I'm a uniter, not a divider. That means when it comes time to sew up your chest cavity, we use stitches as opposed to opening it up.

I was fine-tuning the angle of the single candle on Eloise's tiny birthday cake when the phone chirped.

It was Carlos from the lobby.

"Two people here to see you, Mr Forbers."

"It's Ellie's birthday today and—"

"I think you want to see these people, Mr Forbers. There was silence on the line except for a distant sound of cabs honking at each other. "Cops," he added in a murmur.

I sucked in my breath. Like all law-abiding citizens, as soon as I come into contact with cops on official business I start scouring my memory just in case I'd done something wrong and forgotten about it. Whatever it is, it's all my fault.

"Okay, send them up, Carlos. Please."

The door buzzed a couple of minutes later. By then I'd taken off my candy-striped apron and draped it over the back of a kitchen chair. Jennifer and I had made a sort-of-bet I couldn't make the cake from scratch rather than a packet. You have no idea how much mess a man can create when he's producing a birthday cake no larger than three cupcakes joined at the hip. Powdered sugar, flour and raisins lay like the geographical features of an architectural model around a milk-spill lake in the middle of the kitchen table.

"Mr Forbes?"

"Forbers. That's me."

"Mr Derek, ah, Forbers?"

I nodded, glancing blindly at the badges they held up in front of them.

"Mind if we come in?"

"Feel free. What's this all about? A drink? Or are you on . . .?"

There were two of them, as Carlos had said: a man and a woman. The woman was a pretty if slightly hard-faced Asiatic, her black hair tied back in a pony tail, and seemed to be the one in charge. Her name was something that sounded a bit like Toshiba but wasn't. The man was older, thin-haired, and had lines on his face people get when they've resigned themselves to just working out their time. His name I forget entirely.

They sat on the couch. I sat in an armchair opposite. A jingly, music-box version of "Happy Birthday to You" played on an endless loop in the background.

"We have bad news for you, Mr Forbers."

I don't remember very much of the conversation after that.

"Derek, I can't work with you if you continually refuse to work with me."

I was on my third psychotherapist and this one was having no more success than her predecessors. At least Dr Thisbee was prettier than the other two – who had been, respectively, all goatee beard and bow tie and baldingness (Dr Petersen), and the original Mr No-Nonsense Efficiency (Dr Kolan, whom I mentally referred to as Dr Kolanoscopy, hearing the nickname in Jennifer's voice) – but that was about the only difference. So far all she'd managed to reveal to me about my mental state was that, even though the only woman who occupied my mind was Jennifer, to the exclusion of all others, I still in my masculine fashion registered attractive females, scoping out and judging their faces, figures and rears, checking for rings, then locking away the details in my secret fantasy closet, all without any conscious volition. I'd done the same for Officer Sounds-Like-Toshiba, back on Ellie's birthday. There was an infidelity robot inside my skull. This was not something I was willing to confess to Dr Call-Me-Monica Thisbee, whose own butt hadn't escaped surveillance. Perhaps it was my lack of confession that was getting in the way of her being able to help me. I doubted it.

"This is hard for me," I said numbly to the ceiling of her office.

"Of course it is. Some fundamentalist maniac saw your wife wasn't wearing a wedding ring so he pushed her and your infant daughter onto a subway line to rid the world of a sin-laden, ungodly unmarried mother – stands to reason you're finding it hard to adjust, Derek."

"That's not what it's all about."

"You haven't told me what 'it's all about'."

In a curious way it was rewarding to hear the tone of exasperation entering her voice. Not for the first time. I'd been seeing her for three months now, twice a week, two hundred bucks per hour-long session, all paid for by the unknowing shareholders of Forbers & Daniels, and between us, on what Thisbee called "our great voyage of discovery together", we'd discovered precisely nothing except that I was an uncommunicative bastard, as I'm sure she'd noted dutifully a hundred times or more. There was little else for her to note, after all.

