Three days later another stroke killed Ryan. His father was gone. It was one thing to gull the shills, fool the audience—entertain them with the brightness of the game. It was another to build his life on a firm, wonderful foundation of memories both good and bad—life solid, painful, but real. Jeremy had his cast removed just in time for the funeral. Magicians, comedians, buskers, and actors came from all over Washington and parts of Oregon and Idaho. He had never realized his father was so loved—which only showed how little he knew about anything important. Before vacating the room in the Motel 6, he opened his father’s trunk. Inside he found a stack of paperback books, mostly Clive Barker and Jack Kerouac (that was when he decided his new name would be Jack), three changes of clothes and five changes of underwear, none of which fit him—and the gray box, wrapped in a velvet bag. He opened the box and found the twisted stone, burned-looking but for a small, embedded red eye that seemed to shine even in the dark. The sometime stone.

The sum-runner.

Ryan had never told him where he’d found it. Perhaps it had belonged to Mother. Jack’s luck changed. It did not get better, exactly—not in the larger scale of things—but it changed.

“I’d like to be—to have been a little girl with friends and a good school, good teachers, a normal little girl. I’d like to grow up normal and fall in love—without dreams. Are Jack and I supposed to be in love?

Because it doesn’t seem to be happening—not yet.”

Outside, the sky grew brighter. Yellow and green light flickered through the high window, but Jack could not tell if dawn was coming. It didn’t matter. No more dawns, probably. He did not need to get up and move around—he was comfortable, for the moment.

“How long should I wait?”

Now the window spread a diffuse silver glow on the wall opposite.

Still nothing. Then:

What is yourother first memory?

Jeremy was stunned by how quickly he came up with his reply. “Something’s carrying me. I’m young, I don’t know too many words. A door opens—but it’s an odd sort of door, it meltsaside. And then—there’s my mother and father, but that’s not what they’re called—still, they’re like my parents. They love me. They take care of me. They’re going to be taken away from me.”

He made a bitter face, crossed his legs, and tried to lean back, but the chair creaked, so he bit at his index finger. What he had just said made no sense, but it felt right, felt real.

“That’s what you asked for. My otherfirst memory. I remember being young. And yet here, now, I don’t remember being young. I’m less real here than in my dreams…That’s not right. This is wacked. Take my word for it, this is triple wacked.”

Jeremy looked around, suddenly very frightened—more frightened than he’d been in the sack in the back of the van, or sprawled out bruised and wet on the transformed street, his hand sluiced by the storm’s cold runoff.

“You’re supposed to be Mnemosyne, right?”

A breeze blew through the room, cool but not unfriendly, pulling at his shirt, flicking his pants legs. Playful, sad. He blinked and shifted on the chair, then just listened. A quiet rushing hiss came from outside, more like falling sand than wind—and nothing else. Falling sand or endless quick, tiny waves on a beach. The room was dark. No dawn through the high window. Jeremy—no, he was Jack again—had no idea how much time had passed.

He looked over his shoulder. “Hello?”

The lone high window was more pit than window—he couldn’t even see the frame or much of the wall. The room seemed much colder. “Everything I know is wrong.” Jack smiled, crossed his arms. “I get it. I’m ready.”

He would not just get up and leave the room. That would show them he was a coward, that he couldn’t take their stupid test, which didn’t mean anything anyway.

Hours later, “I jump away from bad things. Everybody would if they could.”

Whom do you protect—and whom do you leave behind? Where do you go when you jump—into another you? How many of you are there?

Jack broke into a sweat. “I don’t know.” He wiped his forehead, then his cheeks. Someone, somewhere, had to be talking quietly through a hole or a speaker. Time to get real. He was willing to give up the illusion that he could jump—that had always seemed crazy—as well as the memory of the dark, crumbling world and what lay beyond the membrane—give it all up, no problem—forget about Glaucous and the huge woman and the wasps—fine by him. Forget about the frozen stuttering city outside the warehouse and the ladies and even Ellen and Dr. Sangloss and Bidewell. He’d dump it all—well, maybe not Ginny. But just don’t ask thosequestions, because he had wondered about the answers for years. How many selves had he betrayed, just by avoiding their pain, by jumping to better, safer lines?

“I can’t be all of us at once.” He tried to laugh. “My head will explode!”

Maybe he was remembering the wrong things. Maybe he had never escaped from the back of the van. Everything between now and then could be a lie, an illusion. Glaucous was torturing him—they were holding him here by spinning out their wasp-winged fates—maybe that was the rushing sound and this tall, narrow room was surrounded by wasps, blacking out the lone window. Who could possibly know?

Jack tried to laugh again but only made a sound like crackling paper. But admitting that Glaucous was real was admitting as well that Jeremy Rohmer—Jack Rohmer—was special, had special talents, dreamed special dreams. Glaucous was no more a sufficient explanation of where he was, of what he was being asked to do, than Bidewell or Mnemosyne—whatever she or it might be. Maybe they were all the same. Madness needed no sequence, no rules. They had not remembered him at the Busker Jam—not even Joe-Jim had remembered Jack at first. That blank look—and then the click of memory.

“You reconciled me, didn’t you?”

Jack was really sweating.

“When was I made? Really.”

What is your earliest memory?

The waterfront, cranes looming, the last light of day falling like burning gold between the gray warehouses—not much different from Bidewell’s warehouse, though not as old. He saw a bumpy asphalt road overlying bricks and patched with gravel and concrete, broken up by bands of light—light, shadow, light, shadow, warming and cooling his face as he rode on his bike. And still, in his pocket, next to the stone…

Jack pulled out the origami puzzle, let his fingers work around the edges, poke through a cupped fold, pull at a tab he had not noticed before.

The sometime stone had arrived first—a long, long time before. The stone tied up past and future, called forth protectors, invoked his card number, the number that Glaucous had asked for—probably written on the inside of the puzzle he had not yet learned how to unfold.

Jack was just a book on a shelf in a library.

“I’m with him—in the dreams. I’m with the Librarian. He has my catalog number—all the numbers to

all the volumes in a library that goes on forever. The Librarian started this.

“He’s the author of my being. No surprise.”

He opened the puzzle cleanly, without a single tear.

One problem.

As the puzzle kept unfolding, the number rolled across the floor and curled up the walls, surrounding him with ratcheting digits—longer than time.

Jack laughed out loud. “I was on the bike, right? That’s my real first memory—the first time I appeared. That’s why everyone has such a hard time remembering any of us—we’re new, and you’re still filling in the gaps.”

Between those who reconcile, and those who see and judge, there is only love. Without you, the muses would not be necessary. And after you give up seeing, there is the joy of matter. But now that fades to nothing.