Billy Shaw

Billy Shaw experienced the most mysterious of mysteries the day his phone went missing.

He just ran to the bathroom, he swore, and was about to get down to the kitchen for a morning sip when he realized he was without phone. The phone had to be in the house, for just earlier that morning he was watching porn on it. Now it was nowhere. Not on his bed, not in the closet (but he hadn’t even gotten dressed yet), not in the bathroom where he stared at his penis and had the impression that it was sinking back into his body, not next to the kitchen sink filthy beyond any salvation by mundane scrubbing (but he lost the phone before he got to the kitchen, didn’t he?). Billy mumbled profanities while digging all over the dingy house. God knows why he still had so much stuff. When Sarah left she must have had taken with her two-thirds of their belongings, judging from the sizes and quantities of boxes she took with her. Their separation had been the neighbors’ favorite gossip since the moment she showed up in town a year ago, and they had finally vindicated the phony well-wishers with a bang. No, he didn’t have that much stuff, but it was all chaos in here.

“Think, think,” he muttered to himself. Could it have been flushed down the toilet? Was that even physically possible? He was not so confused to commit such a thing yet, despite the suspicion of his two daughters, their basis being the clinking of ice in a glass that frequently accompanied his hellos whenever he called them, always out of the blue, and with hardly anything to say.

Billy wanted to slap himself: he could call his phone on his landline. Pray to God he hadn’t turned on the silent mode. Morning calls sometimes gave him headache but he had not managed to wean himself completely off his business interests yet, if only to spite his elder daughter and her husband, so the silent mode was often blissfully utilized.

Billy dialed his phone number in the hall.

After a few seconds a voice answered and Billy’s throat had never felt so dry in his forty-seven years.

“Shaw. Hello?” The other person repeated.

Despite the weird static and a decade of separation, Billy could still recognize the voice. He would recognize it in his sleep. Lately he had taken to watching old video tapes and occasionally heard it as he took out the garbage, as he opened the daily pizza box, and as he swished and sloshed Scotch and stared at the dying sunlight and sighing shadows on the porch.

And of course, the name. A person with the same voice and the same name? Perhaps his daughters were right: Scotch had finally claimed his brain.

“I’m sorry, but you seem to have my phone,” Billy finally managed.

“Is this a joke? Wait a second… Billy?”

“Margaret?”

“What’s the matter, Billy? I thought you were in the office? Did you leave your phone at home? Jessie said she was going to call you about some of her ideas for Eliot’s birthday party.”

There Billy stood frozen in his grimy pyjamas but his tears flowed and flowed. His daughter. His grandson. His grandson’s birthday, which was today indeed, now that he thought about it. If there was a party, he was not invited, had not been for years.

“Margaret, I missed you so much.”

“Are you OK, Billy? I’m flattered but you’ve been out of the house for two hours.”

“Because you are dead, Margaret. You’ve been dead for ten years,” Billy was crying now.

“Mr. Shaw, if this is a new prank you’ve learned from Jerry, I’m not amused. I’ve got a mountain of chores now, Jessie wants a very special birthday for Eliot. We’ll talk when you’re home. And remember, the party starts at five thirty.”

With that, she hung up.

Margaret and he went way back. Small town high-school sweethearts turned teenage parents out of impulsiveness and ignorance, a most pitiful cliché. What was not cliché was that they had stuck together through thick and thin. She called him Billy Bunny for his proficiency in bed and he called her Maggie Match for her temper. It was mortifyingly lame now, but it was a secret joke they used to cherish.

It was Maggie Match who’d held the fort with Jessie during the six months Billy Bunny, sill very much a high school kid, spent in the Gulf War before returning home in delirium.

It was Maggie Match who’d stroked his back and held his head night after night of war-haunted nightmares.

It was Maggie Match who’d eavesdropped on a customers’ conversation while bagging groceries that the future belonged to computers and that evening brought home a pile of computer night class brochures and since he liked to tinker with machines so much, why didn’t he tinker away the bad memories with what the future belonged to? He’d opened his mouth to say his atrocious academic record would not go well the braininess of this stuff but her glance’d shut him up.

