She sat there on the bench for a long time before moving again, gazing down at the grass beneath her feet with the peculiar intensity of the insane. The people who had passed her by during this time had taken little notice, most sparing not even a glance on the young girl in the torn jeans and old army jacket, caught up in their own movement and nothing more.

She stood, after that very long time, looking straight across the green, her sharp blue eyes seeming to assess every detail of the landscape. The wind pulled at the loose tufts of her uneven short blond hair, making her shiver and pull the coarse material of the jacket around her tighter, as if she’d just realized how cold it was out. Some of the last fall leaves fell past her, twirling and diving in the breeze like suicidal skydivers. She glanced up at the trees, at the motion of the bare branches pulled about, losing the last of their small multi-colored flocks to the last bitter days of fall. She smiled, the sides of her mouth pulling up into a slightly devilish grin. Then she walked off, suddenly and with purpose, content in the mere fact that the rest of the day remained to be explored.

The brown leaves crunched in sorry second deaths under her boots, some scattered ahead by the wind as if in flight from her determined steps. Ignoring the sidewalks completely, she strolled across them and instead walked down the road, ignoring the stares of pedestrians and the cars slowed down by her presence.

A bus rolled up slowly, pulled over to the side of the road near her when she moved aside. She turned, then, reading the adverts on its colorful sides, noting the driver gesturing her aboard with some impatience. She got on.

The driver didn’t spare her another look, although she now noticed that the bus was completely empty other than the two of them. It took off ponderously, lurching its way back onto the road in front of an even slower truck, the movement almost throwing her off her feet until she half-slid, half-fell, into the nearest seat to the front. She glanced up at the driver, wondering if he’d noticed this blunder, but he was oblivious.

Now she sat back in the hard red seat, slouching against the plastic, letting a worried look slip back, unchecked, onto her angular features. She laughed quietly, nervously, to herself, and ran a hand through her tousled hair. Soon things would be right.

Two blocks down the bus slowed, stopped, and emptied itself of its one traveler. She hopped down the single step and headed directly into the building opposite where it had stopped, opening the heavy wooden door with some effort before disappearing into the darkness within.

Across the street, a man in a dark coat and jeans noted her entrance, but did not move.

I wish I could talk to you in person but this seems to be the best I can do right now. I have no idea if telling you how I deal with stuff is going to help in the least, but here goes. whenever anything gets out of control, i know that i could always drop everything, hit some sort of low, and go from there. no matter what. so long as I'm alive I don't give a damn what goes wrong. i'm not going to let it drive me nuts. I don't believe in any sort of life after death, so basically this is it. there's nothing to look forward to since any day could be the last. life is extremely short because of this. any day could be the last one, and the last one will be indiscernible from today. it’s not going to be special or anything, one day it’s all just going to end. there is no obligation to or in life. if i hate college, i can drop out. if i hate my parents, i can conceivably never see them again. if I don’t want to do anything, i don’t have to. but I do, for the most part, and i make this a choice rather than an obligation. i continue on the track i'm on because it seems a good one, for the most part, and I enjoy it for the most part. so i might be in some serious trouble. if i am i will do what i have to. if I'm not, i'm not.

The door closed behind her, and the man on the opposite side of the street turned away.

Inside, she sat down in the dimly-lit room, pulling her knees up in front of her in the worn leather armchair. The lady behind the desk smiled sweetly. “Marie? You can go right in.”

“But I just sat down,” She said.

The doctor stuck some instruments in some embarrassing places before turning his serious gaze upon the girl’s face. “Well,” he pronounced solemnly, “there doesn’t seem to be any infection. I recommend you keep an eye on that, though, since it could get worse. If it does, come see me again and I’ll give you something for it.” His eyebrows made some interesting motions, and a look of awkwardness fled across his bristled features. “Are your parents here by any chance? Your mom or your dad?”

The girl shook her head. “I took the bus here by myself,” she answered.

“Alright. Well.” He picked up one of the instruments, passing it from one hand to the other in the moment of silence that passed between them, then put it back on the table. “Well,” he continued, “you’re free to go.”

