I turned the machine off and ate a simple lunch of crackers, Lebanese hummus with cilantro, and beet spread and went to the backyard to do some breathing exercises. The Witch was out at her temp job, but she had left something burning at her altar, which I always warned her against.

In the yard, the leaves rustled. I breathed slowly to remind myself that temporality was curved and only experienced through the body’s folds.

I went back to work. I zipped the Bio-meter into its regenerative pouch and turned my attention to simpler questions, like Blithe’s physical location. I consulted pages of GPS coordinates.

As I followed him down I-10W, I heard a knock at the door. A Rhiz messenger left a normative manila envelope with no seal at the door. I opened it.

A plane ticket to the other coast.

I walked a few dogs, and then Minna came over. She was wearing a thrift-store cardigan, expensive jeans, and a silk scarf. I occasionally envied the fact that she could keep the same clothes from 201–, and never had to undergo radical appearance changes. She was thin, Russo-Japanese, and every day she seemed more beautiful in her new understanding of the world.

We met because I was late one day picking up her dog for a walk. She was getting her clinical psychology doctorate and had a special fellowship from the Future Business School. FBS’s advanced monitoring technology indicated that, in the near future, the elite would confiscate most of the available wealth and the middle class would need to accumulate something else aside from capital. The FBS anthro department had been tasked with figuring out if total well-being was a viable alternative to endless toil for the pursuit of money and professional achievement.

Every year, they chose one student in each discipline as an FBS fellow, who did not have to fulfill any academic requirements. The fellow did have to rigorously meditate, collaborate with a spiritual guide, and spend at least two hours a day on food preparation and consumption. They could use the rest of their time in any way they wanted, as long as it benefited their “wholeness.”

Because she was a fellow, Minna didn’t go to class very often and rarely needed a walker for her French bulldog, Olivia. Early on in our friendship, her grandmother was dying, and I kept Olivia at my place while she went to Japan. She said my texts of Olivia swinging in my hammock, wearing a judge’s bonnet, and eating doggie ice cream really helped.

In the kitchen, the Witch had a cauldron of bones simmering. Minna always enjoyed my roommates’ eccentricities, having a more removed perspective.

“You’re not going to believe what I did the other day,” I told her as we sat on the couch with the TV screen pulled up.

I explained all about the hex and the boxes and the quest to retrieve Blithe from the Shadowlands but left out the spiraling.