It was Maggie Match who’d been the light of his life.

It got better. He seemed to have escaped the curse that fell upon so many of his brothers in the war. Jerry convinced his parents and cousin to be early investors in the Billy’s hardware and server shop and his business took off afterwards. The nineties were kind to those who woke up in time to the dawn of the Internet and somehow the dot-com crash spared a substantial portion of his holdings. Over the years they’d amassed a modest fortune from his expanding computer business and his precocious investments in startups on the side, along with two daughters and two dogs. He couldn’t remember ever feeling happier than the moment he first held Becky in his arms, all bundled up in her parents’ hope and incredulity. He’d found it hard to wrap his head around the fact that they had made it this far, and still the future lied open and inviting, the horizon beckoned, the odds finally in their favor.

How did that turn into this? A baseless suspicion, a heartless word, a careless turn of the wheel, and darkness felt so quickly, as if heretofore it had been hovering above them and only held off by the flimsiest of scaffolds. It had been night for Billy ever since.

It had been night until this morning when he talked to Margaret by calling his own number. She was his Margaret, of that there can’t be no doubt. But how? Either he had lost his sanity or he was accidentally connected to a parallel universe in which there was no car crash and Margaret still lived. Perhaps this was not an accident but God’s finally granting him his most fervent wish, a chance to apologize. Or the Devil had just gotten more creative with punishments by bringing to life the might-have-been he always visited in those blue hours, made more bearable by the gentle lift of alcohol. He understood a slip in sanity was the only sane explanation and by rejecting it he would prove its very premise. But what good can explanations do to a man in search of redemption? For now, Billy Shaw chose to believe in the existence of a parallel universe.

Still, it was many an hour before he could bring himself to dial again, lest the illusion be dispelled so soon. After a nerve-racking minute Margaret picked up. The static seemed a little more pronounce now and in the back of his mind Billy saw a window slowly closing. Children were yelling and whistle blowing at the other end.

“Hello, it’s me. Billy. How’s the party going?”

“You are not my husband. He is home now .”

“I am, Maggie Match, but in a different timeline.”

It was Margaret’s turn to fall silent.

“If not for the voice, and that name, I’d have thought you are someone hired by Jerry. But even Jerry don’t know about Maggie Match. Hold on a second, I’m stepping out into the yard. It was a war zone in here.”

For the next thirty minutes she asked questions and he answered. How did they first meet? (Peepers’ Land, the dog days of summer before sophomore year, she was working at the counter after moving to Sharnwick with her grandparents. She caught him and Jerry stealing a Playboy and told them to scram. He thought her undyed red hair was dope, the fire of his loin. The next day he came back alone and fixed her starter motor. They started dating even before he knew she was going to be his upperclassman.) What did her grandparents say about him that Halloween night? (The three of them, now an impossibly tight trio, ate popsicles and rode the carousel and he sicked up the former on the latter—he and motion were never on good terms. Still, he insisted on walking her home and she introduced him to her grandparents. Later she overheard them talking in the kitchen. “That boy was attached to our girl,” her grandma told her grandpa. “He trembled like he’s got Parkinsons when she kissed him goodbye.” Her grandpa, who had a touch of the real disease, guffawed. She fell hard for him at that moment, she told him years later when life finally gave them some space to breathe and reminisce. “Billy Bunny, be helpless before me,” she’d commanded him.) What’s the first line he wrote when he wrote her from Iraq? (“Maggie, the sand is eating me up and the bugs are, too. Only dreams of you and Jessie keep me going.”) Where did she keep that letter? (Between the pages of Asimov’s The Gods Themselves Both of them became avid sci-fi fans after Jessie and treasured Asimov.)

