- 3 -

* * * * *

         Faded from sight, the afterimage was still scrawled across her retinas, a negative spear slashing sideways in her vision. If she looked at Tristian it bisected him every time she blinked. You bastard, she thought at him, you asked me not to speak. You didn’t mention that I needed to blink, too.
         Tristian hadn’t moved from his position near the living room, except to turn back toward her. The object was switched off and was held tightly in his hand, as if he was trying to squeeze it out of existence. She had no idea what it was. She had no idea what she had just seen. For a second, he had seemed somehow different, a man wearing an illusonary skin that the light had briefly burned away. For some reason, the man underneath had seemed more familiar. Tristian was staring at her and his face was set, neutral. Clearly he was waiting for a reaction. But her brain hadn’t even figured that one out yet.
         She released the first words that came to mind. “So I take it you didn’t get that a garage sale, huh?”
         He blinked, as if she had just asked him why he insisted on wearing his pants backwards despite the weather, and seemed unsure of how to respond. For a second, she was afraid he might just walk out, afraid that he had revealed too much and frightened her. She didn’t want that to happen.
         “It’s a joke, Tristian,” she said to him, “one of those things we tell when we can’t think of anything else to say. It’s a family trait.” Not that her parents had been a laugh riot, settling for silence when all else failed, but this wasn’t really the place to go into that. He was still staring at her, like she had made the thing extend from her own hand. “But you’re going to have to say something soon, Tristian, or I’m going to start babbling. And if I run out of things to babble about, then I start talking about random things, like the last few dates I’ve been on. You have to make me stop, Tristian, before it’s too late.” The last sentence was spoken in a quasi-feverish rush, an attempt to capture his attention again.
         Her words woke him up somehow and he smiled faintly, slipping back into the present. With an unconscious motion, he returned the object to its place on his belt. She thought he might sit down finally. No such luck. It just gave him an excuse to pace again. Tristian always had an incredibly annoying style of pacing, because he refused to stick to a rigid repetitious line, but instead kept varying his path so it just looked like he was randomly wandering around the room. The general consensus was that he did it deliberately, but nobody was ever going to get him to admit to that. She made a mental note to get everyone to gang up on him at the next gathering. Was that considered an intervention?
         Turning away from her slightly, he ran a finger along the counter, perhaps looking for dust. His eyes saw something else entirely. “Since we last saw each other there’s been some, ah, changes in my life.”
         “I’ll say . . . you didn’t have that thing at the barbeque. It would have made cutting the steak that much easier.” Without the object present it was simpler to just speak about it in the abstract, not unlike discussing nuclear fallout and life on other planets. Unless it’s right there in front of you, it just never seems real.
         “I didn’t? No, I guess, I . . . that must have been a couple of weeks before . . .” her cousin seemed confused by his own timeline, although she didn’t want to press him. “There was a point that . . . I think I was out of synch with . . . with a lot of things. Like time.” The last two words were tossed off as an afterthought. How Tristian spoke them without sounding delusional was beyond her. “And if I try to explain, it just won’t . . . it’s just not going to . . . make sense . . .” He was trying to convince a person that wasn’t her and wasn’t him. “So I’m not even sure how I’m really supposed to-“
         ”Whoa, pause for a second,” she interrupted, resisting the urge to hold up a hand like she was a traffic cop. He met her eyes in a wary fashion, with the wired tautness of someone who expected either of them to disappear at any moment. “How about we try this, how about we try something radical . . .” it was hard to keep a grin off her lips. He looked so silly when he was paying close attention. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
         Tristian wet his lips, glanced at the wall behind her, then at another wall. “Sure . . . why not?” he said almost breathlessly. “The beginning, then. We can start there.”
         “That’s better.”

* * * * *

         To slip, to shift. Time as elusive as a handful of light.
         Once, twice a year, you forget and don’t forget. The details blur, the minor changes become more jarring. Memory alters characteristics without asking permission. The tilt of a voice, the relative height, the color of hair. Night arcs forever downward and it’s as big as the world. What did you ever have in common? Genetics links everyone. You can’t just that as an excuse. This fragile distance was too tenuous a beast. Never wanted to spend the time to travel. It’s a finite currency and a volatile one when provoked.
         “Of course you don’t want to hear it. But I have to tell you anyway.”

