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“What I’m saying is, I have an idea that can be beneficial to both of us. I need a boyfriend. You need help.” She said it

matter-of-factly because these were matters of fact, even if she needed his help a lot more than he needed hers. Like, a lot

more.

“You came all the way to my hotel room to ask me to be your boyfriend because you’re lonely and you want to help me?”

“You make it sound like you don’t need it. You couldn’t even open the door to let me into your room. I'm sure you have phone calls to make, stuff you need done. And what happened in the arena—”

“What happened?” he asked harshly.

“The mirror,” she said. He’d looked terrified. What had he seen there?

He relaxed again. “I do have help, next door.”

“Right. But—”

“How did you even find me?”

“It wasn’t hard. I know a guy who takes pictures sometimes. He only does it part time. But he—”

“Why did you really want to see me? And who are you?”

“Persephone Cross.”

“And?”

“And I just need you to hear me out. Promise not to kick me out until you at least do that?”

He took a few seconds, and then he raised a brow.

“Right. Um. The thing is...” Persephone gathered up all the points she’d put together on the way here, but then something—maybe

it was the way he was looking at her, really listening, like the way he’d seen her, truly seen her, in the arena—made her want to be honest, made her want to just put it all out there so she could say she’d given it

everything she had. She went from collected to desperate in two seconds flat, and the words spilled out: “I’ve been trying

this acting thing for a really long time and some people might not think five years is long but trust me it is when you’re

waiting tables and having to support yourself and you keep hearing the same rejection note over and over and you’ll be damned

if you end up doing the casting couch thing which, trust me, I’ve been offered more than a few times. I’m at the point where

I’ve got to make a change if I want different results—you know, like that Einstein saying, and anyway, long story short I

know being your girlfriend is going to get me some face time out there and that’s what I really need, just the appearance

of it, because John, let me tell you, you’d be surprised how many Hollywood couples actually aren’t but pretend to be because

this actually works.”

John leaned back, and each second he didn’t speak felt like forever. Then it seemed as if he might, but he started looking wildly around her feet. He shouted, “Stop!” but kept right on looking at nothing.

Persephone took a step back. “Do—do you want me to get your security? John?”

He was sitting there, sure, but he was staring into space as he clutched the armrests and she just knew...

He wasn’t there.

18

The seat is laid nearly flat; his shoes sit in a cubby beneath a tiny minibar, and he is hurtling through the air. The bright-mouthed

stewardess smiles and asks if he is all right. He says yes but I’d like a seltzer, please. He looks through the oblong window at the vast dark blue forty thousand feet below. He is afraid. Not of flying, but of what

he’s been asked to do. What he’s agreed to do. Which isn’t illegal, though some might argue it should be. Yet it is an opportunity,

one anyone would consider too good to pass up.

If anyone knew, which they could never.

19

From the hotel door, Persephone watched John blink and take several deep breaths.

“Hey,” she said with a weak laugh. “Thought I lost you there.” She didn’t move.

He stared back at her with an indecipherable expression. “I just... remembered something...”

She felt herself nodding. If he weren’t a dead guy she might think it was some kind of neurological episode and it wouldn’t

be creepy at all, but he was a dead guy so this was every kind of spooky.

Yet she’d come with a purpose.

“You... you were saying?” he asked.

She moved warily toward the sitting area, and this time it was she who was looking around his body, around his head and shoulders

and feet. She didn’t know what she was looking for—ectoplasm?—but anything other than thin air might make her proposition

moot. “You were saying something, actually,” she said. “Your answer?”

“About being together.”

“Fake dating, yes.” She lowered herself back into the chair. “Are you interested? I mean, it wouldn’t hurt.”

“What wouldn’t hurt?”

“Having a hot girlfriend.”

“It’s hardly the thing one might expect from the saintliest man to arrive since Jesus split loaves.”

Persephone couldn’t say what she’d expected him to say, but it wasn’t that.

“You’d have to strike the perfect balance between desirable and wholesome,” John went on, with such confidence that Persephone

could almost have been fooled into thinking that the blanking-out thing hadn’t happened. “You’d have your work cut out for

you, although the experience would be well worth it. I’m sure you could spin it into something.”

“So you’re into it?”

He looked back at her as if she hadn’t said anything.

“Am I allowed to ask what happened to you a minute ago?”

“You can ask. I won’t be obligated to answer.”

Persephone really hoped he wasn’t going to be like this all the time.

20

They reached Ruben’s place by Uber. The entire ride the driver talked incessantly about getting into NFTs and crypto which he hoped would help him to relocate to Austin or somewhere in Texas aka New California , where he then hoped to either get a girlfriend and settle down or perhaps try his hand in tech.

Or music. The man kept at it until finally John declared, Those are horrible plans , after which Persephone tossed him an incandescent glare before launching into some unnecessary inanity that only set the

driver off again.

“You didn’t have to be so nasty,” she said as they exited the SUV.

“Is that what I was doing? I thought I was keeping us from drowning in his life story.”

Ruben greeted them at the door in his robe and waved them inside, and after settling in, John made the requisite introductions

before adding, “This is our first date.”

“Um, your t-shirt?” said Persephone, holding out the signed tee from Riley Ray.

Ruben took the shirt, went burgundy, and averted his eyes. He gestured toward the overstuffed sofa.

For several moments they sat in the living room, no one saying a word, until finally, Ruben placed his hands on his knees.

“I’m sensing a debrief.”

