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depression or psychosis, keep him in for further observation, or cut him loose and let him sink or swim.
    “Christ, Guy, I'm not going to kill myself,” he said. “I'd rather live just to spite the fuckers. Flight or fight? Fuck, I'm going to light fires under their fucking feet.”
    “I started to remember it all at the funeral,” says Jack. “I was thinking about how we first met. It was in this Social Studies class. We just clicked, like we'd known each other all our lives. At the funeral I started to remember that we
had. All
our lives.”
    He sits in one of the leather armchairs I have positioned on either side of thewindow in my office, facing each other for just such conversations, just such confessions. It's our third or fourth meeting. Sorry, I find it hard to keep a straight line to my thoughts these days.
    “We were like children playing in the Illusion Fields,” he continues. “Let's pretend. One day we'd be soldiers in the First World War—Captain ‘Mad’ Jack Carter, Private Thomas Messenger. Another day, I'd be a seraphim sent to hunt him down across this weird graey version of Amorica. We'd lie in bed together and go to sleep in this world, only to wake up in a town called Endhaven, among black-suited refugees from a nanotech apocalypse. We've been shepherds in Arcadia and rent boys on the streets of Sodom, Doc. I've crossed deserts wider than the world because he dared me. I've led armies to destruction because he was in danger. I remembered it all—Christ, it was like being born again—as I was standing there at his funeral, listening to the Minister spout his bullshit. We've lived a million lives and always ended up together, whatever fold of the Vellum we were in.”
    What he's describing is a psychotic break, a retreat from the horror of reality into elaborate fantasies of eternity.
    “And in these other…folds,” I say, “Puck didn't die?”
    “Oh, no,” says Jack. “He always dies. You should know that, Reynard. You should remember too.”
THE UNDECIDED WORLD
    It's three in the morning and I should be in bed, but I've always been a night owl, so instead I'm getting out of my car and crunching through the snow into the all-night convenience store to buy a pack of cigarettes I could probably wait until tomorrow morning for. Melissa's on duty again and I smile.
    “Hi, Melissa.”
    She's in her early twenties, drop-dead gorgeous and a total flirt for my accent. First time I came in, she was chatting to a friend when I asked her if they stocked Regals. She started interrogating me about where I was from, what I was doing here, how long I was staying, charmingly excited by this stranger in a strange land.
    “Say my name,” she said finally.
    “Melissa?” I said, confused.
    “Say it again.”
    “Melissa?”
    “Gosh, it sure sounds so much better the way you say it than the folks round here.”
    Outside, I tap a cigarette out of the packet and light it before I slip back into the driver's seat of my car, pull the door shut, blow out a billow of smoke. I reach up to adjust the rearview mirror and, leaning into it, I see my own reflection. I don't have any horns. I don't have to touch my shoulders to know that my wings are also absent. I have a passing notion that there's something wrong about this—should I be disturbed?—but then I realize that, of course, of course, this is just what Jack was telling me about. We all live simultaneously in a myriad of folds, those on Aerth dreaming of Havens for their dead, those in the Havens dreaming of Aerths for those alive. So, then, there's nothing really strange about the cat's eyes looking back at me from the rearview mirror; it all makes perfect sense.
    The world just hasn't decided which reality it wants to be.
    The next morning, as I potter through my daily ritual of Earl Grey and waffles with maple syrup, I'll notice the pack of cigarettes on the kitchen table and remember the dream and the normality that inspired it. I'll remember