chapters:

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(it’s like there’s a portal or something)

It was dark out, long past any child’s bedtime. In a humble brick ranch house on a suburban street lined on both sides with near-identical brick ranch houses, a yellowish light glowed in a living room window.

Inside, by this overhead living room light, two grown adult men hunched over a coffee tabletop that was covered with hundreds of tiny Lego blocks of various colors. The men were building something. The lankier one, the one with the slick swoop of dirty-blond hair and the neon graphic tee and rectangular glasses, who sat on the edge of the couch in baggy black basketball shorts, elbows on his knobby knees, was Pete; he was a guest here, technically, although this was his home away from home really, because the second guy, Roger, the one sitting on the carpet with forearm resting on the table, was his best and closest friend. Roger, in a holey gray t-shirt and cargo shorts, looked like your typical tired blue-collar guy who spent his days out under the sun working hard and building stuff – because that’s precisely what he was. He had reddish-brown hair pulled back in a messy half-ponytail, and stubble that was beginning to go gray on his jaw. Tonight happened to be the eve of his birthday. He was about to turn thirty-seven.

Imminently. It was almost midnight. The two had been building and talking and laughing for hours. As they were sitting there, building something out of Legos and deep in conversation, having accidentally stumbled into a topic that was actually very serious, Roger’s wife, Jordan, emerged into the living room from the adjacent hallway, for the first time all evening. At first they didn’t even notice her there.

“You’re doing Legos?” she asked. Her tone made it clear that she was irritated.

Roger lifted his gaze. Pete turned at the waist and looked over the back of the couch. It was he who replied:

“Fuck yeah we’re doing Legos. You got a problem?” But he grinned to show that he was just playing. “What’s up, Jo?”

Jordan didn’t smile. It was no secret that she had had it up to here with her husband and his annoying friend. Thirty-seven years old herself, Jordan was big and tall and her glossy brown hair was currently in a tight bun. Her hair being pulled back away from her face was not flattering for her head shape, and her milky-fair countenance was shiny with the moisturizer and anti-aging serum that she wore to bed, but her resting bitch face was otherwise pretty. Dressed in a baggy old tee and black yoga pants, she was holding her iPhone up as if to show them a picture on it, but its cracked screen was black.

“I can’t find my charger,” she said. “Have you seen it, babe?”

“No.”

“Fern probably did something with it.”

Fern was Roger and Jordan’s two-year-old daughter, who was constantly misplacing their items and generally wreaking havoc in their house. Jordan gave Roger a look that said that it was his fault this had happened, because it was his fault that Fern existed, and he should be sorry.

“I’ll find it,” Roger said, taking the hint. He stood up. Jordan hadn’t remembered that it was his birthday tomorrow. Pete had, of course. He’d brought cake that his wife had made. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. Like an eager lapdog, now, Pete sprung up to help look for the charger. While Jordan stood scrolling, the two friends searched the small house, but after ten, fifteen focused minutes, found nothing.

“It’s not here, Jo,” Roger declared.

“I’m at five percent. I need a charger.”

Pete wished aloud for the seventh or eighth time that he had brought his, but he hadn’t. Roger, unfortunately, didn’t care enough about phones to spend money on an iPhone, and his little Android charger wouldn’t do the job.

“Does Sheetz sell iPhone chargers?” he asked.

“Hell yeah it does!” Pete exclaimed. “I love Sheetz! Midnight Sheetz runs are the best. The mozzarella sticks! They’re calling to me.”

“We’ll head out in a minute.”

Jordan gave him a look that said that they would head out now. But Roger turned away from her so that he didn’t see it.

“We’ve just got to finish the temple first,” Pete explained. “Check it out! It’s an Aztec temple. It’s almost done, kind of.”

“Well hurry up,” Jordan said. “And clean up the Legos before you leave, okay? If Fern finds any of those in the morning, she’ll put them in her mouth and choke.” She turned and started to walk back down the hall without even looking at the Aztec temple. “I’m going to bed.”

