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She made a tuna casserole because I think she felt bad. But she must’ve meant the whole thing about not coming back, ’cause

she didn’t even give me the casserole in one of those white bowls or even a Tupperware thing, you know? She gave me straight-up

aluminum tin. That has I Don’t Need This Back So Don’t Worry About Seeing Me Again all over it.” He paused, and then asked

quietly, “Are you mad?”

Are you mad? So earnest. So young. And yet, though not being psychic, Ruben had done something to connect John to his otherworldly life,

however inadvertently. “Not mad at all,” John replied.

After a few moments Ruben turned to him. “Have you tried reaching into your pockets?”

“I’m not going to indulge that.”

“I’m being serious! Try it.”

“No,” John said, despite the suspicion this would never end.

“Just try it.”

“No.”

“Dude.”

John, feeling silly, finally did indulge Ruben because he was, after all, just a teenager. Or rather, John tried to, but the

ghostly fabric did not react to his ghostly fingers. “Satisfied?”

“I thought maybe you could pull out a driver’s license or something. I’m guessing you’re wearing what you wore when you died,

so...” Ruben tapped the steering wheel. “But we can’t get discouraged. First ideas usually don’t cut it. We keep brainstorming.”

The pockets idea was a good one but John wasn’t going to tell Ruben that.

“You know what?” said Ruben. “I’m your Xavier.”

“Sorry?”

“Your Professor X.” Upon John’s look, Ruben exclaimed, “C’mon, dude! X-Men! Professor X was the guy who—never mind. Look,

before we can get you back into your house, we’ve got to know where it is, right? And you can’t even remember your last name,

so coming up with an address is a reach. But if we can find your family—or a friend, or just somebody who knew you—I’m sure

we’ll get the location of the house. Why do you look like I just asked you to eat a stale pastry? There has to be someone

out there who can help. You ever hear of Six Degrees of Separation? They have a Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, too, but it’s

not like you’re trying to find him.” Ruben looked thoughtful. “What was that lady’s name again? The one the guy spoke to you

about? I think it was his boss?”

“Hannah.”

“Yeah, the Hollywood lady. It’s true that you don’t have enough info about yourself to do a decent Google search, but she

has resources for sure. She’ll figure something out.”

John was hardly in rapture about the idea of having to speak to anyone, in addition to Ruben, on a regular basis.

They drove alongside the shore and Ruben took a U-turn to pull over. When they stopped he hopped out of the car and came round

to open John’s door. “Even if you weren’t a ghost, to get out, you’d have to roll down the window to open it from the outside.

Anyway, Mamá says the broken handle is good practice.”

“So she foresaw this moment,” John said drily. “You having to open the door for a ghost.”

“Nah, dating. Girls like that stuff, and I get it. By the time I’m in my own Batmobile, it’ll be a habit, right?”

As he stepped from the car, John took in the air’s briny scent. (He contemplated his ability to smell, as in, how he even

could, but then he was able to see without corporeal eyes, so what were these metaphysical rules?)

“Listen, about Mamá,” Ruben said as they navigated their way down to the sand, “she really does have the gift. You’d be surprised

at all the bigwigs who come to see her on the low. I’m talking movie stars and Fortune 500 types. Hey, you sure you’re going

to be OK out here? I guess you can’t get robbed or whatever. It’s just—” He glanced dubiously at the sky. “It’s times like

this where it all goes down, you know?”

“No.”

“Like, every story. You know, you pull up to a seemingly innocuous spot and it’s all, You going to be OK? Yeah, I’ll be OK. OK, dude, see ya later! And then—boom!—it happens. The Big Bad arrives.”

“You’re really into those stories, aren’t you?”

“Yeah. But they aren’t silly stuff. It’s real life in there.”

Again, he glanced around nervously, and now it was John’s turn to cast a glance across the beach, the sky, the water.

“And hey,” said Ruben, “I may not be psychic psychic, but I’m damn sure good at game plans. You’re looking at a UOD sensei. Missions, weapons stockpiling, rallying teams,

I’m your man.” He proceeded to ask questions John didn’t have a hope of answering, including where he used to live. “I thought

catching you off guard might get an instinctive reaction. Never mind. Locations are probably not important anyway.”

“Aren’t they? What was all that about crossover points? Earlier, you seemed adamant about those.”

Ruben inhaled and looked across the horizon. “True. But if some detail were really, really important, you’d recall something.

A tidbit, you know?”