Et cetera, et cetera. The yard was much quieter now. The party must be dying down. Someone called her name. “Be right back, Billy. Watch out for Eliot’s trucks,” she said to the other Billy. Billy was suddenly feverish with jealousy.

“OK, so… how did I die in that timeline?” She finally asked after a minute of pure static.

How should he put it to her? “Because I was a jerk” was the succinct but unhelpful answer.

He’d never been unfaithful to her. But cheating is far down the list of the worst things that can happen to a marriage. Their relationship, which had stood its ground so proudly, so defiantly, before the twin onslaughts of adulthood and parenthood, had found itself helpless before the relentless wears and tears of mundane existence. He’d been busy chasing his business ambitions and evading his trauma, leaving her the sole burden of childrearing. With each passing day touches got slightly more sparing, kisses more economical, conversations more routine. Sighs started to pass unheeded, distress signals uncaught, unanswered. Their shared world dwindled and splitted. The center barely held.

He started to find alcohol’s gentle murkiness preferable to both the harsh light of days and the pregnant darkness of nights. At first it was merely an indulgence, but luxuries tend to become necessities before you know it. Then there were arguments. There had always been arguments—their household had been the kind of ecosystem that thrived on episodic wildfires. But there began to be resentment simmering just underneath the surface of those arguments. There began to sprout doubts and suspicions, distorted and amplified by booze.

What had he resented her for? He could not recall clearly. Perhaps he’d blamed her for her too ready permission of the growing distance between them. Perhaps he’d expected her to resist more, to protest more, to continue being the centripetal force she used to be. The disappointment he felt when he realized otherwise was both deep and pervasive.

Fortune weaves and Fortune unravels. What you see most clearly is the afterimage of your blessings.

“I came home very drunk one night. We had a terrible fight. I said everyone was bearing down on me and God knows if my daughters were really mine. You ran out of the house, you took the car. A log-hauling truck swerved into it when you got on the turnpike.” Billy let it out all in one breath.

The driver was drunk. For a while he had often found himself after the wheel of that very truck in an endless desert. No Margaret to stroke his head as he turned and thrashed though, and that had been the real nightmare.

“Jesus,” Margaret said. The static had become a little deafening.

“I wanted to hit where it hurt the most. But I did not mean what I said. I’m sorry.”

“Billy… if you are Billy at all… this is too much. Too weird.”

“Margaret, I’m not asking you to forgive me. I know I can never earn it. But I’m glad that I could apologize.”

“I understand, Billy. Would you please give me some time to proce…”

Her voice had drowned in the noise. Billy dialed and dialed again but couldn’t get through.

The next morning Billy walked two miles to the local AT&T for another cell phone. Fall was afoot; in a few weeks the hills would be rolling domes of fire and gentle chills were already dribbling down their sides. He felt his pace a little brisker. His head was the clearest in a long time. He hadn’t let in one drop of Scotch since the call with Margaret. He needed to think.

He knew it was past time he called his daughters to propose a reconciliation. Becky had overheard their fatal fights and after her sophomore year in CU she had refused to come back home, even for holidays. Jessie was more sympathetic at first—she had been struggling with her own marriage when Margaret died—until Billy started drinking at noon and chasing other red-haired women and wasting away their family’s hard-earned wealth. During one thanksgiving dinner she had said he was insulting her mother’s memories and he had offered no explanation, not even seemed to wish to. His complete, absolute resignation fanned her fury. Leaning on the sink and nursing a bottle of Scotch, he could hear the frantic sound of their tires spinning away on his gravel drive, and it thrilled him. Their fragile cordiality had broken at last. He had managed to hasten his long trajectory towards self-destruction. From now on his life would be a mere afterword, and he would sabotage it with glee and abandon.

Yet as long as one lives all finalities are false, all conclusions tentative. Yesterday was the proof. Only upon waking up and looking at his window screens softly exhale in the fuzzy morning light did its strangeness fully register with him. Not so much the sci-fi aspects—there are things in life best taken at face value and dwelled upon no further—but rather his own attempt at apology. The Margaret he’d wronged was gone. The Margaret he’d apologized to didn’t need to hear it from him. His foggy brain had conflated the two of them. He now found his actions yesterday embarrassingly senseless.