* * * * *

         “. . . the stuff about the speech and the alley and what happened there, I’m going to skip it because it’s just not important . . .” the cadence of his speech was deafening and she was doing her best to follow the madcap angles of his thoughts. He was nervous about something, he kept crossing and uncrossing his arms as he paced. “But that night I ran into two . . . beings, I guess, that’s the only way I can describe them, to call them gods, it just, it scares the hell out of me, to think of them that way, but hell, it’s probably true . . .” Had he ever told any of this to anyone? Was it because she was family? Did he think she was going to run screaming from the apartment, run all the way to his parents and tell them that their son had become a raving lunatic? Based on his words and mannerisms alone, it might be true . . . if not for the object he carried. He certainly didn’t build it himself. Tristian was smart, but not brilliant. Someone gave it to him, obviously. The fact that she was trying to rationalize all of this logically was either a credit to her ability to deal with shock or merely a symptom of her weariness.
         “And I’ve never even seen them before but when they talk to me, I can hear . . . their voices are embedded in my bones, I don’t know why . . . it doesn’t make any sense . . .”
         She had to stop him before she totally lost the thread. “Hold on, hold on, Tristian . . . who is they . . . who are you talking about.” When he stopped moving it only seemed like half of his body agreed to it. He jammed his hands into his pockets in a futile attempt to look casual. There was a sickly look to his eyes. “You keep talking in general, but you’re not saying, it’s going to drive me nuts if you don’t-“
         ”Agents,” he spat out and for a second he thought he had sneezed.
         “Agents?” she repeated. “Is that what you call them or what they-“
         ”I don’t know,” he replied quickly, nearly decapitating her sentence. “That’s what I call them but I’m not sure if I made it up or if that’s what . . . if they call themselves that.” For a second he looked absolutely miserable. “I don’t know,” he said again. “I keep waiting for it to start making sense but every day brings something else I don’t understand and I’m . . . it buries me, I can’t see anymore, I can’t . . .” shuddering quietly, he ran a hand tightly through his hair, biting his lip to keep himself from speaking further. “This is stupid,” he whispered. “I’m just wasting your time, I’m okay, I shouldn’t be . . .”
         “Have you heard me complaining yet?” she asked mildly. Her hand was still wrapped around her coffee cup but she hadn’t taken a drink in a while. It was still lukewarm. She took a sip both so she could convince herself she wasn’t wasting it and to give her a second to think. “Because I want to listen, Tristian, but you have to work with me here . . . take it slow. Take a deep breath . . . can you do that?” He stared at her without comprehension. “No, I’m serious, a nice, deep breath. Come on, I know you can.” She kept her voice light, the tone of someone instructing a petulant child.
         A lopsided grin peeked out of his face briefly even as he turned away. She tried to hide a matching grin as she heard him exhale.
         He placed both hands on the countertop, bowed his head. He did look thinner, but she couldn’t be sure if that was because she hadn’t seen him for a while or it was just the long culmination of gradual weight loss.
         “Perhaps,” he said, his voice slightly muffled by distance, “perhaps I should start over.” He made a sound that might have been a snorted laugh. “Allow me to introduce myself.” There was a flat resonance to his voice, a recitation of something that he could never get to sound as good as it did in his head. “My name is Tristian Jacart, and I’m the host of the Agents.”
         “Well,” she said, drumming her nails on the table, “I guess that’s a start.” For some reason she kept waiting for him to comment that he was a man of wealth and taste.
         “Trust me,” he said, “that sounds as weird to me as it does to you.” He had turned around again to face her, and looked slightly calmer. The object swung at his belt placidly, almost blending in with his pants. The afterimage still lingered in his mind’s vision. She didn’t want to ask him what he used it for. Maybe he just needed it to open doors.
         “And how long have you been a . . . host?” she asked, trying not to picture him in a bad tuxedo ushering guests into a stuffy restaurant. It was all she could do not to giggle. Somehow this conversation was just barely becoming surreal.
         That question made him frown distantly. “Since the day I was born, apparently.”
         “And what exactly does it entail?” Not laughing while speaking those words was one of the hardest things she’d ever done. Not that she wanted to make fun of him, it just struck her as so odd. And yet, part of her believed it. There was too much conviction in her cousin for it to be otherwise.
         He was quiet for a long time, chewing at his lip thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, with a sharp laugh, “I have absolutely no idea. I’m still waiting for someone to explain it to me.”

* * * * *

         Crisscross winds strafe the uptown traffic.
         I don’t ever remember her at the house at the place in the world I used to live.
         “You can’t expect me to play in these shoes . . .”
         “Well, then, I guess you’ll have to figure something out, hm?”
         Relationships in a family are splatters of hideous, gnarled threads, never seemed to connect anywhere, hanging all the time, all too ready to choke someone who tried to unravel them. Most of them are well defined. Mother to son. Son to father. Father to daughter. Daughter to brother. Brother to sister. The line goes in hysterical circles and there’s no guessing for when it might trip you up.
         What is a cousin? Can you tell me that?
         The son or daughter of aunt or uncle, that’s what they are. That’s what I can tell. That’s what I’ll say.
         But what kind of relationship is that? There’s no guidebook for it at all. It can be as distant as the lights on the apartments I used to see when I used to cut across the parking lot. The buildings jutted far above the surrounding landscape and at night it sparkled with urban jewels, glittering with dewdrop decay. They were sentinels, and I could never touch them. Family can be like that, unassailable. Sometimes it happens even if you don’t want it to be that way.
         It doesn’t always have to that way. Sometimes it’s not.
         That’s all I’ll say. That’s all I wanted to say.

