But if that was what was about to happen to me now– seriously bad news. If I was locked in a jail cell for the next twenty-four hours it would be another of my seven days gone.

“Come on, house painter. Time for you to go to the basement.”

That’s where the cells were in the police station and it was a very bleak part of the building, believe me. Later when I became chief the first thing I did was hire an architect and a builder to make that space a lot more humane. But thirty years ago it was a big dark basement with three holding cells and three sixty-watt bulbs to light them.

Why was I reliving my seventeen-year-old life as a forty-seven-year-old? Or at least a day in that life? The last time I returned from my future to my now, everything had been correct. Why was it now so wrong? Now life inside my house was all right (excepting Gee-Gee) but one step onto the porch and it was thirty years ago. Why had I been returned to the day that Bucci put me in jail? I could have thought a lot about these matters sitting in a cell for twenty-four hours. But there was no time to fuck around. I had five days left—maybe only four. There was only one thing to do and I hated it.

Closing my eyes, I said, “Holes in the rain.” The phrase that sent me back to my future.

Or so I thought.

When I opened them again, fully expecting to be back in post-millennium Vienna, I was still in the patrol car sitting next to Pee-Pee. The only difference being he wasn’t moving and neither was anything else. It was like the time on the street with Astopel in Vienna when he told me I couldn’t talk to George. Who, it later turned out, had transformed from a friend into a centuries-old dog sitting on a hotel bed.

“How do you row a boat on a wooden sea, Mr. McCabe?”

Despite all my confused looking around, I hadn’t checked the backseat of the patrol car. Sitting there was the recently dead student Antonya Corando. Today she looked pretty good.

“What’s happening here, Antonya?”

“You must answer my question first. It’s important.”

Resting an elbow on the seat I watched her in the rearview mirror. “I don’t know how you’d row that boat. I haven’t seen many wooden seas, to tell you the truth.”

“Neither have I. It sounds like a Zen koan. I liked those when I was alive. They tickled your brain so much you wanted to scratch it. Like ‘I am turning out the light. Where did it go?’ “

I reached into Pee-Pee’s shirt pocket, took out his cigarettes, and fired one up with the car lighter. “How do you row a boat on a wooden sea? Well, if the water was made of wood then you wouldn’t need a boat. You could get out and walk to wherever you were going.”

She smiled and had a beautiful mouth of big white teeth. “I don’t know if that’s the answer, but it sounds like a good one to me.”

“Why are you here, Antonya?”

“Astopel wanted to come but they wouldn’t let him because he messed up too many things. He was the one who killed me. And made me start doing those notebooks with the drawings of you. I didn’t know what I was doing when I made them—they just came to me and my hand acted like a slave. Astopel also sent the other you, the young one.”

“Gee-Gee?”

“Yes.”

She started giggling which only confused me more. “Why are you laughing, Antonya?”

“Because of all the ‘ee-ee’s’ in your life. There’s Gee-Gee and Pee-Pee Bucci...” She laughed out loud now and it was a great sound, a girlie sound, something that reminded you life could be your friend.

“And you know what? I wouldn’t mind making wee-wee right now—too much coffee this morning. So that makes three ee-ee’s for me-ee.”

That set her off more. I sat basking in her loud free laughter like it was Italian sunshine. Nothing moved. I smoked Pee-Pee’s Pall Mall cigarette and looked around. Out my window a candy-apple-red Chevy El Camino driven by fat Russell Pratt stood waiting for an unchanging red traffic light to change to green. Which reminded me—

“Antonya, since you already died then you know: What comes after? Is there a God?”

Her new laughter came like a tidal wave. After it washed over everything she had to wipe her eyes. While looking at me in the rearview mirror her laughter came again. What the hell did I say?

“What the hell did I say? I only asked if there’s a God.”

“But you asked like you wanted to know what time it is. Like it’s no big deal.”

I rubbed the top of my head. “My life couldn’t get any stranger than it is right now. The way things have been going, maybe you’re God dressed up as the dead girl who drew pictures of my future. I don’t know. There are no rules in my life anymore.”

As if on cue, the door on my side of the car flew open and someone grabbed my shoulder. Hard.

“Get out. Come on, get out of the car!” Gee-Gee. He looked and sounded very scared.

“What’s up? What’s going on?”

“Just get out of the car and let’s go.”

“Hi, Gee-Gee!” Antonya called out from the backseat.

He gave her a quick eyeball while pulling on my shirt. “Get-the-fuck-out! Let’s go.”

Starting to move, I looked in the mirror one last time. Antonya was still smiling. It was bizarre because her facial expression was exactly the same as it had been moments before when she was laughing at me. It seemed like her face would stay like that forever.

“Bye, Frannie!”

“Run, motherfucker. Just run like a fuck!” Gee-Gee took off like a cheetah. My middle-aged legs and Marlboro lungs were no match for the kid. He’d blast down the street half a block then stop short to check on me. Gesturing me forward with a big wave of his arm, he’d call out hurry, move it, come on. I tried but it was no use. Trying to keep up with him, I knew my days of running hard on this earth were finished. Plus why the hell were we running anyway? Why had I followed him when I might have learned important things from Antonya if I’d stayed? Found out about death or God or who knows what else. But no, I just jumped up and ran after myself. Hey me, wait for me!

When I was on my third verge of collapse I gathered enough strength to call out to him, “Where are we going?”

“Home! We got to get home before they get here.”

“Who’s they?

“Just move, man. Just move.”

Back the way I’d come, past Scrappy’s Diner, the high school, houses of old friends and enemies. Another dog I’d known stood sniffing a spot in someone’s garden. Stopping to catch my breath I felt like I was running past my life, in reverse. But even that strange way, memories continued to fly through my mind like small objects flying around in a tornado. There was no way I could have stopped them.

But something stopped Gee-Gee. Twenty feet in front of me he was suddenly airborne and then fell in a strange way on his side. When he hit the ground it was so loud that I could hear the bounce of his bones on stone. Running up, I was only concerned for him. The boy—the boy—he fell so hard—is he all right?

“Don’t worry about me—just get back to the house!” Holding his hip, he kept looking behind me, then all around, very scared. His face was so scared.

“Gee-Gee, what is it? What’s happening?”

“Astopel screwed up everything. He interfered. He interfered with your life and shouldn’t have. I only found that out for sure now. Before I thought it was okay he was around. It was okay to bring me here to be with you and send us both to the future, but it wasn’t. He shouldn’t have done any of it. Understand? He shouldn’t have killed Antonya. He shouldn’t have come and tried to influence you. But he did, and now you got to deal with the fallout. His shit comes down on your head if things go wrong, but that’s the way it is. So get home, please. If you get to the house I think you’ll be safe. If not, you’re fucked, and that’s a guarantee.”

“What about Astopel?”