“We will. Night, babe.”

“Nighty-night! Good to see you!” Pete called after her.

In no hurry, though, they returned to their Legos and the serious matter that they’d been discussing prior to the interruption, which was: religion. Pete’s wife, a devout Catholic, had been urging him for some time to officially convert, to get baptized and confirmed and received into full communion. Pete wasn’t opposed to the idea. He’d become more religious in the last four years, made friends with the parish priests, listened to the Bible in a Year podcast during his work commute, and, for reasons that he himself barely understood, started to believe in God; under his t-shirt he was even wearing a Miraculous Medal, on a steel chain around his neck. But something about officially converting gave him cold feet.

Meanwhile, Roger, who was clean and sober and had found God in A.A., attended church regularly, and had been saying for some time now that he was willing to get baptized – but simply hadn’t done it yet, and kept finding reasons not to. Like maybe it had been done when he was a baby. He had no way to know, and didn’t care to look into it.

Or maybe it was simply too late.

“I dunno, man,” Roger said, as if they hadn’t even been interrupted. He pressed a red Lego into place. “I’ll do it if you do it.”

“Why do I have to go first? You go first.”

“Nah. Too lazy.”

“I’ll push you.”

“Into the holy water?”

“Yeah, like, just – ”

Pete made a splashing sound and with his hands pretended to push someone’s head underwater and hold it there, drowning them.

“Hey, fine with me. Straight to heaven,” Roger said dryly.

“Yeah, right, bro. Your criminal-record-having ass? Straight to heaven?”

“But isn’t baptism supposed to like wash all that shit away, though?”

Pete started to say something, at the same time moving to place a Lego on the temple – but in doing so, accidentally brushed one off the edge of the table.

“Shit.”

He bent down to look for the fallen brick, squinting through his glasses into the shadows beneath the table. Nothing there.

“I dropped one. Do you see it?” he asked Roger.

“No. You gotta find it, though, or Fern will.”

“And she’ll eat it.” Pete slid off the couch and got down on hands and knees to peer underneath of it. Nothing. He grabbed his phone and turned on the flashlight and used that. Still nothing. “Shit. It’s gone.”

Roger began looking for the fallen Lego, too.

“What color is it, anyway?”

“I think yellow?”

The radius of their search area increased from the coffee table and couch vicinity to the outer edges of the living room, under the shelf that held the TV, in the pile of shoes by the front door, around the fireplace, even into the kitchen, just in case the thing had bounced. But how could it have bounced ten or twelve feet?, because that’s how far away they were looking, now. Crawling around on the floor like overgrown rugrats with flashlights out, they looked for the fallen Lego at least twice as long as they’d looked for Jordan’s phone charger.

But to no avail.

“Man. What the hell?”

“Right? I have no clue where…”

They both stood up at the same time and faced each other, Roger scratching the back of his head idly, looking around, Pete with flashlight still in hand.

But at the very same instant, they noticed something.

“Wait.”

“What the – ”

“Do you see that?”

“Yeah I see it, are you kidding me? Is this a prank?”

“I didn’t put that there.” Roger looked away from it, at Pete’s face. Roger was a terrible liar; Pete knew right away that this wasn’t a joke.

They both stared. It wasn’t the missing Lego that they were looking at. It was a doorway – a doorway that hadn’t been there before. Had never been there, the whole time that Roger and Jordan had lived in this house.

“What the fuck,” Pete said, almost shouting. “What do we do?

“That… that doesn’t make sense,” Roger said.

“Do we call the cops? Do we call an ambulance? Are we both hallucinating?”

“That can’t be there. That’s an exterior wall. On the other side of that wall is the yard.”

Whatever lay on the other side of the open doorway was cloaked in black shadows; they could make out the vaguest suggestions of motionless gray shapes.

“The fuck,” Pete said – almost whispering, now.

