Mark wasn’t thrilled to return to Webster, the copy-and-paste town west of St. Louis where he’d grown up. The town was cluttered with the same box stores and fast-casual restaurants that existed in the next town over, and in the one after that. It’s easy to forget where you are in towns like this. You can be in one place and believe you’re somewhere else.
At the check-in desk, the Comfort Inn employee streamed Friends on her phone. It’s all anyone watched when Mark was a kid. Now, twenty-five years later, everyone was obsessed with the show again. The hotel employee laughed at something Phoebe said.
“Checking in,” Mark announced, handing over his credit card and ID.
The young woman behind the desk let the scene finish before taking his cards. “New York?” she asked, inspecting his license.
“Yep, only a few blocks from Monica’s place.”
She looked up. “What?”
“The Friends apartment.” He tried to match the smile in his ID photo, taken nearly a decade ago, in his twenties.
“The show was actually filmed in LA.” She slid a form across the counter. “You here for Dimension Skip?”
“Yeah,” Mark said, signing without reading the form. “I’m a writer.”
She glanced up from her phone. “Reporters always come back disappointed,” she said. “The machine never worked.”
Mark didn’t consider himself a reporter. He wrote ideas-driven nonfiction about science. At least he wanted to. Mostly his editor assigned him lists like 10 Weird Things about Outer Space and 5 Questions that Stumped Einstein. The only reason he’d come back to Webster was because he thought this story might be different. “You hear about Kyle Kipper?” he asked.
She paused Friends. “You don’t believe that guy, do you?”
Mark shrugged. “He’s an old classmate of mine,” he said. “Thought I’d hear him out.” Kipper, whose YouTube videos about Dimension Skip garnered millions of views, had refused to talk to other writers. Mark’s editor was excited for him when Kipper reached out to the magazine, insisting a list about “the Dimension Skip dude” could be his first viral piece—The 10 Alternate-Dimensions Where This Missouri Man Claims to Exist—but Mark saw the assignment as more than that. That’s why he’d flown out here, on his own dime. He imagined writing an in-depth profile on Kipper that charted how the man’s sense of reality had become unhinged. He planned to treat the topic with care, to share Kipper’s story so that it might help readers understand how anyone might become convinced that the rules of the universe work differently for them. The profile, he hoped, would reignite his own passion for writing. He was almost thirty-seven, the same age as Ross at the end of Friends, and his era of churning out listicles had gone on for too many seasons.
“Good luck,” the Comfort Inn employee said. She handed Mark his room card and rejoined the cast of Friends in New York or LA or wherever.
The view from Mark’s hotel room featured a sun-bleached billboard that advertised jobs at Dimension Skip. Be a part of the future. A man in a company uniform that looked like the onesies astronauts wear in the space station held a wrench. A woman in the same onesie answered a phone call on her headset. Similar billboards lined I-70 on his drive into Webster from the airport. Dimension Skip, after its bankruptcy, hadn’t bothered to take them down.
After unpacking, Mark rewatched a few of Kipper’s YouTube videos. Although Kipper came across as a borderline conspiracy theorist, all Mark could see in the videos was the Kyle Kipper he’d known as a kid. They were friends by proximity, owing to the fact that their last names started with the same two letters. In elementary school, he and Kipper were assigned to sit together on the bus and lined up one after the other for recess and lunch. In middle school, they were partners in Biology and entered the nurse’s office together for mandatory scoliosis screening. But in high school they drifted apart for a couple years, until Frau Müller, in junior-year German class, began pairing them up as conversation partners. Together they stumbled through their new language, chatting about their favorite hobbies and foods, the names of each other’s uncles and aunts, and what they’d done the previous weekend. In those late high-school years, after everyone had settled into new social circles—Mark with the track team, Kipper with the skaters—the class opened a portal to a world where the two old friends could get to know each other again.
German was Mark’s best subject and probably Kipper’s worst. Kipper couldn’t help himself from questioning every grammatical rule, annoying Frau Müller and their classmates. He wanted to know why, for example, you say “I have hunger” in German rather than “I am hungry.” Because in German, Frau Müller told him, your hunger doesn’t define you! As the semester went on, he took his ideas further. He developed his own philosophy of tenses, writing out a proof showing how the simple past and the future perfect were essentially the same, which of course made no sense. But Mark was intrigued; he’d always considered Kipper smarter than he was, or at least a more original thinker, and even if he knew Kipper was wrong about his philosophy of tenses, he wanted to understand how he was wrong. But he found that the more he tried to understand Kipper’s reasoning, the less he excelled in class, because he started to see the language the way Kipper did. Which was objectively incorrect, but correct in Kipper’s universe. As a result, Mark’s grade suffered. To save himself from a B, he did his best to ignore Kipper. He started coming in late so that he could choose a seat far enough away that Frau Müller would pair him with someone else. The two didn’t talk much after that, not even in German.