The girl nodded and hopped down off the table, keeping her head down as she headed out the door back into the waiting room.

The secretary smiled at her sweetly. “Marie? You can go. The insurance covers it, and the forms will be mailed to your house.” The girl nodded and left.

The large door creaked slowly to a close behind her as she stepped back out into the brisk fall air. The large building towered behind her seemingly fragile form, the stern brick and white edging reprimanding her now sullen air, the way in which she dove down the steps quickly, looking down, her hands in her pockets against the cold.

The bus wasn’t there yet. She hopped about from one foot to the other, anxious to be away from this place. Her eyes never lifted from the pavement, now, her face never turned to seek the sky. She caught a glimpse of a man, a stranger, walking towards her out of the corner of her eye, and a cautious look, almost fear, darted onto her shifting features.

The stranger came closer, slowing as he approached, his black boots clicking lightly upon the pavement. She turned from him as he strolled right up to her, ignored him when he spoke to her.

“So what’s your name?” he asked. She just stood there, facing the wrong way, trying to will the bus to hurry up, to come get her.

“I don’t mean any harm,” he continued. “I was just wondering who you were.” There was another moment of silence before the girl finally gave up and turned around slowly, her bright eyes searching his face for some explanation of his presence there, his inquiries. But she turned away again without an answer.

The man sighed and leaned against the bus stop sign as if he had all the time in the world. He turned his gaze back upon the street, looking in the same direction as the girl, as if in anticipation of the bus’ arrival. He started to hum, softly and lightly under his breath, his green eyes relaxed as they scanned the road. The wind caught his dark coat and it twitched like a living thing. The girl eyed him nervously from her position, trying to remember the tune, which was somehow familiar to her.

I don’t… I don’t remember all that much.

The bus finally appeared in the distance, its progress down the final stretch of road seeming to take some small eternity. Then it pulled up close, the doors whooshing open, the driver, a different one this time, watching them carefully as they stepped aboard.

The bus was almost full this time, but they were both able to find seats. The man wandered down the length of the bus with his purposeful stride, seating himself in one of the empty rows in the back, not looking at anyone now. The girl sat in the front again, whispering an apology as the woman she sat next to moved her bags aside to make room. The doors slid shut and the bus moved on.

I feel like I’ve lost someone, someone who perhaps never existed. But it never felt that way, not then. Perhaps that person, in fact, was more real than the stranger standing in his place right now. He looks the same, but I do not love him anymore. He does not look the same anymore… then… I don’t know. His face used to be more open to me, too open, maybe. He used to talk to me for hours, sometimes. There was something great between us, greater than the first, the empty, but less than what I have now.

Even before the very first stop, the woman next to her was fumbling both her bags and the expression on her face, making it obvious to Marie that she was not exactly welcome there. There were, after all, a great number of empty seats in the back, enough that any modern woman conscious of the immediate state of society would be at least somewhat distressed at a stranger choosing to sit beside her on the bus, even if it was only a young girl. Marie took the hint and headed to the back of the bus at the first stop.

The man glanced up and smiled invitingly as Marie headed towards the back of the bus, gesturing that she should take the seat beside him. She glowered at him with the best menacing glance she could manage at the time, and sat down in the last seat, by the back window of the bus. But then the man got up, even as the bus moved forward again, and sat down in the seat across the aisle from her. He smiled again, and offered his hand.

“I must apologize for my previous behavior,” he began, “but I was merely trying to become friends with you in a more natural way before I proceed with explaining to you who I am.” Marie sat there, wordlessly refusing the prooffered hand and continuing to say nothing, glaring slightly.

“In fact,” the man in the dark coat continued, “I was also hoping that you might remember me, improbable though that would be. I am friends with a man named Julien Fils, and I am have come to bring you word of him.” At this, the girl started, and opened her mouth as if in protest of his words. Then she paused, and gave a slight gesture, indicating that the man should continue what he had to say.