Pete laid his hand on Roger’s shoulder, as if checking to make sure that he was tangible and this was really happening. Roger frowned. They glanced at each other, communicating without words.

And then, cautiously, they walked closer.

It just looked like a normal doorway to an unlit room — but that was impossible. They stood just outside of it, trying to peer in. Holding their breath. Everything was silent, just the hum of the AC and the whir of the white noise machine in Fern’s room down the hall. The air seemed to vibrate. Pete used his flashlight, but the light somehow didn’t penetrate the space beyond. It just stopped, like the beam was sliced short at the end where it met the doorway.

Roger waved a hand in. Nothing happened. He placed his sock-foot through the door and tested the ground.

“It feels hard,” he reported.

“That’s what she said,” Pete murmured, reflexively.

“Can’t see shit, though.” Roger frowned. “Should we try it?”

“I should text Lou first. In case we die.”

“We’re not gonna die. There’s got to be an explanation.”

“You go first.”

“Nah, you can.”

“I always go first. You go first.”

Pete gave Roger a light shove on the back, as if to push him in ahead of him. Roger didn’t move, except to reach his hand back, fingers outstretched. Pete grabbed it. Hands clasped, with Roger in the lead and Pete following close behind, they stepped across the threshold into the thick darkness.

.

(we used to have hope)

“Hold up. This is your living room. We’re still in your living room. How is that possible? How…”

Roger blinked. They were, indeed, still in his living room. They were on the other side of the living room, though, right where they’d been standing when they first noticed the doorway. While beside him Pete fidgeted and gesticulated and paced and narrated his entire thought process with panicked urgency, Roger looked around, studying, trying to do the mental math.

“Hey,” he observed, interrupting Pete. “There’s Jo’s charger.”

It was plugged into the wall right where it ought to have been: the white wall block with cable attached, dangling from the outlet by the armchair onto the carpet. Without thinking, he walked over and retrieved it. Pete trailed close behind.

“But this is just your house,” he was saying. “I don’t get it. Roger. Where are we? How did we – ”

“I dunno, man.” Roger, holding the charger, shrugged wearily. “I’ve seen enough shit. I’m gonna go plug in Jo’s phone.”

“Hey. Wait up.”

Pete chased after him as he started down the hall toward the bedrooms. The hallway was dark. Barely had they made it three steps, though, when it became, suddenly, too dark – as if they had dropped into the ocean depths where no light could penetrate.

The light was gone. Pete grabbed onto the sleeve of Roger’s shirt and started to blurt out some profanity or exclamation of terror – but before he could get a single word out, the lights came on.

They were still in a hallway.

“Okay, what the hell is going on!”

“Power outage?”

“Power out– what? No, retard, this isn’t a power outage, did you see how the – ”

“Hey, check it out.”

The hallway they were standing in was not the hallway of Roger’s house. It was dimly-lit and lined with shelves, shelves that reached from floor to ceiling. And the shelves were crammed with stuff, positively overflowing with a chaos of assorted items.

“What is all this stuff?” Pete asked.

“I was looking for this.”

From an eye-level shelf Roger took something small and dark brown: a guitar pick. He held it up for Pete to see. It had the peeling remains of a small yellow smiley-face sticker on it.

“My favorite one,” he said.

“What the fuck,” Pete said, reaching for an item on a shelf to his left. “My dental insurance card? I was looking for this last week.”

“Hey! It’s Fern’s sippy cup. I thought she left it at daycare.”

“Is this like some kind of like Peter Pan, Neverland, lost things shit right now? Are we in Neverland?”

Roger scoffed. He was putting the guitar pick and the sippy cup in the pocket of his cargo shorts along with the iPhone charger; laugh at cargo shorts all you want, he always said, but they did come in handy.

“You tell me,” he said. “That’s your area of expertise.”

Pete frowned. It was true that he’d been compared to Peter Pan more than once in his life, because of his elfin appearance and his utter failure to ever grow up and act his age (his “boyish charm,” he called it), not to mention, of course, the first name — and had even dressed as him for Halloween once or twice.

