She stood across from me, hands tucked into the armpits of her jean jacket, the tear in her nylon stocking looking garish in the pale yellow light. When she glanced at me through the fogging breaths and cigarette smoke, my heart did the skids.

Five of us huddled on the snow-covered sidewalk outside the restaurant, Lenny the manager, a couple of waitresses in addition to Rita, and me, a thirty-year-old busboy who’d only been in Oregon a month. The conversation had turned to our plans for the holiday, and while Lenny and the other waitresses chatted animatedly about turkey dinners with annoying relatives and last-minute shopping for hard-to-find toys, Rita and I hadn’t said
a word.

We’d been exchanging glances a lot the last couple of weeks, the kind of glances that often lead to buying condoms and beer from the mini-mart in the middle of the night, but I hadn’t thought about pursuing her until that moment. I was sure my own eyes had the same look, a what the hell am I doing here sort of a look. I didn’t know squat about Rita, nothing except that she was about my age and that she lived on the south side of Rexton out by the golf course, but after that glance I wanted to know everything about her. I wanted to know where she grew up and what movies she liked and why she never smiled. The conversation was winding down, everybody doing the slow sidestep toward their cars, and I was thinking Don’t let her go, ask her stupid, do it now, but then came the death-tugging. Like an invisible cord pulling at my chest.

At first I thought it was a small one. The last year or so I had been getting three to five small ones per day and I had gotten pretty good at suppressing them. But then everything took on an azure glow and I knew that in ten seconds I would be on the ground frothing at the mouth.

I abruptly said goodbye and turned to go, thinking maybe I could make it around the corner, behind the juniper bushes where nobody would see me, but I hadn’t made it three steps when the world went dark.

I was pulled over black asphalt and along a double
yellow line straight into a pair of bright lights. I didn’t recognize them as headlights at first because they were stacked on top of one another, but as I neared I saw the shape of a black minivan turned on its side. I passed two out-of-focus bodies before I came to an old woman lying flat on her back in the middle of the road, her legs twisted at an awkward angle. A piece of glass was embedded in her forehead and blood was gushing from it, covering her face as if she wore a red mask. She blinked up through the blood.

“The grandchildren,” she said, coughing.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t help you. I’m not really here—”

“Please …”

“You’re the only one who can hear me or see me,” I insisted, saying the words I had said hundreds of times before. “There’s nothing I can do. It sucks. I know. I’m really sorry.”

I had long since learned there was no sense in trying to walk away, but I could turn, and once I stopped moving I faced the other direction, focusing my eyes on the place where the edge of the road blurred into white fog. There were other voices too, people yelling at one another down the road. She kept talking to me, begging me to tell her if her grandchildren were all right, if they were alive, her voice sounding more gurgled and strained until finally she stopped talking.

I would have covered my ears, but I knew from experience that it would have made no difference. My hands wouldn’t block the sound.

The snow felt cold and wet on the back of my head. When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Rita. She was leaning over me, the streetlamp creating a yellow halo around her curly black hair. I saw Lenny and the others behind her, looking down at me with that particular mix of revulsion and relief I had seen plenty of times throughout my life. I wondered how long it would be before Lenny found a reason to fire me.

“I’m—I’m all right,” I said, starting to sit up.

Rita gently placed a hand on my chest. For a small woman she had a surprising amount of strength. “Take it easy, Jimmy,” she said.

“Man oh man,” Lenny said excitedly, “you gave us quite a scare, Jimbo. I thought maybe I was going to have to give you mouth to mouth but Rita said to just leave you be and it would pass. Shit, you almost gave us a heart attack but she was right.” He laughed. “You’ve got her to thank or you might have had a rude awakening. And everybody around here would have thought I was queer.”

He said it as if he expected people to laugh, but nobody did. I imagined kissing Lenny’s cigarette-stained lips and had to stifle an urge to retch. It was bad enough with the taste of bile in my mouth as it was. My legs and arms burned as if I had just spent all day in the gym. Rita helped me to a sitting position, and that’s when I saw the worst part: the stain in my crotch.