Kipper didn’t want to discuss the past on their initial video chat. All he wanted to talk about was Dimension Skip. For a hundred grand, the service had promised a peek at your other selves, across dimensions. If you found a dimension you liked more than this one, you could schedule regular visits, splitting your time between inhabiting the you here, in our dimension, and another you, somewhere else. But the machine simply didn’t work, according to everyone who used it. Hence the class-action lawsuit. Hence the bankruptcy. Before shutting its doors, a spokesperson for Dimension Skip—presumably to save face for the inventors of the machine—claimed that “certain governmental restrictions” compromised the service’s effectiveness. In other words, they couldn’t crank the dial up high enough to give customers what they wanted. Kipper, though, was convinced that the machine had worked on him, even though he’d never been inside. The proximity of his house to the Dimension Skip campus had exposed him to invisible waves, he claimed. “Or maybe they’re quanta?” Kipper asked. Whatever the case, his prolonged exposure to the waves or quanta granted him access to the parallel lives he wasn’t previously aware he was living.
“I imagine that’s a powerful feeling,” Mark said, on the video call. He tried to sound calm and understanding, like the couples therapist he and his ex had seen.
“Not at all,” Kipper said. “It’s distracting, how I flip in and out of dimensions.”
“You can’t control it?”
“No.”
“So what happens when you leave?”
Kipper leaned back in his office chair. “I’ve found myself cooking breakfast at a seaside café. Another time I was doing data entry in a cubicle. Once I was at my daughter’s ballet recital—but I don’t have a kid!”
“And you’re still you in these other places? You remember your life here, even when you’re at the recital?”
“Yes. I know I don’t have a daughter, but I also can’t imagine losing her.”
Mark jotted this down. “What happens to you here? To your body, I mean?”
“It’s hard to explain,” Kipper said. “Let me show you.”
McGurk’s Bar & Grill wasn’t a chain, though it had similar décor and beverage options as other gastropubs in the St. Louis metro area. Inside, Kipper, in black jeans and a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, greeted Mark with a hug. “It’s been so long.” He smelled like Tabasco sauce and hair gel.
“Too long,” Mark said, pulling out a stool.
Kipper signaled the bartender. “Two Buds.” Although the McGurk’s beer list was impressive, everyone ordered Budweiser out of local allegiance, ignoring the fact that the massive brewery was now owned by a beverage conglomerate in Belgium. Kipper swiveled on his stool to face Mark. “Red eye?”
“I look that tired?”
“You look the same as I remember,” Kipper said. “Just older.”
“So not the same at all?” The bartender set two pints of Budweiser on the counter before Kipper could answer. The foam cascaded down the glass. “Tell me about Dimension Skip,” Mark said. He took out his small notebook. “You never actually used it?”
“You know there’s a reason why they wouldn’t let them build that machine anywhere else,” Kipper said. “Safety of the general public.”
“There’s fifty-thousand people in this town,” Mark said. “Why is it you’re the only one who’s come forward with this?”
“They don’t live where I do,” Kipper shot back. “You’ve been there, Mark. That house my dad lived in.” He took a drink. “My old man sold most of the land after he was laid off from Boeing—and guess who bought it?” Kipper didn’t wait for Mark to answer. “Dimension Skip!” A few people down the bar glanced over. Kipper wiped the foam off his mustache.
“Look,” Mark said, leveling with his old friend. “I talked to a few experts before flying out here, and it’s highly unlikely simply living next to Dimension Skip exposed you to anything that would cause you to skip dimensions.”
Kipper fidgeted with his coaster. “Highly unlikely, but not impossible.”
“Virtually impossible,” Mark said.
“My line of work makes me more vulnerable.”
The two hadn’t talked since high school, but because they were Facebook friends, Mark knew all the relevant facts about Kipper’s life. “You’re a mechanic.”
“Exactly. I’m outside all day fixing cars, no more than a hundred yards from that machine.”