It was that onslaught of embarrassment that jolted him awake. Alex, Jennifer, Sarah— all redheads with a faint cackle in their laughters that in Margaret always made him think of the popping sound of distant wildfires, all hopeless reenactments of his life with her, all as clear from the start as mistakes can be. His pursuits of them were but a prolonged act of wallowing. He had been sulking at life like a child. All the while his daughters went on with their private griefs in their own parallel worlds. Billy could not allow this to continue any longer.

At AT&T he took out his address book—he was old-fashioned like that—and found Becky’s number.

He saw her at the entrance of the cafe before she saw him and waved her over. She looked like a college freshman in her navy peacoat and trainers, even though she was nearly a decade older than Margaret was when they dated and an adjunct professor now. As she approached, he was startled by the sight of her face, both deeply familiar and deeply novel. They hadn’t seen each other for… how many years now? He looked at her lightly freckled button nose, at her amber wavy hair framing her faintly lined grey eyes. He felt younger and older.

“Hi, Dad,” she said.

“Hi, Becky,” he said, then added after an awkward moment, “I can see Denver’s full of hip cafes now. This one has avocado on everything.” He was indeed surprised by the change he saw. It’d been years since he last drove to the city.

“Didn’t you and Mom go through a very heavy hipster phase in high school?”

“We were called burnouts back then.”

Becky smiled and he felt he could finally exhale. Becky was sweet like that. Margaret’d been fiery, he was bitter, and Jessie both, but his younger daughter always possessed a spacious sweetness. As a child she didn’t so much move on as let whatever happened slide off her like water droplets sliding off a lotus leaf. “My baby buddha,” he often cooed at her as he bounced her on his knees.

It was not a surprise that Becky had been so distant for so long. He hadn’t wanted to witness her moving on. He had been distant. Perhaps she’d sensed his eagerness for self-torment and decided to let him have a taste of it.

“Becky…”

He hesitated. A FedEx truck stopped right outside their windows, the purple and yellow letters garish in the dimming bluish life.

“I have no excuse for what I’ve said and what I’ve done. I know I’ve been pushing both you and Jessie away. I know we cannot simply sweep all the years under the rug. I only want you to know that I have decided to stop drinking and start building a bridge. I hope you won’t close the gate.”

Becky looked pained. She looked like an appendicitis patient who’d found out she’s been taken to acupuncturist’s. Something was off.

“Dad, so you still didn’t know?”

“What…? What didn’t I know?”

Becky stared at the FedEx logo. Billy wanted to yell at the driver to get moving. Deliver it already! Becky was crying. Billy stared at the scarf, balled so tight in her fists. Becky said, “I’m sorry, Dad, I’ve got to go.” Billy was stunned to hear her say sorry to him. She left him sitting motionless in the last of the afternoon light.

From: Rebbeca Shaw
To: me
Dad,
I’m sorry I left you stranded there. I couldn’t bear to say it face to face with you. When I heard your sober voice on the phone for the first time in God knows how many years I was really happy. And afraid. I thought it was time, I was prepared to face it, I had always suspected you knew, I suspected wrong, I was not prepared at all. Hence I’m writing to you now.
I was awake that night and heard you quarreling as you knew. When you said you thought I was not yours, you gave form to an unease that was always there. I’d always felt different from the rest of the family, look-wise, temperament-wise. I’d always wondered if there was a real possibility. You were so rarely there. Jessie used to invent stories about how you are a dead war hero or a penniless artist in San Francisco and some guys at school believed it and found her hot. You didn’t know that about Jessie, did you?
When I started college DNA profiling was getting popular, and the summer after the first year I took a sample of your hairs and sent it to a lab along with my cheek swabs. It was easy, you had stopped changing your sheets by then.
You must have guessed by now. I was not your biological daughter. I have no ideas who the real father is.
I was torn, Dad. Would I still be able to call you Dad? How was I supposed to think about Mom now?
But it is not the secret that has been eating me up. It is my selfishness. I only think of myself. I told myself you were so devastated the truth would kill you. I told myself I didn’t want to taint the memory of Mom for you and Jessie. In fact I was scared you would kick me out. I wanted to keep my fantasy of this family untainted. I would rather have you beaten up by guilt so that I could go on pretending to be clean. Now you know why I couldn’t bear to come back home.
You said this afternoon we couldn’t simply sweep everything under the rug. I’ve been doing that for years. It was untenable.
Love,
Becky

