It seemed incredible but the barriers were gone. The two stupid guards were both comically snoring, their dark glasses knocked askew, and nobody had come running. He’d done it.

Giles looked at Tiffany and grinned. She lifted a fist and gave a pantomime pump, a sophisticated quotation of a real fist pump. Later it would seem incredible to him that he never thought to tie the guards up. They walked around the corner, down to the plain door and tried the latch (it was one of those handled doorknobs).

It was unlocked. I didn’t even think to specify that, Giles realized, aware of Tiffany’s warm, powerful presence beside him. Tiffany’s presence in his story; his brain flipped a switch…

As they walked into the dark room, he flicked a glance at Tiffany. She’s slowly falling in love with me…

He started that thought, but skidded it to a fumbling stop, burning with shame.

He couldn’t do that, couldn’t try to change the story so Tiffany loved him, any more than he could have kissed Hiyako when she would have kissed him back out of guilt. He patted the wall and found the light switch.

Tiffany never let on in any way that she sensed the thought which he had fondled and set down untouched. But he still had the feeling that he’d been damn lucky he was so ethical. He felt for a moment like a small boat rocking in the wake of an ice-breaker which had just steamed past.

In the center of the room was a work table with dark brown fake-wood linoleum topping with black streaks, metal legs. On the table lay his mother, as he’d seen her yesterday, young and vital…

No, of course it was not Mary Hammond. It was himself. Giles Hammond.

Even though we’ve seen a thousand pictures of our precious selves (a million in these days of selfies), none of us has any practice recognizing our own body seen from the outside. Giles felt his heart turn over with a wu-lump. Is that what I look like? He was afraid to touch himself.

He looked over at Tiffany. “What do we do now?” he whispered, afraid to disturb the sleeper.

“We wake you up!” she said in a normal voice which sounded like a shout. Giles winced.

As Tiffany shook his body, saying like a nurse, “Wake up now, dear. Your presence is needed,” Giles wondered what would happen to him. What was he? Was he a dream that this sleeper created? Was he a character in this story, this story which he stood right now on the stage and told out loud?

Robby Baker had been a character in his story and Robby Baker was gone. When had he last inhabited the character of Robby Baker, the newspaper reporter whose ex-wife was Mary Hammond? As Tiffany chafed the hands of his body on the table, Giles thought back. He had “been” Robby when he was back in the Abiotic Institute in the mid-1970’s and had stopped being Robby the instant he walked out the door and into the present day empty parking lot. What had happened “in-story” to Robby Baker?

Tiffany stopped shaking his body. She stood silently for a moment, her gloved hands on his shoulders. With a reluctance which Giles could not understand, she said, “I shall need to use extraordinary methods. We must have you awake and with us, dear.”

“Um, okay?” Giles shook his head, confused. Wasn’t he awake and with her now?

She pinched a thumb and index finger and began to pull the black lace glove from her left hand.

And there it was. The silver hand with the golden palm which had touched his mother’s heart and killed her with a stroke. She removed the other glove, laid them both on the table, flexed her fingers like a concert pianist warming up.

Hardly knowing how he dared but suddenly angry at Mary’s death as he hadn’t let himself be for this whole time, he reached out to pull her hands away from his helpless body. He saw his pale, human hands, so fragile the bones, so liquid the flesh which draped them, saw them move through the air to touch Tiffany’s hands.

Time stretched in the second before his hands made contact. Her face began to turn and it held horror. Horror!

Her sizzling, crackling hands folded under his.

They were filled with golden juice, like that strange fruit on Cloud Rock. Now she faced him full on and she was not angry, she was not potent with rage, she was only horrified. She struggled with him and he would happily have let her go but like once when he touched a live wire as a boy, he could not open his hands. Back then his quick-thinking mother had whapped it from his hands with a broomstick. Now he only held on as Tiffany’s hands, without her will, centered on his chest and touched him there as she had touched his mother.

Something wrenched him forward, arching his back in ecstasy. His body fell to the carpeted floor, dead, heart stopped, seared and serene. If he could have looked, he would have seen on his face that same look of epic pleasure he’d seen on Mary’s face in the vision. But he could only fly forward toward the tunnel of light, Tiffany’s blistering “Bloody hell!” crackling in his ears.

He swam forward in confusing chaos but her arm gripped his like iron, slammed him to a stop and turned her to face him.

In the dark he stood in front of her, and now she was angry, she was furious. He expected her to slap him hard and cry, “Damn you, damn you!” and he braced himself for the sting. He got it now: she’d meant to kill his old body and leave “awake and with us” the Giles who had lived through so much, learned so much.

But Tiffany turned from him and flung herself at the feet of another being, one Giles had never seen before but who Jasmine, RJ and Hiyako would all have recognized as Carmen, the curandera who had started this all so many years ago.

Mysterious, amazing Tiffany sobbed like the child she had been when this all began. “I’ve lost it all, I’ve lost her, I’ve lost everything, there’s nothing left.”

Her voice became Doree’s as the healer stroked her hair. “Nada. All gone. Cheez, I don’t got anything.”

Then she looked up, like the child she had been in Giles’s story. “Fix it, fix it like you did before, when you made me?”

The wise woman knelt and placed a hand on Tiffany’s heart.