The man looked rather pleased at this first sign of compliance, and continued a bit more amiably. “My name, although irrelevant, is Larry,” he added, “But I’m sure that does not interest you in the least. What you wish to hear, I believe, is the story of Julien Fils. The young girl nodded. And then the bus, and the travelers, fell away.

It was merely a blink. The lashes sank down over her blue eyes and then she sank into the blackness, the blankness behind the lids. Red, black, the warmest sound of sinking into space as some do sometimes when they are free to do so. It did not last a second, but the moment swam in eternity for that second, and thus was neverending.

Wetness. Sodden, absolute, pathetic, … wetness. She moved slightly, which produced a horrible squelching sound, and something slimy and warm coursed all over her body. Her mouth opened, she gave out the yell of a waker, and opened her eyes.

It was ridiculously sunny. All she could see was the sun right above her, blinding her so much that she would not have realized if the rest of the sky had been green instead of blue. The second thing that caught her attention was the fact that she was lying on her back in the shallow, muddy water at the edge of a pond. She heard a goose honk rather close-by, and lifted her head up out of the water, the mud and waterplants slowing listening to gravity, ignoring the demands of this newly arrived being in favor of returning to their watery home. She sat there, in complete and utter bewilderment. Finally, she reached up a hand to clear the mud from her hair and face, and wash off the worst of it in the pond. She didn’t know where she was, but that had happened to her before. Everything usually sorted itself out in time. The man who had given her his name on the bus, well, there was no sign of him. But he had said that he would bring her word of Julien…

It had been three years since she had spoken to Julien Fils, an eternity, in her opinion.

Where had he gone to? They had known each other only briefly, but there was no second of it that she had forgotten, or at least that’s what she believed. She’d often wondered how these things stood in his eyes.

Three years ago, they had met in a library in New Jersey. It had been after a fairly dramatic part of her life; she’d lost her way, been failing her classes and fighting with her parents and was fed up with the world in general, just those three years ago. And so she’d left, for awhile. Abandoned Connecticut and headed south on I-95, driving her beat-up Prelude with a vengeance down the interstate highway, tears streaming down her face and a determined look in her eye. She wasn’t going back. But then her friends turned out to not be as enthusiastic about her living with them as they had at first seemed, and she’d left their apartment after only three days, completely unsure of what to do.

And then she’d wandered into a public library and sat there, among the aisles of dusty books, crying her eyes out in the fiction section, wondering what was to become of her. And then she’d met Julien.

She would have felt mortified if anyone else had found her in such a position, but the moment she set eyes on him she knew that nothing mattered with him. He didn’t even look all that surprised to run into a slightly depraved-looking young girl sobbing among the James Ellroys, merely sitting down beside her, waiting for her to speak first.

“Aren’t you going to ask me what’s wrong?” she’d asked him, finally turning her tear-stained gaze upon this stranger, wondering what it was he hoped to gain by sitting there in his silence.

He did not smile, then, but he answered her fairly. “I was hoping you might tell me of your own provocation,” he said, “I have no mind to appear meddling.” And still he sat there.

Marie had never been one to put her confidence in others, especially those she hardly knew, but this seemed different. Already she could feel something between them, nothing flamboyant, but rather just some quiet understanding that they had shared before even a word had been spoken. She knew she was safe with him, but did not know or care to know why she felt this.

She finally wiped the tears from her face, using the sleeve of the shirt she was wearing at the time. Making an effort to control her emotions, something she was usually a natural at, she then spoke to him.

“I left my home,” she started, “because I could not stand my family anymore. I left my friends because I could not stand them, either. And I left my boyfriend, because I did not love him.” She shot a defiant look at Julien. “There is nothing of worth in my life, so I left it. But I have nowhere to go.”

Julien leaned back into the bookcase, and held out his hands in a self-deprecating gesture. “So what do you want?” he asked.

She laughed, then, the nervous laugh of somewhere who is lost and has just been asked where she wants to go rather than given directions. She sat and thought for a minute, trying to phrase something that she truly felt.

