one or two from time to time, but hadn’t ever really entertained any kind of census of the critters. And Suburban Ecosystem Population Dynamics (Bio/ES 318B) (with Prof. Gloria Rasmussen) was a class I didn’t really do so hot in, to put things mildly. So first things first I went soon as I could to see Winston Shea, who was like an accountant or something and known for his proficiency with numbers. No problem was what Winston said; sure he’d help me in my little mission. Winston and I drove around the neighborhood real stealth with a disposable camera a light meter and a notepad and took survey of the local environs, noting visible rabbits and visible signs of rabbits, Winston sometimes even pointing out invisible signs of rabbits, which I thought was extraordinarily clever and pretty obviously a sign of the keen intellect for which he was so widely renowned.

It took three rounds of the block and several heated arguments, but our results were basically incontrovertible. It seemed that, in the 1300 block of Wainsmither Avenue, there were somewhere between 4,900 (the low estimate, which Winston said he didn’t put much stock in) and 45,000 rabbits. 27,450 being our best estimate. To me it seemed slightly astronomically high—seeing as I couldn’t recall ever seeing the beasts in groups of more than three or four—but as I’ve mentioned previously (and with some trepidation, as it’s something I generally like to keep private), Bio 318B wasn’t quite my pizza pie, if you know what I mean.

Knowing there were probably twenty-some-thousand rabbits to take care of in the fashion yet to be decided upon, my heart fluttered with nervousness. Ideally I also wanted something like a reassurance of the ethicality of what I was doing, wiping twenty-thousand odd lives off the face of Wainsmither Avenue—particularly since, as now seemed blatantly clear, relocation was completely out of the picture. One rabbit, or even two or four hundred, maybe. But 27,450? Impossible.

It was clear I was in way over my head. I hoped Ellie would be happy when I was all done.

First casualty of the battle wasn’t so much a rabbit as it was one of their sympathizers, 8-year-old Awilda Rowe who keeled over in a dead faint when she heard about the massive plans in the works to clean out the rabbit-scum of the neighborhood. She literally had to be dragged away across the front lawn of her house and into its somnolent enclosure, dark and away from the soon-to-be smell of blood in the air. Her mother apologized, Barry dragging the girl away, said, she didn’t know how the girl got these ideas in her head, me wanting to exterminate the placid creatures, ridiculous! I said sorry but it’s true and Mrs. Rowe nearabout keeled over too, limping wordlessly back into her abode. It’s for Ellie, I shouted before she slammed the oak door shut. Ellie, I murmured. Wondering, why the hell’d she have to pick me for the job?

I went back to Ellie’s house, wanting to set things straight and just about willing to lay down my soul on behalf of the rabbits, which I didn’t so much love or hate as was indifferent towards. I knocked on the door and Cloyd answered. ‘fore I even got so much as a syllable in edgewise, he divulged how Ellie’d gone and booked a room at some cottagey bed-n-breakfast off in the hills somewhere and wasn’t coming back till all the rabbits were dead’n gone. Was the short of it, anyways. So I asked, could he help me figure out how we were going to accomplish this task? ‘s your task, he said, shrugging. Cloyd was never a terribly ambitious man, and wasn’t one to tread on someone else’s job, never mind if that job was putting out the fire on his own house. “Complacent” was the word some people used. The words “lifeless” and “unindustrious” weren’t unknown in descriptions of Cloyd’s disposition toward things.

Having exhausted that avenue and not exactly having much in the way of ideas, I treaded, trepidant, onward to the residence of a known rapscallion, Osvaldo. Osvaldo I didn’t much like, but I thought he’d enjoy the job, figuring out how to rid the rabbits. I walked up the bramble-lined lane rather quickly, eventually making my way over the pretty insubstantial hump of Mt. Arnick and approaching the quasi-gothic ranch house in which Osvaldo was known to live. Name on his mailbox said, OSVALDO BLANKENSHIP; white lettering on a plain black mailbox. The door opened before I had a chance to even contemplate knocking on it.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Osvaldo said slyly, whole herds of shivers traveling down my spine.

Cloyd had called ahead and told Osvaldo that I was coming, is what he meant. Didn’t know why or how or much of anything, other than that I was to show up sooner or later, which I did as was pretty obvious to everyone present. Said, did I want to come inside and discuss the situation? Saying ‘situation’ like that and making it seem so improbably gargantuan a task so as to be practically impossible, or at least befitting of a righteous historical figure of larger stature than my own. I said, no, I didn’t mind standing outside and talking it over. “Though I wouldn’t call it a situation, is all,” I clarified.

I more or less clarified how Ellie (“Eleanora Pearline Tomasa Billy-Lea”, I said for the benefit of Osvaldo, who wasn’t exactly known for his abundant socialization in amongst the rest of the neighborhood) had this maybe vaguely morbid or psychiatric fixation on the lagomorphs that dwelt in and around her house—how she wanted them dead being the gist of the situation. Though I wouldn’t call it a situation, I re-clarified.