“No,” he said, with authority. “Can’t be. This is too creepy. Let’s get out of here.”

“Right. Which way?”

When they turned around, the hallway behind them was black. In front of them, it stretched on, apparently endlessly.

“Oh God. We’re gonna die here,” Pete groaned. He whipped out his phone. “No signal. Of course. Oh my God. We’re gonna die here, dude.”

“No we’re not. Come on.”

They walked on. But the farther they walked, the weirder things became. They started hearing things. First there was a song – an acoustic guitar melody, playing softly in the air around them as if through some invisible speakers.

“Hey.” Roger stopped walking. “That song.”

“Do you know it?” Pete asked. He stopped talking for half a second to listen. “It kinda slaps.”

“Yeah. I came up with it in the shower a few weeks ago. I was gonna write it down,” Roger said, “but I forgot it.”

“You forgot it?”

Roger was humming along, playing air guitar as he walked.

“So how’d it get here? This place just, like, pulled it out of your head or something?” Pete narrowed his eyes as he glanced around at the drop ceiling, the cold gray tiled floors. It felt like a basement. “Hell no. We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Nah, this is kinda cool.” Roger noticed something else on a shelf as he walked by – an old paperback book. He opened the front cover, saw his own name written there in his own handwriting, and nodded. “Nice.”

“Nice?! How is any of this — “

“I wonder what other lost shit we’ll find.”

“Okay, cargo shorts.”

The passageway cut left. Rounding the corner, they suddenly found themselves in a waiting room.

A familiar waiting room.

“Wait. Why am I at work?”

Somehow they were in Pete’s office. He was by profession a psychologist (believe it or not), and owned a psychotherapy practice that also employed two other providers and an intern. As well as a part-time receptionist, Marissa, and it was she whom he and Roger were currently looking at: Marissa, seated at her desk behind the little window, while on the other side of the window stood a wan-looking college kid in a striped sweater that was almost comically oversized.

Pete wondered why they were here, why they were seeing this. He called out a greeting, but neither the receptionist nor his patient acknowledged him.

It was like they were ghosts – or like watching a muted film: they could see what was happening, but couldn’t hear the voices nor intervene. The patient was saying something to Marissa. Marissa was looking at her computer screen and then back at the patient. She was shaking her head, apologetic. The patient was stammering, jitterily pulling out his phone now, with hands that were starting to shake, and looking at his calendar app. The look on his face was about two minutes from puking.

Pete gasped.

“Oh, shit! No way! I completely forgot!”

“Is… that guy one of your clients?”

He couldn’t say so. HIPAA and all, so he managed to keep his mouth shut. But the horrifying truth, which he just now realized, was: he had rescheduled the client’s appointment for five on a Friday, because they couldn’t make it to their usual time — but then he’d completely forgotten to put the appointment in his calendar, and when Friday came he went home at four-thirty. The patient already struggled with social phobias and crippling fear of messing up; he would be mortified, possibly even in crisis over this. Pete had to call him immediately.

Again he checked his phone. Still no service.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Pete said. “Come on. Vamos.”

The door that should have been the front exit out of the waiting room led them down yet another corridor lined with shelves; the items on them, now, as they passed, were old and long-forgotten things: Pete’s son’s first pair of glasses, which he’d lost at the park when he was three years old; a certain office key that a certain shift supervisor had once unwisely trusted Roger with at his grocery store job almost a decade ago; a long-outdated TV remote, which had once slipped between the couch cushions at Pete and Lou’s house, never to be seen again.

“This is getting really weird,” said Pete, shaken, as if it hadn’t been really weird this whole time. “I just want to go home. Where’s the way out? Like, why is this happening? Why are we here?”

“I dunno. Maybe we’re supposed to find something.”

“Yeah. Jo’s charger. We found it. So why can’t we leave?”

“Maybe it’s something else.”