“When I was in college,” she started, “I’d look at all the students and teachers rushing about on a bright sunny day, with their backpacks and briefcases, all streaming as fast as they could to get out of the glaring sun and into a dark cool classroom. I would join them usually, thinking nothing of it.” She paused to bring a stray hair back from her face before continuing. “I’ve always loved the heat and the sun, though, and sometimes I couldn’t stand to be inside, even if it wasn’t in a class, even if it was just sitting inside or reading inside or whatever. I’d have to be outside if it was that beautiful, that warm, that sunny. If I wasn’t, it’d be like I was missing something immense, something wonderful. And I would see the workmen outside, in the sun all day long, prying at mortar or working on the soil, and I knew a million times over that I’d rather be doing what they were doing than head on my way to class, to sit inside there and learn how to behave and think so I could sit in more cool dark rooms and buildings doing the same sort of thing all through the rest of my life.” She shrugged, and looked back at Julien’s face. “That’s not what I want,” she said.

Julien smiled. He had no idea who this girl was, but already she’d proven herself above the vast majority of mankind, in his eyes. “So, what do you want?” he repeated.

She turned her blue eyes away from him, staring at the ends of her beat-up muddy boots. “I guess I just want to be outside more,” she replied, and smiled. “I guess I don’t really know.”

Julien stood up again, and offered his hand. “Will you come somewhere else with me?” he asked, then tried to rephrase it. “I mean, like a coffee place or something. Not my house or anything,” he grinned, and looked a bit embarrassed.

Marie grasped the proffered hand and stood up beside him, looking directly into his eyes as she did so. “Sure,” she answered, “I’d love to.”

Julien Fils was a bastard with a capital for every one of the letters. He lived in New Jersey, which wasn’t entirely his fault yet which did not exactly help, and he was at this moment sitting in a New York subway, which he was at blame for and which didn’t do much for him, either.

Dressed all in black, and smelling faintly of one of the more expensive colognes, he sat rigidly on the plastic subway seat, trying not to breathe in the fumes emanating from the fat cigar that dangled precariously from the thin lips of the woman beside him. Her name was Samantha Leanne Botts, and she had read somewhere that cigars were the next Good Thing. She wanted to be a model, in a vague sort of way. The subway moved on.

Sitting back and pointedly ignoring the woman beside him, Julien immersed himself in his thoughts. “What the hell am I doing here?” he wondered. He had always felt, with some sort of vague certainty, that there was more to life than expensive cologne and places with “new” in their names. Vaguely he contemplated whether or not the original places that were the namesakes of such things were still around somewhere, perhaps locked up in one of the more eclectic museums in Jersey. “Something’s not right.” He continued on in his silent self-reflection, as the bundle of sticks and stogies beside him sighed and rearranged her limbs on the seat, rather like a praying mantis would do if it felt inclined to stretch upon waking. Julien sat back and prayed silently that none of the bits would touch him. He wasn’t very fond of people, on the whole. And vice versa works surprisingly well with that statement, too. Most people don’t take too well to people who go around wearing black at people and not talking to them. They find it rather unnerving, like carnys.

The subway was fairly empty, except for the two of them. Which makes it all the more hideous that the would-be model had squished herself up next to the only thing with a Y-chromosome on board. But fairly empty isn’t completely empty- there were, in fact, a number of people around, but none of them were really worth mentioning.

The model made a conscious effort to stretch languidly, or at least would have done so had she the vocabulary for it. As it stood, she was hard-pressed to grasp the concept of stretch in the first place, as all her useful brain cells had been mistaken for excess weight and promptly lobotomized in a dietary misunderstanding. It had been an ultimate scandal of the 60’s that insane asylums in Sweden were secretly and innovatively transformed into illegal weight loss centers, although it is also one of the greater ironies of those years that people of about the same mental state ended up going there, anyway. Lobotomies were all the rage, and people raved about what it did for their overall enjoyment of life, too. “After just one visit, I lost 10 pounds, the ability to do simple math, and all the worries of my former life!” The model smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes as those bits weren’t really connected anymore.

Julien restrained an urge to yawn. It would probably be mistaken as an invitation to speak by the animate kindling beside him.

