“Everyone, take the rest of the day off,” said Kev. I was still in a daze, walking into people, crying my eyes out. And just as the words were said, everyone got into their cars and left and I was left sitting in my car, where Ollie and I drove together that morning, where I was annoyed and scared and I had every right to be. I felt the guilt burning a hole in my stomach. I could’ve done something. I could’ve called someone. The police or someone better, maybe. A crisis counselor, if those actually existed. I didn’t feel right about any of it, I knew something was wrong, and I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing. And in the end, it was my fault. It was my fault that Ollie’s brains were drying on his desk.

  I drove home through wet eyes, barely able to see the road. When I got to the apartment, I collapsed on the couch to absolute emptiness. There were no sounds coming from his room. The instinct, that sixth sense, of knowing someone was around, had vanished. I was fucking alone and Ollie was gone.

  I fell asleep on the couch, a deep, horrible sleep where I dreamt of nothing. The whole time, I could taste the snot in the back of my throat. It was an awful blackness. Shitty, shitty blackness. I’d jolt awake every so often, when a car parked outside or the refrigerator hummed or the clock on the wall, Ollie’s clock, ticked.

  For a moment of wakefulness, I counted those ticks. And I tried to remember what Ollie said about them earlier today. I tried to remember everything he said on his last day to make sense of it all, but I was too tired. I was dead tired. Eventually, I got up off the couch and shambled zombie-like to my bed. The sleep continued, but this time with dreams. Vivid dreams where I was looking at Ollie and I had the gun and I was putting it to my own head and I was pulling the trigger and the explosion blew my eardrums out and my neck snapped my head to the side as the bullet entered and then everything went black, again and again and again.

  And then, suddenly, I woke up.

  I blinked.

  I wiped my eyes.

  I snuffled my nose and took in a lungful of snot and coughed.

  That thing, the thing at the back of your head that told you you were being watched—that was an air-raid siren right now. It was screaming in my ear: you’re not alone, you’re not alone!

  It was morning, I realized, or almost morning anyways. The light from my window was gray and the sky was indigo, it must’ve been only minutes before sunrise.

  Footsteps, a creak.

  I blinked again.

  I realized my door was ajar.

  A shape.

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  My jaw dropped. I scrambled out of bed as my eyes adjusted further.

  “Ollie?” I asked.

  And the voice, the shape, replied: “He lives.”

  9

  AT FIRST, I thought I was dreaming, which is a dumb thing to think, but I wasn’t sure which part was the dream. Did Ollie kill himself in my nightmare? Did Ollie resurrect as an apparition of my hope?

  “I’m real,” he said, sounding haggard. It was as if he heard my thoughts. “Real as shit, dude.”

  I moved toward him and then suddenly recoiled. He noticed. He laughed.

  “Dude, c’mon. It’s me. Just like what I said would happen. It didn’t count.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  And I realized suddenly that I couldn’t remember why I was crying. It was gone, like how a dream just starts to evaporate after you wake up. I remembered some of it, instances, I still had the heaviness in my heart, but for some reason, I couldn’t articulate what had happened. And this scared me.

  “You don’t remember,” he said.

  “No, no—I remember,” I said. But I was lying to myself.

  “What do you remember? We’ll need to start keeping dream journals, I think. That can be a part of the process.”

  “Something—something—something happened at work, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Everyone was sad, upset. Was there a shooting?”

  “Yeah, sort of.”

  He gave me the details, quickly, nervously, as if he were embarrassed by them. It all sounded so strange and otherworldly to me. “You killed yourself.” Saying it out loud brought a faint memory, of my friend lifting the gun, the sharp crack of a sound that hurt my ears. “I—I was there.”

  “Yeah, you were. That’s good. Jeez, this is going to sound stupid, but I have a splitting headache.”

  I didn’t laugh. “You killed yourself,” I said again. “You never told me that you had any, you know, issues.”

