They all wanted to know what he’d seen the other day through the viewport that made him cry out. They’d all come running, pegging him with questions that he did not dare answer. What would they have said if he had told them about it? About any of it? That he’d seen something staring in at him or that last night he’d seen a figure out there. The figure of a man floating in the lake. No suit on, just a white, bloated corpse that looked as if it had been in the water a week. As he watched, it slowly began to flake away into a maelstrom of particles and fragments. All of which was bad enough, but it had worn his face.

They’d say he was nuts, that’s what.

And maybe, just maybe, they’d be right.

He sat there, thinking, trying to come to terms with himself. Who he was and, just maybe, what he was. Everything was scattered. He was like a puzzle now that was missing pieces. Had they always been missing? Had he ever truly been whole? Had he always been broken and fractured like this? He realized at that moment that he needed a drink like he’d never needed one before. Something wet in his mouth, cooling his throat, warming his belly and soothing his head. The terrible craving made him feel like he was dry and shriveled inside, cracked open like arid soil. That was crazy, of course, because he wasn’t much of a drinker. A beer now and again. Maybe a few icy glasses of Sangria when he was out to dinner with friends. That was it…but, oh Christ, how he needed a drink.

He couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d seen outside the viewport. He wasn’t even sure what had drawn him to look out of it in the first place. Only that, later, as he thought it over, he was certain that it had not been a conscious decision on his part. It was almost as if he had been made to look out there. The first thing he had seen had not been that awful figure, but his reflected image in the glass. It had startled him. The face he knew so well—the cocky leer of his eyes (which his mother had lovingly called roguish), his perpetually smirking mouth, the sunburned cheeks he’d sported since his teenage surfing years in Oceanside—was gone, replaced by a catatonic, grim visage that appeared decades older than it actually was.

That’s when he noticed the floating figure out there, staring at him with empty eye sockets from a puffy, fish-nibbled face. It slowly broke apart, dissolving like salt dumped in water until it was just a swirling, milky cloud of matter that, too, dissipated.