“Are you alright?” The question broke through his thoughts like a freak on a unicycle might burst through a paper-covered hula-hoop. He started, and looked up towards the source of the sound. There was nothing there. He stole a glance at the mannequin beside him, but she was busy gazing out the window in what she took to be a dramatic fashion. Julien sat back and contemplated his sanity.

“I said, are you alright? Life seems to have been getting you down lately.” The voice was undoubtedly and unquestionably coming from a completely unknown source. A confused look did a small dance across Julien’s worried features.

“Did you say something?” he asked the thing beside him. It shook its head prettily and emptily, like a buoy on perturbed waters. Julien continued to look confused. “Did someone say something?” He aimed this question at the other unmentionables, who lived up to their name doubly so by not saying a word in response. Julien decided to sit in silence and contemplate the doings of his own inner self, as the outer world seemed rather incomprehensible at the moment. “La, la, la.” He hummed a bit to annoy the other passengers, otherwise lost in his thoughts. The rest of the ride continued in relative silence.

The silence was immediately broken the moment that Julien stepped into his well-furnished apartment. “What a well-furnished apartment!” someone exclaimed. “What a delightful life you must lead!” If there was one thing Julien couldn’t stand, it was sarcasm. That and disembodied voices speaking to him out of nowhere. But sarcasm was the worst, unless it was emanating from him in his normal scathing manner, in which he quite enjoyed it and found it rather witty.

“Who the bloody hell do you think you are? And where are you?” Julien looked around accusingly. “I’m sure this is illegal, at least in some states.”

“I’m your conscience, Julien,” the voice whispered dramatically.

“I don’t have a bloody conscience!” Julien stormed about angrily, looking under and inside different bits of furniture that might serve to hide someone.

“I know, I know. I’m just messing with you. I’m really… well, who I am doesn’t really matter right now. It’s you I’m interested in.”

Julien quavered, and tried to make it sound aggressive. “Wha-what do you want?” he snarled, feebly.

“I want nothing. With the single exception of having you want the same.” Julien had a sudden vision of a scruffy teenager with a gun to his own head: -‘Don’t do it! You’ve nothing to gain!’; -‘Yes, I gain nothing.’ and then a gunshot.

“What do you mean?” some, but not all of the quaver had left his voice. “I don’t understand.” The voice seemed to consider this quite seriously, or so Julien inferred from its silence. It reappeared again in a moment, though. “You’re right. You haven’t a clue.” And then it vanished out of existence.

Julien sat there, in the silence, and contemplated his sanity, or lack-thereof. His life had been getting a tad bit beyond his control, what with people being horrible in general and all, and life being meaningless, but this pretty much knocked the last snowball off the ol’ snowman of sanity. Never before had anyone spoken to him so frankly and, perhaps, truthfully. Never before had anyone spoken to him out of nowhere. Both factors confused him immensely. It was a long while before Julien could get to sleep that night.

The next morning, Julien stretched lazily after a dreamless sleep in his expensive down sheets and opened his eyes slowly only to find that his entire house was missing. And that his down sheets had somehow reverted to the geese they had begun their existence with.

“Dear God!” shouted Julien, pushing the webbed-footed things off him.

“Quack,” protested the geese. This is not making any sense whatsoever, Julien thought to himself, and resolutely tried to wake up from sleep again. It didn’t work, so he concluded he was delusional and rolled over, trying to fall asleep on what seemed to be grass and geese droppings. His face rolled right into a goose dropping. I am not asleep, concluded Julien, beaten. And he got up.

He was outside. He was standing by a beautiful lake, surrounded by overly tame geese and covered in their overly smelly droppings. He wondered vaguely at the brilliance of the scene, then remembered that he was delusional. “Right,” he thought, with determination. Then he realized he hadn’t a clue where to go. There were some benches nearby, though, so he decided to begin by sitting down on the nearest one and wiping the mess off his face. It seemed the logical thing to do at the time. But after a few minutes or so, the bench dropped him. Julien had never been dropped by a bench before, so he sat there on the ground, looking a tad bit confused, as a dragonfly flew circles around his head. “What are you doing here, Julien?” the dragonfly asked him, before it flew away. Julien shook his head in bewilderment. This wasn’t the way Tuesdays normally went, not for him, at least. Maybe off in some remote corner of Africa they have Tuesdays like this every week, he thought to himself, but not in America. Not within my explorations of the world have I ever come across a Tuesday like this.