I told Osvaldo I was wondering if he might have some kind of scheme for ridding the twitch-nosey mammals. He gave it some thought, standing there and hmming and hawing and hewing, scratching his chin thoughtfully and maybe once or twice digging wax out of his ear, and then said, sure, he didn’t see it would be a big problem. How many were there, anyway?

And I said, twenty-thousand, give or take.

Osvaldo? His eyes lit up like tiny lights, bright and deranged.

We set to work on his plans at once.

Chain reaction was the idea Osvaldo had, rabbits being somewhat apt to a communal existence (as was his understanding). Easier than going around and, one by one, lopping off the rabbits’ heads—which, among other things, would be especially gory and likely to rouse something of an outcry in the neighborhood, never mind how much the people liked or didn’t like rabbits (Eleanora excluded)—we’d start with one rabbit and, through the magic of physics or something like it, have that rabbit become so much as the downfall of the entire rabbit culture.

Fire was one of a large subset of possibilities that Osvaldo presented to me. He’d never seen it done in like movies or read it in books or anything, but it didn’t seem impossible; we’d be all Prometheus-like and give an unsuspecting rabbit fire, via maybe a specially-constructed rabbit-scale torch or something, that rabbit then going on to spread the flame (literally and so to speak), burning all of rabbitdom to the ground. He’d (or she’d) carry the torch (literally, again), all the rabbits so entranced and fascinated and in wonderment of the dancing orange tongue that they’d be entirely oblivious to its real-life ramifications, e.g., it burning their warren to crisp blackness and decimating them most impolitely. Was one idea he had along this theme of lettin the rabbits do the work for us.

Another idea was something of like germ warfare. Contaminate one rabbit, have it spread the dread disease amongst its kind. Problem being that neither Osvaldo nor me really had much in the way of epidemiology. Which isn’t to say that we didn’t have a copy of that gorgeous Scientific American paperback, Investigating Disease Patterns, on our respective coffee tables, or that we hadn’t read Hot Zone, etc., but neither of these books quite read like a how-to manual on rabbit decimation, which is really what we were looking for. And look at Australia. My reasoning was, if something like rabbitpox could be real effective-like on a massive population of rabbits, Australia wouldn’t've had such a problem as it did. Excluding for a moment the possibility of Osvaldo’s sheer and utter brilliance above and beyond any other human being ever to walk the face (or crawl under the surface) of the Mother Goddess Gaia.

“I read in a book once,” said Osvaldo, thinking, “how these people spread this disease to their target by like infected blankets or somethin. Could work.”

I pointed out—remaining of course affable and deferential to Osvaldo’s presumed genius in his limited field of expertise—that, far as I knew, rabbits didn’t have much need for anything like blankets, not in the real world outside of, e.g., Beatrix Potter and so forth. They don’t even wear shoes, is what I said.

“Besides,” I added, “what’s to say we wouldn’t create a rabbit-human-virus hybrid, a supervirus so virulent that it might as easily wipe out six billion persons as twenty-thousand rabbits, no difference one way or the other to it.”

Osvaldo’s eyes lit up, but he agreed it didn’t seem so plausible for this particular task.

Poison, of course, was another outlet. But again, it wasn’t something either of us’d had much experience in. Not with rabbits, anyway.

What about specially-trained parasites, Osvaldo asked.
What about prescription drugs, he asked. We could get them addicted, he said (meaning the rabbits).
What about we give them rock-n-roll and get them to die young?
What about we introduce them to the thrill and excitement of interstate highways?

No doubt about it: the man was brilliant. Too brilliant, almost. But anyway, I knew Ellie wouldn’t have to wait much longer fore she could come back and enjoy a de-rabbited neighborhood, clean and safe and luxurious and even (maybe) a wee bit bucolic. Perfection.

I thought long and hard about Eleanora Pearline Tomasa Billy-Lea as Osvaldo and I sat working away at our fool-proof way of outsing the rabbits out of this life and into the next, makin the world a safe place for civilization and so forth. Me thinking and wondering not a little bit maybe why I was the one had to instigate the whole thing—getting rid of the rabbits, who hadn’t really done me any particular harm. Me wondering not a little bit why Ellie wanted me to do the thing, being as her and I weren’t exactly like Bonnie and Clyde or anything. I knew her name and, to hear Cloyd (since I couldn’t ever right understand what she said, her not speaking English), she knew mine; beyond that, us not really having much interaction day-to-day, now least of all with her off in some bed-n-breakfast waiting for me to exact her wishes.

Osvaldo and I sat on the ground outside his hut, books and magazines piled up in minor mountain ranges of paper around us, a sea of crumpled papers in front of us, sketchy ideas we’d thought through and then discarded as impossible or improbable or unfeasible, and a large glossy photo of a rabbit propped up against a tree, just so O. and I didn’t forget what it was we were dealing with, didn’t get distracted by specifics. Was best we could easily call to mind the face of evil, long-eared and doe-eyed. (Rabbit-eyed, sure, you wanna split hairs.) All around us the night began to come out, stars peaking through the dimming fabric of sky and crickets slowly yawning and crawling out of bed and whirring to life, telling us how it’s about 72º Fahrenheit (what with them not knowing Celcius real particularly well). I’m thinking, maybe we need a candle. A flashlight.

