1.

I ride the worldlines. That’s what you do when you’re dead. I ride them as they flow time-wise, ceaselessly forward, leading the edge of physical. Like anyone dead, I’m drawn to the story I lived, to the worldlines I knew. I can follow them forward, or trace back, rewinding through memory. I’m not sure what the worldlines flow through, but I can see them well from my world (i.e., the Land of the Dead). If I catch sight of you on your worldline, I’m not spying; I can’t watch you undress or go to the bathroom. Not unless it’s important to the book of you, which contains those essentials that you and the Totality together extract as your meaning. And don’t let anyone fool you, your life has meaning. I’m reading one worldline the most and it’s of tremendous import: my sister’s.

Ricky’s Worldline—October 29, 2025

The gust that blew open the double doors of the group home felt damp, like the wind had moved over water. Then a whirlwind whipped around Ricky Jameson: Construction paper from her project rose above her and above the head of group-home-resident Tony Hanover. Churning around them was orange for pumpkins, black for witches’ hats, and purple for skeletons. Ricky launched up from the table and into the vestibule to shoulder the doors shut. She, the staff worker, was responsible for him, the vulnerable adult. But just as she reached the bright green doors, they were sucked back in two bangs.

Tony gave Ricky that flat now what? expression, demoting her status from supervisory to burdened. Yes, now what? Well, organize the mess; it would not be Tony tidying up. She bent to retrieve the pages, accepting her responsibilities, a series of now-what? moments. Within each, she figured out how to connect with the residents of this group home, their thirteen separate twilight zones currently contained in the residential treatment center of New Foundations. Many of these worlds were charming, poetic even. But not all.

Tony’s inner world seemed made for sharing secrets, and all were unsettling. They revolved around two topics: Thought reading and his nephews. But tonight, he took his time.

“Ricky,” Tony pronounced, not to get her attention, but to weigh the name, feel its dimensions. “A boy’s name. What’s it short for? Your full name.”

She deflected his probing. “I like the name Ricky. Feel free to use it often.”

The information he sought was Ricarda Jameson, but she heard the advice in her mind, Don’t share too much, as she had only once in her nine months at New Foundations. Revealing personal details to a resident had seemed so natural at the time, as she helped to clean the room of a average-seeming woman who made Ricky wonder if there were sometimes errors in people’s diagnoses. Only later, at the Med Office window, when there was an audience, did the woman down her pills with a snort and throw the fluted cup at Ricky. “Rich BITCH! Whore for money! Designer BITCH!” she shouted. Only then did Ricky acknowledge her mistake.

Her mind full of humiliation, Ricky had blurted to Shanice, her shift supervisor, “I told her about my mom. But she’s dead.”

The edges of Shanice’s topaz eyes hardened against letting anything controllable unravel. “You want to talk about it?”

“No.” But Ricky always felt pride that her mother had sewn for Lavin, a Parisian couture fashion house.

“OK,” Shanice had nodded her approval, and continued, “Joan’s spent all day in her room. When she does that, she sees bears. Pretty soon the shit is going to hit the fan.”

Ricky shook out of her reverie, back to Tony, who stared at her. This was not the time to go over old ground, especially in regard to her mother, who was mainly gone from her imagining. There was no face to go with the nostalgia, so she rarely peered into that well of sorrow. Should sorrow find her, her Cognitive Regulations armored her: No whining, no pointless leisure, no social media or gaming addicts, nobody childish, nobody weak, nobody who can’t help. There was more nobody in her life than she admitted.

Tony tried a new tack. “You must have done crafts with young family members.” He rotated a black paper square in front of him, as if debating its use. “I bet they were boys and you’d all hack away at projects.”

Was this a gambit to get more sharp objects? There was only one scissors and it was carefully monitored when not locked in the craft box.

No, the key word was boys. She should parry this fast, but her mind went to her brother, and how there weren’t any boys in her family.

Why had she thought it was a good idea to have a Halloween party? It had seemed like fun when she’d asked Tony last night during meds, as she tapped his Depakote into the cap of the pill bottle, then into the paper cup, to slide across the Dutch door ledge of the Med Office. As he swallowed his pills, she ticked the box corresponding to the correct name, Tony Hanover, time, medication, and date, so close to Halloween.