John hadn’t anticipated the embarrassment he’d feel for admitting the facade to Ruben, and though he didn’t have to admit

it, the alternative—pretending to Ruben that Persephone was actually his girlfriend—was even more ridiculous. Also, he liked

the fact that he’d be putting on the ruse with someone who needed the facade nearly as much as he did. John gave a contracted

summary of his and Persephone’s agreement, which included her coming over to the hotel daily at eight in the morning, and

he waited for Ruben to laugh.

But Ruben didn’t. Instead, he nodded his head. “Yeah, yeah, makes sense.”

“Anyhow, there’s...” John glanced at Persephone. In the hotel room, he’d felt the solidity of the floor beneath his feet,

the bristling of the brocaded armrests beneath his fingertips. He’d seen the plumes of fog snaking around her ankles. Feeling

the physical realm around him, his memories... He hadn’t doubted a connection before, but more than that, it had become

clear that she was a step toward home. Perhaps even a leap.

John told them about smelling the nachos and beer and President Obama and flying in the airplane (minus John’s suspicious activity bit) and feeling the fabric of the hotel’s chair.

He told Persephone about his Grey House, about needing to return home, and he told them about the Grey Man coming for him in the arena.

What he omitted: fog vines emanating from Persephone’s body, because he didn’t want her to break up their fake relationship as soon as it started (he made a mental note to bring Ruben up to speed on those at a later date).

Ruben stood and headed for the kitchen. “Enteract. John’s Environmental Interaction situation.”

“Don’t you mean in teract?” said John.

“No. Environmental Interaction . Smoosh them together and you get En-ter-act. It has a ring. Anyone thirsty?”

“Just water is fine,” Persephone replied. “So, wait, the... Grey Man”—she whispered his name, as if saying it too loudly

might make him appear—“if he’s out to destroy you, that means you have to destroy him first, right?”

“It appears so,” said John.

“But how?”

“Maybe,” Ruben called from the kitchen, “it’ll be easier if you do it here, in the living world. He’ll be like a fish out

of water, so I’m guessing it’ll be your best chance.”

“He’s a fog,” John said quietly. “How do you fight that?”

“All right, people,” said Ruben from the refrigerator, “we’ve got Snapple, juice, kombucha, cold brew, Sunny D...”

“No, really,” said Persephone, “water is fine.”

“I got you,” Ruben said, taking out a Brita filter. “I don’t have half that stuff. I just always wanted to say it.”

“The recollections? The touching?” John said, impatiently enough that Persephone threw him another blazing glance.

“Right.” Ruben returned with a glass of water for Persephone and something that looked like fizzy blue milk for himself. He

took a swig. The tassels on his mystic’s robe swung like little gold pendulums. “Interacting with stuff—strange, especially

the fact that you didn’t get Colón’s CPS.”

“What’s that?” Persephone said.

“Cross-Planing Sickness.”

“Sounds like an extreme sport.”

Ruben took another swig. “These last couple of times aside, John always gets sick crossing planes—passing through physical

objects.” He turned back to John. “Your immunity to CPS could be temporary or permanent. But another thing.” He took a deep

breath. “You could be on your way to becoming solid. I can’t say for sure, but—”

“Solid, as in alive?” Persephone asked.

Ruben was noticeably flustered at having captured the full intensity of her attention. “Yes—I mean—no. Not alive but a solid

ghost. Still definitely dead, though. I don’t think there’s a way to reverse the dead part.” He turned to John. “Sorry, dude.”

But John could hardly bear the thought of being alive, of being fully here in this messy world of living things and their

problems. He just wanted to be dead and back in the Grey House.

“How do you know all this stuff?” Persephone asked Ruben.

“He’s my Professor X,” John said absentmindedly. He glanced up to see Ruben beaming at him and John felt a small smile slide

over his own face. Then, remembering the part about being possibly stuck here, he sobered.

“Yeah,” Ruben said to Persephone, “what he said. I guide him, figure out theories and otherworldly boundaries. All right,

let’s start with the memories. The beer-and-nachos sense memory. I say beer, you say...” At John’s silence, Ruben tried

again. “I say nachos, you say...”

party of one

like anyone, i went through phases , though for me, given my timeline—or, rather, lack of one—they were more like eras.

I had the era in which I tried to blend in with the villagers.

I had the era where I drifted from nomadic group to nomadic group.

I had the short-lived era where I went all cottagecore and played at being that wise, elderly lady in the woods that everybody

sought out when they needed help.

For a very long time I just wanted to be born, to know what it was, but I realized there’d be downsides. Or maybe that was

what I needed to believe to get through the grief of never having experienced it.

I had that era where I went to every shaman or intuitive I could find because I was tired of being the one who had to come

up with the answers.

I went through a couple of eras in which I entered every haunted house, fortress, mental institution, prison, woods, cemetery

on the books. Even got to the point where I was screaming into the air, daring anybody to show their face.

There were other eras, too, ones in which I didn’t live so much as exist in a half-exhausted state, one particular millennium

being, compared to any other person’s lifetime, the equivalent of a very fatigued afternoon.

Then came the internet. It was the best thing to come around since the automobile and the convection oven.

I was certain I’d find others like myself.

But I lost hope, and the disappointment hit harder during this time because it was the internet age; if there was anyone like me to find, we’d have found each other.

It’s a unique kind of sadness, feeling isolated when you’re supposedly in touch with more people than ever.