The plan we’re working on goes like this: Osvaldo and I construct a gigantic, faux-garden. Rich, lucious California carrots (or whatever it is it the grocer says rabbits like best, when we get to the grocery store), magnificent heads of cabbage, and so forth. The most delightful feast a rabbit’s ever laid eyes on, is what the plan is. Us then going about ‘planting’ these delicacies in a neat patch of ground. But not just any patch of ground. What we’ll do first is, we’ll lay a giant, humongous square of burlap out on the ground (burlap because it’s most like soil, least likely to be recognized by the rabbits as alien, assuming for the time being that they’d care anyway, what with the most amazing feast a rabbit’s ever set its rabbit eyes on), tying each of the four ends to like a metal cable or something, four cables which we’ll then real subversively knot together at their far terminus, what knot we’ll then hook to a well-concealed crane. The plan is that the rabbits will come in one hopping horde to devour the goodies, enter the burlap garden, and be hauled into a giant gunny-sack by the crane.

Which honestly is as far as our plan’s gotten. We’re thinking that we’ll either toss the sack over a cliff or into a lake or something: into a non-rabbit-friendly environment, in short.

Osvaldo says it will take care of like (he’s estimating) 18,000 rabbits or so, his margin of error something like 3%. The rest of the rabbits, he says, we’ll take care of when the time comes.

Lots of people aren’t going to be happy at this, which is why I’m thinking long and hard about Ellie and why she wants me to go about doing this job. Wondering if it’s going to be worth the harassment by my fellow neighbors who don’t bear any real what you’d call animosity towards the rabbits all around them.

Osvaldo and I’d just about worked out all the glitches in our plan and I said, I’d meet him at the grocery store, there were some things I had to do. He nodded at me, grinning silly, and I walked back down the lane into town.

My plan was, I wanted to visit Ellie’s house, perhaps have a good-nature chat with Cloyd, voicing my doubts and whatnot. And as I walk through town, I realize I’m humming, like I’m happy or something, and as I’m walking, I realize that everyone’s coming out of their little houses to watch me. They’re coming out in their nightgowns and robes and glaring at me. Sulking on their front lawns. Ellie’s house looming out in front, a beacon in the midst of a metaphorical fog; a fog of people not being able to understand how’s we’ll be so much better off with all these rabbits gone. Ellie’s voice echoing in my head even though I can’t really understand much of what she’s saying. Can’t understand anything, really.

As I’m walking down the street, it occurs to me how Osvaldo wrote out everything he wanted to tell me. He’d talk too, but I couldn’t really understand him, is what I’m realizing. His voice, as I think about it, sounding more and more like the garbled noise of Ellie.

Distracted, I nearly trip over a rock that’s inexplicably on the sidewalk. Like, who’d leave a rock on the sidewalk? A little dazed from my stumble, I realize that my shoe went flying off into the darkness. Everyone standing all around me, watching, glaring, their robes and nightgowns and boxers and pajamas rustling slightly in the breeze, like leaves. I sit on the curb of the sidewalk to put my shoe back on (after I find it) and realize: I’m putting the shoe, which isn’t so much a shoe as it is a cloth bootie, onto a rabbit’s foot, that rabbit’s foot being mine. And as I scratch my head, I realize: I’m scratching my head with my foot.

Counting people as I look around, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Counting, 11,023, 11,024, 11,025. Counting, 22,453, 22,454, 22,455. Counting, 27,833, 27,834, 27,835.

I look at Ellie’s house and realize it isn’t so much far away as it is tall, enormous.

Me remembering how, when I rode around in the car with Winston, I was like a little kid in the seat next to him; me remembering how gigantic everything was around me, how the seat-belt just dangled, lifeless and useless behind me.

There are whispers all around me.
Do you think he realizes?

I sit there on the sidewalk, winking, blinking, twitching. Realizing.

The door opens on Ellie’s house, and Cloyd stands there, looking around with a flashlight. He shouts out something, but it doesn’t make much sense, it’s hard to understand. Me realizing, I’m the one who doesn’t speak English proper.

I let out a mad squeal and a cheer goes out, everyone realizing that I understand, and we surge forward, a giant, seething mass of rabbits that tramples, claws, and bites Cloyd, the combined weight and fury of twenty-some-thousand rabbits utterly and completely destroying him, a limp mangled body all that’s left behind, gigantic and sticky and sick-smelling.

After that it’s Winston. Then we go back for Osvaldo. We track down Ellie and catch her while she’s sleeping.

Then we push onward, towards human towns and housing developments and cities, me telling everyone, Now we know how they think, now we can use their wisdom against them.

Us leaving a wide swath of sick-smelling desolation in our wake.

photo by ben

The whole world is dark and funny since the sky melted. I know you know, but there are some what don’t. A man, a famous case—it was on the news, they made a movie about it, or a documentary—thought he was sleep-walking, that the sun never came up ever again. I think probably he ended up not being able to adjust and killing himself. Sad, but there wasn’t a place for him. If there isn’t a place for you, maybe it’s just as well.

