"Welcome home stranger." A week later those words seemed to echo with every footstep I took as I drifted in and out of elevators, wandered aimlessly from one room to another, drove a golf cart around two and three story guest houses, swimming pools, art galleries, office buildings, tennis courts, gardens, a school, concert hall, media center and library.

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.

I did have to admit that whoever I had been when I had this place designed, I must have had good taste. My art gallery had pictures by Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko and George Bellows, among others. The concert hall was made of pink marble and was surrounded by hand-carved replicas of famous Greek statues. The gardens, filled with rare and exotic plants, were home to ducks, rabbits, deer, peacocks, Canada geese and fish that swam unmolested in the lakes.

There was an army of people on staff that I had to deal with almost constantly, but it was usually possible for me to wander around without being bothered for at least a few hours a day.

Sometimes Pete accompanied me on one of my tours. He didn't like the golf cart, though, and insisted that we walk most of the way. Pete was very athletic and had, according to him, almost played tennis professionally when younger.

"This direct cerebral what-ever-it-is, how on earth did they come up with that?" I said as we trudged up a winding hiking trail that, at its summit, seemed to lay the entire L.A. basin at our feet.

"Oh... that," Pete said, stopping to smell buckwheat. He had powerful legs that I had trouble keeping up with.

"Most people don't know but it's actually a pretty funny story. Quite by accident. You ever hear of people getting radio reception in their mouth after having braces put in?"

I told him that I had heard of that happening.

"Okay, well, the first documented case was reported by a woman who brought her 13 year old son in for psychological testing because he was compulsively masturbating. Turns out he was looking at porn sites on the internet."

"What do you mean? Like...?" I said.

Pete tapped the side of his head with a finger. "He'd been given Amoxotrividian a month before for a seizure disorder."

"They didn't think he was nuts or something?"

"Not after he started e-mailing his therapist. The kid had figured out how to run programs, said it was easy because he had spent so much time using his iMac and playing video games."

"But, Pete, the internet," I said, wondering what kids all over the world were looking at now. "Is, or the last time I heard about it, you need a phone line, don't you?"

"Not with wireless," Pete said, looking up at the sky. "Satellites. Your own company's Web Star. You know it's funny in a really weird way. Every paranoid's worst fear. I remember the first hospital I worked in when I was still an intern. It seemed every other nut that walked through the door had the same problem-the radio or television was beaming programs into their head. Hey look, now it's reality.."

"And everyone's brain is on the internet?" I said.

"Not everyone's," Pete said, stooping to pick up a flat rock, then expertly spinning it over a bush. "Quite a few people have resisted the temptation to join the Borg."

"What's that?" I said.

"Oh, you remember Star Trek? The Borg were half machine, half organic beings, unstoppable, 'Resistance is futile'."

"Oh yeah, I remember that. I was more into Star Wars."

"Me too."

"So," I said, watching a mosquito flit over Pete's head, wondering if I should warn him of an impending attack. "I guess I joined the ranks of the Borg after I was shot, after Amoxotrividian repaired my brain?"

"No, you're more like the chief Borg," Pete said, looking, like me, down at most of the city of Los Angeles. It looked serene beneath its thin coat of powdered sugar colored smog, like a perfectly planned colony that had been carved into dry rock by a race of extraterrestrial giants.

"Well," I said, putting my hands into my back pockets, wondering if there were anything in my past life that could be salvaged. I had once put my faith in a system, a quasi-religion, and not just out of greed or stupidity. Now I wanted to quote scripture, if for no other reason than to see how the words would feel in my mouth.

"This new internet together with marketing, exponential growth. Must have created a lot of opportunity."

I looked down like Yurtle the Turtle at my domain.

"Oh yeah, it did that all right," Pete said, looking at me sideways.

I watched a mocking bird land on a tree stump, heard a peacock cry out like a cat down below. Hardly any other sounds. I took off my glasses, cleaned them on my shirt. Was I, like Victor, Williams, Mash and Oberman, more machine than man?

Had I really turned into the Borg-the chief Borg?

"You sound like you don't quite believe that," I said, putting my glasses back on. I wondered how far we were from security, those men I occasionally saw wearing rap-around sun glasses, who came out of walls, bushes and doorways, then seeped back in like shadows. Pete, I knew, could have snapped my neck as if I were a chicken. And wouldn't it be a blessing to rid planet earth of the chief Borg?