“I’m troubled by my thoughts,” he had said, “but I’d really like to hang decorations with you. It’ll be our special one-on-one.” She should have known it would just be Tony, the reason the other twelve residents hadn’t even wandered through.

She wanted to be good at this job, at finding things that needed doing. She had a knack for planning activities and she was tidy; she enjoyed re-positioning the few pieces of stuffed furniture in the TV room that could, in another place, offer the promise of conversation. She never minded emptying the ashtrays on the third floor smoking porch that overlooked the fire escape and back yard with its parking lot and vegetable garden. She understood why the residents would huddle under the smoke-stained ceiling of the porch in all weather, shivering or sweating, to let the cigs stoke their brain dopamine; it was one reward in their control.

Tony sensed her drifting. “Such delicate fingers.” He breathed the first words in staccato tempo. Once he had her attention, he drew out the last syllable into a hiss. His hands pulled up near his chest and flopped forward, going from snake to rabbit. It was his fair coloring and prominent teeth. The dark frame of his glasses added to the impression of dithering, but his words were precise. “Even though I’m feeling anxious tonight, I really want to celebrate the season.” His smile squooshed his face into a mask of dearness.

Ricky avoided looking by bending to retrieve a piece of paper she’d missed. As she did, his case notes from his first hospitalization re-played in her mind’s eye.

Tony is a small, emotionally reserved child who, although cooperative, gives brief and unelaborated answers to questions. He exhibits little capacity for personal insight although his WISC scores indicate a high IQ. His mother describes him as frequently staring blankly and admits that Tony’s father (who abandoned the family and has not been seen since) tried to kill him at age five by throwing him down the basement stairs. In addition, Tony reported to his mother that an older family member had been “messing” with him sexually. When Tony was asked about his own sexual abuse of his younger nephews, he denied it and said “I’m like a father to them.”

When she sat up again, Tony crossed his legs and leaned forward, laughing, the paleness of his complexion, hair, and white dress shirt becoming more Warhol than rabbit. “You seem so young for someone with such a responsible job.” His eyes lasered her above the thick black glasses. “How do you stay so youthful? Positively juvenile!” he cackled. As if he knew.

All I did was change one number: the year. Besides she’d be eighteen in eleven months. Barely false pretenses. And the fake ID hadn’t even been her idea. On top of that, she’d grown up fast and she knew she looked mature. Her face was lean, without baby fat, and she carried herself like a stand-alone, a component without connection ports.

Besides, this job got her out of the house. The nurturing at home had been halved when her mother died. And then, in a compound injury that both took her brother and seemed to vacate her entire sense of being, she was left alone with her father in the tall house on Kyrie Lane.

“Can I harm someone with my thoughts? I can’t tell you what I’m thinking. It’s too violent,” Tony’s already quavery voice quivered more.

“No, you can’t; thoughts are different from actions,” Ricky replied, conscious that he’d hooked her curiosity. What type of violence? She made a mental note that this should definitely be recorded on a half-sheet for the rest of the staff to read.

She was ready to be done with the morose reminiscing spurred by Tony’s conversation. “Okay.” she said with determination, “Let’s make a skeleton to hang outside on the front door. With the brads here, when the wind blows, the bones will do a little –”

Tony interrupted her. “I’m not interested in bones. At least not artistically.” In another abrupt shift, he smiled as if signaling a secret confidence between them. “At least write some magical symbols.” He pushed the pile of markers toward her. “I know you know some.”

“Afraid I don’t. How about a scary pumpkin?” She wanted to head off his favorite topic: the Nephews.

“I want to share the secret of what happened.” Too late.

In the diminishing light of the vacant front rooms, he’d relish her spiral into tortured imaginings. She’d end this. “O.K. Hey, how about those symbols?”

She began with ♃, using the purple marker on orange paper, the colors of Jupiter, the expansive god of abundance. Then black on red, for Pluto, ♇the lord of the Underworld, and silver on black, ☿, for Hermes, the messenger of the gods. Her metallic gold on black, symbolizing the Sun, ☉ made him giggle.

“See? I knew you knew them. I knew.” He stared at her, leering. “But there’s one I want to show you.”