Billy dialed his old phone number again and again that day, and the next day, and the day after. He didn’t know what else to do.

Finally, the call went through. Margaret picked up. Her voice barely made it above all the the sea of static.

“God, Billy, I’ve been waiting for you for days.”

“Margaret…”

“Billy, I don’t know how longer will we able to connect. You have to listen to me. What happened is terrible but you must move on. For Jessie and Becky and Eliot. I can only imagine how badly you feel, but it’s not your fault…”

“Are you happy over there, Margaret?”

“Pardon?”

“Are you happy where you are, Margaret? Am I a good husband there? Have I ever been?”

Static.

“What do you think, Billy?”

Billy felt the autumn chill settled early. Insects trilled and ticked as deafeningly as if it were night.

“Becky told me…”

“And only then did the idea of asking after my wellbeing occurred to you, didn’t it.”

“I shouldn’t be the defense here, I think.”

“Nor should I. Look, Billy, I’m not gonna apologize to you, no more than should you me for the other Margaret’s death.”

Oh, my Margaret, my love, so heated up yet always as straight, as hard as a whetstone, Billy thought.

“Don’t you think I, or the other me over there, deserve to know?”

“It’s always about you, Billy. Your passions. Your traumas. Your redemption as a successful and dedicated businessman. Your little beautiful docile supportive family. Your tragic alcoholic veteran act.” The adjectives somehow sounded like the bandaids ripping off when she enunciated them. “All yours.”

“But you know what, at some point I got tired of being a supporting actress. I wanted my own drama, my own adventure, my own tragedy…”

She sounded like her throat was being flooded. Jesus, lately I can’t make it through a conversation without someone crying, Billy thought and immediately felt disconcerted by his own thought.

Margaret trudged on.

“You know you are my first love, right? My only love, Billy. And that’s the thing that finally got to me. It all happened so fast, I felt roped in. It was supposed to be a summer fling, and, blink once, blink twice, and voilà! I was now the good wife, the good mother, the good homemaker—I always hate that word so much…”

Margaret was rambling now, and the static swallowed her words. Billy was glad because he didn’t want to hang up on her.

The sky was a deep blood orange, flushed with rising purple from the edge.

Billy dug through his whole house the second time in three days for a clue. None was found. What did he really want to know anyway? Was it relevant now?

What Becky’d revealed was mere tremors. The ground really shifted under his feet when he heard Margaret’s lack of remorse. Now he knew why he was so thrown off when her voice began to get nasal. She was sad the way a bystander is sad about a car accident.

He was more afraid than angry now. The world he lived in had turned out to be his world only, unshared, unacknowledged. Every interaction he’d had lately further crumbled its false foundation. He was afraid he would fall through.

Billy sat down on the single stool in the kitchen.

The cupboard was half closed like the eyes of the Buddha.

The headlight flashing through the blinds make the glass bottles inside the cupboard gleam like deliverance.

A car honked.

Billy almost jumped.

The car honked loudly and peculiarly. It was an DIY horn that could only mean…

“Yo, Billy, care for a juicy ass steak?” Jerry’s voice boomed from outside the anarchic lawn.

Peepers’ Land was driven out by Barnes & Noble, which was wiped by Amazon. So now it was a chain store steakhouse and the only good one in town.

