Kyle knew, of course. The day it happened, he knew. He’d known all along, really. The dreams—those ought to have been a sign. Knives, swords, falls, but what really did it was a tiny ball of metal. Several of them, actually, slamming into his body with such tremendous force….

It was the only time he’d ever died in a dream. He hadn’t actually died; he woke into another dream just at the moment of death itself, a strange sensation, like he had been held underwater for too long and finally broke the surface. But it was all the same. He had known he was dead even as his body finished manifesting that fact.

There hadn’t been anything strange about the day to start with. None of those gloomy clouds which invariably shadowed the early pages of the murder mysteries he read. It was sunny, actually, as it had been the day before and the day before that. Three days ago it had rained, a short, pounding rain that lasted throughout the afternoon and into the evening. Kyle had found his porch covered with puddles afterward, and he knew that the wood was going to rot, that the landlord would have to replace it. He had wondered vaguely whether the landlord’s own porch had the same rotted wood and chipped paint that characterized this one; whether at this moment the landlord was standing on his own porch, staring at the puddles and thinking that perhaps he ought to replace the boards over the coming summer. He decided it was unlikely.

He ate pancakes for breakfast. Small, flaky golden circles with strawberry syrup drizzled over the top. Normally he would have considered contentment and life and the meaning of everything. But today there was no such thought. No thought whatsoever, but for the way the pancakes crumbled in his mouth and the sweetness of the red syrup. Just outside the window, two gray pigeons haggled over a piece of garbage. Above them rose the towering buildings, tame metal monsters which sat between boulevards and avenues and traffic lights. A few puffs of white lingered in the sky, smoke or cloud, he wasn’t sure, and in a way it no longer made any difference. Somehow it fit; it all fit together in some pattern that he couldn’t describe, not even to himself. For a moment he was glad there was no one with him. They would have asked him what he was thinking and broken the spell or discarded his musings as meaningless.

The pancakes were gone. He even remembered taking the last bite. Strange, that. Usually his thoughts eliminated all memory of the physical world. He pushed back his chair a little and wiped his face with a white paper napkin. One of the pigeons flew away. Kyle dropped a few bills on the table, then walked to the door. A waitresses said goodbye to him. By the time he thought of the proper response, he was already outside.

He thought about it again that day, how he would die. This time it was a car crash. He’d been driving down Shanks’ and suddenly it hit him hard, from the front. It was big. One of those Suburbans, maybe. Forest green with an all leather interior. The teenage girl who’d been driving leapt from the car, screaming.

But he wasn’t aware of her, not really. He was lying, half sitting, crushed between the steering wheel and his seat. He tried to move, half to get away, but perhaps more because that was what they always did, in the movies and in the books. It was expected.

The pain was expected too, the feel of something in his back, some part of the seat, perhaps, like that girl on ER a few months ago. He could only guess, of course; to turn around and look would be impossible. Behind him, gasoline was leaking, dripping to the ground. In his mind he could see the huge puddles, rainbow against the gray-black of the asphalt. But he saw only the steering wheel and a bit of the frame of the car. Why hadn’t the airbag deployed? he wondered suddenly. Perhaps it had malfunctioned. That part could be worked out in detail later.

The dripping continued behind him. Sirens in the distance. They couldn’t be coming for him, not so soon. He tried to move again, again felt pain sear across his back. And neck. His chest hurt too—the pressure. The vehicle must have been very hot, he thought. And all that gasoline….

Crackling behind him. Heat. Kyle closed his eyes. Not like this. Please, oh please… He was tensing in his seat and it made the pain worse; he had to relax somehow, before he lost too much blood. He was dizzy, terribly dizzy; he knew he was losing consciousness. The flames were up to the passenger seat now and pretty soon they’d hit the gas tank…. He moved his right arm slightly, reaching for the release on the seat buckle. There were shouts outside. Perhaps—just perhaps—if he could—

He was standing in front of his door, his hands already in his pocket, searching for his keys. He blinked a few times, stared down the long road, wondering if he had really walked it. He had, he was almost sure. His face was slightly numbed from the wind, and he vaguely remembered passing a white mailbox with the name Maxwells inscribed in gold and black letters. Then again, maybe it was just a remnant of some dream; maybe he was still dreaming. Anything was possible. Perhaps he was a butterfly having an exceedingly detailed dream in human form. Kyle smiled at the thought, finally succeeded in getting the door unlocked. He finished the fantasy quickly, catching the seatbelt release just as the flames got to the gas tank and the whole thing exploded in a white hot shock of pain and instant release. That, he decided, might be the best way to have it: no slow demise, just a quick, unexpected shock and then nothing. Or something, perhaps. He wasn’t entirely sure what he thought about life after death. He’d gotten to the point where it really didn’t seem pertinent to his everyday life anymore. He would find out when he got there. Until then, he contented himself with vague suppositions, themselves quite possibly wrong.

