I backed nervously away, tripped over another old shoe and fell on my ass. The person- the thing walked toward me and squatted only a few feet away. I noticed that when he did, the only parts of him that moved were his legs. His upper body stayed perfectly upright. Not a single ripple appeared in his coffee.

The darkness in his eyes spun like a vortex in a dark ocean, and I suddenly had the unnerving feeling that I, the room, and the rest of the world outside the stained walls, were scum growing on the damp stone around the deep, deep well hiding behind that placid face. The darkness began to writhe, crawling out of its face and reaching for me across the sliver of space that stretched between us. I began to scream, and the scream rippled out from me, rebounding from the walls and going nowhere because there was nowhere to go. I clenched my eyes shut, but nothing can stop nothing, and it slipped in through the gaps between cells in my eyelids, invading my mind.

I was nothing. I was always nothing. We are nothing. Little disturbances in space, playing games with probability. Tag and tug-o-war across vast stretches of emptiness. We think matter and time and distance are different things, but it’s all one. One vast, simple thing playing in the darkness for a little bit. One day, I suddenly knew, it would stop playing and get out of the pool and all the little disturbances would slowly still and all the nothing would go back to what it always was. The universe would become silent and cold and empty, and the vanishingly small things pursuing their own tiny plans, all the little fleas that we called people would go back to what they always were.

Nothing.

My eyes are open wide and I see. The universe in it’s full breadth and length extends around me, but it is a poor, cramped thing. Every movement cascades into the future, turning my body into an undulating snake that thrashes and writhes as is darts from one place to another. Things are moving around us, in directions that were never directions until Grejolki has spoken to me. Nick, I think desperately, until Grekolki has spoken to me. Before he gives me his eyes. I will scream again, but for that brief moment it is taking my breath away. My world tunnels through the true world much as my body has tunneled through my world. It is surrounded by things that were not worlds, and will not be worlds, but that may look like worlds if you squint just right.

I scream again, and it doesn’t even bother to touch the walls. My scream lay on my tongue like roadkill, filling me with the scent of failure and the deep sadness of all things ending.

“Goddamnit Nick!” I will shout. He will look at me and smile his mysterious little smile and then he’ll pull back. The darkness is drifting away from me and disappearing back into his eyes. He takes another sip of his coffee as I scramble madly across the floor toward the exit, cursing furiously.

“Keep that shit to yourself, you fuck!” I shout, panting, as I finally come to rest against the wall by the door. He stares at me curiously, and then is distracted by a fly. The fly may or may not have experienced any of the same things I just had, but whether it had or not, it was corkscrewing madly through the air, trying to figure out where it’s next meal might be found. For a nauseating moment, I could sense the universes inside universes that filled its tiny body. I shook my head to get rid of them.

I HAVE KNOWN MORTALITY.

“Fuck you! We’ve lived together for six fucking years and now you decide you want to give me some sort of crazy-ass vision!?” I was beginning to calm myself, but I still remembered the answer to my own question. If you see like I just saw, if you existed across all time, then to experience something, at some point that writhing path of you has to actually do the thing. Otherwise past and future you never remember it.

Just my fucking luck Nick decided today was the day.

I grabbed the rest of my things, furious, and stomped out of the front door, slamming it as hard as I possibly could. Five minutes later I was sitting in my shitty car with my girlfriend, who was trying to apply makeup in the back-facing camera on her phone. She glanced at me as I slammed the car door, but continued to work on her mascara. We sat in silence for a moment.

“How’d it go?” she finally asked, and I remembered, rather than saw, the glucose in her brain being converted into ATP. The crackle of electricity between the clusters of neurons inside that said ‘I am concerned for your well being, but also, you do stupid magic shit on a regular basis, and I can see you have all your limbs and are behaving like yourself, so not super worried.’

“Bad. It went bad.” I said angrily. I cranked the car and pulled out, narrowly missing a minivan.

The driver of the minivan slammed on the brakes and gave me the finger. As it happened, she was on her way to the airport, and just missed her flight. She went home to her husband instead, and, unwilling to take his abuse anymore, nailed him in the forehead with the edge of a tennis racket. Then she took his gun from the nightstand and called the police. The police, that bastion of fair dealing and reasonableness, arrived and immediately shot her twice when she didn’t drop the weapon quickly enough. A nosy neighbor filmed the whole thing.

It went viral, of course, and led to a series of local protests against the department. The department took this personally and beat on some of the protestors. The protests grew, the police response stiffened, and the National Guard was called in. Two weeks later, a team of soldiers, pelted with bricks by protestors, opened fire and killed twelve. Two days after that, they were ambushed by civilians with AR-15’s and killed. The second American civil war was, as it happened, even bloodier than the first.

I wouldn’t know. I sat in traffic, looking back at the angry woman with her middle finger extended, and considered jumping out of the car and giving her all of the money that I had, just so she wouldn’t go home. But there were other paths. There were always other paths. No matter what you thought you knew, Nick always knew more. There was no escape from the future.

I put my foot on the gas and the tires squealed as I pulled out into traffic.

Two days after the first protest, we moved out of the country.