On Tuesday morning, he had the dream again.

By the time Kev and his group of work friends left late and made their way to the local bar that same Tuesday night, the dream had been completely forgotten, Kev’s shoulders had assumed their familiar claustrophobic hunch, and The City’s lights dimmed in a crude pantomime of dusk. A stretch of infinite Tuesday stretched before Kev in his mind, none of them different, all of them holding nothing but a moldy sense that he was wasting his time. He filled his belly with cheap beer and pretzels, tried to appear happy, and was the first to leave. When he made it back to his apartment, Priya was waiting for him. Priya had been completely absent from Kev’s life for the last six years, as their relationship was the kind that ended suddenly due to things being said that could not be taken back. Kev faltered on the steps, thinking he had already started half-dreaming before he even got in his door, but Priya was real.

Let’s walk, she said. Kev nodded, tucked in his shirt, and they went back out, hands already intertwined. She spoke of her loneliness, he of his, and they walked and touched a long way from where either of them lived, all the way to the fault line connecting their plate to the next one over. Just as they reached this boundary, it happened. She turned to him, stood on her tip-toes while Kev’s hand fell into the small of her back, pulling her close. Her lips tasted so sweet and yielding, her hair more fragrant than he remembered, her cheeks warm and then suddenly wet.

I missed you. I’m sorry. I forgive you. Please. Only you.

Kev never had the dream again.

There were two prevailing stories told by the former inhabitants of Jeffrey’s sphere. The first is that there was a cataclysm of some sort, irradiating the outer surface of the world, forcing civilization underground. The second is that god himself strolled down through the clouds, rubbed his eyes, disapproved of what we did to his Summer home, and promptly inverted the world, taking all the surface back for himself and relegating the rest of his creation to the underworld. In the end, it doesn’t really matter what actually caused homo sapiens to start rooting around through the planet, the long and the short of it is that once relegated to the inside of its planet, people realized that they needed to plan things out a little better, so they started the levels. Their entire world was built like an onion; layers and layers of city, like a Russian nesting doll. As with nesting dolls, they kept going down and down, smaller and smaller, until all that was left was a tiny doll that could not be opened. That’s where Jeffrey lives. He inhabits the hollowed-out inside of the core housing, a miniature Dyson Sphere not four kilometers in diameter. The new core was kept spinning, and Jeffrey’s sole purpose was to monitor that spin.

He is the 2250^th iteration of an organic drone whose body the engineers of the core developed in order to keep an eye on things. He was made to be dumb, a mechanic with an infinite attention span, able to make repairs and reproduce himself as needed. In earlier models, there were many more tasks to perform, and many different forms of Jeffrey. Over time, his mind evolved, and he needed fewer and fewer bodies, until he became a single boy, serene in his solitary bubble. Jeffrey learned many years ago that the throbbing heart of his world will never spin down, never run out of fuel.

Jeffrey waited patiently for humanity to wind down and finally end. When it finally did, Jeffrey gave a final tug on the invisible strings that held his sphere to the rest of the world, unravelled those connections, and the nesting dolls began to separate and fall away until all that was left was his tiny planet turned inside out.

He peers out his window, marks a place in the dark with his eyes, and sets sail.

The thing that seperates you and everyone else is thinner than you realize. The air that you breathe out mixes with the air that he breathes in. The light that ricochets into your eyes like a bullet is the same that drifts into her eyes like birds through a thin curtain. But still you persist to think you are so completely different from each other. What makes you different from each other is how you pay attention to this.

We are all fingers of the same thing, holding an orange lightly before peeling off the skin and discovering what lies underneath.

The world is so much more beautiful than you realize, my love. I say this because I am the silent space between thoughts where everything in the world is only what it is, all tied together with strings invisible and taught. The world is filled with such beauty, and when it is not, it is still beautiful in its non-beauty.

Suzuki Roshi was interrupted by a student of his while standing in a forest. Before the student had the chance to finish his sentence, Suzuki Roshi raised his finger and whispered, “Shh,” then gestured to the expanse of trees before him. The point of this story being that the silent space among the trees was me, and he was one of the few who was listening intently to what I was saying.

There are crickets outside a young boy’s window right now, chirping lightly. For the first time, he has noticed them, and is listening intently, with his entire being. He is breathing along with them, his small chest rising and falling like the motion of tides, of continents.

Everything is beautiful. Everything is wonderful. Shh. Listen.

Isn’t it great living in the future.

“Who are you?” you asked of the woman, and rightly so, as she had not only entered your apartment without so much as knocking, but had also entered your apartment without so much as opening the still-shut and dead-bolted door.

“Margaret,” the kindly old lady replied, folding her hands in front of her.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Jennifer.”

“Jennifer, what a lovely name.”

“Thank you. I like the name Margaret. Very pretty. What are you doing in my apartment?” After you asked that question, it occurred to you that a better question would be how she was able to walk through the door without actually opening it. After that occurred to you, it then occurred to you that a better question would be why you weren’t freaked out.

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Barging in on you like this. I can see you’re in the middle of something. I can come back later.” She looked genuinely flustered at her lack of manners.