* * * * *

         “If you don’t know,” she asked, honestly curious now, “what do you do? How do you go about being the host?” It occurred to her that she had no idea what time it was. That was the problem with night, ten looked the same as two in the morning, unless you lived in the Arctic or something. When it got brighter out, she would know that she’d be up for too long. Damn, and she had to go to work tomorrow too. But there were questions inside of her that kept coming forth, like those magicians that couldn’t stop the foam balls from popping out of their mouth.
         “I just . . . I just keep doing what I’m doing . . .” Tristian said, looking briefly confused. At least he was leaning against the counter now, and not pacing. That was definitely a relief. “Apparently that’s all I really can do . . . if there’s trouble, it . . . somehow it finds me.”
         “What kind of trouble?” The way his voice sounded, it didn’t seem that he would be called upon to fix toilets and the like.
         “Ah, the first time . . . when I met the, ah, Agents . . .” he inhaled sharply through his teeth, reached behind him for the coffee cup. It was no doubt cold by now, but he just held it in both hands and stared at his reflection in the opaque liquid. Maybe he was watching memories. “They teleported me to a city that’s past Pluto . . .” and he said it much the same way she would state I took the bus across town this morning. She had never thought she would hear the word teleport used in casual conversation, at least not with its usual meaning. “I’m not really sure why, but right after I . . . I got there the city was attacked by . . . other aliens and I was caught in the middle, I had to fight, I . . .” he had closed his eyes now. His hands were absolutely still. She could have balanced glass figurines on the edges of the cup. “The city, it was carved in an asteroid and so there was tunnels burrowed throughout it . . . it was fairly cramped and I remember the smell, it was hard to classify, if rust were rotting meat, maybe . . .” he stopped, his mouth in a tight line. “It doesn’t matter,” he continued, “because in those tunnels I ran into something, it was killing the people who lived there, they were invading all over the place but I just saw one, it . . . it looked like something out of a nightmare, all tentacles and bug eyes and . . . it kept roaring, in the tunnels the roar was almost this, this physical thing, I could feel it in my bones, I . . .” he brought the cup up to his face but didn’t drink. A second later he lowered it again. Maybe he was just looking for his reflection, trying to convince himself that he still existed. “It had . . . six tentacles and three of them had bodies wrapped up in them . . . one was missing its head, the thing, the alien it took a bite out of one of the corpses while I stood there, I remember it had a mouth like a bottomless pit and these giant teeth and its face was covered in blood, just in splotches, like some weird skin condition . . . and one of the bodies was still twitching. I remember that.” His voice was level, betraying only the required emotion. She wondered how many times he had gone through this event, in an effort to commit every detail to memory. She’d heard the tone before, when she was a kid and she used to sneak out of bed and cling to the stairs, listening to her father sit and talk with his buddies over drinks late into the night, especially when more than one beer was tucked into their systems and the talk turned toward Vietnam. Tristian’s voice contained the same resolute shock. “I had been running from . . . from something else and so I couldn’t go back the way I came and while I was standing there it, it saw me and it let out this . . . bellow and it just rushed me, it was so big I didn’t think anything could move that fast but it did and . . . and I . . .” A hint of dark humor streaked his face briefly. “Well, I’m still here, right? So you can probably guess what I did. What I had to do.” The angry slit cut across her memory again. The joke she had wanted to make before, about a certain movie, was gone now. She knew perfectly well what the object was for and what he could use it for.
         “Tristian . . .” she said, beginning to stand up, not even really sure why, maybe to give him a hug, maybe just to touch him, to remind him that he existed. He looked so withdrawn, like he always did when things ended. One of the last times she had seen him, at his grandparents’ anniversary party, held in the basement of a restaurant, she had somehow managed to convince him to dance, to actually get on the floor with the rest of the goofier members of the family. He, of course, managed to throw just about everyone off the beat. Later, when the party was finished and everyone was leaving, she went down the stairs to make sure that she hadn’t forgotten anything. Halfway down she saw him, standing in the center of the empty room, alone, his hands in his pockets. As she watched he began to pace, in slow measured strides, his eyes darting back and forth across the room. He might have been retracing the steps of everyone who had been there, replaying the memories at his own speed. There had been a tired, spent look to him. She could still hear the sound of his footsteps in that hollow place, and even though the sound followed her back up the stairs, for some odd reason she expected that at any second the sound might disappear and with it, Tristian as well. The loneliness was in him then, but she choose to walk away, not wanting to face it. But it was different now. She wanted to help.