“That’s cause it’s Wednesday,” said someone. “Oh, right,” answered Julien, although he couldn’t figure out, for the moment, why that almost made sense. Then he thought: wait, did that someone just hear my thoughts?

“Most definitely not,” it replied, and left, without ever having been seen. So he sat there a moment longer and pondered that. Until, of course, he realized that the pondering really wasn’t getting him anywhere. Then he merely sat.

After awhile of such activity had passed, he decided that it would be better to perhaps go find something a bit more productive to do. So he got up, tried to knock the worst of the mess off his pajamas, and looked about hopefully. In New York and New Jersey, this approach to getting somewhere usually worked rather well. A subway sign or other such feature could normally be found to guide him wherever it was he wanted to go. However, as Julien soon found out, this method doesn’t have quite the same effect for someone who is standing on the grass by a pond. One of the geese began to stare at him hopefully, in an act of retaliation. Or maybe it just wanted some bread. Julien gave up the hopeful look, and stared despondently at the only sign around, which read “No Fishing.” It featured a very brutal comic picture of a man being swallowed by the monstrous fish-creature he’d caught. Julien eyed the placid surface of the pond skeptically. There didn’t seem to be any brutal devourings occurring right this moment, so he turned his attention back to the bench that had “dropped him.” On closer observation, he realized that there wasn’t anything holding the planks of the bench together; they just sort of floated in space in the correct positions. He wondered if all benches were like this, perhaps he’d just never looked at one close enough before. A bit daft, he though, rebuking himself, to have just assumed that they had something to hold themselves together with logically all these years. At some point he should have checked, because to miss something like this would be just… well, impossible.

Confusion had not only set in at this point, but had also pitched the tent, dug an outhouse, and started cooking dinner. Julien played with the bench a bit, bouncing the planks around in the nothingness that held them together.

“Please don’t do that,” someone said. He turned around, and was startled to see an actual real flesh-and-blood person standing there, as opposed to a talking dragonfly or some other such nonsense.

“Who are you?” asked Julien. “I was about to ask you the same thing.” The man smiled a wry smile and ran his fingers through his reddish hair. He was dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, and he looked remarkably at ease with himself. “Although I’ll assume you’re a visitor, what with the pajamas and all. The wry smile turned into a laugh. “Unless you just like to sleep a lot and find it more convenient to wear those all day so you can fall asleep wherever you want.” Unsure what to make of all this, Julien stood there in his wealth of silent confusion. “I see you are standing in a wealth of silent confusion,” the man added, as he read the “I’m standing in a wealth of silent confusion” expression that was evident on Julien’s face. “Perhaps I can help to explain a few things.”

“That would be… good.” Julien continued to do what he was becoming best at. “Um, where exactly am I?” he asked, for starters.

The man turned around and made some nice expansive and utterly random gestures. “Here!” he said. “Where else?”

“Home,” said Julien. “In bed.” He stood there for a moment, looking about at the lake and the grass and the geese and anywhere except at the man. “Might I ask you what your name is?” he asked.

“Sure.” The man waited a moment, just to make sure that Julien realized the full idiocy of his question. “The name’s Larry.” He extended his hand for a handshake, then withdrew it before the thought of shaking it had even reached Julien’s conscious mind. “I’m sorry, I don’t like to be touched.”

“S’ok,” mumbled Julien, content to stare at his shoes and wish they were red, or had rubies on them, or had any chance of doing anything remotely involved with bringing him back home and away from this nutcase right now. His shoes continued to do none of the aforementioned things.

“So…” his newfound friend stood there on the grass, looking rather self-satisfied, only now in a more confused sense of the word. I always knew confusion was contagious… thought Julien.