It was 10:33 according to the clock on the stove. In half an hour a rerun of Matlock would be playing. Kyle glanced at the newspaper, saw news of an earthquake spilled across the front page and flipped it over. Bra ads. He covered it with the comics section, then wandered over to his bedroom and lay on the bed. Across the room was his latest manuscript, another failure from the start. Or at least that was what the editors would call it. After the first story there’d been nothing. Even that hadn’t been the greatest success; it had received wide acclaim from the readership of Imagination magazine, but that was about the extent of it. Still, he felt like he had to write, at least to try. He picked up the notebook—he still used paper and pen, when he could manage it—and flipped to the last page. Darien had just discovered the second jewel of Alonquin; that left one more, which Talia would naturally find before him. It would be interesting to see how that played out, and Kyle found himself grinning in anticipation. He flipped a few pages and began the scene; less than a paragraph in, he flipped back. Perhaps it would be better to continue writing in sequence. After all, he’d written the entire story in order so far: all one hundred and nineteen pages of it. Sometimes he flipped through them all and counted them again, just for the pleasure of knowing he had written them. But back to the story, he reminded himself. It was just about time for a change of perspective; something from the villain’s point of view, perhaps, so he could build up the suspense. He flipped back to the last scene with Rakon. The phone rang.

Springing from the bed, he grabbed the receiver. "Hello?"

Wrong number. Very sorry, of course, to have interrupted him. Thank you and goodbye.

He could never figure out why they said thank you. He turned back to his story, but in those moments it had somehow lost all its appeal. He lay back on the bed and tried to imagine something, anything. He tried to bring himself into the world of stolen jewels and good against evil and all the rest. It wasn’t working. Perhaps another time.

His alarm clock read 10:45. He glanced at last month’s copy of Imagination, then flipped channels while he waited for the show to start.

This gold necklace could be yours, for only 29.95. Diamond earrings starting at—

The latest in a series of apparently random drive-by shootings was—

Tonight, join Professor Allen Golding for an exploration of the ancient mysteries of the Egyptian pyramids, in the latest installment—

The Matlock episode turned out to be one Kyle had already seen three times. He left the TV playing while he browsed through his modest collection of videos, mostly tapes of old TV shows. He needed something that would inspire him, something new, something fresh. Scanning the titles he drew out a tape of old Nowhere Man episodes and popped it into the player. He hadn’t watched the tape in over a year. Within the first few lines of the opening sequence, he was engaged. He went through one and a half episodes before he remembered that he ought to do something besides watching TV all day. And there was the two hour Bradbury special on that night. He stopped the video in the middle of one of Thomas Veil’s better speeches and began to search for his shoes. He needed to get out, to do something. And his sister’s twenty-second birthday was only two weeks away. He caught the bus from Simms’ Avenue to 38th Street, remembered one stop away from the mall that he’d forgotten to bring her wish list. He’d have to do without.

He stepped into the mall in a daze. It was strange, the way these moods hit him. He could never tell how long they would last; sometimes they only stayed for minutes, other times for hours at a stretch. They seemed to have become more frequent as of late. He tried to focus, to keep his mind on the map of the mall, stores outlined in green and blue and red with numbers which corresponded to something or other. He felt tremendously dizzy, but he stayed in front of the display, fixing his eyes time and time again on the Specialty listings. Or would Jewelry and Accessories be better? Finally he backed away, deciding to wander the mall instead. A tall bearded man stepped from the shadows behind him and he shuddered. How long had the man been standing there? Was he being followed? He knew the idea was ludicrous, but he played with it anyway, building up a history of the man and himself, a plot constructed mainly from excerpts of Nowhere Man and The Truman Show, with a few additions of his own thrown in for fun.