"I'm coping," I said. The ceiling was tasteful grey with a slight tan tinge that suggested Thisbee lit up occasionally when there weren't any patients around. I could have done with a cigarette myself, right now, except there were NO SMOKING signs.

"You don't seem to be, Derek."

"I'm getting from day to day. I'm functioning okay at the office."

Forbers & Daniels was at the boring end of legal work. We saw wills through probate. We negotiated contracts for property purchases. That sort of thing. We had fifteen partners doing it and, since this was Manhattan, Pete Daniels and I made a lot of money out of it.

"You're obviously not, Derek. Functioning okay at the office, I mean. Otherwise you wouldn't be here, would you?"

"It was insisted upon."

In other words, Pete had insisted upon it. He'd taken one look at my face when I'd finally dragged myself in after . . . after Jennifer's and Ellie's passing, and he'd realized this was something he and his cute wife Leonie (a slightly large but definitely characterful behind was the infidelity robot's verdict) couldn't deal with on their own. So he'd phoned Dr Petersen and made me an appointment, no discussion permitted.

"And for good reason," said Thisbee.

I pulled myself up and sat on the edge of the black-leather couch, facing her.

"I keep telling you, I'm functional. Sure, I'm not the life and soul of the party – never was, anyway. But I'm carrying on with life. I'm struggling through. I'm doing it. I don't need help. I'll never get over Jennifer and Ellie, which is what you seem to want me to do – maybe that's why you hardly ever use their names, just call them my wife and my daughter – but what does it matter? Why should I 'get over' them? They'll be a part of me the rest of my life. And that's what I want them to be."

Thisbee made another of her neat little "bastard" notes on the pad in front of her.

"So you believe."

"It's my life."

"What about revenge?"

"'Revenge'?" For a while I'd wanted personally to string up by the balls their killer and his guru bigot, the self-styled Reverend Charlie Scruton, star of a teevee screen near you, then roast them over a slow fire, but that had passed. I'd spoken out to the New York Post arguing against Nate Kirlian, the killer, getting the death sentence, which was maybe why he was now in a hospital somewhere upstate.

I'd told Thisbee all this – see, Doc, I'm not so uncommunicative after all, even if the "bastard" label still applies – so I couldn't understand why she was asking about it now.

"Not revenge against Kirlian and Scruton," she said. Maybe she was just doodling on the pad, not taking notes. "Revenge against Jennifer and Eloise."

"What?"

"For leaving you, the way they have."

"You've got to be joking."

"No joke, Derek."

She'd touched a nerve, but it was the wrong nerve.

Security arrived while I was still smashing one of the framed diplomas from her wall over the corner of her desk, smashing it until there were only glass on the floor and wood splinters in my palms.

Jennifer had a way, when one or other of us had put off too long the glum trip down to the laundry in the basement, of prancing around the apartment in the morning, waving her offending garment in the air, and singing to the tune of the Moody Blues' "Nights in White Satin":

Yesterday's knickers,

Right here in my hand . . .

I like to think it was during the inevitable aftermath of one of these performances that Eloise came into being.

Later that night I was eating Korean takeaway out of the containers when the phone rang.

"Derek?"

"Pete." My partner in the fecund enterprise Forbers & Daniels.

"You all right?"

"Yes. Why?"

"Dr Thisbee called."

"Oh, her."

"Yes. Her. She's concerned about you."

"Whatever happened to patient–doctor confidentiality?"

"She didn't tell me anything that may've passed between the two of you, Derek. Just she was worried about you, thought maybe someone should keep an eye on you."

"Meaning you."

"That was her implication, yes." Pete gave one of those dry little chuckles of his that showed his mild embarrassment at seeming to have become the focus of attention. "I wondered – that is, me and Leonie wondered – if you'd like to come over this evening, have some dinner."

"I'm already eating."

"I can hear." We laughed together.

"Dang," said Pete mock-seriously. "You know the damned woman only lets me drink when we have company. I was hoping . . ."

"I could come over after, you'd like."

"I'd like."

I glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. Mickey Mouse was telling me it was half-past six. Another reminder of Ellie. "Nine be too late?"

"Nine'd be fine."

I put the phone down. Pete had given me a target. Nine o'clock – well, eight-thirty, because I'd have to leave here about then to start hunting a cab. Eight-thirty. Two hours. I could keep on living 'til then.

Eat, Derek. You need to keep your strength up if you're not going to go to the wall.

The food tasted like sawdust. I ate it.

Once upon a time there were two young lawyers: Pete and Derek, Derek and Pete. They'd come out of law school without having attracted the attention of any of the fashionable legal firms, so they'd set up a practice for themselves above a nails emporium in one of those areas of Newark the tourist brochures ignore: Daniels & Forbers, or, after much debate, Forbers & Daniels because it sounded better. Clients were few enough and far enough between that the two young lawyers were their own secretaries, and much of their practice consisted of staring fixedly at the phone or lurking around in supermarkets hoping someone would slip and fall. This was long before the Poundbury inheritance came along and transformed their fortunes, prompting the move to Manhattan.

Pete had a car. Derek didn't. Pete had a girlfriend. Derek didn't. Pete's girlfriend was called Leonie Franks and she was a math postgraduate at NYU, and Derek found both her and the math rather intimidating, although even then he appreciated her characterful ass.

One cold and rainy evening Pete announced as Forbers & Daniels were closing up the office for the night that, because it was raining so hard, he was going to pick up Leonie in his car from the rail station and give her a lift back to the little shoebox apartment she shared with two cats. He could give Derek a lift as well, if Derek didn't mind the ten- or fifteen-minute wait there was likely to be at the station.

Derek didn't. It was one of those Jersey days when someone up above the clouds seemed to be draining an ocean, or at least a good-sized inland sea, down onto the ground.

They had to wait twenty minutes at the station, long enough for Derek to begin wishing it was okay for him to smoke in Pete's car, and when Leonie finally appeared among the throngs of commuters she had another girl with her, another mathematician with a characterful and in her case definitely not overlarge ass, the two girls clinging together and laughing under a single battered golf umbrella whose stripes seemed in danger of peeling away as the wind whipped at them. Leonie was sure boyfriend Pete wouldn't mind giving her friend Jenny – "Jennifer," the other girl corrected quietly – a lift as well. So Derek moved into the back seat to allow Leonie to sit in the front passenger seat alongside Pete, and Jenny – Jennifer – climbed into the back seat behind the driver, Pete.

Jennifer's face was wet from the rain, which had stuck a slice of her mousy hair to her forehead that she had to keep pushing back to stop it getting in her eye. She wore pale blue jeans with a designer hole cut at one of the knees, the left in point of fact, and a bright red jacket that was supposed to be weatherproof but wasn't. As the lovers exchanged the customary sweet welcoming nothings in the front, Derek and Jennifer, averting their gazes appropriately, made small conversation in the back.

She had very blue eyes, and she was good at rolling them as we tried not to listen to the worst of the slush drifting over the seat-backs.

I fell in love with her like that. I fell for her so hard and so suddenly I resolved to burn my entire Penthouse collection the moment I got home.

What was surprising to both of us was that she found herself moderately interested in me.

It was a cold night as well as a wet one, and Pete suggested we stop for a drink somewhere. So we did.

At a place called Murphy's Irish Bar where the only beers on offer were Bud and Millers, and where the barman looked at Leonie blankly when she asked him for an Old Bushmills. Jennifer agreed, while the other two canoodled, that yes, maybe, oh all right then, I could see her again.

When I got to Pete's and Leonie's apartment down in the Village – a big loft that had once been the top of a warehouse – it was to discover Pete had decided to make a Baked Alaska. While he whistled, hummed, sang and swore in the kitchen, Leonie and I settled down in the living-room with the first of the bottles of red wine she'd opened. Though the label said Goliath and showed a picture of a rooster that had apparently been famous for reaching a weight of forty-seven pounds, the wine was surprisingly drinkable.

I said so.

