The woman in the tub let him watch her bathe before filling the silence. “Just relax. I’ll show you what I like,” she cooed. He fumbled with his lips, which were so unlike his own, searching for a response, but found nothing to convey the strangeness of what he felt watching her.

The door connecting to the bedroom was slightly ajar, and a light and fan had been left on. The woman wore heavy makeup, her ankles crossed on the edge of the jacuzzi tub, toenails a garish red, her hair tied back in an Escherian sequence of interweaving braids. She smiled and invited him in with the curl of an extended index finger. He sat on the edge of the tub and she handed him a wash cloth, then turned around, causing the soapy mixture to froth, displaying in the process her immaculate back and shoulders and neck. He ran his palm across her wet skin.

When they finished, he fell back on the mattress, while she put on a blue bathrobe and went into the kitchen to grind Arabica. When the blood had come back to his head, he felt a stinging in his side. He had to urinate. He slung his feet over the side of the bed, feeling the oxygen flow down into his legs, and the sudden, piercing shock of the cold tile when his toes met the floor. (How long had it been since he had felt that shock? He thought of cold, interminable winters in Des Moines, and beyond, a distant boyhood outside Omaha.)

As he made his way back into the bathroom he paused, catching his reflection in the mirror. About twenty-five years old. Red hair, reasonably tall, and fairly muscular, in a pampered sort of way. And the woman had seemed to genuinely enjoy it, although who was to say. He ran his hand through his hair. The bedroom was mostly empty, with off-white stucco walls and a large Richter print hung in a black matte frame across from the bed.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“L.A.,” she said.

“I’ve never been to L.A.,” he wondered aloud, running a hand through his hair.

“Where are you from?” she said. He could sense the boredom in her words. The rote, routine exchange.

“It doesn’t matter. Can I see you again?”

“Of course,” she said between sips of coffee. “You know how?”

He nodded. She adjusted her robe and walked out onto the porch to smoke a cigarette in sunlight. There was something about her face, shrouded in the haze of California smog, that made him think of Catherine, defiant to the bitter end. To smoke that ash and breathe that air. To stand half-naked on the balcony of that fake stucco chateau in the hills of San Whatever, staring down oblivion, and not even blinking.

Before she finished the cigarette, he had fallen asleep, and when he awoke he was another man, a different man, the man he had been before, in Des Moines. The man who had been the boy in Omaha, who had become a man in New York, who was dying.

For months he had been fading. He felt himself drifting in and out of signal, like an old aerial cell phone signal. That summer the city had been hit by a wave of brown-outs, Chinese currency spikes, and tropical storms creeping along the coast from the Carolinas. He felt his own existence worn down and frayed as the city rusted and buckled under sea salt and rain.

Mr. Cutler, a woman said, coming back into frame. He mumbled something. Mr. Cutler, do you need any help? No, no, he was fine. Thank you. He shuffled out of the elevator and down the unlit tiled hallway and onto the street and its grey sun. He had forgotten again where he was going, but his memory was seared with the image of the previous night.

The streets were quieter now than what he remembered when he lived here with Catherine on the Upper West Side. Their Sundays had consisted of long, slow walks through the city streets, choked with life. Now they were comparatively barren. He supposed this was because everyone in New York was somewhere else, four hours into deep meditation with a yogi on a Kapilvastu cliffside, soaring in a methamphetamine daze over some rocky plains in New Mexico, or submerged in a rubber suit among the coral tombstones of Indonesia.

Catherine had been an actress, a singer on Broadway in the early days, before everything had gone sideways. Much he had forgotten that he wished he could remember; and much of what he remembered he wished he could forget. Singing Sondheim for him softly on a bench overlooking white elms, back when New York winters were cold enough to bring snow.

He shuffled into a bodega and picked out an individually wrapped pickle with a cartoon character printed on the package. The clerk ran up the amount and he placed his chapped palm on the sensor. He took his pickle to the park, a little stretch of grass laden in duck shit that overlooked a bus stop, and sat and hummed a bit of a misremembered tune to himself.

The coffee cup… I think about you… it’s like I’m losing… my mind.

How feeble his lungs felt compared to the red-haired man’s. Duke had encouraged him to get out of the apartment more. It was good for the lungs.

Since Duke hooked him into the ISM his life had been lived in the intelligible gaps between long static stretches of consciousness as the red-haired man. In those moments he was impossibly near to the woman. It was as if their bodies were coterminous, segments of the same thrashing set of fleshly appendages. He thought of the others she had been with. By extension, he had become part of one giant, writhing mass of human animal.

When it ended, his soul was sent home over a binary protocol, and again: static, grey, infertile. (Traffic and voices, the sound of pigeons fluttering outside on the windowsill, pecking eyes for a sliver of concrete.)

Her braids were different the second time, with looser knots, less geometrically dense arrangements that somehow summed to a greater net length of hair. Of course, it was a wig. How had he not seen it before? He was the same red-haired man with the muscular body. He watched himself in a cylindrical porcelain lamp that distorted the reflection like a funhouse mirror.