That’s not what you’re supposed to think, but that doesn’t affect the truthfulness of the matter. I almost didn’t adjust, and maybe the whole place would have been better without me, if I couldn’t. But I did. I like it now.

There are still some people what don’t know, but it’s rarer and rarer.

The sky melted, and it turned out that the universe was just an illusion. How the way we thought was wrong. Or, not wrong, but different. Really the sky is like a giant tree. We’re like on one of the outermost branches, dangling from a stem at the North Pole. The universe isn’t actually a tree, or anything like it, but it’s the best explanation, of how things are different now. There aren’t planets and asteroids and comets and satellites. Or: there are, but we understand them differently, now. Everything’s local. I don’t even understand, how everything has changed, but I know that it has. You only need to look up, or over, to see it. How the sky’s not there, anymore. The sky was a good part, and I miss it. But now that we know we’re not alone, it seems to not matter as much. Everyone’s so close.

The sky was a thing what protected us not from like cosmic rays but from our own inexperience.

There’s not as much light, anymore.

You only have to think of a place, and you’re there. A lot of things are the same, and a lot are different. There are some new religions, now. Some old ones, too. Astronomers are like idols now, never mind how wrong they were. They’re the ones what run this place of ours.

I went to Norway for the weekend, though it’s not Norway anymore, and the days are different. We call them 1day, 2day, 3day, 4day, 5day, and on and on. Nobody really knows when they stop. It feels like it doesn’t matter.

Every once in a while you’ll see someone suddenly realize how the sky’s not there. Like, they were in a bubble of their own. You’ll be walking down the street and see a person fall down to the ground, crying. Or laughing. Everyone’s different, but it’s always the same. Always preposterous. You can see it in their face, how it’s so absurdly funny to them, when they realize it. Like they read the news but didn’t understand it. Or thought it didn’t apply to them, somehow.

There were signs, beforehand, of something strange. The street theater. The signs, rallies, bands of musicians. People set themselves on fire, just stopped what they were doing and burnt. It was an ugly, unhappy stage. If they knew what was next, maybe they could have waited.

Admittedly, it was bleak.

There was an endless tension in the air. War was on everywhere, and it was creeping into peoples’ lives, ordinary people, uninvolved people. There was information, people would pay their entire savings for. Some people had always thought it was the end, and it didn’t seem any different to them. They just kept going. Figured, why not. Maybe that was the point. They didn’t know about the sky, then. How— They couldn’t imagine that we could talk to the billion points of light.

Collectors dumped their collections into the sea, which was oily and rank. You would say fire was the overarching element. Burying earth, filling the air.

The expectation of the sky being there, that wasn’t a thing you could have predicted. So basic you don’t know how it could ever go away.

At the time I felt like my head was collapsing. Which, you know wasn’t uncommon. The food supply was tainted, untenable.

There were maybe cures—now we know of course, but then they were only concepts, things tried on the desperate. I was one of the first, before the sky melted. The pressure was a monster, inside my skull.

First they said, this will not feel quite right. There will be some discomfort. I’d been accustomed to what I thought was discomfort. But: imagine being eaten from the inside out. I would have killed for that. I hoped the world would end, and it would all be over.

If it really was the end of the world like they were all saying in the air it would have been stupid for me to have the procedure. Idiotic, going out in a blaze of excruciating pain while the historians and the runners sit on rooftops and watch the sky melt away.

It wasn’t even a new technology, probably. It wasn’t the nuclear warheads or the space (“space”) lasers or the engineered killer viruses.

It was Greek fire, remixed by a frantic, cornered despot with nothing left. It started with a dead blue spark, but then something different happened.

Nobody knows if there’s another world behind the one out there now.

Some say we’re all dead, that this is purgatory or whatever, a waiting area. Some say we’re still burning.

I’ve felt pain, though. Real pain. I’ve felt pain that I know could not be worse. The sky melted, and now the world is dark, and strange, and different, and real. We know we’re not alone, and we’ve visited other worlds, and eaten their foods. No one listens to music anymore. It feels unnecessary. On 4day Rina and I are going to what used to be 1843. The world is a funny knocking place. I love it. I’ve never been happier in my life.

They’re everywhere, you know. All around us. Ready to close in on us at any moment, gnash us in their teeth like giant mice.

This isn’t a story about giant mice, though. Oh, sure, there are giant mice involved, but that’s not the focus of the story. No, not at all. So naturally, I’m sure, you’re wondering why you’d want to read something that’s not about giant mice. Let me just assure you, there will be a relatively interesting piece with giant mice in it.

That’s not what the story is about, though.

I’ve escaped for long enough to be able to write down this much; I hope to be able to finish the story, spread it among the population. Because, after all, this is something that the people need to know. It’s not like one of those haughty-taughty conspiracy theories that claims it explains away all the unexplained.

No, that’s not what this is, but it still needs to be explained.

This is a story of genetic engineering, a used bookstore, and a certain ocean-side resort hidden under the streets of a city called Glensbrook. There are a couple other key components of the story too, of course. Like a mad scientist, a sports car that is so ridiculously expensive and top-secret that it officially doesn’t exist, and the beginnings of a revolution.