"This is the Chardonnay," Leonie told me. "The Pinot Noir's not as good. Pete and I bought a bottle of the Chardonnay a couple years ago because we liked the label and because it was fairly cheap, and we've been getting it ever since."

We made talk like that for a few minutes, just as if I hadn't smashed one of Dr Thisbee's framed diplomas to smithereens. No one had said anything about the cuts on my hands.

Then Leonie's face lost that gloss of the good hostess. She leaned forward, looking at me intently over the low walnut coffee table.

"Pete's told me what happened today."

"No privacy, is there?" Reaching for my glass, I kept my voice light, but Leonie knew me well enough to hear the complaint.

She reached across and put a hand on my knee.

"Hey, Derek, we're family, remember?"

I shrugged. "Guess so."

"You're stuck with us, okay?"

"I know. But that means you're stuck with—"

"'Xactly."

A funny little silence, half tense, half fond. I looked into the top of my wine glass at the red meniscus there. Her hand on my knee was still. I knew she was staring at my face, but for a minute or two I didn't want to meet her eyes. I'd never told Leonie that every time I saw her or heard her voice it reminded me of the rainy night when all my perspectives had changed, that it made things difficult for me. Whenever she laughed or spoke it was Jennifer's laughter I heard, Jennifer's voice.

Finally I raised my gaze.

She squeezed my knee, hard, then removed the hand. "Now we've got that straight, bubster, it's time we talked properly – time you talked properly."

"A couple more glasses of this stuff and I won't be able to."

"Funny joke."

"Thanks."

"You know Thisbee's trying to help you."

"That's what she gets paid for."

"More than that. She didn't have to phone Pete this afternoon."

"Breach of professional ethics."

"Maybe."

"I'm embarrassed, Leonie."

"I can see. But Thisbee – Monica – she really does actually care about you, your welfare. Otherwise she'd not have called Pete."

I nodded. I didn't feel one way or the other about whether the shrink was good or bad at her job, interested in me or bored. The only reason I'd gone to see her and her predecessors was I'd been told to. I reached automatically for the pack of cigarettes in my pocket, then remembered Leonie had given up smoking a couple of years ago so it'd be cruel of me to light up in front of her.

"Go ahead," she said.

"No, really . . ." But I pulled the pack out anyway. Leonie got up and fetched a very clean ashtray from somewhere. Pete was singing obscenely in the kitchen about a village blacksmith.

Leonie changed the subject abruptly, the way she did. "It's Eloise's birthday in seven weeks, Derek." She glanced at her watch as if it'd show her the days ticking away.

I stood my lighter carefully upright on the coffee table, the first-placed monolith of a tiny Stonehenge. "Yes."

"What're you planning to do?"

Pete and Leonie, without allowing me any room for debate, had taken over my life through the Christmas period. Realizing how dreadful my first Christmas without Jennifer and Ellie would be, they'd booked themselves and me on a fortnight's package holiday to Istanbul. Turkey's one of the few countries in that part of the world where Americans are still relatively safe. More important, in Turkey people don't celebrate Christmas. Before that, my two good friends had hauled me to London for the week either side of Thanksgiving.

"I haven't thought yet."

She knew I was dreading not Ellie's birthday, except as a sort of calendric marker, but the anniversary of the day when . . .

"You can come here and tough it out, if you'd like."

"I thought I'd maybe go into the office, treat it like just any other day, hope to face down the devil."

"No chance, Der. I know you better."

"Yeah, well . . ."

"Look, I've something for you." She began digging in her front blouse pocket. "Pete doesn't know about this. Well, he does. But he's not allowed to."

We exchanged grins. Two conspirators together. "That's why he's baking Alaska?"

Leonie smiled back, then turned her attention to her pocket. Whatever she was trying to pull out had got caught in the fabric. "Wait a– shit – got it."

She held out a slightly dog-eared business card. "I've only the one, so if you're interested, copy down the info and let me have it back."