A man shouted down the bar. “Is that you, Kipper?” he asked. “Thought you’d gone to live on another planet.” The man’s friends laughed.
Kipper massaged his wrist. “No one here believes me.”
“Why should they?” The question didn’t come off the way Mark intended. It sounded condescending, but he was simply asking for evidence.
Kipper’s arm began to tremble, slightly. “The thing about the multiverse is you can’t disprove it,” he said. “Which means it’s always a possible explanation, right?” He gripped the edge of the bar. “You ever read about the Johnson & Johnson talcum powder case? Thousands of people dead after using that shit. And that was baby powder! We’re talking about a powerful machine here, one that promised to bring you to another dimension. Why wouldn’t something like that have an effect on the people who lived near it? It’s brand new technology. Even its inventors can’t know for sure what it did to the air and the water. Not until more people like me speak up. And more people like you write about us, lend some credence to our claims.”
Mark wouldn’t have flown out here if he didn’t think there was at least a slight possibility that Kipper was on to something. It seemed feasible that the machine would have an effect on the environment. That it caused second-hand dimension skips, however, sounded far-fetched. “Is it possible these are hallucinations?” Mark asked. “Remember Drew Redzus’s uncle, how he streaked across the football field our sophomore year proclaiming he was God, but it just turned out he’d put the wrong mushrooms in his pasta?”
“You don’t think I know the difference between psychedelics and this?” he asked. His entire right arm was shaking now.
“You okay, Kip?” the bartender asked.
“I’m fine.” He placed a coaster on top of his pint glass with his good hand.
“Is it happening?” Mark asked. He grabbed Kipper’s arm. He wasn’t sure where this instinct came from. He’d probably seen George Clooney do something similar on ER. It was important to stabilize the patient.
“Let go.” Kipper pulled his arm away, knocking over Mark’s beer.
Mark jumped back. The beer missed his lap, spilling onto the floor. He looked down at his beer-soaked loafers. “Damn it,” Mark muttered, bending over to pick up the pint glass.
Kipper’s stool was empty by the time he set the glass back on the bar. He glanced back and saw the bathroom door slam shut. Mark considered checking on Kipper, partly to make sure he was okay—but mostly, he was embarrassed to admit to himself, to double-check that it was in fact Kipper in the bathroom and that his interview subject hadn’t skipped off into another dimension. Down the bar, the man who’d yelled at Kipper was eyeing Mark. He decided to stay put and wait for his friend to return. If he wasn’t back in three minutes, he’d check on him. Any sooner would be an overreaction; men needed their space, and clearly Kipper wanted to be alone. The bartender brought Mark another beer. He gulped it down, cycling through explanations for what could be going on with Kipper’s arm. He’d neglected to ask the experts whether radiation from the machine could affect the body in other ways. When Kipper returned—and he would return, Mark assured himself—Mark would ask if he’d seen a doctor; the x-rays might be the evidence he needed to crack open his story, which Mark now envisioned as an exposé on the damage an irresponsible corporation had inflicted on the health of the citizens of a small Midwestern town.
Mark glanced back at the bathroom door. Still shut. On the TV above the bar, the local channel played commercials from the same businesses that advertised to Mark as a kid. The car dealer’s son used the same line Mark had heard the man’s father deliver thousands of times: Come on down to Bommarito! Their lot was still jam-packed with F-150s, though the trucks themselves had nearly doubled in size. Next, the Dirt Cheap owner appeared in a chicken suit, squawking about the unbeatable deals at his local chain of liquor stores. Cheap-cheap, fun-fun, he chirped, in his gravelly smoker’s voice, as deals on low-end liquor flashed across the screen. Mark couldn’t believe the man wasn’t dead yet. At the end of the commercial he took off his chicken head, and standing there as half-man, half-chicken, guaranteed he’d beat any deal in town. The old man’s face, though still pocked and weathered, hadn’t aged since Mark was a kid—was this also the son of the original owner, or an ad filmed years ago? Bommarito, Dirt Cheap, the commercials made Mark wonder what his life might have been like had he stayed here, in his hometown. He’d always assumed he would leave Webster, that none of his connections here would last—though he had not accounted for the invention of Facebook, a site designed to remind you, as you age, of all the previous lives you’ve lived.
“Where were we again?” a young man in Kipper’s seat asked. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the Kipper Mark had known in German class.
