“Oh.” I’d thought she’d meant some plasticky board game by Ideal or whatever. “Yeah, I guess I did play something like that.”

“Really.” She had a stone in her hand, but she wasn’t putting it down.

“Well, yeah. Basically. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, though. And I thought I’d made it up.”

“Maybe we both made it up,” she said. She set the stone down on the side star point. It was a fine move, but it was still a book move. That is, not insightful. She hit her clock.

“I guess,” I said.

“It’s our psychic link.” She smiled. It wasn’t an ironic smile, or a wry, knowing, sardonic, nonconformist’s smile, not even a humorous smile. It was just a sincere friendshipish expression. A rare bird these days, I thought. It was a smile like, we’re hanging out and bonding and isn’t that great. I felt a smudge of mistiness in the back of my eyeballs. Squelch that. Hard up. Don’t forget how she made you a sucker. She conned you like she was Fa’pua’a Fa’amu and you were Margaret Mead “Or, I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe all kids play that.”

“No, I don’t think so. Just a few sad, introspective nerded-out kids.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

I cocked my head, closed my right eye, and looked at the board with my left eye to get a fresh look at the position.

“It’s good to keep your different life stages in touch with each other,” she said. “All those years just swish by.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you have any left?”

“Any what?”

“Any second parts coming up in Time Machine, you know, like, where you plan to sit in that position again and whatever.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess I do,” I said. “I have one left.”

“When is it?”

“Uh… January twentieth. At noon. Four years from now.”

“That’s great, okay, so maybe we should do something together then.”

“Well, I don’t-uh, okay.” This topic was harshing my wave. I scooped up a stone and thwacked it down, a hane on her last point. Nothing board-shattering. I hit my clock. Maybe I don’t need to find out what’s the real deal with Tony. Maybe I should just take off now. No, don’t. Leave now and she’ll really know something’s up. In fact she’ll probably tell them to ratchet up the surveillance on you. Although that’s kind of weird, she’s a romantic interest and also your Stasi minder. Although the whole thing is weird. Well, NFML. Not For Much Longer. Just crush her flat in this one game, have two bites of bibimbap, and book. No sweat.

“Okay, it’s a date. Even if we’re both married to other people by then. Right?”

“Yeah…” I said. “… Why, are you getting married?” Damn it, Jedface, don’t ask girls questions like that. Have a drop of sangfroid. Forget Sick Tony Sic, you lost, get over it. Anyway, what do you care? Nothing matters. We were all going to be dead in-no, don’t think dead. Nonexisting “No, I’m not,” Marena said.

I said okay, or something. I tried to look at the board, but the game was at that point where the stones start to look and even feel like pustules erupting on your skin, and you just want it to be over.

“Are you upset about Tony staying here?” she asked, a little muffledly because she was working on that fingernail again.

“No, I mean, he, you know…”

“I totally haven’t touched him.”

Huh.

“It’s okay,” I said, “you get, you get to touch whatev-”

“It’s not a romantic thing, he’s just staying here because he’s, for a place to stay.”

“What about that getting-married business?”

“That was a different guy.”

“Oh.”

“And I’m not sure about that lately.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“I mean-look, this is all getting into feelings and, like, feelings.”

“Yeah. I have difficulty with those things.”

“Hmm,” she went. She sort of melted herself down into her oddly yielding Memory Foam cushions and stretched out prone.

“Maybe it’s okay, whatever happens,” she said, “maybe there’s another whole world out there, like with that Mr. Bubble thing?”

“Sorry? I don’t get the reference.”

“The Crazy Foam, you know, those two guys from the Layton Institute with the bubbly verses, uh…”

“Oh, the bubbleverse,” I said.

“Right.” She was referring to this incident back in 1998 when a pair of Warren-funded physicists reported that said they’d created a bubble in the quantum foam and created another universe that, at that moment, was the exact twin of our own, but which, because of random perturbation, would exhibit divergent outcomes later on. It was purest bullshit.

“That’s what I said.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Do you think that’s possible?”

“You mean, that they created another universe in their lab?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I, you know what Taro says, multiple uni-they’re, you know, cheap on theory, expensive on universes. So, no, I don’t, really. That’s just something people say when their equations don’t come out right, they say whatever’s left over just slides into some other handy universe.”

“Yeah, but they said they saw it.”

“How would they see it? It’s not in the same universe.”

“Anyway, we’d be in it,” I said.

“Okay, I don’t know. That’s what they said. And they said there was definitely not an infinite number of universes. There aren’t even a lot.”

“So how many are there? Like a handful?”

“Right. A few more ’n a couple.”

“Five or six?”

“That sounds about right.”

“Huh.”

“Still, that’s just my intuition,” she said. “And every once in a while one of them forks and makes two.”

“Fork in the road.”

“Yeah. And then, you know, when something bad happens in one of them, it might not happen in all the others.”

“Hmm. A very pleasant thought.”

“Come on.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t know, maybe it’s possible.”

“Never mind. Heck.”

“Maybe it’s going to be alien probes,” she said. “Running around the universe blowing up life-sustaining planets out of sheer pity.”

“Humanitaliens.”

“Yeah. Damn, damn, damn, damn,” she said, five times in total. “Damn. We really nearly all died. Sorry, my mind’s-I’m very free-associating.”

“Do you mean with the Madison thing or just the Hippogriff thing?”

“Oh… I was thinking about Madison, but yeah, I also feel bad about those pilots sometimes.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Those guys dream about seeing action like that. They’d rather do one minute of real fighting than live to be a thousand.”

“Yeah, I guess you-you’re such a guy, ” she said. “You get stuff like that.”

“One crowded hour of glorious life.”

“Yeah, whatevs.”

I guess I mentioned the Hippogriff Incident in the press release, but just to clarify, we, or Warren Labs, were allegedly responsible for the incineration, on March 21, of two Fuerza Aerea Guatemalteca pilots, by, allegedly, an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. It was an almost-major international incident that had exacerbated tensions between Guatemala and Belize, and even between Guatemala and the U.S. As of today, thanks to nearly sixteen million dollars of lawyering, Marena and the team and I seemed to have gotten away pretty clean, and even Executive Solutions still hadn’t been charged with anything. But the whole thing had made it harder for the Warren Group to rock the boat anywhere in Latin America.

“Look,” I said, “dying isn’t-I mean, they probably didn’t even notice.”

“Why, you know what it’s like?”

“Dying?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure it’s like, nothing.”

“But apart from that.”

“No, I mean, all I was saying was-look, the deal is, despite one’s ingrained denial of it, the fact is that every time you fall asleep, you die. In fact you basically die every time you even just lose your train of thought. And when you die for the last time, for you it won’t be any different, you’ll just forget what you were thinking about and not start up again. I mean, you won’t notice. The illusion of continuance is just pure nonsense.”