I sit up. The sky arches overhead but has condensed into a black ball that completely encloses me. My chest hurts, covered with bruises that bear down on my ribs, my skin, and my clavicles. Breathing is painful. I feel as if I’ve slid down an endless pipe lined with a thousand sharp-edged welding seams.

There’s no horizon: the sky and the sea have melted into one. In the darkness above, the motionless stars. In the darkness below, like heartbeats rising from the dank, deep darkness, stars move on the sea’s swell, giving the impression that they’re floating and twinkling on the water. I can tell that the tide is approaching by the way the water rushes and rocks around me in the dark.

Then I figure it out. Everything. The realization drips into me with the searing burn of acid: I’m floating in the sea of the dead. Again.

This sea again, this boat, this endlessness: I’ve been here before! I thrash the surface of the sea with the oars, and an icy chill seizes my painful, battered chest and tightens its grip on my heart.

Maybe they haven’t noticed I’m not dead and they’re burying me?

A flurry of thoughts, colliding with one another as they grope for the moment before the incident. Where was I before I was here? Where was I, and who was I? Or rather, was I still me?

And then I realize everything. I’ve lived so many lives. I’m caught in an endless loop of being trapped in between. I didn’t want to acknowledge that my father was right from the very start: it’s dangerous to wander in between, along the boundary between life and death. As a man, a ghost, a demon, or as nothing. I should have stepped straight through that door.

Maybe this is hell. Yes, this must be hell. To live over and over again, through countless variations, repeatedly starting from scratch and committing the same mistakes and new mistakes, and then back to the start. And not to recognize any of the fresh repetitions as things that you’re experiencing for the second or fourth or thousandth time.

Which life have I just lived? In which goddamn fucking real world?

The no-Sam world, in which Sam was never conceived?

The Eddie-dies world, in which my wife’s life is snuffed out on her forty-fourth birthday because we argued and she drove along the coast road drunk? She often drank because I made her unhappy. She drank Talisker. She was sitting in a car that accelerated over a cliff, arcing outward through the air before tumbling down and down and smashing on the rocks.

Was it the best of all possible worlds, in which my father was still alive, holding his granddaughter Madeleine Winifred Skinner in his arms? Winifred after Eddie’s grandmother.