Will looked, almost desperately, at the path by which he’d come. His face showed fear, and anticipation as well.

“I’m here,” I said, wondering if he’d hear me.

“Oh, wow, what I’ve just been through!” he answered mentally. “And besides that, I tried talking to myself a few minutes ago, and no one answered … like there was no one there. Weird.”

“That would have been when I was too frightened myself,” I said.

“That makes two of us, but what do we do now? I’m alive, anyhow.” He paused. “Aren’t I?” he asked. “Suddenly now that I’ve decided to live, I feel … unreal.”

As he spoke, I saw him clearly. He was myself as I’d thought of myself years ago; living in a commune (though actually I never had), but more: so lonely that I could hardly bear to remember. Was I, Will, asking help from a future self? Or was I, the future self, changing the future by going back and altering the past … from my present?

So I said, “You’ll be me. But I’m learning too. And I’ll be different because of you; and because of what just happened.”

“You mean, you’re real and I’m not? To me, you’re just the self I talk to.”

“Neither of us is real without the other,” I said. “If I denied your reality, I’m sorry. And if I ignored your questions and aspirations, I apologize deeply. But I don’t know how to accept you, either, even though I desperately want to.”

And as I said that, confusion overtook me completely, for suddenly I was Will, listening to my words of inner dialogue, and I was myself as myself, speaking the words.

I wasn’t sure what was happening as the cliffs shimmered, and Will’s image along with them. I know that I had a memory lapse in here somewhere, but the next thing I knew I was standing on my patio again, staring down at the unfinished lawn and at an old pair of men’s shoes that someone had thrown beside the garbage cans.

My exhaustion was so complete that I stumbled into the living room and fell almost immediately into a deep sleep. But just before I collapsed, I remembered, as an official part of my own past, when I had stood on a hill, contemplating suicide. I’d completely forgotten the event; blocked it out, of course.

Yet drowsily I wondered: Or had the memory been born just now, and built into the past? And more urgently: Where was Will now? Were either of us still in danger?

Chapter Twenty-Six

Ram-Ram says Good-bye and Tells What He Knows