"I'm sorry, but I could only find one." She presented it to me and I stood up, putting some weight on it. I realized immediately that it wouldn't take much usage for the discomfort in my armpit to make me forget about my foot. My hand fit nicely into a worn twist in the branch about halfway down.

"This is an antique isn't it?" I asked, taking a tentative step as I braced myself on her shoulder.

She looked at it for a moment before she answered. "Yes, I suppose it has gotten old hasn't it?"

Her words echoed in my head as I took the next step. 'I guess it has gotten old hasn't it.' It sounded like something I might say if I wasn't paying attention. It sounded hauntingly familiar.

A funny thing happened to me after I'd completely assimilated Vasili's and Bobby's memories, I lost almost all perspective of time. It happened so subtly that I didn't realize it for the first few years and I sometimes still misplace things in my own history. I would remember important events in history that happened during Vasili's lifetime, like the opening of the Panama Canal or the first flight of the Wright Brothers, then would pick up a newspaper to see that it was the fiftieth or seventy-fifth anniversary of the event. Only then would I realize, 'hey, that was a long time ago.' Their memories are as clear to me as my own, and though I can always tell who the memories belong to, they appear to me as an uninterrupted timeline. Events that happened during their lives happened to me as well, and quietly got older while I wasn't paying attention.

'I guess it has gotten old.' I kept thinking about how familiar it sounded and how strange it felt coming from someone else. She probably misspoke.

The door to my room opened into the nave of the church. The room I had traversed in the drugged darkness before was enormous in the light. The long sides of the room were covered in rich wooden panels that rose a full fifteen feet before slanting inward to meet the ones of the other side in a high vaulted ceiling. The vast hardwood floor was devoid of the original pews, except for two lonely ones directly in front of a short stage where the pulpit had once been. The back wall of the room was the exterior stone wall I had seen the night before. The rough cut stones held three tall, stained glass windows ending in Gothic arches at the top. The colors of the glass shown through softly, but I couldn't make out the scenes in the dim twilight. I turned to look at her. "What time is it?"

She looked up and pointed to a clock on the wall above me. "Eight-thirty, p.m."

The unexplained time loss made me feel even more disoriented. "Wow, what was that you shot me with?"