I took the card. There were just two lines of type, in italics and small enough I had to peer to read them. The second line was a phone number – 212, New York City. The top line said just: "We Change Things." No company name, no explanation.

"'We Change Things'," I read aloud, as if Leonie herself might not have seen it. "What in the hell does that mean?"

"What it says. They're expensive, but they're good."

"Good at what?"

"What it is they do."

I took another swig of wine, emptying my glass. "You're not helping me very much here, Leonie."

Without taking her gaze away from my face she reached out for the bottle and gave us both refills.

"Monica Thisbee told Pete she'd done as much for you as she thinks she can – that she's getting nowhere fast. You could just find yourself another shrink, meaning Pete could find another for you and pressure you into going along. That'd make, what, the third? The fourth?"

"Fourth," I said.

"Or you could try these people. Save Pete some hassle."

I turned the card over to see if there was anything on the other side, any clue. There wasn't.

"You still haven't told me—"

"I'm getting there. Did you notice anything odd about April seventeen this year, and last year, and the year before . . .?"

I had a sip of wine, thinking back. I'd better go a bit easy on the wine. Pete and Leonie had a spare room I was always, they said, welcome to use, and I even kept a change of shirt and underwear here, but I wanted to get home tonight. I'd left the remains of my Korean meal all over the kitchen counter. Roaches. Yuk.

"I'm sorry. Should I have?"

"Seven years ago, April seventeenth. That was the day . . ." Now it was her turn to concentrate on the Chardonnay. "I still don't like even thinking about it."

Suddenly I knew what she was talking about. One of the sorrows of Pete's and Leonie's life was she couldn't have kids. To be honest, I don't think it affected Pete all that much, but it had devastated Leonie when her solitary pregnancy had gone horribly wrong: the doctors had saved her life, but they hadn't been able to save the seven-month baby boy inside her. And they hadn't been able to save her ability to have more children. This had all happened nearabouts Easter, I could recall, but not the day or the year.

"Was that when you lost the baby?"

She nodded, her mouth a tight line, tears close.

I moved around the table and sat down beside her, pulled her close to me. She didn't start crying, but I could feel her shoulders jerking as the sobs tried to escape.

"I'm so sorry, Leonie." Trite words, but she knew what I meant.

I'd once or twice asked Pete why they didn't adopt. He'd told me that maybe one day they would, but for the moment even just the idea hurt Leonie too much. While she'd remained in hospital, Pete and I, fueling ourselves with Famous Grouse, had shared the gloomy task of demolishing the spanky-new nursery, with me taking the toys and the crib off to charity thrift shops while he stripped down the wallpaper and tore up the carpet.

"I can live with it," she said finally, moving herself a little apart from me. "Every day of the year, I can live with it." She blew out a long breath. "Except that day. The first year, Pete stayed home and tried to get me through it as best he could, but it was a nightmare for both of us. Everything came rushing back in, even rawer than the real thing. Strange." She reached out and stubbed my cigarette, which had been burning down to the filter in her ashtray. "I was climbing the walls, I was threatening to jump out the window or cut my wrists in the bath. Poor Pete."

"Poor you."

Leonie cocked her head to one side. "You're right. Poor me, too. Now, if you'll only stop hitting on me . . ."

We laughed thinly. I went back to my own side of the coffee table, lit up another cigarette.

"The next morning – well, Pete had knocked me out finally with gin but hadn't dared go to sleep himself in case I woke up in the night and did something stupid. We vowed we weren't ever going to let this happen again."

"You should have told me. I could have . . ."

I stopped. There probably wasn't anything I could

have done. It struck me Leonie and Pete were far better friends to me than I was to them.

"Right." For a moment it was as if she was commenting on my thoughts, not what I'd said. "Christmas and Thanksgiving you can avoid – there are ways of getting around them, away from them. But April seventeen? Escape isn't possible. Wherever you go, April seventeen is April seventeen."

"China?" I said stupidly. "Isn't the calendar different there?"

