HE FELT LIKE HE HADN’T SLEPT in weeks, but even while acknowledging the thought, he scoffed at his own lazy adoption of the cliché. He had slept, certainly, because he was still able to carry on low-intensity conversations, complete an embarrassing modicum of work, and drive a car between the yellow lines.

What he really felt was the sense of impending something. Not doom, necessarily, as that was far too dramatic and gave his life a self-importance that he’d never sincerely felt. Perhaps it was impending disappointment, the sneaking suspicion that cigarettes had ruined his future as a sommelier, that his bum leg had shattered a potential career as a soccer star, that his perpetual habit of settling and unsettling had dwindled his romantic prospects to ex-lovers he’d already spent years winning over, and that from here on out, people simply wouldn’t invest time in someone patient and real and eccentric.

The possessions of the future seemed like a long, dismal string of increasingly health-related holiday conversations with relatives, coupled with increasingly skeptical looks when he told those same relatives that children were not, currently, on the menu.

In the face of that bleak picture, it was only natural for him to peer down into the abyss of “alternate” options. Unfortunately, he’d been a coward for the better part of a decade, once the entropy of the world reminded him that he was a fragile slice of flesh with no special luck or destiny to keep him safe. Given that cowardice, the idea of alternate options was forever a dark rim on his consciousness, a vignette of black potential he could easily ignore, until those long nights where tunnel vision brought his horror to bear. Even in those moments, in the whiskey dregs of a self-drowned night, he would escape into his own projection, an alter ego of sorts, a bold rebel on the run, with every option stretching out ahead into infinite webs of potential, where life seemed far too rich and undiscovered to ever imagine ending it.

Those brief self-deceptions dragged him kicking back from the edge of countless evenings alone in unrecognized rooms and unremembered countries, when the fear crept into his throat like smoke, slow and steady. The vision of his body, emptied of will and madness at just the right moment, filled him with confidence that he would always find a way to survive. His alter ego, never spoken of nor confessed to out loud, had never let him down, nor failed to appear in his desperately predictable seconds of breaking.

That is, his alter ego had never let him down until that peculiar Thursday afternoon in an anonymous beachside bar in California, somewhere between Big Sur and Tijuana, in one of his obligatory and brutally destructive visits to the western edge of the world.

*******

Find the bottom of this ball of madness in SN14: Twilight Zone, hitting bookshelves soon!

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