He grabbed her hand that still held the marker. Before she could jerk away, the clammy flesh of his palm and splayed fingers caught in hers. Her hand went with his, as if paralyzed, while he crudely scrawled a new symbol, her fingers dragged along painfully as he powered through the strokes. Shoving the symbol in front of her, he cried in a high voice both hysterical and winsome, “I know another secret! I know what happened to him. Find the symbol and you’ll find him!”

Before his shriek died away, he grasped the scissors from the tabletop and drove them, like a nail of crucifixion, into the hand, his hand, that still held the symbol, ٤Λ , before her.

#

Under the spidery brooms of treetops that swept the night, the ambulance went quietly up the hill from the group home with the white-faced young man inside. Ricky looked down at her incident report.

Resident: Tony Hanover Date: 10/30/25

Staff: Ricky Jameson Time: 8:30P

Tony asked to make Halloween decorations. He said he had violent thoughts. Then Tony stabbed his own hand with the scissors from the craft box. This staff immediately had mental health supervisor Shanice Jackson call 911. This staff then went back to stay with Tony, who was unresponsive, until the EMTs came and removed–

Her handwriting was shaky. “Normal,” she thought, “under the circumstances.”

What was not normal were her lies, about her age, about her knowledge of occult symbols, and about Tony’s drawing. She had left it out of her report, instead shoving it into her back pocket. She lied by not writing that Tony had drawn the tattoo of the person she loved most in this world: A person she had lost and that Tony told her she could find again.

–the scissors. Tony was taken to St. Luke’s Hospital where his wound was treated and sutured. No bones broken. He will be kept under observation (Unit 8). The hospital will contact program director Dr. Belquis Veladora at N.F. as soon as possible the morning of 10/31/25.

Shanice had blocked the residents from entering the front rooms and reassured them that everything was under control, sending them either back to the TV room or to bed. Then she consulted with the on-call supervisor who confirmed that they had followed the correct procedure.

After all of this, Ricky asked Shanice, “It’s almost time for the shift change; would it be OK if I take off? I’m not feeling very well.”

Shanice looked at Ricky and nodded. “You look like you just saw somebody stab himself. You should go.”

#

A cold weight settled in Ricky’s head as she climbed into the decrepit Hyundai that, for almost two years, had been “Tristan’s car,” and now was just merely available. She had never before left a responsibility unfinished and had suggested as much during her job interview with her boss, Belquis Veladora. Under blue-black hair and with eyes the color of chai latte, Belquis had fixed Ricky with a stare. “Is your dad the James Jameson I knew in graduate school?”

It was.

“¡Qué excelente!” said Belquis, who Ricky found warm, although not exactly cozy, like an exotic teapot.

“I knew your dad from the Psych department.” The woman’s slight smile hid what she must be thinking: parapsychology. A word that would be said like the name of a vehicle gone off a cliff, or a girl whose reputation was seriously damaged. But then the woman laughed, “What a nice guy.”

Ricky hoped Belquis didn’t see her dad in her—well-meaning but impractical, smart but clueless. She needed to be tougher than he was. So, just days after her brother Tristan’s death, she had returned to work and buckled down. Belquis had reached out to James with a sympathy card that Ricky finally opened, since James wouldn’t. Call me if there’s anything I can do.

Over the auto’s shuddering progress, Ricky rehearsed answers to the questions Belquis would have about Tony. She would tell the truth as much as possible, but not give away too much.

Belquis would ask, “Do you know why he stabbed his hand?” and “What did he say before he stabbed himself?” The director would quiz her with the disarming, slightly disbelieving smile that she had when her top teeth stuck out a little. This meant she was considering other perspectives or was ready to find humor in something serious. Although Belquis seemed to regard her job as a series of exceptional moments, this was too exceptional; it was bizarre.

“Well, Belquis,” Ricky imagined saying, “I made some symbols, not even magical. Just astrological. To keep Tony from jacking off mentally again. Then he drew a tattoo that was on….”

She couldn’t finish the sentence. Imaginary Belquis, who leaned back impossibly far in her ergonomic chair, hands crossed over her little pooch of a stomach, nodded knowingly. Ricky began to cry as she tried to remember. What did he say?

She answered herself aloud, “He said I’d find him.”

#

One house light burned at 16 Kyrie Lane as Ricky rattled the Hyundai along the front curb, leaving the driveway free for her dad to pull out, although he wouldn’t. He might as well not be there, even though he always was. It didn’t cross her mind to talk to him.

