The laughter suddenly erupts from him again.

“The war!” he raves.

“The warrr! We won!”

His head snaps up on his neck and he stares into my eyes, hissing—“We won!”

Keen subsides into idiotic chuckling, his face folded down against his throat. He’s laughed himself out. His laughter trickles around the room, his voice comes from the walls, the furniture, the fireplace. It jumps from the window, runs cackling into the distance. We can hear it go, we can hear it for a long time.

Jil Punkinflake, catching his breath, holds one of Keen’s arms. He looks into the depraved face, eyes like jellied blood twitch in their sockets with a faint slick sound.

“Where’s Keen?” Jil Punkinflake asks.

“In paradise.” The voice chuckles in vomit. It gurgles in his throat and he tosses his head aside spattering the floor with a little.

“You are there now?” I ask.

“Now I am there there I now am now I am there.”

He takes a deep shuddering breath, and grows even more shockingly pale, as though he were suffused with longing for something near. As he speaks, the room fades, and I am there, living the words he says, which have become colorless, toneless, have merged entirely with events and sensations.

“Who are you?”

“I am the one that balances the flood and the it’s what I can say to you is only that there is a dead one in the choice way, I speak faster than it is in your power to follow. Right now you are speaking not I. Now is the time for I to speak through I.”

“What is your name?” I ask, not knowing why. “Tell me who you are.”

“I am trailing along balancing bodies with time. The way you choose is all spattered with peculiar lights and your selection is waiting. You have already waited. By water from his face, by the street stretching past me, by taking time away from me, taking him away from me, taking them away from me. Time without I, without it, is me.”

“Where is Keen?”

“Pouring rain spilled down his face. He blows rain in spurts away from his lips. I speak faster. In the rain his young face seems to melt. I have to speak faster. I struggle to record on what I say on a water sheet but the music must allow time enough for whatever it is to come through these streets to me right now. He speak in doorways, am looking at me.”

“What does he say?” I ask.

Blobs of rain tremble cold on his face. He shivers. Congealed vomit webs his lips in thick yarns.

“What are you saying, Keen?” I ask, raising my voice and speaking distinctly. “Keen?”

His white lips tremble open, letting rain run down onto his teeth.