"You don't know what's going on in the rest of the world," Pete said, taking a step toward me.

"Well, maybe I don't," I said, taking a step back.

"Peru just installed it's third government in nine months," he said, taking another step in my direction.

"Well good for them," I said, taking another step back.

"And it's been considered one of the more stable regimes."

"What are you trying to tell me, Pete," I said, looking at his hands.

"What I'm trying to tell you is, all around the world one economy after another is failing. The poor countries are tired of seeing all of their natural resources being used by rich countries and getting nothing in return and the rich countries have exported all of their industries so they have no middle class, only the super rich, a marginal working class and the poor. Markets have expanded until there's no place left for them to expand. Cheap energy is running out and you have literally billions of people working for the equivalent of one or two dollars a day and technology is wiping out the few jobs they have left. Like you said, it's all falling down like a house of cards."

"When did I say that?"

"The day before you passed out, the day before you had your memory wiped clean."

He said it as if I had deliberately pushed the 'delete' button on my own brain.

"But the internet...?"

"The internet is a drug," Pete said, looking at the ground for something. Another flat rock-something solid- to spin with the power of his own arm?

"That's all it is, an electronic fix only instead of letting people drop out it keeps them working longer and longer hours mostly for crap they can't afford, or..." He snapped his fingers. "An illusion."

I felt the muscles in my shoulders bunch up as I looked down once more at the city. Was anyone alive down there? What had been going on in the last five years?

"Illusion of what?" I said, feeling a spinning sensation in my head.

"That they have everything or that they're going to get everything they've always wanted. And you want to know something, Fick? You're looking at the man who helped design it all."

"You?"

"It takes psychology to convince people that it's things and money that are more important than people, ideas and emotions. Yep, you recruited me personally and I was more than willing to come along."

"Well," I said, laughing nervously, feeling sweat run down my sides, wondering if this is where he'd kill me. "I guess I know talent when I see it."

"So now let's talk about something else," he said, starting to walk at a brisk pace back down the path.

"Like what?" I said, impatient to get back to a golf cart. My legs hurt. We had been walking for a long time and I was out of shape.

"Like," Pete said, turning around to face me, placing his hands on his hips.

"Tell me about you and Samantha. You are married, in case you've forgotten."

I walked for about a minute down the path before saying anything, following Pete as if I were his obedient disciple. Samantha and I hadn't been getting along. How could we be expected to? I looked at the trees, wondering what worlds could be reached by climbing to their top. Every night I dreamt of Dorothy, and yet I was dismayed to discover one day that, try as I might, I could no longer remember her voice. Sweet, gentle little Dorothy. Not a girl but a woman. I felt a constant ache in my body for her. How could Samantha take her place? What did I know of Samantha, other than the fact that we had been married for five years and had two children? Getting along! How could we? She had married a man who couldn't keep his freedom or even his memory. I thought of escape, of ascending once more into that gnarled, ancient tree and holding in my arms the one I loved.

My brain could have been thin sliced into a romance novel by Norma Ravewood.

Late one night two days before, while sitting on the floor of my study, playing with a train set, eating pistachios and wondering what to do with my charcoal print of Jiminy Cricket, the door opened and Sally came in, dressed in pink pajamas and carrying a can of orange soda with her two little hands.

"You're up late," I said, sliding sections of track together. Funny, I thought, how classic toys never go out of style in an age of high technology.

She walked up to me on her pajama feet, set the can of soda on the floor, then sat down beside me, eyes half-closed and face puffy with sleep.

"What's the matter?" I said. "Sandman didn't pay you a visit tonight?"

It's a sad rite of passage of sorts to realize, when you sit next to a child and don't know what to say or how to act, just how far down that long and lonely road of life you are from childhood. After a few minutes I guessed that the soda was for me; so I drank some, offered her a sip; but all she wanted to do was snuggle next to me. Unsure of myself, I put my arm around her, then felt her little body relax and go limp next to mine. In a few minutes she was asleep. I carefully picked her up, carried her to her room, then put her to bed next to her sister, who slept with her legs draped over the bed board, hands under her head, as if she were sunning herself on the beach.