That left two people. No, why did she still do that, forget that Tristan was gone? He had “sloughed off his mortal coil,” to use the kind of obscure phrase he was prone to. She desperately wanted to hear him say any pompous thing from the classics that he was always reading, even criticize their dad again, ripping on one of his publications (Dad: Brain Waves or Relativistic Time Bending? Extrasensory Perception , 2009), with a silly parody (Tristan: “Brain vagues and relativistic fact bending: extra sensory concoctions”). Or counter one of her dad’s biographical nuggets about his hero Sir Isaac Newton (Dad: “He considered his occult and alchemical studies to be his real life’s work and the most important branches of science”) with a shaming nugget of his own (Tristan: “I read that true alchemists knew that processes of metallurgy were just symbols for the perfection of the soul”). Tristan had always beaten their dad at his own game.

Nevertheless, in those days she had defended their father, reminding Tristan, “Dad always says, ‘Trust only what you perceive with your own senses,’ ” to which Tristan would retort, “That’s the problem, he hasn’t sensed anything.”

And it was true. Again and again, in his lab, her father showed sleepy, stressed, bored, hung-over, eager, or suspicious undergraduates the back side of Zener cards, the classic figures used in ESP studies, for them to report what they saw on the front: “square,” “star,” “circle,” “cross,” or “wavy lines.” But he never found anyone who tested better than chance, meaning they just guessed.

Tristan would jab away at this fact in round tones, as if he were saying something very important to someone very far away. At one meal, he stood and shouted at his father, “Have you ever, actually ever, seen anything out of the ordinary happen?” He continued to yell into their dad’s confused face, one that clearly had nothing extraordinary to report. “With your own eyes, have you seen even one thing?” and then, to James’ bowed head, “That’s what I thought.”

Ricky didn’t like Tristan’s disrespect, but he had always been there to protect her.

She remembered one of their first days at “academic opportunity of a lifetime” (her father had called it), Convent of the Temptation in the Garden. She wasn’t sure how the other students knew that she didn’t fit in, that she was a scholarship student, but they all did. On this day, an older girl, a macaroni heiress, walked toward Ricky in the garden with a group of older girls.

“You’re a little mouse, aren’t you? I’ll call you Minnie, Minnie Mouse.”

“I’m Ricky,” she remembered saying, trying to look confident.

Suddenly there were boys gathered around her too. One of them was handsome, with black hair and creamy white skin. Good looks spent on a cold face. Because his family owned a mortuary, people called him Eddy Munster.

“Maybe it’s ‘Louse.’ I’ll call you Lucy Louse. Can I check your head for lice?”

As the boy began to move toward her with wriggling fingers, Ricky shut her eyes. The other children laughed uproariously. “E-yew, don’t touch her!”

Because he was so close to Ricky, she felt the sudden exhalation of breath on her face. When high, frightened cries from the gathered students rose up around her, she opened her eyes squarely into the intense face of her brother, who was staring at the ground. There, her torturer writhed, holding the place where the pant legs of the grey gabardine uniform came together.

“Unhh,” the boy grunted repeatedly.

Tristan finally looked up, but not at her. His head slowly swung around to scan the gathered, peaked faces. His narrowed eyes rejected the alarm of the assembled.

“I mean this to be a warning to anyone who messes with my sister.” Then he turned again to the boy and kicked him in the gut.

The gathered children continued to make fearful sounds. He commanded, “OK, now take me to the prioress. I want the whole school to know that a little Sissy Mary like me fucked this big kid up.”

He directed his fearsome look around the semicircle. No one moved or spoke. After some moments Tristan took Ricky’s hand and led her away. She recalled that she had only started to cry at the crudeness of Tristan’s words, like there was another Tristan underneath the one whose stuffy correctness was off-putting in its own way.

Ricky’s memory stopped there like the end of a movie preview. Did anything ever happen to Tristan? She didn’t think so, because he would have been expelled if the prioress had ever known. From that day on, they never talked about it. From that day too, Tristan was embraced by the cliquish Temptation in the Garden soccer players. Many of the boys were foreign students who boarded at Temptation. They took him into their fold despite his young age, and Tristan became a person that other students deferred to, and from whom they kept their distance.