         But he was obsidian, smooth and reflective, revealing the flaws only when the light struck him at the right angle. Waving a hand dismissively, he motioned for her to sit down, to keep away from him. “Don’t worry, I’m okay . . . really I am,” and he smiled, as if the act might add fragile credibility to his statement. She didn’t believe, but she couldn’t assault it either. “I survived and . . . and it got better from there. It always does.” He flashed a quiet grin at her, taut but still natural on the fringes. “So do you think I’ve gone crazy? I don’t think we’ve had a real lunatic in the family for a few generations, we could be due.”
         “I don’t think it’s you,” she said softly, resting her chin in her hand and propping her elbow on the table. “No, I think I believe you, it’s just . . .” she narrowed her eyes. “Why you? Why is this happening to you?”
         “Just lucky I guess,” he said with another dry laugh. “I wish I knew for sure, from what I’m told . . .” and he didn’t elaborate on who might have told him, “. . . it has to be someone and, ah, this time it wound up being me.”
         “You, hm,” she said. God, she was getting tired. The coffee had done nothing for her. Tristian seemed as wired as ever, she wondered if that was a side effect of whatever he was, whether he even slept anymore. That would be nice. Eight hours a day extra. A free day every three days. What would you do with all that extra time? Live, she supposed, too tired to think of anything more complicated. People would figure out something. They always did. “So when you say it has to be someone . . . you’re the only person like . . . like that, in the whole world?”
         Tristian snorted with what might have been cynical amusement. “The world? The Universe, actually . . .” and the concept was so large her brain couldn’t wrap around it. “There’s really only one at a time, apparently, and this time, out of the trillions upon untold trillions of people in the Universe . . . it’s me.”
         “It’s a kind of luck,” she said with a cheery smile.
         “Better than being hit by a meteor, I suppose,” he replied, frowning briefly. “Though only time will tell, I guess, which is the preferable fate.” He sighed, twisting his head to the side, not looking at her. “It’s not all bad,” he said, his eyes facing the darkened living room. It wasn’t clear who he was speaking to. She didn’t dare look over there. The bedroom was that way and a silent signal was tapping her on the shoulder already, courtesy of her brain’s internal clock. “I wanted to think that way, at first, because I was all covered in blood . . .” it was a memory reciting itself, unfiltered and pure. She couldn’t listen to this. It was too personal. “There were symbols splattered on the stone walls in blood and I couldn’t tell if they were part of some alien language, or just random splatters. That’s the danger of this Universe, you want to read into things, you want to think it’s all connected . . . but too often it’s just random, it’s just meaningless. And nothing makes any sense, and it’s not terrible, it’s just the way things are. We don’t think about, but when you do, you can’t stop.” There was a subtle intensity to his voice, a hushed fever to his words. “And you don’t want to accept it, you don’t want to come to terms with it, but at the end of the . . . the day, there’s nothing you can do. And even if it doesn’t make you feel any better, it’s still good to keep in mind.” He was talking to himself. He had already left her place, retreated back into his own world.
         Then, abruptly, his gaze darted back to her. For a fleeting moment, Tristian appeared otherworldly, the kind of man who would leave the planet to have crazy adventures. “I kept running, I didn’t know where I was going. Dark shapes rushed past me, chittering, going in the opposite direction. I slipped on things that might have been entrails and eyes. I thought I was in a terrible dream, and I was going to die there. So I kept running. I kept going up . . . and then . . .”
         He broke off suddenly, stared at her for another second without speaking and then without warning strode off to her left, toward the living room. The dark, draped shadows swallowed him easily enough and he entered without hesitation.
         Her eyes followed his blurred passage, not comprehending at all what the point was. A self-guided tour? Deep inside her living room, she heard a faint rustling and the creaking of furnature.
         “After a while, I did the only thing I could,” his voice drifted out to her, a radio station desperately clutching a lonely frequency for fear of being disrupted entirely. “I stopped. I stopped. And I want to show you why.”
         Silence spread easily, liquid poured from an overflowing container.
         “Come in here,” he asked, nearly begged. “Please, I just want . . . please.” He was out of words apparently, trying to coast on emotion. It had never been his strong point, he had never wanted to give anyone the key, the codes. He was nothing but pure sound now, his body diminished, withdrawn, vanished. There was nothing to grasp, or follow. Just the sound. “I don’t know how to show you. I’m not sure how to try. Just . . . please.”
         She didn’t know what he was saying. She had no idea what he was asking. No more words emerged from the shadows, she couldn’t even see the darker contrast of his thin frame, a line drawn on the dark. He didn’t say anything else, it was quite possible he wasn’t going to.
         Slipping quietly out of her chair, she padded toward the darkness, and without hesitation, slid inside.