  He waved a hand. “I did, actually. Just the day before I did it. We all have issues, dude. But please, don’t get all sentimental on me. I just did it to test the Tidal Reality. It worked, right? I died and then reality was reset, right?”

  “I’d totally forgotten about all of that—Jesus.” I went back to my bed and sat down in the early morning light. “I can’t believe any of this.”

  Ollie came to sit beside me and put a hand on my back. I almost recoiled from the touch—faint memories of being moved about like a doll, something from a dream, remained within me. “I didn’t really think this through, man, and I’m sorry for that. I shouldn’t have made you watch me blow my brains out. That’d be pretty rough to watch, I bet. I’m glad I didn’t have to see it, you know? But, I also want you to know that everything from this point on can be a lot of fun, if we make it. That’s why I’m doing any of this. Because it’s fun.”

  “Killing yourself is fun?”

  “No, no, no. Oh, ye of little imagination. If you found out that there were days you could do anything, that nothing mattered, what would you do?”

  I had to admit, I’d never thought of it that way. I understood Ollie’s jabber, but not what it meant. He was looking for a way out. A way to make life interesting, worth living.

  “So, this is it,” he said. “It’s real. What do we do?” And I realized he was really asking me. It was just, I had no idea what to say. What could I possibly say now?

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But just for a second. Barely anything, really. It was like one millisecond of really sharp pain and then total oblivion, like a deep sleep—but without, you know, consciousness. It’s hard to describe the lack of consciousness. It wasn’t like I was asleep, it was like I was deleted.”

  “How did you come back?”

  “I just woke up in bed. Probably where I would’ve been the day before if nothing had happened.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah. Weird shit.”

  “Everyone—well, I can’t remember now—but I have these feelings, you know—like everyone was probably pretty torn up. Do you think work is canceled?”

  “It’s Saturday, dude. And no. They won’t remember it. This isn’t my first stunt.”

  “You’ve done this before.”

  “Nothing like this, but other things. Outbursts, running and screaming. Took a shit in the coffee pot once.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’d I do?”

  “You were dying, man. Like, crying tears.”

  “Jesus, I bet. What’d Kev do?”

  “Straight up vomited. Just hunched over, grabbed his knees and threw his lunch up on the floor. I think a couple other people started doing that too.”

  “That happened?”

  “Swear to God.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “I can’t remember it, not even a little.”

  “The next day was back to normal, everything was wiped, except for me. I wrote everything down after to be sure I remembered.”

  We just stood like that for a while, and then eventually we moved to the living room. It was only seven in the morning and Ollie already had a couple beers cracked open. I didn’t refuse. We drank and talked about what this meant and I kept trying to weasel my way out of this new reality that Ollie had presented to me. And then, whenever I did, he’d reel me back in with a new story, a new triumph from a past Tide. I’d be asking questions, wondering what I did in a different timeline. Talking about it was really learning about myself—peering into a different dimension to see me in all of my multi-faceted forms.

  Did I believe him? I wasn’t sure.

  I didn’t not believe him.

  I was really just enthralled, at everything, the possibilities. The beer hit my lips and I was getting drunk as the rest of the world woke up. Ollie put an arm around me and everything was okay, almost. Even on the most perfect day, sitting at home, drinking with my best friend, I couldn’t get rid of a dark feeling in my stomach, an echo of despair. I’d jump when I heard a loud noise. Out of nowhere, a creeping bit of mourning would come over me and I’d have to sniff and say aloud, “What was that?” while I wiped my eye. Ollie was cool about it though, he was always cool about it. “No problem,” he’d say. “It’s cool.” And I’d forget it happened and just go on talking.

  “When’s the next Tide?” I asked, trying to sound casual about it.

  “Next Wednesday.”

  “Do they happen every week?”

  “Sometimes. Some more than others. Some weeks I’ve had three happen, sometimes it skips a week or two. It’s hard to say. I try to predict them, but it’s like the weather, you know? You don’t always know it’s gonna rain until your hair’s wet.”