Mark wasn’t sure what to say. Was it true, what Kipper claimed?
The young man laughed. “What, you think I’m him?” he asked. “That we’re in some kind of parallel-universe situation?”
“No, it’s just—” Mark wasn’t sure where to start.
“Why not?”
Mark took a drink, buying himself a few seconds to organize his thoughts. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in the multiverse—he’d interviewed several physicists who found the theory credible, including a few who deemed plausible the claims Dimension Skip had made about government restrictions keeping them from sending people to parallel universes—it was just, was it possible that he, Mark, had skipped across dimensions? That he was in an alternate world where Kipper was still a teenager? Kipper never mentioned traveling to timelines where he was younger or older; weren’t you supposed to stay the same age? Mark should’ve researched that before his trip. Maybe this was more of a Back to the Future moment? That would be convenient; his readers were probably more familiar with the concept of time travel. Mark scanned the bar. The man who’d made fun of Kipper stared into his iPhone. So no, not time travel.
“Don’t worry, I get that reaction a lot,” the young man said. “I’m Kai Kipper, Kipper’s son.”
Mark had never seen photos of Kipper’s son on Facebook. “Kipper doesn’t have a son.”
“He doesn’t?” Kai lifted his hand to his face and stared at it in mock wonder. “Then how am I here?” He took a drink of his dad’s beer.
Mark sometimes rushed to conclusions, his ex, a life coach, told him a few years ago. She encouraged him, an Enneagram Five, to embrace the part of his personality that wanted to be more open and receptive. He’d been trying to do that. Of course the absence of a person on social media doesn’t mean that person doesn’t exist, he reminded himself. “Sorry,” Mark said, standing up from his bar stool. “I’m a little frazzled. His arm was shaking pretty bad.” He pointed to the bathroom. “I’m going to check on him.”
“Wait,” Kai said. “How bad?”
“I don’t know, a lot? I tried to stop it but—”
“You tried to stop it?”
“I held his wrist and—”
“You touched him?” Kai slumped over the bar. “Then you’re in another dimension.”
Mark looked down the bar at the man on his iPhone, trying to detect if he was in on the prank. “I haven’t left this bar.”
“It’s the same bar and it’s not.” Kai stood up to leave. “It’s not worth my time to explain this.”
“Explain what?” Mark asked.
“You’re looking for a different Kipper, a Kipper who lives in your dimension, where apparently I don’t exist.”
Mark didn’t want the kid to leave. Whoever he was, he clearly had a connection to Kipper, and that might be useful for his profile or exposé or whatever. “Fine,” Mark said. “If I am indeed in an alternate dimension, can you at least tell me how to get back?”
“Kai,” the bartender said, holding up the empty pint glass. “You’re fifteen.”
“Fifteen is eighteen in Webster years,” he said.
She pointed at the door.
“You mean twenty-one?” Mark asked, but the young Kipper ignored him.
“Give me a ride home,” Kai said. “If he’s not here, he’s there.” He bit his bottom lip, the way Kipper used to. “Well, not the Kipper you’re looking for, but some variant. Probably close enough.”
Mark used the bathroom before leaving. The only other inhabitant was a drunk old man at the other urinal, his forehead pressed against the cold tile.
Driving through Webster, nothing had changed from his drive to the bar from his hotel an hour before, which allowed Mark to rule out time travel definitively. They stopped at Burger King on Kai’s request, the same Burger King Mark always visited as a kid, and sat in the same corner booth where he and Kipper would do their fifth-grade math homework on Saturday afternoons while waiting for Mark’s mom to pick them up after she finished her shift. He wouldn’t have remembered this booth, or those slow afternoons of simplified fractions and one-dollar milkshakes, had Kai not insisted on stopping here. But he didn’t want to think about who he has been; he was interested only in who he could become. The future, not the past. These minor memories of childhood, these little Burger King nothings, were meant to be forgotten! He turned his focus to his Whopper. It was misshapen and a little damp.
“Flame-broiled!” Kai said, biting into his burger.
An old commercial popped into Mark’s head and, as he opened his mouth, it was that burger—the flame-broiled patty in the commercial—that he bit into, not whatever he was holding. He swallowed and took a handful of fries. He was hungrier than he knew. That was something else he was working on, listening to his body more than his mind. He finished his Whopper in three large bites.
“Let’s see if he’s home,” Kai said, crumpling up his wrapper. He jumped up from the booth.