So Tristan became her source of safety. And the more her father failed to battle back, the more determined she was to be a ramrod, to not take shit. She avoided anything that lulled her resolve, like tenderness or flattery. That year, she rolled up her uniform skirt every day before school, and matched Tristan’s eye-rolls that most things were “tiresome.” Her curiosity for the remarkable vanished.

#

The second person Ricky thought to talk to, who knew many details already, was her best friend, Starr Ann Potolovich.

Ricky’s first distinct memory of Starr Ann was vivid. Starr Ann’s mother had led her daughter into the third grade classroom of Convent of the Temptation in the Garden after the year had already begun. The mother looked like a queen, making Starr Ann look small and meek by comparison. The garb of the elegant woman was expensive, but plain. No, Ricky thought, not plain, but familiar. She had seen that dress before, in her mother’s sewing room. Her mother had made the dress worn by the new girl’s mother. The dress was confirmation that some link existed between her and the new girl: two elegant mothers bound by taupe shantung, binding two little girls.

Ricky kept her fingers crossed through the first two periods that the new girl would be next to her in the recess line. When she wasn’t, Ricky was determined to find her on the playground. This was tricky because Temptation in the Garden did not have an actual playground, but a garden with many winding pathways. After running along a number of these, Ricky spied the new girl staring up at a huge bronze statue of patron Saint Magenulf and his miraculous stag, who grew a cross within his broad rack of antlers. “That dress your mom was wearing? My mom made it.”

“Hey!” Starr Ann said forcefully, startling Ricky into close attention. Then Starr Ann, taller than Ricky, her height accentuated by long dark hair, began to sing. It was a song that Ricky would recognize later, when they blared Starr’s brother’s old vinyl record collection down in the Potolovich basement family room.

That day in the garden, it was hard to make out Starr Ann’s rushed, eight-year-old words, except for “needles and pins” and “face” and “loved.” Ricky’s hand lifted to her cheek, as if she would discover something new, something noticed by the new girl. Ricky had made a friend.

More of her life than not, Starr Ann had been there to advise and protect Ricky, the charity case, marked as different, undesirable. To all but Starr Ann.

One day in the sixth grade, as Ricky waited, early and alone, at her class lunch table in the refectory, a barrage of light missiles riffled her hair. She heard a snigger and was aware that nearby tables, as they filled, were closely watching the target practice.

Just as more incoming bits hit the table, thankfully there was Starr Ann at the entrance of the dining hall. Peanuts, Ricky identified with relief, as another one hit her head.

“Hey Sandefer,” Starr Ann yelled loudly. Three tables that hadn’t been watching were now quiet and at attention.

Starr Ann picked up a peanut from the table and held it up between thumb and forefinger. It spanned half an inch. Starr Ann raised the peanut to eye level, looked at the peanut, and then at Sandefer, comparing.

“These are definitely your nuts.”

The tables erupted in wave-like fashion as Starr’s insult was repeated further out to those who couldn’t hear. In Starr Ann’s orbit was social safety.

#

The night Tony stabbed himself, Ricky went right to her room. On the nightstand stood a framed photo of two people. One, was her own self, and the other, his arm over her shoulders, was a young man whose mouth was oddly wan in its setting of flat bronze cheekbones and fiercely white teeth. They both wore T-shirts and blue jeans and stood in a setting of thickly growing woods next to a rough wooden-sided building.

Barely visible on the man’s forearm, the one that curved across her shoulder, was a muzzy blue figure that she knew to be an “Α” with its crossbar balancing a right-handed circle and left-handed squiggles. She took Tony’s drawing from her jeans’ pocket. Smoothing it, one corner stiff with blood, she laid it on the bed under the lamp. Same symbol. ٤Λ .

“It’s true,” she said quietly, as if the Chinese lantern glowing darkly from the ceiling and the model human brain on the tall bookshelf were listening.

All the way home, she had kept repeating that Tony was crazy, that this was just a bad night at work; but now she was certain that Tony had given a prophecy of events that had been invisibly in motion toward this night.

Ricky’s fingers rubbed the paisley leaves of the photo’s frame. She was catching up, but too slowly. She had to concentrate and pinpoint, as exactly as she could, what had happened to her.