My brother, I remembered, used to sleep like that.

I tip-toed out of the girls' bedroom, then walked down the long, circular corridor that was bathed in blue light, stopping to look out a window at a pond and a small, arched bridge. The water shimmered in the moonlight like polished, oval gemstone. Suddenly my whole body seemed to press against my heart. I felt lonely, angry and afraid all at once. Five years of my life had been taken away from me. My left eye was gone and I was living as a prisoner with strangers, spending fantastic amounts of money I hadn't made. Richest man in the world but I was a complete fraud. Once again my life had gone haywire in some completely ridiculous way and happiness had slipped from my grasp. And yet I also knew that here, too, was another opportunity. If I couldn't love Samantha I could at least be a father to my daughters. Some men, I told myself, long to have children all their life but the chance never comes along, and as they grow older a nagging sense of emptiness, of having wasted the best years of their life, never leaves them. It wasn't too late for me. And yet I didn't know if I could ever feel right assuming such a role. Maybe, I thought, if I could remember their birth. If I could recover the one memory that is the most precious to parents.

The train set could wait. I was sleepy, but also restless, so after putting on pajamas and a robe I paced the silent hallway like one of those mad kings or wealthy lunatics someone is always writing a play about. As I opened doors and peeked inside I felt as if I were in the world's biggest hotel, a hotel that I had almost all to myself. Room after room after room. All empty. I guess I should have been impressed, since the house, castle or whatever you want to call it looked as if it had been built only to impress people. But at that hour of the night it only seemed like an ornate warehouse, a place built by someone with too much money and time on his hands. I swung open one door, saw Miss Curly Corkscrews in a black lingerie, and started to close the door in her face before I knew what I was doing.

"I'm so... beg your...sorry... pardon," I babbled.

"Come in," she said. She stood in front of a lit fireplace, holding a bottle opener, looking as if she were expecting someone.

"I...I'm just, you know," I said, trying not to look at her body through the nearly transparent lingerie.

"Come in and have a beer," she said. "It'll help you sleep."

"Oh, well," I said. I did want company, and I didn't want to be rude.

She walked on pink slippers over to a chair, then slipped a nightgown over her head.

"Better?"

"Well that's, uh, okay," I said, more embarrassed now that I had to admit to being embarrassed in the first place.

"You don't remember me?" she said, opening one of two dark bottles she had taken out of a small refrigerator.

"Oh I remember you," I said. "You're the, the..." I couldn't think of the word.

"Nanny."

"That's it, the nanny. I saw you the first time I came to the house."

She took the slippers off, then walked over to me in her bare feet, smiling like a cat.

"Nice and warm in here, isn't it?"

"Warm, yes, I guess you could say."

She handed me a bottle, which wasn't beer but ale. I took a sip, wondering how best to make a graceful exit.

"Too bad about your memory," she said after taking a long drink.

"Why is that?"

"Well," she said, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, then running the tip of her little finger around the neck of the bottle. "Some of those memories might be happy."

"Well," I said, sliding my foot toward the door. "You know what they say, what you don't know you don't miss."

"Oh?" she said, lowering her head, then tilting her pale blue eyes up at me. "Is that what they say?"

"You know, actually, I was looking for my wife," I said. That was a lie, but I was getting warning signals from my scalp to the soles of my feet to get out of Miss Curly Corkscrew's room.

"You don't know where she is in your own house?"

"Yeah it's kind of funny," I said, looking at her painted toenails. They had little intricate designs on them in gold and silver. "There are so many rooms in this house and I think she moves around every night."

"She's in the crow's nest," she said, setting her dark bottle of ale down.

"Oh good," I said. The blank look on my face must have said, "Where's that?"

"Just keep going up till you can't go up anymore. That's the crow's nest. There's just one so you can't... miss it."

"Gadzooks," I muttered to myself as I stalked down the hall, a taste of bitter ale in my mouth. "What a crazy damn house."

