“Human beings are funny,” my therapist Sophie always said, which I took as a lighthearted way of accepting that we often run in the opposite direction of our desires, and that even knowing that we’re running in the opposite direction doesn’t necessarily change anything.

In his Gram, Aiden stood on the roof of a hotel, looking out into the distance. Of course, he was shirtless. He’d set up the tripod and his tattoo could be seen, a shadowy banner across surgically sculpted pecs. He was not in his usual biome. Instead of woven furniture and fruit trees, there were skyscrapers sitting vacant and unfinished.

Heaping Hillocks of Hellfire! I cursed in the style of the Witch.

He was here.

The caption: So gr8ful to be in the city for a special project. I am always replenished when I get to bathe in the hum of New York. Sending muscular love + light.

My phone’s screen started to turn white, and the matchbook-sized hologram projector lifted out of its side. His perfect body hovered in my backyard, just below the cherry blossom tree. Aiden had enough of an audience to activate hologram-tech.

Welp, I thought, maybe it’s time to see this character IRL because when moments are strung together like language, in a breathing place, it is harder to hide behind a pose, a tired line, a landscape overswept.

When the hologram faded, I waved my hands through the space where his body had been.

Buzzing with anxiety, I texted R, my celebrity booty call. We had met the summer before on Cape Cod, due to forces so providential that they proved the tired-ass world was still enchanted. We continued to fuck each other, she a B-list movie star still playing teenagers and I a melancholic dog-walking trans guy from the non-coast, which made a kernel of inexplicable sense.

Hey, (I always had to sound aloof) u know Aiden Chase from the Gram? Could u get me a meeting with him while he’s here?

She did not respond.

Even tho we (men) are supposed to be rugged individuals who embark on heroic journeys alone, needing nothing but our Siren-barren solitude, the truth was, I couldn’t stalk Aiden by myself.

My other roommate, the Stoner-Hacker, was winding down his midnight-to-nine shift of Galaxy Hunt. Soon he would light a bowl and sleep until three, order some food, smoke another bowl, do some high-level hacking, reject his pinky-ring-wearing father’s calls about getting a real job, smoke again, and settle in for another nighttime battle as an intergalactic druid warlord.