After several minutes of wandering he found a jewelry store. It took him half an hour to decide on the right piece, a gold necklace with a delicately sculpted sapphire pendant. He’d been saving up for his sister’s birthday for some time; nonetheless, the necklace was a bit over his budget. He hesitated, then wrote the check. It would be worth it, just to see the look on her face.

Kyle ate lunch at a small café just outside the mall, watching the clouds gathering outside and considering plans for his book. Perhaps if the next scene involved a fight, something where Talia could be revealed as a spy…no, it was too early for that. But there could be hints. I obey—but in her eyes lay a spark of something…no, wait; he did not see that her eyes… He grabbed a napkin and pulled a pen from his pocket. "I obey." He turned away, satisfied. He did not see the gleam in her eyes—a strange gleam, something that could almost be defiance. She smiled as she left the room. It would take work, but it would do for a starting point. He folded the napkin and put it in his pocket, then returned to his chicken sandwich and french fries.

As he mounted the bus steps he heard a church clock chime one. He never wore a watch. Instead he relied on bank clocks or the kindness of passersby when he needed to know the time. Time was something with which he rarely concerned himself. It was a strange phenomenon, people hurrying to conform to random formations of numbers with colons in between.

He would look for another job today. Maybe a lower editing position for a magazine or local newspaper. If necessary he’d even take a job as an administrative assistant for a few months, just enough to tide him over. There would always be time to do what he wanted to do, after he paid the bills. Perhaps someday he’d even be able to fly out of New York, spend another year in England. It was an old dream, one that had been crushed many times, and yet he clung to it, almost believed it.

He stepped off the bus in high spirits. And yet the earlier mood still pulled at him, made him contemplate things that weren’t worth thinking about. Time. What an odd thing, time. The clock had chimed one. It could not be later than twenty after. And yet, what was twenty after one in the end? Arbitrary labels of hours, minutes, seconds. Was time real, at that? He felt as if he could almost step outside its bounds, as if he could exist on a separate plane, experiencing everything at once without experiencing anything at all: as if he could exist, for a moment, in eternity. Everywhere around him details seemed to spring to life, tiny things he’d never noticed before. He saw in an instant a pigeon’s colorful neck, knew that he could never forget the gleaming image, wondered at its clarity. Each blade of grass sprouting up from the cracks in the cement, a gnarled oak standing firm on the street corner. The way the buildings all lined up, all filled with different people entirely unaware of each other’s existence, entirely unaware of him…

It was a strange sensation. He looked up at the clouds again, endless swirls of white and gray, felt as though he was being pulled from the sidewalk, as though he were swimming in that endless mass, far away from the world. It was odd, he thought, that he should feel so far from the world at the precise moment he felt closest to it.

He heard the rumble of an engine behind him. Even before he turned, he knew. The sight of the pale blue truck merely confirmed it. Everything was so clear in that moment. And he could have ducked, dived for the cover of the trash cans or the gutter, he still had time, but he stared blankly, feeling the inevitable pull of destiny, watching silently while the blue truck came closer, as a hand and a gun appeared through the open window. He wondered, briefly, if it would be the way it had been in his dream. He wondered why it all felt so remarkably peaceful, so planned, as if every moment of his life had led towards it. He supposed they had.

He wondered what the police would think of the napkin in his pocket. He was glad his sister’s necklace was in the bag, glad both that he had bought it and that he would be holding it when he died. It would be like a farewell. He wanted, almost, to write something in his own blood, some kind of cryptic message that would lead them to the killers. The license plate number, perhaps. But the thought came to him with the bullet, and he knew he wouldn’t have the time. He’d expected more pain, somehow. Then again, it must be happening awfully fast, because the bullet had gone through his head, and there might have been another one in his chest, but he wasn’t sure, it was all too fast…. Too fast, and yet with a strange unbearable slowness. He wondered if his life would flash before his eyes. The clouds, the pavement, everything was turning to a sticky red. He felt that strange sensation of rushing upwards, as if he’d been held underwater for too long and was racing for the surface, clinging to the world a moment longer, trying to remember everything, wishing for only a little more time, and yet strangely reconciled as he broke through the surface and everything vanished, almost like a dream….