Details. In John’s House, they remained largely unchanged, save for whatever might be floating in the great ocean beyond the

windows, but there were so many details in this world.

He stared across the water, as if an answer might surface. But oceans held their mysteries. The ocean surrounding the Grey

House was impenetrable, and whatever oddities he saw were what the ocean presented to him, including the floating woman. Was

she even real? Here, the water was wild and its appearance changed constantly: jewel blue and crisp beneath a clear sky, navy

and heavy under cloud cover; there, the ocean remained perpetually dark, with a sobering timelessness, a silent boast of outlasting

everyone and everything else. He wasn’t entirely dissimilar; he had, after all, outlasted death. In the Grey House, his world

had smudged beautifully into a watercolor of tranquility, and he shouldn’t be faulted for preferring a less complicated existence.

John inhaled deeply. This ocean was not his ocean, true, but it was the closest he could get to home. And so perhaps he hadn’t

simply blurted the beach as a destination, after all.

A wavering light caught his eye: down the beach, a group gathered around a newly ignited bonfire, and beyond them, a shiny

red Jeep whipped down the highway, blasting music that warped off key in its wake. Again, John’s eyes flitted to the fire.

A flare of anger bloomed in his gut, and he felt chilled in a way that didn’t make sense.

“You OK?”

“You should go to work,” John said, transfixed by the bonfire’s flames...

“You see something?” Ruben lowered his voice to a whisper. “The Grey Man?”

Had John perished in a fire? He couldn’t remember anything. There was only a feeling.

Rage.

14

William Williams’s bow tie was going increasingly askew.

“Jin Mi,” he whispered frantically into his mobile, “pick up your freaking phone. This isn’t funny.”

William had been surprised when John called (Ruben had actually made the phone call, just as he’d done the internet search

to locate William’s number; John had suggested they run a search on himself, but there was only so far one could get with

searches like John accident death and deaths of Black men named John ).

After things were worked out with the security woman who’d been keeping them downstairs, William stepped onto an awaiting

lift. John, though, hesitated at its doors and considered the metaphysical laws of lifts and multistoried buildings. The floor

hummed with that particular grounding vibration, the energy of boundaries and not-quite-defined order. In the face of riding

a lift, the buzz was comforting.

“You OK?” William asked.

“I’m OK. You?”

“Living the nightmare of my choosing. Because that’s your life when your boss has two other assistants.”

Somewhere between the front desk and the lift, William had fixed his bow tie. Good at multitasking and obviously determined

to make top assistant.

“So,” said John. “Hannah J?ger.”

“Hannah J?ger works miracles. Trades in them.”

If she wasn’t a miracle worker, a woman who had her own company in a building such as this had to be at the very least preternaturally capable.

The doors to the lift slid open and John was relieved to discover that the floor on the fifteenth floor vibrated, though significantly

less so than the ground floor, which vibrated slightly less than the pavement outside. They strode past men and women pushing

paper this way and that as they spoke in hushed tones into large phones. John followed William through another door.

Sunlight poured through wall-to-wall glass to kiss white orchids and bounce off lacquered white surfaces. Behind a glossy

white desk sat a sharp-faced white woman with straight blonde hair cut severely above her shoulders. She sipped from a sleeved

cardboard cup.

A birthday party for two. A fat cake with a smattering of rainbow sprinkles around its edges sits atop the kitchen table.

A portion of the cake is smashed, a beautiful mess in the shape of a great handprint, and a tearful girl with large eyes and

a mass of frizzy brown curls clutches her glittery Birthday Girl tiara in trembling hands. Stumbling to the corner, her father,

disheveled, drunk. Lips trembling, she whispers, It’s OK. He doesn’t hear. She won’t tell her mother, who hadn’t wanted to give him the day in the first place. She wants both her

parents to be happy, and so she is used to keeping secrets.

“The so-called game-changer in the flesh?” Hannah J?ger’s raspy voice punctuated the end of John’s glimpse into what he assumed

was her past. Her smile was dimpled and lent her a sweet expression that, on her face, seemed disconcertingly out of place.

“Only in the most metaphorical sense,” said William.

Neither appeared to have noticed anything strange, and John realized that these glimpses into people’s pasts could feel to

him like several moments strewn together, but to those around him they were but momentary flashes that spanned an eye’s blink.

Hannah gestured to the leather chairs before her desk. “Sit.”

William sat and John, with some concentration, did the same. Hannah gazed harder at him, squinted.

“John, anything to drink?”

“No, thank you.”