Afterward, she put on the robe and left the bedroom, while he lay on the mattress as before. But this time he drew a white bedsheet around himself like a toga and strode with the force of a Roman statesman into the kitchen. The woman, wig slightly askew, stood drumming her crimson nails along a package of Marlboros and pouring tepid coffee into a sun-bleached Mickey Mouse mug.

“One round,” she said without looking up, and with the exact same inflection as a bodega clerk.

He placed a hand on her shoulder and she shrugged it off.

“Can I ask your name?”

“Emma.”

“You’re lying.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not.” The woman placed a cigarette between her lips. Her eyes scanned some invisible projection in front of her.

The name was too old, belonging to his own generation, children of jet fuel and fiberglass. He wanted to grasp her wrists, feel her warm skin in his own strong hands, to savor the feeling of being in that manly flesh.

But he restrained himself. There was a man in the chateau, Duke had said, in case the visitors got out of hand. One of the people who managed the whole affair, watching for authorities, keeping tabs on who came and went, that sort of thing. If she screamed, he would be out for good.

She would not give him her name. Why did it enrage him? Something of the power of a name. He had begun to forget his own. It only came back to him now and then as a Pavlovian response when he was asked. “What is your name?” “James A. Cutler.” The words meant nothing to him now. They were no longer a symbol that pointed to any object in the real world. A dangling pointer.

“You should lay down,” she said. “It’s almost time.”

He laid down on the mattress and closed his eyes. Pinpricks in his fingers meant that the sedative was wearing off. Already he could feel his dead self returning, filling the space in his consciousness that had been vacated to make room for the red-haired man. And somewhere inside him, the red-haired man could feel himself returning from the psychic limbo to which he had been banished.

Duke was not a programmer. Not in the sense that he was an employee of a transnational corporation commodifying information. Duke was a drug dealer. It seemed the two roles had fused at some point in the intervening decades since he had retired.

A natural convergence had occurred as the neurolinguists mapped and charted the mind, which apparently was something more akin to a topological grammar parser than a calculator. Soon you had script kiddies cranking out olfactory adaptor exploits that made half the planet smell like rotten eggs until the manufacturer could get out a rushed update.

At least that was what he gathered. He could not keep the tech straight in his mind, the central problem being not that it had changed form but that it had become invisible and unlocatable. But Duke had summarized it for him well enough on a dust-laden whiteboard one afternoon while they shared a can of lukewarm pea soup.

Integrated Sensorium Magnification. Your brain talked to the ISM. The ISM interfaced to the network. The network interfaced to another ISM node, and any other complicit nodes which aided in aggregation. And then the two talked across an amaterial session construct, shoving qubytes across the fiberglass. Okay? Now that’s a binary protocol, right? You follow me, Mr. Cutler?

Well, the math probably was a little different, but the general idea seemed to make sense. It wasn’t so different from what he remembered when this was his domain, as they said in the biz. Got it. But then he asked something about managing session state and Duke laughed and shook his head, and that was the last time he asked questions.

He liked Duke. Duke was a good kid. Couldn’t be older than twenty, from some forgotten corner of Alphabet City, his mind sharpened by the merciless whetstone of New York. He felt like a very slow, deranged time traveler listening to Duke describe the world around him. Yottabytes of sensor data flowing from the city to server farms in Long Island. A.R. laser sword battles on warehouse rooftops under pulsing neon. Strange lights of unknown ontological origin drifting over the city at night – impending alien invasion or the mass hallucination of twenty million souls. They would talk for hours in his apartment and he would make soup from a can. This was his life.

And then Duke had told him about women plugging in to the network and selling “the privilege of their company” to lonely, overworked California data engineers. When’s the last time you was with a girl, Mr. Cutler? Couldn’t remember. He had split with Catherine in ’35. Then there were a few women over the next decade or so. That was about when things began to go off the rails.

You know, I can set you up. There’s girls out there that just do it for fun. Or the money. They get their guy to plug in and whoever wants to pay, he gets to sleep with them just once. You plug into the guy and it’s like you’re there, right? You got the cash, I can make it happen. Lots of guys your age do it. They lease their bodies out? Don’t think of it that way. Is this strictly legal? Duke changed the subject.

It was like borrowing another man’s body for an hour. Walking around in another man’s skin. What you said and did while you were possessing him would be completely forgotten by the man when he awoke. Those memories would be yours. No, Mr. Cutler, he ain’t gonna know what you did. The guy takes a pill and hooks up to the machine same as you. We just gotta schedule the time and it’ll be like he was black-out drunk.

At first he said no. He wondered if he had forgotten sex. Was it possible to unlearn the most base instinct? Maybe if he could just imagine that it was her it would come back to him, and he could have one last time to remember before the end. (Picturing now the mole on her inner thigh, the cluster of freckles just under her left eye, the way she would lock eyes with him and bite his lip during climax.)