Mark followed Kai outside, to the parking lot. “We’re over here,” he shouted to Kai, pointing at the rental car. But Kai walked confidently in the opposite direction and ducked through the bushes at the perimeter of the lot.
Mark paused, trying to reorient himself. He looked back at his rental, parked in front of a dying oak tree. He hadn’t paid attention to the tree before, but now he recognized it immediately as the tree Kipper took shelter under while waiting for the bus on rainy days. He’d assumed this was the Burger King a few miles down the road, the one where he’d done homework with Kipper, but he now realized he was standing in the parking lot of a different Burger King, one that must have been built after he left town. He ran to catch up with Kai.
Through the bushes was Kipper’s family home, a farmhouse that now possessed the structural integrity of cardboard left out in the rain. Its mossy roof sagged, and the front porch sloped to the left, towards the Dimension Skip campus.
“Is that it?” Mark asked, staring past a tall barbed wire fence, at the sleek gray building that housed the retired machine. A row of high-voltage power lines ran alongside the fence, on the Dimension Skip side. “We used to ride bikes through that field.”
“Could it be a bigger eyesore?” Kai joked.
“Chandler Bing?” Mark asked, grounded by the reference to Friends.
“Seriously?” Kai said. “That’s Joey!” He kicked at an old tire buried in the overgrown grass. “My dad’s kind of neglected this place ever since it started happening.” Busted engines and scrap metal littered the front yard.
Mark dropped the Friends thing, even though he knew Kai was confusing Joey for Chandler. He was here to write about Kipper, after all. “I imagine it’s been tough for you,” Mark said, “your dad being caught up in all this.”
“Yeah, but it’s not his fault.” Kai walked towards a large satellite dish, about ten feet wide, installed before the town had cable television. As kids, Mark and Kipper would lay across the dish’s scooped surface and make up stories about what life was like on each and every star—that lasted years, until they were old enough to know that nothing lives on stars. Kai climbed up and lay across the dish. “What’s he like?” Kai asked. “The version of my dad you met. Is he rich?”
Mark hoisted himself up, next to Kai. “I don’t think so. Honestly, it sounds like he’s not much different from your dad here.”
“Except he never had me.”
“He never told me about you,” Mark corrected, “but honestly we’re not that close.”
“Then why are you looking for him?”
“I’m a writer, and we were friends as kids. He wanted me to write about his experiences with Dimension Skip.”
“Really?” Kai asked. “My dad wouldn’t want that.” He scooted up higher on the satellite dish. “It happened here once. The first time, actually. We were watching a meteor shower.”
Mark turned to face Kai. He really did look like Kipper. “When was that?”
“The week my mom left.”
Mark knew about the separation; Kipper had changed his relationship status on Facebook and posted several late-night status updates that were simply song lyrics from the emo bands he listened to in high school. “What happened?” Mark asked. “To his body, I mean?”
“He didn’t disappear, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Kai said. “You wouldn’t even notice if you weren’t paying close enough attention. But I can tell. He empties out, like his soul or whatever leaves his body. He fixes cars, cooks dinner, watches TV, but you can tell he’s not all there. Part of him is somewhere else.”
“But how can you be sure he’s in a different dimension?”
“I’m his son,” Kai said. “Besides, I’m not the only one. Lots of people believe him. He spends all day in the comments, talking to them.”
Maybe it was better, at least for now, for Kai to believe his dad was in another dimension and not simply obsessed, as he was in German class, with another unproveable theory. Mark decided to dial down his skepticism in front of the kid. He lay there, on the dish, and stared up at the billowy Missouri clouds, then closed his eyes and listened, as he and Kipper would as kids when Kipper’s dad was drunk and Mark’s mom was working late again, to the distant sounds the dish picked up: the breeze through the grass, a delivery truck crunching down a gravel driveway, the crackly bzzzzz coming from the electrical wires.
A familiar voice intruded. “You okay, bud?”
Mark opened his eyes. Night had erased the clouds. Across the field, the silhouette of the Dimension Skip building cut a hole in the starry sky.
“You were out for a while,” Kipper said.
Mark rubbed his temples. “Where’d you go?”
“That’s my question for you,” Kipper said. “I went out back for a smoke and you disappeared from the bar. Had a feeling I might find you here.”
Mark slid down from the dish. “Where’s Kai?”
“Who?” Kipper squinted, as if looking into another life. “Kai, as in my German-class name?”
