The west end.
Like he’d just gone in one big circle.
“It’s not possible,” he says, and doesn’t even register how high-pitched his voice is. “It’s not—”
But there it is. Amorea in front of him. The mountains on the other side.
He looks behind him.
There’s a hill. Rises up and away.
He says, “Okay, Mike. Okay. Just think.”
There are three logical answers.
One, he’s dreaming.
Two, he’s sick, much sicker than he thought.
Three, he got drunk somehow and is stumbling around Amorea.
And maybe there’s another one.
Four, aliens.
Okay, so that last might not be the most rational. This isn’t fiction. This is real life. Amorea isn’t an island. He knows this. They’re not trapped here, and there’s a balance. They work. They won’t descend into chaos. Everyone is assigned their part. He’s overthinking this. He really is.
Occam’s razor, and he thinks, I just wanted to get to them mountains, fo sho.
Since it can’t be aliens, it has to be one of the other three.
He’s not drunk. He’d know if he were drunk. He’s been drunk before, not a whole lot, but enough to know how fluid everything becomes, how slow and sweet. It was a few poker nights, with one
too many Falstaffs. Or that night he and Sean sat in the backyard on the patio and went through a bottle of white wine, and they were laughing, weren’t they? This was more toward the beginning, more when he was unsure of Sean, unsure of what was happening between the two of them. He needed the courage from the wine, and by the time the bottle was empty, he said something to make Sean laugh and he thought to himself, That’s a nice sound, that sure is a nice sound.
He’s not dreaming.
Well.
He’s pretty sure he’s not dreaming.
He can’t remember ever having a dream this vivid before.
(Granted, he doesn’t dream much to begin with, and lately the dreams he has been having are all mired in a strange haze, like being seen through a grainy filter, and yeah, it’s the specifics that get to him, those little details that seem like they’re making it harder and harder to wake up.)
(They’re filled with sounds of breaking glass and men standing at the edge of his bed and voices in his house saying things like Code Orange and It’s like you’re not even trying, Julienne, Jesus fucking Christ, don’t you see what’s happening here? though he can’t remember when he had them, just that he did.)
So he has to be sick.
That’s why it’s a razor. Because it cuts straight to the truth.
There’s that little voice in his head that says, Really? That’s what you’re going with? Climb back up that hill behind you and see. Goddamn you, Mike. Goddamn you, Greg, just climb back up that hill and see—
That’s when he knows he’s sick.
Because he doesn’t know anyone named Greg.
And part of him wants to. Part of him wants to listen to that voice and climb back up that hill.