The next night, unable to sleep, I put on my robe and slippers, then walked down the long, circular corridor that was bathed in blue light. I stopped to look at the pond, then thought about finding the crow's nest. I had seen Samantha only once that day, as we ate breakfast with the girls. We barely spoke. I ate what the girls ate, which was oatmeal, orange juice and a banana. Samantha drank only black coffee. She looked tense and irritable, as if the wrong word would break her like a cracked tea cup. I chatted with the girls, who were going to bake cookies and then go swimming with Miss Curly Corkscrews, our flirtatious, ale guzzling, late-night nanny. Worry, like a tiny worm with one sharp tooth to nibble with, poked its way through my gut. What if Samantha knew where I had been last night? Would it matter to her? Did it matter to me?

It was another beautiful night with the pond and the arched bridge bathed in the reflected light of the moon. Another quiet, beautiful, lonely night. I looked at the door of Miss Curly Corkscrews and felt a tingling sensation in the back of my legs.

"She isn't married," I thought. "And, for that matter, neither am I."

But my feet refused to move in that direction. I wasn't ready for yet another romantic complication; and the thought of sex left me feeling ashamed not only because of Samantha but because I wanted to remain faithful to Dorothy. A part of me still wanted to believe that we would find each other again.

I thought that it might be fun to look for the crow's nest after all, so I walked to the elevator, then changed my mind and took the stairs, thinking of Emily, thinking of my dream.

What are you hiding from?

"Always some damn thing to hide from," I growled under my breath, dragging my hand over the marble banister. There were times when I felt as if I were on the set of a movie, like Citizen Kane.

"Rosebud," I whispered.

Finally, after climbing for so long that my calves ached, I came to the top of the stairs. I was in a little room with a couch, one window and a set of wooden steps that led to a door. The crow's nest.

I sat down on the couch, then looked at an oblong piece of furniture in front of it that I hadn't noticed before, a low glass-top coffee table cluttered with piles of playing cards, empty glasses and an ashtray full of skinny, filtered cigars butts, the kind that look like imported cigarettes. The thought of walking up those wooden steps and knocking on the door suddenly unnerved me. "What if she's not alone?" I thought. Someone had been drinking out of those glasses and smoking those cigars, perhaps the chauffeur.

"It's one thing for me to have an affair with the nanny, but if she's fooling around with the driver I'll kill him," I thought. I was trying to be funny.

The steps looked as if they had been made of teak wood; and I wondered, as I climbed them, if the house had consumed, along with everything else, the last of the rain forest. I stood on the landing, feeling my heart thump in my chest, feeling suddenly anxious and vulnerable.

"Those security men", I thought. "How do I get them if I have to?"

Then I remembered the phone, the one in my chemically redesigned head, and calmed down. After taking a last look at the stairs I prepared to knock; but to my surprise the door swung slowly open the second I touched it.

"Sam," I whispered. "You there?"

It was a small room, built like a cube, with windows, which were open, on every wall. Light came from the moon and a candle floating in a glass swan. The only furniture was a small couch and an end table next to it. I felt as if I had stepped into a doll house, a doll house, I imagined, where it was always cold and always midnight. The kind of doll house parents leave untouched after the death of a child.

I walked to a window and looked out. In the distance, like an igloo made of pink ice, was the concert hall. I could also see the gardens and lake, which looked like painted pictures on a dark canvas. It suddenly occurred to me that I was living in the middle of a theme park. Moneyland, the Most Conspicuous Concentration of Wealth on Earth. Bring the whole family! (Offer void to the poor and working class).

"Fick," I said. "You really must be the richest bastard on earth."

"Is someone here?"

Every inch of skin on my body was pushed from the bone by needles as I spun around.

"Jesus Christ!" I gasped, waiting for my heart to catch up to me.

Samantha, my wife, had been laying on the couch the whole time.

"Fick?"

"Yeah, it's me," I said, feeling weak all over with an urge now to laugh.

"What are you doing?"

"Just, standing here," I said. "I was, well, wandering around, kind of wondering where you were. We haven't talked much since I came back."

"Where are you?"

The needles came back beneath my skin as I looked at her eyes.

"I'm...in front of you."

"Oh."

"What's the matter?" I said, feeling a mounting sense of horror. What if she had done something to her eyes?

"Nothing," she said, laying perfectly still. "I'm online."

"Oh," I said, taking a deep breath as I felt blood return to my face. "What are you doing online?"

"I'm in Falcon Crest."

"What's that?"

"A city," she said, sitting up. "Want to see?"