“You’re not wearing a bracelet,” Rita said.

I couldn’t look her in the eyes. “Guess I forgot it,” I mumbled. Quickly, I stood and started for the street. “See y’all after the holiday.”

I took three steps before the world started to tilt. Rita was there, a hand on my arm.

“I’m giving you a ride,” she said.

“No, it’s all right,” I said. “I can—”

“I wasn’t asking,” she said.

I was fourteen when I had my first seizure, staying the summer in New Ulm, Minnesota. It was one of those sweltering days when you can feel the sweat sticking to your eyelids. Me and Ray Pullman, the red-headed kid who lived next door to my grandparents, were hiding out in his basement playing penny ante poker and drinking Coca Cola out of glass bottles. Having just cleaned Jimmy out of his comic book money, I asked him if he wanted me to keep a tab on his losses.

“Asshole,” he said, smiling. He never showed his teeth long because of his braces. “That’s you, asshole Peter Parker with the Imperfect Pecker.”

I leaned back in the folding chair, feeling the metal stick to my bare back. It was too damn hot for shirts. “And you’re asshole Clark Kent with the Boner of Steel,” I said. “You can’t even walk because your boner is so big.”

It was a game we’d been playing all summer. Ray had been a big fan of Superman ever since John Byrne came out with his re-release of the Superman origin story when we were in fourth grade; Ray had every issue since carefully sealed in plastic bags and backed by cardboard. He wouldn’t even let me read them unless I washed my hands first, and even then he watched me the way my father watched me when I was washing his Mercedes. Ray liked Superman, aka Clark Kent, because the guy was pretty much invincible.

Me, I said that’s exactly what made Superman boring. Peter Parker had problems just like the rest of us. You could beat him straight up in battle even if you didn’t have some stupid green rock. It was because he was imperfect that we could relate to him.

“Well, what do you know,” Ray said. “Anybody who leaves their comics sitting all over the floor, getting ripped up and the cats chewing and pissing on them and stuff isn’t somebody who knows anything.”

That was Ray’s way of ending any dispute. A true comic book collector protected his comics, and according to Ray only a true comic book collector could know anything for certain about comics. Since just about everything we talked about came back to comics eventually, that line of reasoning pretty much ensured Ray won every argument.

“This is dumb,” I said, putting down the cards. “Wanna go to Baker’s Pond?”

Ray shrugged. “Beats smelling your stink all day, I guess.”

Twenty minutes later we were in our swimsuits and standing on the grassy bank twenty feet above the pond, the oaks casting a fishnet of shadows over us. Some little kids were on the shallow side playing with a dirty beach ball, but otherwise we had the pond to ourselves. We came there two or three times a week most summers, and every time we always started with a big jump off the bank.

“Tall buildings in a single bound!” Ray shouted and jumped, cannon-ball style, his red hair making him look like a ball of fire.

His splash was like a mushroom cloud. The little kids screeched and swam for the shore. I wanted to splash the little kiddies too, but I knew better than to jump before Ray surfaced. I had done that once two summers earlier and nearly broken Ray’s jaw.

I waited, but Ray didn’t show. It wasn’t like him. Usually he was up and laughing, swimming hard for the near shore. Thirty seconds passed and still no Ray.

“Yo, Superman!” I shouted. “Stop kidding around!”

As the ripples faded, my pulse quickened. The kiddies were watching me. I was debating about what to do when finally I saw a bit of red hair coming up through the water, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then I realized that he was face down. And there was blood gleaming on the back of his head.

“Ray!” I screamed.

It would have taken me two or three minutes to navigate the narrow, rock-strewn path down to him, so I decided to jump. I knew there was risk of hitting whatever he had hit, but I thought that if I backed up and gave it a good running start I would land far past him. But as I turned around, something happened—the sun flashed through a crack in the leaves. A lot of people who suffer regular seizures say there’s usually a trigger of some sort, flashing lights and pulsing sounds being the key culprits, but this would be the only time I could pinpoint an outside cause. It was nothing, a blip of white light, but I felt the world spinning and going dark. I never felt myself hit the ground.