  “Right,” I said. “Sure. Makes sense.” And slowly, I realized, I wasn’t lying.

  10

  WE DIDN’T DO anything bad on Wednesday.

  Ollie was letting me get my feet wet, carefully. He had come to trust the Tidal Reality through many days of trial and error. He was confident in his abilities to live without consequences. He knew I would have to go through the same experience. I was scared shitless, of course, but I went along with it because of the lingering sorrow and triumphant awe from Ollie’s Lazarus-like return.

  On the first day, my first Wednesday, we tried a lot of things together. We talked long and loud about incest, mass killings, and dead children. This was as much as I was willing to commit to—I couldn’t hurt myself or others. But I could talk, I could talk loud and be obnoxious. We forced horrible things to come out of our mouths and then, like so many other things that happened between me and Ollie, we made a game of it. We traversed taboo after taboo, louder and louder, my heart machine-gunning in my chest.

  Those around us were shocked and disgusted, of course. Someone stood up and went to whisper and it was Kev—blond, effete Kev—who asked us to leave for the day. Ollie, being bolder, refused. I had a moment of panic where I thought that it was time to start begging to stay—a feeling that disgusted me. I was waiting for the hammer to drop and the realization to set in that I had just fucked up my life beyond repair. But Ollie just laughed. He chided Kev and encouraged me to chide him too, and as the blood pumped through my ears, I did my best to be Ollie’s mimic.

  “You . . . fucking suck,” I said weakly.

  Kev recoiled, his eyebrows raised. “Get out of here, both of you.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Yeah, fuck you!” I repeated.

  Security escorted us out.

  And the next morning, I woke up, the last day like a hazy dream, and went back to work. Nobody said anything to us. Nobody remembered our inglorious exit. Kev gave me the rundown of the day’s work, with the same enthusiastic rigidity as always.

  Full. Body. Chills.

  Ollie elbowed me. “See?”

  I’d gone along with it out of some desire to turn my steering wheel into oncoming traffic; the worst case scenario would be that I lost a job I already hated. But I didn’t actually believe it was going to work.

  But, there we were—another day; another excruciating day.

  Then, the next Thursday, we started our day with bolder intentions still. The week in between had been duller than most, more full of dismissals and condescension. It was tedium with a chainsaw. Kev had heard that the numbers weren’t as good as they should be, that a branch was out competing us, and that we had new quotas to make. For us, this meant overtime as we seldom put in even the most minimal of effort. Kev delivered this to us in the same dry, bootlicking way he always did.

  He gathered us in a circle, all the lowly key-pushers, and said: “Alright, team. I appreciate all the hard work everyone has put in, but the numbers don’t lie. We’re slacking. We’re falling behind and we need to, as a team, buck up and make this right.” He went on to orate numerical benchmarks as if they were his personal prayer. “If that means overtime, we’re gonna okay it. We don’t care about overtime, we care about getting the work done. We don’t want it to come to that though, we know you all have lives.”

  Ollie and I were sniggering in the back, mostly out of despair. We knew what he was getting at before he got there.

  “From now on, we’re going to be cracking down a lot more on non-essential, non-work activities. Watercooler talk, horseplay, you know. We need to get our numbers back on track.”

  I could’ve sworn he looked at us when he said it.

  And for the next week, we made good on it, just as he said. Anytime Ollie and I would start talking, even quietly, Kev would pop in and say something professional and officious like, “Hey, guys—you haven’t met your quotas for the day. Everyone else here would appreciate it if you focused on your work.”

  We’d nod and say, “Sure, alright, Kev. Whatever you say.”