The hallway was growing darker, the ceiling gradually lower. It almost felt like they were moving downhill, perhaps, deep down into the depths of who knows what. It was less of a hallway now and more of a tunnel.

But they came to a window on their right-hand side: an opening in the wall, through which a pale beam of sunlight streamed in. They stood before it, looking out.

“Wait a second,” Pete said, recognizing the scene before them. He knew it immediately; this, he could never forget.

They were looking out through the years into the sunny afternoon of Saturday, May ninth, 2015. It was as if they were standing just across the street, facing the front steps of the gray stone church with its rose window above the doors and flowering trees on either side of the walkway. The church was all decorated for a wedding: silky white ribbons, bundles of flowers on the railings. Rose petals littered the lawn, where a crowd of people in colorful springy attire, their faces blurred and indistinct as if in a dream, stood around the doors, waiting. Through the open window, Pete and Roger watched too.

Then the big front doors opened from within and there emerged the bride and groom: a beautiful young couple, both of them blond and beaming, the bride in a billowing white princess gown, clutching a big lush bouquet of pastel pink and pistachio green. You couldn’t tell from looking at her, unless you knew her very well, but she was eleven weeks pregnant. With a smile she tossed her bouquet into the air, and up it soared, like in slow-motion. This was Pete’s wife, Lou, and the groom at her side was, of course, Pete himself.

If he leaned far enough out the window, he could smell the flowery spring air of that day, and a sugary ghost of wedding cake.

“Damn,” he said, softly, watching. “Back when I believed in happily ever after and shit.”

Roger put his arm around Pete, and they watched for a moment longer.

Things had been so good back then. They were not so good anymore. In the last eight years, Pete and Lou had been through a lot: a traumatic premature birth and long NICU stay, subsequent postpartum depression that drove them apart, leading to infidelity, leading to resentment – and just when things were starting to heal, they’d agreed to try for another baby, but that had been a year and a half ago now, and it felt hopeless, and things were freezing over, again, between them, and Lou barely even seemed to like him anymore. But back then, things had been so much fun, and he’d been so happy, back when he thought that a romantic relationship was the very alpha and omega of existence, the solution to the emptiness. He knew better now.

But the sunshine and roses beckoned from without.

“Hey, what do you think would happen if I just – ”

“I don’t think you should do that, man.”

“Fuck.” Pete shook his head, blinking, and forced himself to step away from the window. “You’re right. Let’s keep going.”

.

It felt like somewhere you’d been in a nightmare once. They passed windows and doorways into memories they didn’t care to see, and saw more lost things, older things that they didn’t even remember losing: a flip phone that Roger had left at a bar somewhere during his drinking days and never seen again; a pair of ripped-up acid-wash skinny jeans that Pete had lost at some house party once upon a time; a favorite lighter, a vintage Pokemon card, a mix CD that Roger’s ex-girlfriend had made for him back when they were seventeen, decorated with swirly spirals and hearts and their initials in black Sharpie. This, Roger stared at with a faraway smile, mesmerized, before carefully rubbing clean on his t-shirt and then slipping into his now-bulging cargo pocket.

But it wasn’t just lost things. There were people, faces, watching them from the shadows, looking back at them through the windows — you had to remind yourself firmly that it wasn’t real — and voices, haunting echoes in the air that you couldn’t quite be sure if you’d heard correctly. Up the hall, a dog ran by, its toenails clicking on the tiles. Roger called to it by name, but it didn’t come.

Around the next turn hung a large round analog clock on the wall, glaring at them with its yellowing face. The clock had no hands, but tick-tick-ticked loudly at them as they passed by. Ticking just slightly, maddeningly, barely-perceptibly, too fast. Each second a little too short. They could still hear it long after it was out of sight.

It was all beginning to feel heavy, oppressive. Somewhere had to be the way out. But it just kept going deeper. Gradually, the hallway widened and became less claustrophobic, and soon they came to another open window that looked promising, this time on their left-hand side. Maybe an exit. Together they approached this opening in the wall and looked out.