Suddenly I was hovering directly over the pond. Everything except Ray was blurry and out of focus, fading into a white fog. I heard the little kids screaming. Something tugged at my chest, pulling me downward. As I plummeted toward Ray, I instinctively raised my arms; I had no cause for concern because I passed right through him.

Now I was under the surface of the pond, tiny particles floating in the murky green water. I didn’t feel wet or cold. I held my breath, though I would find out later that there was no need for me to do so since I was no longer in my body. The first thing I saw was a couple of black oil drums stacked on top of one another, inches from my feet. The last time we came to the pond, they hadn’t been there.

I looked up and there was Ray, eyes closed, blood trickling from his mouth into the water. I reached for him but my hand passed right through.

“Ray!” I shouted.

He didn’t move. I shouted his name another dozen times but he never stirred.

Rita drove a blue Tercel, a manual transmission that jerked when she shifted and fishtailed when we hit an icy stretch. There were empty cans of Dr. Pepper and a mud-stained copy of Vogue on the floor. The piss in my crotch was going cold, my shorts sticking to my thighs. She had one of those funky tree-shaped air fresheners, and it must have been fairly new because the inside of the car smelled strongly of pine. I was glad.

“You want to listen to some music?” she said, breaking the stillness.

“Sure,” I said, though I really didn’t. I was thinking about the old woman on the highway. The images flared up in my mind and I forced them away. There was no rhyme or reason to who I saw die or why. She could have been anyone, anywhere. It didn’t matter.

When Rita leaned over to turn on the radio, I stole a glance at her. The lines on her face were deeply drawn, but she was pretty in a rugged, worn sort of way.

She asked me where I lived. I told her where my apartment complex was. She started to make small talk about living in Rexton, about the upcoming election, and about other trivial things that people talk about when they don’t know what to say, and I nodded and said uh-huh, uh-huh, knowing full well that any chance of us getting romantic then or at any point in the future had died outside the restaurant. This saddened me, and when she eased into the parking spot in front of my apartment, I started to open the car door so I could make a quick getaway. Down the street, a couple of kids threw snowballs at one another under a flickering streetlamp.

“Well, thanks,” I said.

“Hey now,” she said, placing a hand on my arm.

At her touch I felt a warm shiver pass through my body. I turned and looked at her and saw the way she was looking at me, her brown eyes wide, her lips slightly parted, and it wasn’t a brush-off look I was seeing. It was the same kind of look she had been giving me the last few weeks.

“Do you want me to come in?” she asked.

“I’ll be all right,” I said, still figuring I must have been misreading her intent as one of concern.

“I thought you might not want to be alone.”

I laughed. “I spend most of my life alone. It’s no biggee. Really.”

“Are you sure? Because I don’t have anywhere else I have to be. I could—”

“Do you really want to do this?” I said abruptly.

She looked as if I had slapped her across the face. “What do you mean?”

I paused, knowing there was no easy way out now. “I mean, are you sure you want to get mixed up with a guy like me?”

“I was just asking if you wanted some company—”

“We both know where this is leading.”

She sighed. “Why does it have to lead somewhere?”

“A guy like me, with my problem, you don’t want to get mixed up with that. You have no idea what you’re getting into.”

“I know exactly what I’m getting into,” she said sharply. And when I looked at her in surprise, she added, “I was married to an epileptic.”

In the beginning the seizures came once or twice a week. A little old lady in a nursing home passed in her sleep. A six-year-old boy accidentally shot by his older brother flat-lined on an operating room table. They talked to me and I talked back, but I didn’t know if the deaths were real or all in my mind until I watched a pair of hikers freeze to death on a mountain, and then the next day saw the article in the paper with their picture.