Primarily, though, this is a story about villains.

Not necessarily in a bad way, though. After all, villains often get much more credit for being bad than they really are. It’s mostly bad press, is what it is. Villains aren’t really all that much worse than your everyday, run-of-the mill suburbanite neighbor; they just have higher standards and are more determined. Which is not to say that your everyday, run-of-the-mill suburbanite might not be a villain, of course. She might.

This is a story about the joy of villaintude, and some twisted heroes’ attempt to destroy it.

2.

It all started, as you might guess, with a bit of confusion about ownership of a camera on a whale-watching boat ride out on the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, okay, so you might not have guessed that, but that’s more or less how it started. There I was, sitting on a cold and slightly wet, albeit comfortable, metal bench when I realized that was missing something. Something very close to me, it seemed, though I couldn’t quite place my finger on it.

Namely, because I had my fingers securely wrapped around a pair of binoculars, focusing on a particularly interesting patch of ocean, and didn’t particularly want to put down the binoculars. I had a nagging feeling that I should be looking somewhere else, though. Intuition that paid off when I put down the binoculars, because I saw someone else taking a picture with my camera.

“Hey!” I said.

“Hey,” the strange man said, continuing to snap off pictures of blue ocean with my camera.

“That’s my camera,” I said, pointing, indeed, to the camera.

“I don’t believe it is,” the man said, looking at the camera in question. “What’s your name?”

“Michael Spammy.”

“Oh,” the man said, looking again at the camera. “I guess it is your camera. Sorry about that, guess I got carried away.”

“That’s okay,” I shrugged, taking back my camera.

The other man, as you might’ve guessed, looked like your ordinary, run-of-the-mill casual whale-watcher: wearing a pair of fairly well-worn jeans, some relatively new white sneakers, and a blue and white golf shirt. Not what the typical person would consider a prime candidate to be an ultra-villain.

But maybe that’s too much foreshadowing.

Oh, and one more thing: he wore a baseball cap that said: “My Other Car Is A Porsche, Too.”

“Rupert Borga,” he said, offering a hand, which I reluctantly shook. “Sorry about the camera.”

“It’s okay,” I shrugged again, casting down a quick glance to make sure that he hadn’t permanently damaged it or anything. “I probably wouldn’t have gotten anything on it anyway.”

“You on here by yourself?” he asked.

“Well, er, yes,” I said.

“So no one would miss you if I threw you overboard?”

“Er…”

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t actually do it. I was just wondering,” he said, shrugging with the sort of casual indifference that frightened me. This, I would come to find, is one technique utilized by only the best villains.

“Er, I suppose not,” I said, considering the question.

Suddenly, my attention was distracted from Rupert to a portion of the ocean that began to violently froth and foam, with water spraying high up into the air. Given that we were on a whale-watching tour and that I hadn’t really seen a whale before or known what to expect, I suppose it was logical for me to assume that what I saw was the surfacing of a whale of some sort.

It was not.

It was not a whale, that is. It was logical to assume that it was a whale.

“Oh, jolly good,” Rupert said, glancing down at his diamond-studded platinum and gold pocket-watch. “They’re actually on time for a change.”

“They?” I asked, raising an eyebrow as I glanced back at him.

“Want to come for a ride?” he asked, grinning as he took from his face the super chic sunglasses he had been wearing, revealing two silver eyes.

Realize that when I say silver, I don’t mean gray. If I meant gray, I would have said gray. No, his eyes were silver—as silver as the back of a mirror, and just as shiny and reflective. His eyes were just two big silver ovals, staring out at me from who-knew-where.

Well, his eye sockets, naturally.

“A ride?” I asked.

“Trust me, you want to come for a ride,” he grinned again as some of the other people on the boat began to grow nervous. And when I say nervous, I basically mean that they were running around, screaming—not that there’s really anywhere to go on a small boat.

“A ride on what?” I asked.

“On that,” he pointed, and I saw that where the ocean had previously been frothing, there was now a sleek and sporty nuclear submarine, apparently waiting to be boarded by Mr. Borga.

“How…” I began, wondering exactly how we were going to get onto the nuclear submarine. At this point, despite all my other obligations—my job, for instance—I hadn’t really considered not going along. Once again, part of the special charisma utilized by ultra-villains.

“Right there,” he grinned, pointing to where a stairway was magically being raised to connect the side of the whale-watching boat to the nuclear submarine.

“Ah,” I nodded.

Rupert turned around to face the generally chaotic and utterly confused public that was still running around frantically on the top deck of the whale-watching boat. Mysteriously, something resembling a bullhorn found its way into his hands.

“Attention people,” he spoke into the bullhorn, his deep and calm voice having a bit of a cheery and reassuring effect on the rest of the people. “Do not be alarmed. This boat is about to be boarded for sinking further out in the Atlantic Ocean. Your captain will then instruct you once more on how to use the life-boats. No one will be harmed.” He turned to me and, covering the bullhorn with his hand, whispered, “they’re all going to die, basically.”

“Oh,” I nodded. At this point I was feeling pretty good about getting a ride on a nuclear submarine. “You, er, want my camera?”