“Yeup.” Larry nodded, in a rather complacent and understanding way which made Julien feel even more out of his league. It wasn’t just that the man had nodded in that way, it was that he was responding to his thoughts again. To my thoughts, thought Julien. That’s a bit mean, considering they’re mine and all. “Oh!” suddenly Larry continued to look confused, only in a more surprised sense of the word. “I’m sorry. Most people don’t seem to mind. Well, much.” Larry looked guilty, and Julien was damned if he wasn’t going to take advantage of it.

“It’s intrusive as hell. Not to mention it goes against all known science.” He glared self-righteously, something he was very good at. “I’m sorry.” He looked it. Julien merely contented himself with continuing the look of righteous indignation, although in the end it still didn’t prepare him any better for Larry’s next sentence. “I mean, it’s not like I couldn’t read your thoughts to know that it annoyed you or anything, which makes it worse since I knew that you knew that it annoyed you, so I knew I should have stopped.” The righteous indignation meekly bowed down from its fifteen seconds of fame and gave way to the more stable look of confusion on Julien’s face. Ironically, he now felt more out of his league as his facial expressions worked their way back into the only form they felt comfortable in.

Larry shook his head. “I’m really not helping, am I.” Sitting down on the grass cross-legged, he stared up at Julien imploringly. “What do you expect of me, anyway?”

As if pulled down by some invisible wake, Julien sunk down into the grass beside his confusing friend, hugging his legs like a lost 5-year old, not minding the condition of his pajamas. “What do I expect of you?” he asked desperately, “Why don’t you just tell me where I am?”

“You want to know where you are?” Larry grinned. “You really do, don’t you? Bloody idiot.” Then everything disappeared.

There was absolutely nothing for some indefinite amount of time. Then everything reappeared.

“Um…” Julien was lying on his back in the overly lush grass, with a look of utter despair and confusion embedded into the very features of his features. Beside him, Larry stretched languidly, secure in his vocabulary. “What are you so worried about?” he asked placidly, and then flashed an evil grin in the direction of the almost physically tangible void of distress that had once been Julien.

“Er…” No intelligible response seemed forthcoming, so Larry contented himself with stretching in new and unique ways.

“Um…” distracted from his confusion into an sudden eddy of lesser confusion, Julien flailed into being for a second: “How do you do that?” he asked, as his friend bent his leg around his arm in a way that made the Cirque du Soleil seem like an Aussie rugby team forced into gymnastics at gunpoint.

“S’easy.” Larry yawned, and something vital within Julien imploded. “Oh,” he managed, weakly, “I suppose it comes from being omnipotent and all.” As if enlightened by this statement, he suddenly sat up and aimed his frantically bright green eyes into the more placid depths of the other. “You’re not God, are you?” he asked in disbelief. “You couldn’t be…” Larry shrugged. “Why does it matter?” he replied.

“Well, cause then, cause then, well, you’d be God.” Julien answered, before resigning himself to staring down at the grass between his toes. Larry stared at him blankly for a moment just to make sure that the absurdity of this comment had set in fully. “For what it’s worth,” he finally responded, “I’m not.” There was another moment of awkward silence.

“So…” he finally said after a while, “I suppose there must be some reason that I’m here.” Beside him, the blue eyes fixed themselves upon his face, and a different expression, something built of intentness and expectation, alighted upon Larry’s calm features, making Julien even more aware of the words he spoke.

“And I suppose that this means nothing to you, but I really am not who you think I am,” Julien continued, looking finally as if he possessed some sort of conviction.

“Aren’t you?” asked Larry, softly. His face turned towards the sun, lighting the reddish hairs upon his unshaven chin as a light smile flickered within his expression, not noticeable in anything but a slight movement of the lips and something in the brightness of his eyes.

Suddenly Julien felt very young, like his presence there was of no more import or merited no more surprise than sand toyed by waves on the beach. He sat up straighter and took a long look at his companion’s expression, as if trying to discern the meaning of life from the sunlight reflected in his eyes. “Who do you think I am?” he asked softly, confusion buried under something greater.