"Sure," I said, feeling the same kind of flutters in my stomach that I used to get when one of my fellow inmates offered me drugs. "How do I get there?"

"Well, you have to go online first, of course," she said.

Of course. I sat next to her, closed my eyes, tightened my abdominal muscles, imagined a triangle, point up, then turned it upside down as I said, "Starting direct cerebral interface protocol." A dot appeared between my eyes, turned into a vertical line, then expanded horizontally into a white screen filled with numbers and symbols that looked something like this:

I heard her ask if the screen were up.

"It's there," I said.

"Type in, "Falcon Crest, slash Golden Eye slash booth 11 slash Saturday night September 2 11 pm 1942 slash and then write in my password which is lost romance at-the symbol for at- lonely castle.

Since the screen seemed to float in front of me I reached out and typed, "Falcon Crest/Golden Eye/booth 11/Saturday night September 2 11 pm 1942/lost romance@lonely castle" then pressed the word 'go'.

A feeling of momentary weightlessness came over me as a booth in a dark cafe assembled itself around me like a three dimensional movie. Then my body seemed to fill out into a suit like a balloon inflating and I saw Samantha sitting across from me wearing a white coat, sunglasses and a hat. There was a window to my right, out of which I could see a cobble stone paved alley slick with rain.

"I don't think I'll ever get used to this," I said, feeling the table with the palms of my hands. There really was a table in front of me. And a booth. And a window. To this day, no matter how often it's explained to me, virtual reality makes me absolutely ga-ga with astonishment.

"How do they do this!"

"Memories on a chip and memories in your head," Samantha said. It sounded like something she had heard in a commercial.

"I guess it's like hypnosis, only with computers and such like."

"It's even more amazing than the mall," I said, smelling coffee and liquor.

"I don't care for the mall," Samantha said, picking up a small china cup.

"Yeah," I said. "I know what you mean, but every night I'm in the mall. I guess in time I'll get tired of it."

"You haven't yet."

"You know, I didn't notice something until just now," I said. "But..." I covered my right eye just to be sure.

"What?"

"I can see out of left eye!" I said.

"Well of course," Samantha said as she planted an elbow on the table so that she could cradle her chin in the palm of her hand. "Why do you think people come to places like this? You can do and be anything you want."

"Amazing," I said, shaking my head.

"Yeppers!"

"So this is where you hang out?" I said, watching a waiter wearing a white apron walk past our table. I wondered if he were real or a computer simulation.

"Is that what you came here to ask me?"

"I don't know," I said, looking down at my hands. Were they my hands?

"Chew the fat?"

"What about?"

"I don't even know how we met."

She wore perfume that made me think of gardens in the cool morning air. Two white gloves lay on the table beneath her hands. Her skin looked cold to the touch but it did not appear that she felt cold. She took off her sunglasses, folded them, and then set them on top of the gloves. There was a faint smile on her lips but her eyes were still and expressionless.

"You were coming down the steps of an office you had to work at, while I was coming up the steps to go to a different office to see my therapist. You recognized me immediately and asked me to lunch."

"I did?"

"We had Chinese."

I looked around me, gathering as many details as I could. The little lamps on the wall, the chords of an accordion that seemed to drift in and out of the doors and windows like beeping ghosts, the intricate pattern of tile on the floor and the clatter of dishes coming from the kitchen. A sick feeling pooled at the bottom of my stomach as I remembered one of my oldest fears, that I would go under water one day and try to breathe instead of holding my breath. I had tolerated the shopping mall because it fit so comfortably in a dream-like state. But there was nothing dream-like about this. It was unnervingly real.

"We thought we had fallen instantly in love."

The accordion had gotten louder, and there was a faint stirring of strings that sounded as if it were coming from the other side of the wall.

"And when we opened our fortune cookies I turned mine over and wrote my telephone number on it."

I looked at Samantha, then looked behind me. When I'm not looking at something, I thought, does it disappear? My old friend Plato came to mind. I knew that what I was seeing was not real and yet I couldn't help seeing it. Would the old Greek, I asked myself, call this another kind of cave?

"So we what? Started dating?"

"We became lovers that night," Samantha said without hesitation.

I looked down at my hands, embarrassed to look at her.

"Oh. Well of course. We were in love, as you say."

