Once upon a time there was a universe.

It stretched in an unbroken line from the distant beginning where everything was one cosmic egg to an endless future of fading pockets of heat. This entropy death was, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the inevitable fate of the universe.

But on a billion billion worlds through space, there were Creators. They wove alternate realities, turning the line which stretched in the x direction from negative to positive infinity into a sheet stretching in the y direction. Where to? Check back in a billion billion alternate realities.

In one reality perhaps a thousand units up the y axis from the baseline (and you must remember that y=0, our baseline, is only relative, there are a billion realities “below” ours), there lived a demon.

His name was Rrrrr (or something not too unlike that). Self-absorbed Rrrrr was lonely so he created Grrrr (or some growly sound like that) so he’d have someone to kick around.

“You are mine,” he hissed in his winter grey voice.

“Gord feck it, you carnt tell me phwat to dew,” Grrrr spat.

Rrrrr did something to Grrrr. In earth terms we might say he froze him, splintered him into shards, kicked the shards to the moon and back and sneered, “You were saying?” Or something like that.

And so they wandered the spaces between worlds in things that might be colorfully called magical tunnels. They avoided other beings and they weren’t very happy but Rrrrr commanded, Grrrr obeyed … and committed acts of sabotage whenever he could.

What were they doing that Grrrr could sabotage? Answering that would be like trying to explain the stuff you hear and see sometimes as you fall asleep: a babble of nonsense words combined with images of a face that is also a lava monolith and a sunset glowing with elements of lamb and bacteria and rambunctious.

But then one day, or maybe it was the same day on a different timeline, Grrrr saw a playful spirit worshiping the sun and realized that he wanted a world with sun. He decided to run away from Rrrrr.

It took a lot of cunning and conniving, some complicated moving of blocks in the walls of the corridors, to create an opening to the world of sun. He punched and pulled at a section of wall until the tangled writing came hissing apart like a sack of cobras and snatched both him and Rrrrr into a fresh story; he was Gerald Benz Rrrrr was Rütiger.

(Giles Hammond tried to hold the story steady, still waiting for a place where he could make a small but important change. He felt the supportive bear strength of RJ, the strong and meditative guidance of Hiyako, the mischievous spirit of the trapped curandera and the bright power of Jasmine. Tiffany waited like a thunderstorm beside him as he watched this new story.)

Gerald was a young man on the run from his overbearing father in early seventies Sedona. He fell in love with Dilyéhé who loved to lie in the sun. One day he wanted to take a photo of his naked wife, but he’d come into this world with a past and couldn’t.

Or perhaps he backed away to include more glory of sun and warm rock and fell to his death through not understanding gravity very well.

But it’s foolish to try and make such a linear story out of such nonlinear time. With dismay, Giles felt the story hiccup and start again.

Once upon a time there was a boy named Gerald who was cruelly repressed by his father. He missed his mother, though he could barely remember her, and poured all his energy into creating pictures, but never sexual ones because that father of his pounded into his head all kinds of Freudian suppression. Anyway, there he was and then there he wasn’t and half mad Rütiger came to the United States to try and save him.

As the tale spun out of his control, Giles was back in the swiveling chair, staring at Killington, hating the hard hands that held him down like rock slabs. He felt RJ and Hiyako in their homey kitchen. But the presence he would have leaned on the most, Tiffany’s, was gone. He couldn’t even turn his head to see if she was in the chair beside him. Had she abandoned him again?

And, for the first time since he had plunged into this world of remembering and reinventing, he felt the push of the audience.

For he stood on the stage and told this story to a crowd and they pushed at him like a nubbled rock wall. Kids whining, mothers shushing, people tilting their heads, trying to follow along.

They knew something big was happening: the Storyteller spoke and Killington wasn’t stopping him. The Planners weren’t stopping him. This was big. For them, he had to make this make sense.

He was Gerald, taking that one more step back to get the perfect picture, feeling a gulf of air under his scrabbling back foot. Terror thrilling through every limb, he fought for balance and fell, a demon stuck in a helplessly mortal body.

He was Rütiger Benz, sitting up in bed with night sweats half a world away, dressing gown plastered to his corpulent form. The echoes of the dream gripped him, tearing at the acid knots in his middle. The boy was somewhere in the world and all the detectives he had hired hadn’t found him. Now the boy was dead!

He vowed to tear heaven and earth apart and bring back the little boy who had been so obedient and dear, the last memento of a wife who had died too young.

Determined to find him and save him. But how? He’d seen the boy in the dream: in a desert but where? Find him, save him, at any cost! Tear the world apart!

An excuse to be cruel, to tear things apart!

How virtuous he was! He was only cruel when he had a reason, a good reason.