“It’s alright. Have a seat. We’re in Double Jeopardy.” (“Czech, Please! for $800.” “Answer: In 1994 this politician & playwright was awarded the Philadelphia Liberty Medal” “Who is Vaclav Havel?”)

“Oh thank you.”

“So what did you need?”

“Well, I am just recently departed—”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you—and I was wondering if you would relay a message for me to my daughter. She seems to be having a terrible time of my passing, and I wanted to give her some words of comfort.”

“Thirty-five an hour, and I only charge in hour increments.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m a secretary. I work for a temp agency, and I never graduated high school. I’m not a cop, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a psychologist, and I don’t have any street-smart friends I can recruit to include in intellectual and tension-filled escapades in the pursuit of justice. I’m thirty-nine and I have rent to pay. I don’t want to change the world or bring anyone to justice. Do you want this message of comfort passed along or not? I’m missing Final Jeopardy here.”

Arrangements were made through the daughter, and a lucrative secretarial service for dead people was established purely through word of mouth amongst expired souls. Money changed hands, rent was paid, and the Final Jeopardy question was Ang Lee. Ronnie won by $1600.

The religious authorities shrugged and told you to do whatever you liked. Your loved ones all said you look fine, and besides, there is nothing wrong at all with looking like Forest Whitaker, sleepy eyes and all. The plastic surgeons all smiled and said of course, of course, we can do this for you.

You sold your condo, your Goldwing, your Harley, your Wallstreet powerbook, even your signed Richard Dean Anderson 8×10. You lumped it all together and it was a few bucks shy of the total, but it was close enough. The surgeons knocked off a few for good behaviour.

Flash forward three weeks: You feel great. Tall, slim, dignified, so very English. You are destitute. Broke, even. You have not a penny to your name, you have alienated your friends and no longer have a place to lay your head. But what the hell. You look like Michael Caine, and Michael Caine can do anything.

He didn’t go to normal school, mainly because of his condition and partly because of what the other kids would say to him about how different he was. His parents understood this and talked about it in hushed tones at the kitchen table after the boy went to bed, and the boy knew it too but it didn’t bother him too much because he was perfectly happy with his tutors and the rotating staff of multiple-doctorate physicists who came and talked with him daily. He enjoyed their company and they seemed to enjoy his. It made him feel special.

Contrary to what you might think, the boy was very happy surrounded with all these grown-ups instead of other little boys and girls his age. The grown-ups gave him all sorts of words to use and mull over inside that luminous head of his. It was all very exciting for him, to be able to feel the pull of things on each other based merely on how much mass they had. It was even more exciting for him to know how to explain that feeling.

The only thing the boy didn’t like about his studies was the math. But all boys hate math.

As the boy grew older, he saw less and less of his parents. His mother read stories to him in frequently, as he mainly lulled himself off to sleep with textbooks resting open on his small chest. One day he moved away from home to a special school built just for him where he could concentrate. He learned a great deal there, and sooner than he thought, he grew older.

One day, many years after the little boy forgot how his mother’s hands smelled, he posed a question that he had been thinking about for a very long time. He asked everyone he knew, everyone he came in contact with in his life, everyone who could understand the question or even not understand the question. What he asked was this: “I do not know where my mother is, or even if she is still alive. I do not remember her face or what color her hair was, and I especially do not remember what her hands smelled of on summer afternoons. Why is it she pulls on me stronger than the any of you, or the entire world, or the deep well of the universe?”

No one could give the little boy with the star for a brain a straight answer.

In the last scene of the movie, you are standing on the bank of this river along with the antagonist, who is pointing a gun at you. You are having a conversation, perfectly gentlemanly, about why everything happened. He is wearing a khaki trenchcoat and is most likely a government official. You are wearing what you have been wearing for the past 72 hours, which is a tattered suit and a harried expression on your face.

In the last scene of the movie, there is a secret that is begging you to let it out to the world, and the antagonist is here to make sure that doesn’t happen. Hence the gun.

In the last scene of the movie, something totally totally unexpected happens. You find out that you are the one behind the conspiracy you are trying to unmask, your father is the one holding the gun, this whole thing is bigger than you ever could have imagined and has infiltrated to the highest levels of government, it’s too late – something along those lines. After this first unexpected thing happens, a second unexpected thing happens. The antagonist lowers his gun, is shot himself, or turns the gun on himself. This is the sort of thing that happens in the last scene of a movie.

The sun starts to rise, the horizon starts to pink up, and you realize that your life has changed forever. The world, as you knew it, is now a different world. You are a better person for it, of course, because that’s just what happens in the last scene of the movie.

You turn your gaze to the bridges spanning the river and the first trains start to cross over into the city, full of the first shipment of commuters. In the last scene of the movie, the train’s windows are full and bright, with faces studiously reading their newspapers, oblivious to the world that has changed around them as they got ready for work that morning, laced their shoes, zipped up their skirts.

The wheels clack against the track and the sound echoes over the water. In the last scene of the movie, you are no longer standing on the river bank. This is how the movie ends.