"You remember what I was in therapy for?"

"I don't remember anything," I said.

"Sexual addiction."

I tapped the tips of my fingers together, almost choking now on my own embarrassment, wishing I were anywhere but here.

"What's the matter, Fick?"

"Well it's just..."

"We don't even kiss now," she said.

"No," I muttered. "I guess we don't."

"It's plain to see," she sang. "That we..."

The wall on the other side of the room disappeared. A man in a white coat waved his arms in front of an orchestra.

"...were never met to beeeeee."

She had an astonishingly beautiful voice! I felt as if a sack of cement had hit me on the head. She stood up, then began to glide around the room as men and women turned to gaze at her.

Violins swooped in suddenly like silken birds.

"So," Pete said, standing next to the golf cart. "She sang you a song! What happened next?"

"Suddenly I had a mouthful of popcorn and was sitting in a movie theater, watching Samantha sing," I said, watching him with my hands in my pockets. "Hey, you know, I think I know what movie that song is from."

"Do you?" Pete grunted. "Driving back?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Good. I'm walking."

"What do you think it means?" I said.

"What does what mean?"

"The song."

"That," Pete said with a sigh as he walked away. "Should be obvious even to you, Mr. Fick."

I drove around without paying attention to where I was going, whistling, "Lovers Don't Kiss," and wondering if Samantha really knew how to sing. I parked the cart, then sat, listening to birds and looking down at my hands. The gold wedding band was still on my finger. I climbed out of the cart, began to walk along side a row of guest houses, and then saw, standing in front of me, a very large black dog.

Suzie trotted toward me with her head down, wagging her tail as I ran up to her. I got down on my knees and then hugged her, feeling her rough tongue against the side of my face.

"Oh Suzie, where have you been, girl!" I said.

"With me," a woman said.

I looked up, already knowing who was there.

"Well," my mother said. "Why don't you come in?"

The house was bigger than the last one I had seen her in and yet it was still cluttered with pianos, keyboards and stacks of sheet music.

"Where's," I said, looking around for a place to sit. "What's his name?"

"Milo? He's playing in Fresno. He doesn't have to work but he loves to play. You should hear him some time."

She took a box of CDs and tapes off of a chair and told me to sit.

"Want something to drink?" she said.

"I'm fine," I said, sitting down, happy that Suzie had followed me and was now curled up next to the chair.

She walked over to a cabinet, took out a square bottle and then poured amber liquid into a small glass filled with ice.

"Mind if I have a drink?"

"No," I said, looking at her as she walked back. The large hazel eyes, the brunette hair still cut short and, of course, that fixed smile, always mysterious.

"Heard you had gone crazy or something," she said, tossing newspapers off a chair and then sitting down in front of me.

"No, not crazy," I said, smelling scotch from where I sat. "At least not yet."

"Or something with your brain," she said, wrapping long red fingernails around the glass. "What is it? Amnesia?"

"That's it."

"Well you remember me."

"I just don't remember what's been happening for the last five years. You might say that I was somewhere else."

"Where?" she said, taking a sip.

"Hard to explain. Dead, maybe. Traveling through time. Hallucinating. I guess it depends on how you look at it."

"You were always weird, Fick," she said, shaking her head. "Even as a kid. Although I would say that for the last five years you have been different."

"In what way?" I said, genuinely curious.

"Let's just say," she said, crossing her legs. "That you seemed to know what you were about."

"Well I don't know what I'm about now," I said. The words seemed to rush out of my chest.

"Um."

"I'm married to a woman I don't even know, a woman who spends all of her time in some kind of virtual reality."

"What kind of virtual reality?" my mother said, leaning forward.

"A musical," I said, reaching down to scratch Suzie's head. "And, to be honest, a cheesy one at that."

"Well I guess you don't want to know what kind of virtual realities I go to," she said, leaning back with her drink.

"No, Mom."

"Do you know that you're father died?" she said, making the ice in her drink clink against the sides of the glass.

"No," I said, feeling cold blood work its way up from my legs.

"You didn't go to his funeral."

"Oh."

"I did. Wasn't sorry to see him go. He'd been in a wheel chair for the last two years. Lost his legs, poor thing. His hair, too. Your's is getting thin on top, I can see. It's in the genes, you know."