  And let me tell you something here: after our first trip together through the Tide, a work week felt more like Hell than ever before. It was like having a taste of pure freedom, of knowing the heights that life could reach, only to be dragged back down and kicked in the guts. We were stuck typing numbers into a blinking cursor, all day, every day, without even the slightest hint of relief. Kev would walk around the desks and sometimes I’d imagine him with a riding crop. After work, Ollie and I would talk about how much we hated work, how much worse it’d become since the new quotas.

  But it wouldn’t be long, we knew. And when Thursday came, we were prepared. I was still stressed about the whole thing. I was constantly asking Ollie, “Well, what if it was all a dream?”

  “It wasn’t a dream, dude.”

  “That doesn’t make it easier for me,” I said. “I need proof.”

  “Well, go through with this today, and you’ll have pretty good proof.”

  Shit like that always pissed me off about Ollie. My palms were sweating and I was freaking out because, well, we could go to jail, and he just told me to ignore everything inside of me screaming to stop and do it anyway.

  That morning, we didn’t go to work.

  “C’mon, man. You’re supposed to be having fun,” he said. “Who knows how many of these days we have left?”

  His wording made me feel sick to my stomach. “You think they can end?”

  “Everything ends eventually, right? It might transform. It might just go away. I don’t know if it’s been here before and no one noticed or if it’s been a recent thing. Is it just for me—or, for us, I guess now—or is it everyone? If I kept getting people involved, could we have this big-ass Purge society? And speaking of—does the Tide affect big cultural events? If a revolution happens on a day with a high Tide, does that mean it happened or did it not? Do they have to wait a day and do their overthrowing again? What about movies, though? If the reality isn’t real the day a movie comes out, does none of the money count? If I rob someone, do I keep the money or does the money reset back to where it was? These are all big questions, my man—and I have zero answers to any of them. So, there’s a lot we don’t know.”

  But but but. “I’m just nervous, that’s all.”

  Ollie shrugged. “Me too, man. Me too.” He took a deep breath and lit up a joint and said, “Honestly, I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “Not ever?”

  “Nope. Always kept it pretty silly, the stuff I’ve done. Gross, sometimes. But mostly silly.”

  “We could bail on it, you know?”

  Ollie moved his head back and forth, as if he were considering it. “We could,” he said finally. “But just think about how that twat talks to us every day, man. Like we’re fucking idiots. I mean, seriously, are you a fucking idiot? Don’t you have a Master’s or something?”

  “Yeah. No, I get it. I can’t fucking stand that guy.”

  “And it’s not gonna do much, you know. It’s not like I haven’t done worse to myself.” He mimed the gun to his temple and made a dramatic limping motion. My psyche jolted as he poked a residual memory.

  “That’s true.”

  “And he’s gonna wake up like nothing happened.”

  “Yeah, hopefully.”

  “No—absolutely. We’ve already done the checklist, we’re good.”

  He was right. I had started to get a feel for it. Something was off. Something didn’t feel right. It was a siren in the back of my brain, repressed by years of training, maybe generations. We went for a walk and spotted birds flying in opposite directions. The usually busy street was totally empty. The corner store had a Closed sign on it. Ollie mused, “I wonder if he’s a fellow traveler. No hate, shop dude. Enjoy your day off.” Then, we turned on the television and watched the news. “This is my favorite,” he said. “Seriously, it gets fucking weird.”

  And he was right, again.

  The news anchor was sweating, his eyes pierced through the television screen. “There are things happening. There are things happening. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it is. Oh, Jesus. Won’t you fucks just listen to me? Won’t any of you listen to me? Something isn’t fucking right. Count the stars, why don’t you? They’re going to shut me down, they’re turning me off, think, think, think—“

  “He always does this,” said Ollie. “Old Jeffrey Masha—he knows about it too. Or, it happens for him too.”

  “Every Tide?”

  “Oh yeah, he goes for it every time. They usually cut the channel before he gets too far, but the next day he still always has a job. Just like me.”

  I was shocked. I looked at Ollie. “Dude, way to bury the lede. Why didn’t you show me this at first?”

 

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