"Oh, come off it, Der. Travelers take their own calendar with them wherever they go, otherwise they never catch their flight home. And it's going to be the same in seven weeks, when Eloise's birthday comes round."

"But you did find a way of escaping the anniversary of . . ."

She pointed at the card, which I'd dropped on the table by the ashtray.

"They did it for me. I'm not going to tell you any more. You want their help, phone them, go see them."

I turned the card with a finger so those irritating little italic words and numbers were facing me again. "These people aren't strictly legal, are they? That's why Pete's not supposed to know about them. Professional code and all that."

"We don't know if they're legal. We haven't asked too closely. We don't want to find out they're not. They certainly cost enough to be breaking every law in the book." She looked at me, lips showing impatience. "Oh, come on, Derek. You can afford it, for God's sake. Just give them a try, Scrooge. You can afford the phone call, at least."

"I guess I can."

I pulled out my diary and a pen, copied down the number from the card.

"Promise me?"

"I'd promise you anything, Leonie."

"Tomorrow?"

"Okay."

"Tomorrow morning?"

"Okay!"

"As soon as your hangover's gone down enough?"

"What hangover?"

"Drink up. Have another. You're staying here with us tonight. That way I can supervise you on the phone when your hands have stopped shaking."

"I really think I . . ."

Pete, with perfect timing, stuck his head round the kitchen door. "You two lovebirds ready to eat yet? I'm not sure I've baked Alaska, but I think I've done for half of New Jersey and I'm damn' certain I've baked a thumb and two fingers. Not since the devastation of the Western Front have scenes like this, etcetera."

On second thoughts, fuck the roaches.

Jennifer did the New York Times crossword puzzle every day. She was good at it. The mathematical mind, I guess: if you can master numbers and equations, the English language follows along behind. Me, I was always lousy at crosswords. Even so, she'd sometimes ask me for help when she got stuck – then laugh at me. She said my absolute crossword uselessness inspired her to logodaedalic feats she'd otherwise never have been able to achieve. And, just every once in a while, I was able to solve a clue she wasn't.

Well, okay, not exactly every once in a while.

Just once, to be precise.

"Four across, Derek. You see it?"

"It says 'Ieper'. Must be a misprint. Maybe it's supposed to be 'Leper' and they forgot to make the 'l' a capital."

Sunday morning, in bed, her left breast a lot more interesting than any fucking crossword clue. She holds the folded newspaper up so the sunlight from the window falls on it better.

"Der, stop that for a moment, will you?" She squirms half away from me. "No, that's an 'I'. The answer starts with a 'Y' and ends with an 's' and there's an 'r' in the middle."

"Ypres," I say, startling myself.

"What?"

"Ypres. Y-P-R-E-S. Place in Flanders. 'Ypres' is the French spelling. 'Ieper' is the way it's spelled in, oh, I don't know, Flemish or Dutch or Walloon – one of those other languages."

"You sure?"

"They fought like hell over it in the First World War. One of those places where millions of men died in the trenches for half an acre of land no one wanted anyway. You must have heard of it."

"I'm beginning to remember. What I can't understand is how you've ever heard of it."

"Your husband is a man of many arcane abilities. Give me my breast back."

"It's not your breast. It's—"

"Ours."

There was a receptionist, which surprised me. From the address I'd been given on the phone I'd expected the back room of a strip joint, something like that, but instead I'd found a small, recently painted door between a grocer and one of those stores where everything costs 99¢-plus-tax. The door was unmarked, except for the number, as befitted a company – if it was even a company – that, so far as I knew, had no name. It was a hot day, and the wind coming in off the Atlantic Ocean smelled of gasoline. I pressed the bell, a buzzer sounded, I pushed through and then climbed a flight of stairs – carpeted, no less! – to find myself in this little office where an elegantly dressed and perfectly presented (Nice little breasts, lovely button nose, wish she'd stand up and turn around, whispered the infidelity robot) blonde welcomed me with a smile.

"Ms Prestantra will be with you shortly. She's with another client right now."