Jerry wore a cerulean shortsleeved shirt with tropical birds motif that hurt Billy’s eyes. He attacked the thick piece of beef as if its wholeness offended him.

“Dude, you’ve gotta get out of the house once in a while.” Despite their advanced ages, everyone he liked was ’dude’ to Jerry.

“I do. How’s business?”

“Tragic. Charles’s being stingy. I said to him, capitalism is debt, my friend. Nowadays it’s called leverage. Lever-ridge. I like that sound. You don’t want to take on leverage, you’re not gonna move the world.”

Charles was Jerry’s biggest shareholder and his much older cousin and a miser. Charles also invested in Billy’s nascent hardware store in the mid 90’s because Jerry somehow convinced him of Billy’s misty vision. Jerry can turn his tongue into silver when he wanted to. Billy suspected that tongue was the reason his sporting equipment import business was always on the brink of bankruptcy but never quite went off the rail. That and the fact that he went surfing all the time. Even a childhood friend like Billy couldn’t fathom how a landlocked Colorado kid suddenly developed a passion for surfing in his twenties. Jerry was also a great friend, though, always there when his young family struggled to stand on its own feet. You’d think he was surfing and chasing after chicks on some Californian beach only to find him the next moment at your door, unannounced, and tried to throw you a rope because of course you were deep in quicksand.

Had they still been attached to the hip as they used to be, Billy would have told Jerry about the phone calls, and how they were fucking up his already fucked up life in new ways. They were not, so Billy kept his mouth shut. Jerry moved to the next town long ago to enjoy his avowed bachelordom, and after Margaret died, their contacts grew scarce.

“You did not drive here just to rant about your archaic partner.”

Jerry looked up from the plate.

“No. I drove twenty miles because last night I was chilling with Janice when she said there was this new documentary about Hugh Hefner on Amazon and I thought about how we used to steal Playboy issues and then I thought about how tight we once were so of course I had to go see how my old comrade’s doing.”

Billy looked at Jerry. It’d been a long while since he last saw his friend. Jerry’s extended adolescent act did nothing to slow his aging whereas the sun had hurried it. There are deep crow’s feet in the corner of his eyes now, but the grey flecked with gold was still handsome.

Billy felt electrocuted.

Now when he thought about it they did look kinda, sorta, alike.

“Billy, my friend, you there?”

Jerry was waving his fork in front of his face.

Same easy-going attitude, same athleticism.

“Sorry, just zoned out for a moment.”

And wasn’t Jerry always there when he was not, could not? His friend number one virtue nicely made up for his number one sin.

“Dude, you been drinking again?”

The route that Margaret took that night… passes through Jerry’s town.

“You look like a ghost just crawled up your ass, Billy.”

Was he being paranoid? There must be a way to find out. Maybe if he can steal DNA sample the way Becky did? But he would have to visit the guy’s place.

Jerry slapped his back hard. “Why don’t you camp at my place for a while? Old Jerry could use some trusted company. We could go fishing at the old creek. What do you think?”

His friend’s bachelor pad was every bit as ramshackle as Billy imagined it to be. Old chow-mein cartons were squeezed between pizza boxes in the trash can, underneath the sink, and behind the microwave oven. The rug was so thoroughly caked with dirt and stains it was impossible to ascertain the original color. On two window sills lied two cigarette trays brimming with stubs; for the third window Jerry made do with a cactus pot. The cactus looked well departed. A couch had holes in it and the corner of a white squarish thing reared up between the cushion and the arm.

Billy pulled the thing up and found his younger self and Jerry flanking a stupendously beautiful Margaret; her head was slightly out of focus, which made her big red perm resemble a halo. Billy himself wore the dazed smile of the besotted. Jerry was partially out of frame and his expression hard to judge.

Billy couldn’t remember where and when this shot was taken, but he recalled that for a while high-school Jerry fantasized himself as a famous photographer in the making and always had a camera with him. He was surprised Jerry still held on to those pictures.