“No,” he chuckled, “it’s your camera, after all. Don’t worry about the people, they’ll be fine. Well, dead, but it won’t be all that bad.”

“Ah,” I nodded again. I was getting pretty good at these one-word responses.

There was a high-pitched shriek—the sound of metal twisting—and I glanced over once more to see the stairway now firmly clamped on the side of the boat. And the top deck, at that.

“Right this way,” he nodded, walking towards the stairway.

So, placing a fairly high value on my life, I followed him, walking down the amazingly sturdy white stairway of metal-gridwork. As submarine-to-boat stairways go, I imagine that it was probably top of the line. Expensive stuff.

Not that nuclear submarines are particularly cheap either, of course.

Unless you steal them, of course.

A hatch on the top of the nuclear submarine opened up, allowing us to crawl through it as two men with white suits and leopard-masks walked past us, heading for the boat.

“Good day,” they said simultaneously, saluting—or so I would presume—my new best friend, Rupert.

“Yes it is, isn’t it?” he smiled, descending into the depths of the submarine. “Just for your knowledge, Mike, we don’t allow flash photography inside the vessel.”

The hatch closed behind me, and we were immersed in darkness.

“This is the UNV Pasta Ship,” Rupert declared, as the darkness was abruptly cut off by the eerie purplish luminescence of several black lights.

Even so, it took my eyes a little while to adjust to the relative darkness of the room we were in, after having been outside in the sun for a little over an hour. Once my eyes adjusted, I saw that we were in some sort of game room, complete with a pool table, a pinball game, a gambling corner, and a rather nice sound system.

“Pasta Ship?” I asked, looking around in awe.

“Yes, Pasta Ship, two words. UNV, unlicensed nuclear vessel,” he nodded grinning. “Feel free to make yourself at home—have a seat or whatever. Would you like a drink or something?” he asked as a section of the wall slid away to reveal quite a wide variety of drinks. “I can mix you something, or you can just have orange juice or something of the like if you prefer.”

“Um… Your choice,” I shrugged, sitting down in an absurdly plush armchair that was dangerously comfortable. “Wow,” I said, the word just escaping from my mouth.

“Like it?” he grinned, furiously mixing something with his back turned to me. Not that I could see whether or not he was grinning, his back being turned to me and all, but it seemed quite logical given his statement and the inflection on his voice.

“You could say that,” I nodded, taking in the sights of the room. “Wow.”

“So, you’re undoubtedly wondering, ‘why me,’” he said, undoubtedly grinning. “But of course, you don’t want to ask because you don’t want to chance that I might think about it some more and throw you back out into the ocean.”

“Er…”

“You don’t really need to answer,” he said, turning around wielding two highball glasses of something blue. “I’m psychic. I can read your mind. That’s one of my specialties. Anyway, you have nothing to worry about from me for now; you’re perfectly safe.”

“Well, in that case, why?” I asked, wanting to get up to check out the pool table, but also not wanting to leave the comfort of the chair.

“Here you go,” he nodded, handing me one of the glasses and taking a seat on the sofa next to my chair, simultaneously taking a rather long sip from his glass.

I smelled the drink rather cautiously, and then took a sip. For some reason, it reminded me of sitting next to a fireplace on Christmas Day, unwrapping packages. Not in a bad way, of course.

“I call it, ‘sitting-next-to-a-fireplace-on-Christmas-Day,-unwrapping-packages,’” he grinned.

“You read my mind.”

“I did indeed,” he grinned again.

“You still didn’t answer my question,” I noted, taking another, longer sip of the drink.

“Well, first of all, your last name’s Spammy.”

“And?”

“Well, I couldn’t let someone die who had a last name like that. Jacques, or Vladimir—well,maybe. But with a last name like Spammy, you can’t go wrong.”

“I see.”

“Besides, I’m looking for a new student.”

“Student?” I asked. “For what?”

“Well, I’m not immortal, you know. Some day I’m going to die, and when I die, I want to have someone to replace me. There are all sorts of other people who could do the job, but I don’t know if I really want them to. I don’t really think they’d be up to it.”

“So you’d pick me instead?” I asked, skeptical for obvious reasons.

“Part of it is that you have powers you don’t even realize,” he said, downing the remaining contents of his glass in a single gulp. “Not powers in the typical comic-book sense of the word, but powers nonetheless.”

“Like?”

“Well, for one, you have no relatives. I know that you think you have relatives, but they’re not really your relatives. You are not your parents’ progeny,” Rupert said, setting the glass down on a coffee table that consisted of a flat pane of glass sitting on top of a large dinosaur skull. “This is probably the first you knew for sure, but can you seriously tell me that you didn’t have questions before?”

“Well, no…” I began, wondering whether I had stumbled into a dream-come-true or a nightmare.

“Exactly. So let me just affirm: you do not have any relatives. And—”

“How is that a power?” I asked.

“The rest of your powers you’ll have to either buy from the catalog or discover on your own,” he said, clearly dodging the question.

“I don’t think you really introduced yourself to me,” I said suddenly, wondering just exactly what it was that Mr. Borga did for a living. “Well, you introduced yourself to me, but didn’t really say what it was that you did.”