“No,” Mark started, confused. Kai wasn’t even German, was it?
“Where’d you go?”
“Burger King?” Mark said. “With your son. After you left the bar.”
“My son?”
“Come on, you know what I’m talking about. Is he your nephew or something? I’ve never seen him on your Facebook.”
Kipper kicked at a rusted engine; a dandelion had sprouted through one of its pistons. “I don’t know why I always get sent back here,” Kipper said, ignoring Mark’s question. “Beth wanted kids, but then all of this started.” He motioned towards the Dimension Skip campus. “Was she there, Beth?”
“No,” Mark said, as they walked toward the farmhouse. He’d never met Beth, but he’d seen photos of her on Facebook, before Kipper deleted them. “I mean, I didn’t see her.” The curtains in the front window fluttered. A shadow, movement. Probably Kai, Mark assumed.
Kipper caught Mark staring at the house. “Want to come in for a drink?” he asked. “We can talk if you’re up for it.”
Mark was surprised Kipper wasn’t more hesitant to allow him inside, but maybe he didn’t care about being caught in a lie after all, as long as he got to spend time with an old friend. Was that what this was all about, reconnecting?
The only other people in the house, as far as Mark could tell, were Chandler and Joey, in their matching recliners, projected larger than life onto the bare wall. Kai had probably neglected to turn off the show. Kipper grabbed a couple beers from the fridge and joined Mark on the overstuffed sofa. “Let’s start from the beginning,” he said, playing the pilot episode of Friends. But Mark wasn’t paying attention to the sitcom. He was thinking, instead, about those weeks he spent studying Kipper’s German proofs. While Mark eventually convinced himself that the proofs were incorrect, he found the careful study of Kipper’s reasoning exhilarating. Never before had he felt so close to another person, which had frightened him. That, more so than his grade in the class, was why he avoided Kipper. Mark worried he’d done the same thing with his ex and the Enneagram. He didn’t want to repeat the same mistake with his reporting on Dimension Skip.
A few episodes in, Kipper attempted to describe the dissolution of his relationship with Beth, but he was out of practice talking about love. So was Mark. That was okay. This was a familiar way of talking, like the two were once again tripping through a new language. Staring at the screen, and not at each other, Kipper shared his regrets and missteps, reckoning with the past in hopes that doing so could change the outcome of the future. Mark listened as Gunther, Central Perk’s manager, brought the gang oversized lattes.
At some point, Kipper noted that Monica’s apartment number changes partway through the first season, from #5 to #20. Mark clung to this detail, trying to make it mean something. Memories are reruns we play in our heads, he thought, sinking deeper into the leather couch next to Kipper. We search for hidden details and inconsistencies, anything to recast our lives in a new light. That was a stretch, but he needed an angle into this profile. He jotted the thought down in his notebook and went to the kitchen for another beer.
“Want one?” he called out to Kipper. But Kipper didn’t answer. Mark lingered in the kitchen, collecting small details he could use to establish setting in his piece: the vintage Wedgewood stove, the burnt oven mitt, the sloth calendar on the fridge. Kipper’s German proofs relied on an understanding of time that did away with any distinctions between the past and the future. From the living room, Ross pined after Rachel. In someone else’s living room, Mark knew, Rachel and Ross had already decided to spend their lives together. That was how time worked, or something like that, maybe. He was tired.
Mark left his beer on the kitchen table. In the living room, Kipper was passed out, drool running down his stubbled chin. His right arm trembled slightly. A tremor from too many years using power tools, Kipper had told him, in the course of talking about Beth. Some nights, the shaking startled her awake. She had nightmares about earthquakes, seismic plates shifting beneath them. People think there’s no earthquakes in Missouri, she’d told him, but it’s just that the faults are buried beneath soft river sediments that erase the surface traces.
Mark sat down next to Kipper, who snored as his arm trembled. He wanted to be the kind of writer who could detect and trace the ten thousand earthquakes of a life, many too minor to feel but which over time shifted the geology of a mind. But how to become that kind of writer? He studied the people in front of him: Phoebe gave Monica a bad haircut. Joey took Chandler to the tailor. Ross and Rachel did Ross and Rachel things. Mark took the remote out of Kipper’s hand and turned the projector off. The room was a vast, blank space. Careful not to wake him, Mark set his hand on Kipper’s and held it there, ready to shift into another state.