Larry turned back to look at him, fixed his eyes upon the other’s face. “I think that you are you, my friend, and that today, for once, that is all there is to you.” Then he sat up, dusted himself off, and offered Julien a hand up. “Come on.”

Julien took the proffered hand and, upon rising, found that he was now dressed in jeans and a blue shirt, not unlike Larry’s. “Where did my pajamas go?” he asked.

Larry smiled. “If you really like being covered in goose droppings you can have them back,” he joked, “but I don’t recommend it.” Julien decided to not press the subject.

His new-found genial, albeit eccentric friend grasped his hand and lead him along the path that ran past the bench and along the side of the pond. Men holding hands had always been on Julien’s list of things to be “not noticed” and avoided if possible, but now he found it quite natural to walk alongside him, noticing for once how lightly Larry’s grasp was, his motions quick and agile, more like a fox or some other graceful animal than a man.

The two of them walked around the pond, their feet making no sound on the packed-dirt path, leaving no trace. The geese cleared their way in advance, for once silencing their harsh throaty cries as they passed. They walked for some time, in silence, this way; Julien caught up in the absolute madness and beauty of this remarkably comfortable dream. The grass, bright green, waved smoothly to and fro in the slight wind, the water rippling from its motion. Tiny fish swam in the shallows, visible only as flashes of light stirring in the soft muted depths of the muddy water. Every now and then a frog, complacent in its frog-ness, would cry out “EEP!” and hop down from the banks into the cool water, awakened from a midday sunbath by their quiet passage when the path brought them close to the swampy edges.

After some time, they came to a small wooden bridge at the end of the pond, where the stream that fed it entered. Larry stopped, let go of Julien’s hand, and knelt down by the place where the bridge met the water, staring down into the deeper water under the planks.

“Look there,” he gestured, pointing out what seemed to Julien only a pool of larger ripples on the surface of the water. “No- underneath.”

Adjusting his gaze to see into the murky depths, Julien caught a glimpse of a massive tail, smooth on the sides and ridged like some prehistoric beast on the top, swirling gently through the water, cruising away from the two of them. “What is that?” he asked.

Larry stood up and turned to face his foundling. “An ogopogo,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “There aren’t many of them left in this world.”

“This world?” asked Julien, and then, “I mean, what’s an ogopogo?” But Larry had already turned away, and was heading up the path away from the lake. Julien cast one last glance at the now still surface of the water before turning to follow.

Wandering along the perfectly manicured path, Julien vaguely wondered where they were going. After a bit more walking, he realized this did not really matter since he didn’t know where he was, in general. And he had no way of knowing where that was, either. Or how he’d gotten there. He looked down at his shoes in a fair amount of distress. “Um…” he asked the man who walked silently but steadily in front of him, “how did I get here?” Larry shrugged without breaking his stride.

Not one to easily be fazed, Julien quickened his pace to catch up and grabbed the man’s wrist with a sense of some urgency. “Why aren’t I back at my house? Asleep in my bed? This must be a dream.”

Larry stopped and, though he was too kind to glare, sent a stern look in Julien’s direction. “I’m no wizard,” he retorted rather uneasily, “but this is no dream.”

Julien ignored the stern look and kept going. “Well, surely you know where we are. Tell me that, then, if you don’t know how I came to be here.”

Larry sighed and, to Julien’s surprise, flopped right down on the warm dirt of the path, his hands outstretched behind his reclining form. “Look.” He paused, looked off to one side of the path as if for confirmation of something, then sighed again and continued with a look not entirely devoid of frustration. “I have lived here all my life. You, evidently, have not. Yet neither I nor you can give an accurate description of where we are, you in your world, and me in mine.”

Julien looked like he was about to say something, then stopped and closed his mouth instead, just for a second. “So you won’t tell me anything,” he retorted, finally.

Larry nodded, and laughed. He lay back on the path, and turned his sharp gaze to the sky, relaxing with all the ease of a cat on a windowsill.