“Ah, yes. Good point, Spammy. I am Rupert Borga, but you already know that. What you don’t know is that I’m an ultra-villain—a member of the elite class of only the best villains. We are a rare breed, you and I.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really.”

“What if I don’t want to be a villain?” I asked hesitantly.

“Oh, you’ll want to be a villain, trust me.”

“What about my job? My career? My family?”

“You don’t have a family,” Rupert pointed out, standing up. “Besides,” he nodded, pacing the room dramatically, “we will become your family. Villains have the same needs as normal people, you know. Somewhere out there, there’s a nice villainess for you. And career? Pah. You work—or worked, rather—as a guide at a modern art exhibit, for crying out loud. You think people who go to see that are mentally, shall we say, stable? Socially well-adjusted?”

“Er, not particularly, I suppose.”

“Precisely,” Rupert grinned.

“Well, in that case, where are we headed now?” I asked. “And what are we doing?”

“So glad you asked, so glad you asked,” Rupert said, beaming. “We’re going to my secret underwater headquarters, where I’ll introduce you to a few of my colleagues and where we’ll decide on my next brilliant scheme.”

“I see. And where would this underwater headquarters of yours be located?”

“Under water, of course.”

“Of course,” I nodded. “Where else?”

3.

“Come right this way,” Rupert said, the pool table sliding out of the way with a flourish to reveal a secret stairway that was apparently lit by Christmas lights. “I think you should be able to see our destination by now. We have a rather wonderful observation deck on this little beauty,” he nodded, apparently in reference to the submarine, running down the stairs quickly enough that I almost tripped and fell no less than twenty-three times as I tried to keep up with him.

At the bottom, as I was wheezing and gasping for breath, he calmly stepped onto an elevator-like device, a tad bemused at my condition.

“Don’t get much exercise, do you?” he intoned, waiting until I had stepped onto the platform to press a bright red button clearly labeled “DO NOT PUSH.” The button then began to flash while a klaxon sounded, and the platform—and hence, Rupert and I—was sent lunging downward and through an inky darkness to who-knew-where.

Well, obviously Rupert knew, but I certainly didn’t have any idea. I still didn’t have any idea once we were doused in light, because the surroundings seemed so alien. Not in that there were a bunch of short, gray-skinned humanoids walking around, but in that it just seemed extremely odd.

Or at least bizarre. Peculiar, you might say.

Most observation decks I’ve been on in the past—especially ones in submarines (not to give you the false impression that I’ve been in terribly many submarines)—have somehow incorporated Plexiglas or something of the like to allow an unrestricted view of the surroundings.

Not the UNV Pasta Ship, though.

When the lights came on, we found ourselves in about two feet of water.

“Since you’re undoubtedly wondering, this is my observation deck, intended to model the surroundings. This water, quite naturally, represents the ocean. And this,” he said, kneeling down to point to a tiny plastic train, “is the UNV Pasta Ship. This,” he said, pointing to a small model of the Statue of Liberty situated on the floor of the ‘observation deck,’ “represents where we’re going. My secret underwater base, as it were.”

“So this is to, ahm, scale?”

“No, not particularly. But after a while you get a feel for these things. Like right now, for instance,” he said, pointing to the tiny plastic train as it moved through the water, “I can tell that we’re about five minutes away from the base.”

Nothing changed, but everything was different.

There Was No News. There was no word on the television, or in newspapers and magazines. Nothing on the internet. Not a word. Political figures did not calm the populace; they did not even mention the invasion. It was as if everything were completely ordinary, as ordinary strange as it ever was.

If not for Amaia, come to me in a dream, I wouldn’t have known.

What does the end of written history look like?

I went in to work, the last day. I didn’t have to, but there was no reason to do anything different. It could have been different, but it wasn’t.

The horses rode down the streets.

From the bottom of the ocean, they weren’t horses, but what could you call them? They were things we didn’t have a word for, because no one talked about them. They were giant, hulking things, wretched and stinking, gray, coarse. That day you could feel the monotonous pounding of their hooves on the streets. A noise you knew would never end.

I made it to work because I saw none.

Looking up and out, we’d either expected invasions from the stars, or not at all. Mostly, not at all. But “invasion” gives the wrong connotation. Friend, this is the beginning.

Amaia told me. She told everyone.

The feeling in the pit of my stomach, working its uneasy way to my throat, wasn’t from some glance at mortality. Part of it may have been the terrible omelet I’d eaten for breakfast, but even that didn’t cover the entirety of the feeling. The feeling was that there was something I was supposed to remember. Something important?

I was a hostage, but in good company.

“This isn’t a robbery!” a bank teller shouted, which seemed like an unusual thing to shout. What did a bank teller do?

1. Three of them, all insisting.

The robbers were awkward and unpolished, seemingly working at cross-purposes. They were all poor public speakers, too. Stammering, mumbling into their masks, not giving their attention to the whole audience.

That anyone recognized it as a robbery could have been chalked up to a lucky guess. Their incompetence was comic at first, though nobody laughed.