"Well, I'm sorry that I didn't go, even if I wouldn't have remembered it," I said, looking out the window at the trees and the shadows on the sidewalk. My father. I tried to picture him, hear his voice, but all that I could summon was a rough morning beard and the sound of cracking pistachio nuts. Is that, I wondered, all we leave behind? I didn't know what to feel. I knew that I was supposed to feel something; I just didn't know what.

"She's all you have now," a voice in my head whispered as I looked at my mother.

"So are you and what's-her-name going to stay together?" she said, brushing a stray hair from her face.

"I don't see how we can," I said. "It's like living with a stranger."

"Maybe you should get to know her." She finished her drink, then tossed the ice cubes to Suzie. "Ever think of that?"

"I don't know," I said, listening to Suzie munch noisily on ice. "She's into this musical and..."

"Yes," my mother said. She looked at Suzie, smiling as if she had just bitten into something bitter while listening to a joke.

"She might be a little...I don't know. I think she's maybe...Ah, disturbed," I said. "About something."

"Like what?"

I couldn't believe that I was having this conversation with my mother of all people; but then, after awakening to find out that I had been someone else for five years and was now the richest prisoner on the planet, everything had taken on a tinge of unreality that increasingly made me feel as if nothing ultimately mattered. I was married with children. So what? And rich! Isn't everyone? My father was dead. Well, what did you expect?

I had the weird feeling that life had turned into a cartoon.

"I think that I might have been cheating on her."

I hadn't expected that to be hard to say, and yet when I did say it my gums and teeth turned numb.

My mother's face brightened as she lurched to her feet.

"This calls for another drink!"

"I'm serious," I said.

"Tell Mommy all about it."

"Not that much to tell," I said glumly. "It's just that the nanny is pretty friendly, if you know what I mean."

"The blonde with the boobs?"

"That's the one."

"Yeah, you probably were doing a little double dipping there," she chuckled as she sat back with another drink. I wondered how many of those she put away in a day.

"I don't mean that I was doing anything," I said, looking at a reproduction on the wall of one of the pictures we had in the art gallery. Two girls, holding their mother's hand, walking on the beach. Not the sort of picture I thought my mother would have liked.

"What I mean is, that, it's not just that I can't remember."

"What do you mean?" she said, looking, I thought, a little plumper than when I had last seen her.

"It's like...," I said, struggling for words. I had gone away and yet I was the only one who really knew that. How could that be and how could it be explained?

"Like... someone else was in my body."

"Oh, the perfect excuse for a man," my mother said, laughing so hard her whole body shook. "I'm sorry, honey, it was someone else using my body! If only your father had thought of that one."

I sat for what seemed a long time without talking, looking at gray hair around Suzie's muzzle, trying hard not to think about what my mother had just said.

"Oops!"

"Well, I'd better get going," I said.

"Don't you want to hear the story?" she said, putting the glass to her lips for a long drink.

I rubbed the back of my neck.

"He came to the hospital a few hours after you were born," she said, putting her feet up on a coffee table, then crossing her legs as if she were relaxing in front of the television. "I hadn't seen him for two days. So he comes in unshaved, in a dirty shirt-I could tell he'd been drinking-and I say, 'It's a boy you bastard.' I didn't want to know what he'd been up to, the sight of him disgusted me. But your father could never keep his stupid mouth shut right after he'd gotten sobered up. So he starts blubbering about how much he loves me and how sorry he is and all I want to do is roll over and get some sleep, I was so exhausted from pushing your butt out of me. Kind of as a joke I asked him who it was, thinking that maybe that'd shut him up, and of course the dumb jerk tells me everything. Oh yeah, that was some marriage we had."

"Jesus," I whispered.

"Jesus!" she snorted in a giggle. "There's a guy who should have gotten married."

"I...I don't know what to say."

"Well then take my advice for what it's worth," my mother said, tossing Suzie more ice cubes. "Go home to your wife and keep your mouth shut."

"Okay."

"One more thing. It's simple but for some damn reason men can't seem to get it through their head. If a woman can't find love at home she'll go somewhere else. You understand?"

"I think so, Mom."

"Good. Now do me a favor and take Suzie with you. She's a good dog but she sheds."

copyright 2002 James Hazard