He didn’t know when the end would come but even in his damaged state he could sense it was approaching. The brown-outs and the storms and the lights in the night sky were portends, signs that the border between the earth and the underworld was frayed.

He cashed out some retirement money and handed it over in a yellow manila envelope that had originally contained a brochure about his liver medication. Duke brought some equipment, what exactly it was for he never did understand, but something like a signal booster that connected to a bowl-shaped white plastic shell, and a zip-lock bag of tiny white pills. Duke gave him one of the pills with a glass of tap water. What’s this for? he asked. Sedatives. It would calm the mind for an hour or so, so that his brain would not confuse his own senses with the ISM. Duke put a hand on his shoulder to reassure him and he choked it down. He hated pills. Reminded him too much of roach eggs.

Then he laid down in bed and Duke placed the bowl over his head, leaving a little gap for his nose and mouth. Now you shout if you feel nauseous, okay? It’s safe. You’re safe. Prepare for lift off! Ten. Nine. Eight…

When he filled her it was not with himself but with the red-haired man. No matter how alive he felt, it was not his spirit, not his genetic code swarming mindlessly toward the unseen ovum. His grandfather had owned a chicken farm. His father had been an accountant. Now the genetic line would die out after him. Its annihilation had been assured years ago.

As he finished, he pleaded for mercy, laying his head upon her chest and breathing heavily, desperately drawing in the dying air. The sacrifice was made but no matter how often he performed this ritual, it would never be enough. He thought of the panicked moments over the years when a crude layer of latex had broken in a moment of careless passion. Now, at the end, he could think only of the phantom souls of those countless impotent unions.

“Do you remember me?” he asked, when it was over, when he had composed himself, and she had gotten up and walked naked into the bathroom.

“Remember you?” she said, wiping eye liner from her cheek. The skin on her shoulder, pale and tender, still bore the red mark of his hands.

He repeated the question, enunciating carefully, thinking maybe he had slurred his words. “From before? Do you remember? Emma?”

Silence. Then a quick sigh, barely audible. “You’ve been before?”

“Yes,” he said with the red-haired man’s lips. “Twice. I asked your name.”

The woman turned to him, black smeared makeup running down her chest and stomach in a cannibalistic pose. “What makes you think I know her name?”

He sat up on the mattress. He grabbed her hand, half afraid she would dissolve into the air.

“You’re not her?”

“You’re not him.”

They stood on the balcony together, the woman in the bathrobe and he with the sheet wrapped around his waist, taking turns on the cigarette, watching the wavering sunset over the solar paneled hills. Occasionally he would open his mouth to speak between drags, but nothing came out. What was there to say?

Pinpricks along his skin told him his time was up. He laid on the mattress and the woman sat in the bathtub and began to wash herself as he watched through the cracked door.

August in New York. A brown-out spoiled a shipment of food and all the stores had were non-perishables. He stood in line at the bodega with a bag of pickle chips looking into the fish-eye lens of a security camera, unable to believe that the disheveled being in the image, bug-eyed and misshapen, had any correlation to himself.

When it was his turn, he placed the chips on the counter and paid. Turning the corner back towards his building, a voice, distant and muted, as if it were shouting to him from the bottom of a well.

Mr. Cutler! Mr. Cutler! He strained to see the fuzzy outline grind to a halt several feet in front of him, propelled by something that seemed to dissipate when Duke dismounted it. Hey, you mind if I join you? Of course, he did not mind.

Duke followed him then to the park bench in the little square of grass. They talked about his work on color inverting optical adaptors and Duke’s mother who was a nurse and the state of the emerging markets. He opened his bag of chips, thumbing about inside the bag, finally emerging with a single curled potato chip encrusted in flavoring dust. He slipped it between his dry lips and sucked on the end of it for a while. The salt stung a cut on the inside of his mouth.

Already he could feel the memory of her fading away, just as Catherine had faded. He wondered whether the red-haired man could recall anything of him. Would he awaken afterward with a vague sense of longing? Would he remember bits of a misspent life that had momentarily fused with his own? No, these moments would be his and his alone.

Whatever that thing was that could once have been located by his name would soon exist merely as a set of bank accounts and government IDs. Although his body would soon wither away and return to the earth, his tax returns would live on in a distributed computing cluster for the next thousand years, regaling future generations with a heroic record of his existence.

You looking to go again, Mr. Cutler? He shook his head now, passed the bag of chips to Duke. No more of the ISM. He would stand his ground and wait for the end to come. The city would rust and heave, markets would crash and bounce, and the people would stubbornly bear it all.

He hummed Sondheim himself as the street lights flickered off and on.

Am I losing my mind? It’s like I’m losing my mind.

Anywhere you want to go I can hook you up. You ever been to the Mayan pyramids? Ever seen Beijing at night?

Duke, he said, placing a hand on the kid’s shoulder. I’m exactly where I want to be.

Written by Robert Cane – © Robert Cane, 2018

robert@robertcane.com