“What’s this place? Do you recognize it?”

Roger shook his head no. It appeared that they were looking in through the window of some sort of classroom – but it had only three complete walls, one side of the room being virtually open to the sun-scorched outdoors. More of a modified shack, really. Children, a dozen or so of them, all apparently African, sat at desks with books open in front of them, their eyes pinned on the teachers at the front of the room, one of whom was standing off to one side while the other wrote an equation full of letters and numbers across a smeary green chalkboard. These teachers were both twentysomething men dressed in matching Peace Corps t-shirts, sunburnt and smiling. The one off to the side appeared dreamishly indistinct, but the one at the chalkboard was –

“Dude, is that you?!”

“What the hell,” Roger said slowly. “But, I…”

“You never got to do that,” Pete said. “You applied, but they turned you down, ‘cause of – ”

“Yeah.”

Peace Corps volunteers who taught abroad had to be of good health, physically and mentally. Having spent time in jail, psych wards, and rehabs, and having survived not one but two suicide attempts, basically destroyed your eligibility, no matter how much of a knack for math and teaching you had, nor how badly you’d always wanted to see Mount Kilimanjaro and wild elephants in real life.

It was a dream lost long ago.

The alternate-universe Roger at the front of the classroom pointed to one of his students, a boy of about twelve or thirteen who was sitting in the front row. Teacher Roger smiled and nodded an invitation, gesturing for the child to come up to the front. The boy did. Teacher Roger handed him the piece of chalk and talked him through solving the equation. At one point, the kid looked up at his teacher and laughed, a genuine laugh, at something he’d said, some joke perhaps. The rest of the class laughed too. Teacher Roger looked like someone who ate a lot of fresh vegetables and called home every week and had never been arrested. He looked so healthy and well-adjusted. He made it look so easy. Glowing, he offered his star student a high five.

“I’m sorry, dude,” Pete said, standing next to the real Roger, back in the real world, if that’s what this was. He touched Roger’s arm. “I know you really wanted to do that. You would’ve been great at it.”

Roger turned away with a half-smile.

“Is what it is,” he said.

There was nothing to do but walk on. They must be getting closer, it seemed, to whatever it was that they were supposed to be looking for – but this wasn’t it.

.

(someday you’ll set it down for the last time)

It felt like this had been going on for a long time – an hour, maybe? Two? The basement tunnel-corridor had become wide and spacious, now, even peaceful, almost, softly illumined by a white light that seemed to be glowing in a room just down the hall, although the room never got any closer.

They were tired. The Neverland novelty had worn off; Roger, who had been quiet since the classroom window, no longer stopped to look at or pick up items off the shelves on either side. The only thing Pete paused to reach for was a familiar green Beanie Baby with the tag missing: it was Legs the frog, his Legs, given to him by someone, he couldn’t remember who; the toy used to ride along in his backpack every day when he went to kindergarten, and he’d had a habit of sucking on one of its feet.

When had Legs gotten lost? And where? Pete hadn’t thought about him in decades. They had to get to the bottom of this soon. There were only so many years’ worth of memories, of failures, of disappointments, left to traverse – and what then?

“Fucking hell,” Roger muttered.

“What?”

“What if we’re stuck here?”

Hearing the idea suggested out loud, the possibility made real, caused something in Pete’s brain to snap.

“Fuck, dude, I told you we shouldn’t have gone through that fucking door. I told you.”

“So this is my fault?”

“As usual.”

“Man, if you hadn’t dropped that fucking Lego, we – ”

“Don’t try to blame this on me.”

Roger stopped walking, and Pete stopped too, a few paces ahead. In the silence between them, the air felt abuzz with something invisible. Good or bad, hopeful or dangerous, it was impossible to tell.

“I’m not blaming you,” Roger said, softer. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I think I’m just – ”

“Tired,” Pete said. He sighed. “Me too. I’m sorry too. Fuck, I’m tired. We’re old, Roger.”

