His eyes were focused on the car’s immobile windshield wipers, but they weren’t seeing anything.

“Helen woke that morning with a feeling she could not explain,” Todd told the windshield wipers. “She could not tell if she had ever felt like that before, but as she could no longer remember feelings or anything that wasn’t part of her daily routine, this was not surprising…”

He stopped. A woman, passing in front of the car with her child in a shopping cart, was staring at him. Todd looked at himself in the rearview mirror and saw what the woman saw: a staring-eyed maniac, holding the wheel of a car that wasn’t moving, and talking to himself without stopping. Todd stared back until she moved on, saying something to the child. Then he addressed the mirror.

“What the fuck,” he asked, “is in me?”

*  *  *

What the fuck is in me? It was a question Todd couldn’t stop asking himself all the way home. The answer was simple. It was a book, called All My Colors, by a man called Jake Turner, only the man didn’t exist, and nor did the book. He was going to go through all his encyclopedias of literature and dictionaries of biography and copies of The Writer’s Gazette and if necessary the Yellow Pages, but he already knew what he would find. Nothing. There was no such writer as Jake Turner, and there was no such book as All My Colors.

So what the fuck is in me?

*  *  *

Todd got home, threw the keys in the wooden bowl by the door—once he’d dreamed of beautiful undergraduates and even the occasional professor’s wife doing the same, at swinging parties where everyone drank Todd’s whiskey and laughed at his jokes and Todd always went home with the most beautiful wife, but Todd never got a professor’s job because he’d never been published, and wasn’t that a loaded word. But anyway, it was a nice bowl—and went into the kitchen to find something to drink. As he opened the fridge, the phone began to ring.

Todd picked up the extension. Maybe it was Timothy, ringing to apologize and offer him a compensatory copy of—

“Todd, this is Sara.”

“Oh, Sara. This isn’t a great time.”

“It never is, unless you’re drunk and I’m naked.”

“Sara, can I call you from my study?”

“No, you can’t. Todd, I just had Janis on the phone.”

“What did she want, a recipe?” Todd almost laughed at his own witticism, then remembered the conversation he’d had with Janis the night before.

“No,” said Sara, “she wanted to tell me to stay away from you. I told her I didn’t know what she was talking about—”

“Good,” said Todd, who had located a carton of V8 but was now thinking of trading up to a beer.