His friend was humming in the bathroom, clearly having a good time. There was time yet. He got in the bed room. Perhaps he could pick up stray hairs on the pillow? Billy knew his plan was ill-conceived. What would he do next, send the strands of hair to Becky so she can send it to the lab? Billy cringed at the thought, but he couldn’t bear to do nothing now, to just sit still and let things happen to him.

The bed was clean and tidy, implausibly so given the state of the rest of the house. Billy looked around in frustration. The bottom drawer of the dresser didn’t sit flush with the ones above it. Billy opened it, expected boxers in loud colors but saw an album full of yellowing Polaroids like the one he found in the living room.

About a quarter of the photos were of young Jerry in ill-informed poses. The rest were of Margaret. Margaret, mostly young and sometimes not so young any more, but radiant always, a flame that burned badly still.

Billy was staring at the album when he heard Jerry’s voice at the door.

“Dude, what the fu…?”

They half fell, half pushed and pulled each other down the stairs—two ill-shaped middle-aged men with more fists and arms and feet and spits and shouting and fury and injury than they knew what to do with. Too much, the voice inside Billy screamed. Too much lying. Too much betrayal. Too much reckoning.

Reckoning. Even in all this flurry of grappling and scuffling, Billy somehow got distracted by the images in his head, as he was wont to do in the midst of war.

Photo of Margaret checking Jessie out of the hospital. Jessie contracted some serious pneumonia while Billy was in Iraq. Jerry enclosed a copy of that photo in his only letter to Billy, saying “Dude, worry not. All is well.” Billy forgot to ask how the hospital bill was paid.

Photo of 8 year-old Becky proudly brandishing her clarinet as if it were a light saber in front of the auditorium, Margaret kneeling behind her. Billy was probably on a business trip.

Photo of Jessie’s high school graduation. She looked like she was embarrassed by her own adulthood. Billy had an investors meeting that day. Such was the dizzying years at the onset the dot-com bubble.

Photo of the Maggie, Billy, Jerry together, brilliant or stupefied or cut out, but all so tragically unaware of the years ahead, wedged into a tight corner.

Jerry must have been staring at that photo when he got the urge to see Billy. Always act on his urge, that guy.

This house, clearly lived in, yet desolate, grieving, suffused with disappointment, more like his own than he cared to ponder.

Photo of the three of them again. Jerry put the camera on timer and ran to him and Margaret, but he’d misframed, or rather, dead-centered it on his friends and forgot to set aside enough space for himself.

Billy had stopped moving by now, and so had Jerry. They each sat in a corner, stared at each other, inhaled and exhaled like sick mules.

Then Billy dropped a fat tear for his friend because lately he wouldn’t get through a conversation without someone crying.

Then he extended a hand to Jerry.

Billy Shaw found his phone impossibly lodged behind the tank of the toilet a few days later. The battery was of course long dead. That didn’t matter though, as he was never able to connect with the other world after the third call with Margaret. On the other hand, the static seemed to have gotten into his head: with every passing day his memory got a little noisier, a little more dreamlike.

While the verity of the calls might be in doubt, there was no question about the existence of parallel worlds. Why, he himself had recently glimpsed and raged at at least three such worlds. He hadn’t managed to wrap his head around them yet. And Jessie might very well offer another glimpse behind the veil. He would take time to get prepared before calling her.

Actually he hadn’t contacted anyone since the revelation, or non-revelation, depending on how one would like to think of what happened. Not Becky. Not Jerry. He had nothing articulate to say to them. He didn’t even know how he felt towards everyone and everything. He put everyone and everything on hold.

Yet the day light had stopped seeming so harsh, so unbearable, so in need of alcoholic blurring. The guilt where he resided all those years, with a penitent’s pervert pride, turned out to be a bunker, so that alien versions of the past would not find him, enter him, upend him, evert him. They did nonetheless.

Billy Shaw experienced the most mysterious of mysteries the day his phone went missing, and he was saved.