“This has got to be over soon.”

“What, you mean life?”

In the dim-lit liminal space lined with lost things, the two tired grown adult men stood wondering what they were supposed to do now. The air seemed to vibrate, getting faster. You could practically hear it vibrating. There was a sound – they became aware, at the same time, of a high-pitched sound. It was a voice. A young child’s voice, laughing.

It was coming from the bright room down the hall.

They looked at each other.

“Let’s go,” Pete said.

This time, the light drew nearer, became brighter, as they approached. They were finally getting close. In no time the tiled floor beneath their feet gave way to a soft, warm carpet of dry grass. And now they were outside in the sun.

Like in a dream, the scenery was blurred around the edges, becoming unclear if you looked too hard at it – like being surrounded by a cloud. It was a backyard, and a house of tan stucco, bordered on one side by a fence with a glittering blue pool beyond — and above, a cloudless sky, and palm trees. The palms moved gently as if in a breeze, but there was no audio; the only sound was that of the voices, the voices of two little children who were sitting together in the very center of the scene, on some sort of patio near the house, playing.

“Dude,” Pete said. “This is my dad’s place. This is where I grew up.”

But who were those kids?

They moved closer. The children didn’t look up at them; they were busily playing in a scattering of colorful wooden blocks. About Fern’s age, they looked to be: two boys, both dressed in little white shortalls – bright, spotless, immaculate white. Their feet were bare, and their little toes looked so pink and pudgy and clean.

The blond-headed one on the right was the loud one, the one they’d heard from down the hall. He kept throwing blocks, banging blocks together, shrieking with laughter, – a little elfin thing, he was, in perpetual motion. The boy on the left, who had soft wispy auburn-colored hair and big brown eyes beneath long lashes, placed blocks in a row and counted them with his little outstretched finger, singing the numbers softly.

Roger and Pete looked at each other, understanding, and then back at the kids.

In real life, they had not met each other until they were thirteen, but it was clear by now that this place they were in was not bound by the laws of “real life.”

They approached and stood beside the children, but didn’t cast a shadow on them. The little boys just happily played in their pool of sunlight. The redhead stacked four blocks on top of each other, and the blond one, noticing, flung himself over and toppled them with a shout and a swipe of his arm, and they both laughed.

“Hey, guys,” Pete greeted them; Roger was, it seemed, too stunned to speak. “I brought you something.”

He tossed them Legs the frog. It landed between them with a soft grainy splat.

The kids craned their necks and looked up. They seemed to recognize them, and greeted them with big smiles, totally unafraid.

Then the blond child seized the toy, examined it briefly and promptly inserted one of the feet into his mouth and began to chew. Evidently, the offering was accepted.

.

For some time, they sat and played blocks with the kids. They were in no hurry; everything felt okay now, and they would go home when it was time.

After a while of playing the little redhead seemed to get tired. He toddled over to Roger and, without waiting for an invitation, crawled into his lap. Startled, Roger seemed not to know what to do with his hands, for a second; he looked at Pete, alarmed, clueless, begging for help — but Pete was distracted, watching the little blond kid chase a butterfly in the grass. The little child nestled his head against Roger’s chest and breathed deeply, his body fully relaxed. Roger relaxed too. He wrapped his arms around the little boy and held him, tentatively at first, and then with quiet desperation.

The butterfly got away. The little blond boy came bounding back to the patio and crash-landed in a pile of blocks, squealing giddily. And they played there a while longer.

The sun was starting to go down, the light deepening from whitish to late-afternoon gold. At last, Pete said:

“Roger. I think it might be time for us to go.”

Roger appeared reluctant to put the little boy down. He stroked the child’s hair. An idea occurred to him:

“Do you think I could just, like…”

“I’m sorry, dude. I wish we could.”

Roger nodded. The kid looked up at him, sensing that something was about to shift. Roger put on a happy face for him.