It was noonish, a flurry of midday banking, when the robbers had burst through the front door. A guard was shot—or, more likely, stunned—and laid out on the ground, like roadkill. There was a popping noise as he fell, maybe before or after. A phone rang. Nobody answered it. A land-line. They left it ring.

“Whatever this looks like, it’s not,” the first robber shouted. He wore an aluminum pie-plate on his face, one oblong hole cut out in the pie-plate for both his eyes to squint through. His voice echoed, tinnish and muffled, “Whatever you think—”

“—it’s not. It’s not a robbery,” the female robber—or non-robber—clarified. She had on a rubber anteater mask, but you could still tell she was a woman.

“We’re all going to die!” someone screamed, out-of-turn.

“Well yes, eventually,” the third non-robber admitted.

“But not by us,” the first robber clarified.

“Not on purpose, at least,” Ms. Anteater said, a rifle slung over her shoulder as she ran a chain through all the door-handles of the main entrance, locking out the outside world. The third robber—wearing a cardboard box over his head—tossed her a spray-paint canister. After dropping it, then chasing it across the floor, she walked back over to the doors and proceeded to lay coat after coat of a particularly roguish shade of orange over the fastidiously clear glass.

“Orange?” the Pie asked, skeptical.

“I was in a hurry,” No. 3 shrugged.

“Too ‘in a hurry’ to buy black?”

“Some day we may both collide in a car-accident, and die,” Ms. Anteater continued, following the previous line of thought.

“This is not a robbery,” No. 3 stated, again, for the record.

2. Her pliant snout.

The non-robbers herded all of us staff and patrons to the center of the room, where we were made to sit. We were relieved of our cell phones and electronic lines to the outside world, but promised that everything would be returned, apropos of this not being a robbery. The intruders handled these items as tenderly as the incredibly clumsy are able.

“We’ll need your watches, too. Wrist-watches, pocket-watches if anyone still has those, anything that might tell you the time.” The Pie seemed to be as in charge as any of the three. My vote would have been for Ms. Anteater, but obviously, this was not a direct democracy, or even a representative one. The non-robbers distributed dollar coins to us, proving that this was not a robbery.

“If it’s not a robbery, what is it?” someone asked.

“That’s—” No. 3 began, then stopped.

“A very good question,” Ms. Anteater said, “that someone should answer.” Her pliant snout pointed menacingly at the Pie.

“There is a time and place for everything,” he said, “and this is ours.”

The lobby was secured as best a lobby can be, windows and doors shut, doorless doorways blocked off by brass-colored stanchions with velvet ropes. Not the best of all possible worlds, but what is? It took maybe five minutes for the three to secure the place and get everyone into the center of the room.

3. Killing time.

“It’s difficult to explain,” No. 3 says.

“Robbers wouldn’t have to explain,” the Pie says, wistfully.

“…only because it’s understood,” No. 3 says. “There’s still a need for explaining. It just happens… inside.”

“We’re here because this is when and where we have to be,” Ms. Anteater says. Maybe Mrs. Who could know?

“You’ll think we’re crazy, if we tell you the truth.”

“We already think you’re crazy,” someone volunteered.

“A fair point,” No. 3 says, nodding. “It’s a fact that we’re on the run from the law, but it’s not your law we’re on the run from.”

“Are you foreign nationals?” A question from the diplomat.

“‘Foreign’ is one word,” Ms. Anteater agreed. “National, not so much.”

There were eleven of us. A baker, a painter, a lawyer. Two students. A would-be doctor. Seven parents. A cryptographer. An officer of the United States Government. A scientist, who studied the migration patterns of non-migrating animals. A convicted felon. A flight attendant. A video clerk.

Some people were more than one thing.

We were being held hostage by crazy people, was the impression at the time.

“My name is Frix,” No. 3 said. “This is Kichiro,” he indicated the Pie. “And, introducing, Voirrey.” He meant Ms. Anteater, the only one left unintroduced, up until that point.

“What’s happening outside right now,” Ms. Anteater said, “is nothing. Hear that? Nothing. Before long you’ll all be on your ways, and it’ll be like we never met.”

“We can’t stay here, see,” Kichiro said.

“Believe us, if there were another way…”

“What are you going to do to us?”

“We’re not going to hurt you in any way, don’t worry,” Ms. Anteater said, reassuringly.

The room spun, and darkened, and went away. The sky exploded, silently, above, a million points of light standing out in the blackness, a million points of light where before there were tiles and ceiling fans. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, so incredible and impossible and beautiful. A night from nowhere.

At first there was no sound, and then, gradually, the sound built up, flooded back into my ears, all of our ears. Chirps, hisses, howls, rustlings. Shapes not stars slowly resolving around us; black, tall, solid.

Everyone was standing exactly as before.

The bank, that was different.

Gone is different.

It was gradually becoming unclear what a bank was, or what Ms. Anteater had on her face.

4. The brigands, undone.

“Sometimes,” Voirrey said, apologetic-like, “you have to run and run and run, and even then it’s not enough. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. You were just supposed to be along for the ride, and then go back. It was just a quick escape, a temporary solution.”

The year is 1087. Plastic has not yet been invented.

But it exists.