I knew the end was coming, so I woke up the past few mornings before Yusuf and tried to memorize every detail of him. The shadows on his cheeks from his beard. The swoops of his sooty eyebrows. His halo of black curls. The moles dotting his body like he’s a constellation of some ancient hunter.

SCENE: A sad man alone with a bunch of junk that seems washed ashore from a shipwreck.

*   *   *

I wish, sometimes, that I never crossed paths with that fucking machine. But then I never would’ve met Yusuf. The Envisioner—the huge, dark gray box with all its facets and spindly metal spider legs—sits about a quarter mile down the beach. You know how spiders can feel anything that brushes against their webs because all the strings give off a different vibration? I can feel the other universes like glowing threads when I press my hands against the machine.

I don’t know how the thing works exactly. Every sci-fi movie I’ve ever loved has had some hand-waving here and there. Let’s just take this premise and go with it, deal? I mean, I don’t know how airplanes exactly work either, but they do.

Anyway, the thing is a predictive device. It’s a gateway, sorta. It’s also a plague. A time-bomb fucking with reality on a multi-universal level. Yusuf talks a lot about knots in the fabric of multidimensional space-time, with each Envisioner a point connecting different paths. When he talks like this, words get all crammed together and I can’t make much sense of him or anything else.

The thing crunches a bunch of numbers and spits out predictions. There you go. You’re all caught up.

*   *   *

Yusuf tutored me in physics when I first arrived at the Compound, and I was still interested in not feeling like an idiot around the global brain-trust of the research staff. I use tutored loosely since the sessions were him doodling on his bedroom window with a marker and me wondering at what point in his talk about quarks I could slide his underwear back down and get him to swear in Arabic under his breath again.

“In nature, quarks exist in twos and threes,” he said one session. “You can’t ever find a solo one flying around.”

“Why?”

“Because the force that binds them actually increases the farther you try to pull them apart.” He squiggled a wavy line between two circles on his window.

“How in the hell does that even make sense?”

“It’s like an invisible umbilical cord connects them. Quarks can’t exist on their own.”

When he told me he was leaving, I wanted to say something about how we’re bound together, too. Except it would’ve been shitty of me to hold him emotionally hostage.