Then, obedient and trusting, the little boy got up and went back to his game. Arranging the blocks, singing softly. Roger regretfully stood up.

For a second everything seemed finished — everything seemed peaceful. But then, the blond boy, blissfully ignorant, scrambling around gleefully in the blocks, shot his little pink hand out and seized something off the ground and, for no reason at all, immediately popped it into his mouth.

“Hey,” Pete exclaimed. “What did you eat? Spit it out.”

The boy laughed through tightly-closed lips, clambered to his feet, and bolted. Pete chased after him.

“Hey. No. Don’t run with that in your mouth. Stop. Spit it out.”

Roger and the sleepy redheaded child both watched, amused, but Pete was worried: not only for the child’s safety, but what would happen to him in real life if his past self choked to death in this parallel universe? The kid was fast, for such a little thing, but Pete caught up to him and they came to a stumbling halt in a pile of limbs on the patio tiles. The kid thrashed and fought, giggling. It had been a while since Pete’s own two kids were toddlers, but parental instinct took over and with swift, deft hands he plugged a finger in the kid’s mouth and tried to swipe the object out.

“Come on. Spit it out,” Pete told the kid again, frantic, raising his voice to be heard over the maniacal laughter.

At last the kid did. With a popping noise, he blew into the palm of Pete’s hand, and something small and hard and slippery landed there. Pete looked at it.

It was a small yellow Lego.

The child grinned with his little wet mouthful of baby teeth. Pete laughed, too. He held it up so that Roger could see it.

“Hey, look,” he announced. “Found it.”

.

It was time. A door had appeared: in the wall of the house where, if Pete remembered correctly, the sliding glass door to the dining room ought to have been, there was a doorway – an open doorway. Pete looked into it, but saw only blackness.

“Let’s go,” he said. His fist tightened around the slimy Lego. “It’s time to go home.”

The sun was descending quickly now, sinking closer to the foggy dream-horizon, into a blur of pink and orange and red clouds.

Roger knelt down next to the redheaded boy. The boy gazed at him from beneath his long eyelashes, a gaze that trusted completely and concealed nothing.

Innocent.

Stroking his cheek, then resting his big tattooed hand on the soft little face and neck, Roger said something softly to the boy. The boy nodded, believing him. Roger kissed his forehead.

Then he stood up. Pete put an arm around Roger. Meeting his eyes, he nodded toward the door.

Before they stepped through, Pete took one last look behind them. The boys were gone. All was still. There was just the twilit backyard of the home that hadn’t been his for a very long time, and Legs the frog, lying alone, belly up, lost again — and, if he listened closely, the now-distant sound of a child’s laughter; the sound of pure and innocent joy.

.

The living room was exactly as they had left it: still and quiet, the Aztec temple standing three-quarters finished amid a scattering of Legos on the coffee table beneath the overhead light. Dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. The low hum of the AC and, faintly, the white noise machine in Fern’s bedroom.

Roger took the iPhone charger out of his pocket and studied it.

“That was weird,” he said finally.

“Right? Why does weird shit always happen to us? We should’ve just gone to Sheetz.”

Dazed, not sure what else to do, they wandered back to their places at the coffee table. Pete pressed the yellow Lego into place at the top of the temple. It was dry now. Neither of them moved to place any other Legos. They were recalling their earlier conversation. As if they hadn’t even been interrupted, Roger said,

“You know, I think maybe we should just – ”

“Go through with it. Yeah, probably.”

They were quiet for a moment, thinking. Then Roger swore softly under his breath. He was staring at the Legos, looking troubled.

“Hey,” Pete said. “He’s gonna be okay, you know? Look.”

He held up his phone, showing Roger the time. It was nine minutes after midnight.

“You made it. Happy birthday, bro.”

Roger looked from the clock to his friend’s face. He trusted him. A new year had begun. Maybe all was not lost, not forever; maybe it was not too late, even now. There was much to do, and although time was running out, it wasn’t up yet. He smiled.

.