The person I'd spoken to on the phone had identified herself – warily, and well into the conversation – as Kamaria Prestantra. I'd been unable to guess her accent. Because my call had gotten directly through, I'd assumed this was a one-woman band. Clearly I'd been wrong.

I sat on a little overstuffed black leatherette couch and felt as if I were in a dentist's waiting room. There were the same well thumbed magazines I didn't want to read. No, not quite the same magazines. In place of the large-print Reader's Digests and the three-year-old edition of Newsweek there were relatively recent copies of New Scientist, Science, Scientific American, even New England Journal of Medicine. All the more surprising, then, the well-thumbedness. In the background, so quiet that the sound might have been leaking through the wall from the building next door, there was a Juana Molina album playing, its deceptive simplicity hypnotic.

The receptionist's "shortly" turned out to be close to twenty minutes, and I was beginning to wonder if the receptionist herself was Prestantra, playing some unknown game with me, observing me as she went through a charade of typing things sporadically into the computer in front of her. Then a door opened and a middle-aged black woman (must have been a knockout twenty years ago and I still wouldn't say no) emerged.

"Kamaria Prestantra?"

"None other. You must be Mr Forbers."

"How do you do."

We shook hands. So formal. For once the infidelity robot had got it wrong. Kamaria Prestantra still was a knockout. She reminded me of one of those African busts you see occasionally in antique stores, carved out of ebony. I realized most of the impression of middle-agedness I'd gotten had been her clothing – knee-length suit in dark-green tweed – rather than the woman herself.

She led me into a small, sparsely furnished office. I was becoming convinced I was wasting my time, that I'd have been better off back at my own desk in my own office at Forbers & Daniels, putting the final touches to the lease for the new Ladybug store at the base of the Empire State. Prestantra's desk seemed to be empty except for an old-fashioned black telephone and an open laptop computer hooked up to an oversized LCD monitor. No pictures on the plain lime-green walls. The single window looked out across a narrow yard to a solid face of dirty red brick. It was as if every effort had been made to depersonalize the place.

Of the client who'd been with her there was no sign. There must be some back door out of the place I'd not noticed.

Sitting on an upright plastic chair I said, "I was given your details by Leo—"

Prestantra raised a hand to silence me. "No names here, please. Confidentiality's our watchword and all."

"I have your name."

She smiled. "You have my first name."

I was startled. "So you're not a Prestantra?"

"No."

Everyone knows of the Prestantra family, of course. Hearing the name on the phone, I'd assumed she was yet another scion of that many-scioned tree.

"But your first name's real?"

Another smile. "For all you know, yes."

"I could have given a false name on the phone, too."

"You could indeed. But for the moment I'll carry on calling you Mr Forbers."

"Derek."

"Derek, okay. This puter" – she tapped the top of the monitor lightly – "doesn't know either of your names. It just knows you as a string of zeroes and ones. When we've done talking, I'll get it to print out a strip with that data on it, and after that there'll be nobody, not even me, that knows who you are except this computer when you give it your card to read."

"And if I lose the card?"

"Alternatively, we can arrange for you to have a subdermal implantation of the information."

"I'll just concentrate on not losing the card."

Prestantra – I still thought of her as that, even though it wasn't her name – Prestantra smiled again, laying her forearms flat on the desk, as if to say this was the answer she generally got and she'd expected no other.

"Tell me what it is you want to stop existing," she said easily.

So I told her about Jennifer and Ellie, and in turn she told me what it was she could do about it.

Cooking with Jennifer in the kitchen – and I could never keep her out – was always a nightmare: she'd persist in being "helpful", chipping in with suggestions of how I could do things better, tidying away stuff I hadn't finished with yet, standing directly in my way when I was trying to hurry hot pans from one place to another, and more. Eventually I'd given up trying, and left most of the cooking to her. My own culinary specialties remained sandwiches and takeaway.

She always cooked a special meal on birthdays. A year or two before Ellie announced her imminent presence I was sitting in the armchair by the window, catching the last of the daylight to read the New York Times, wearing nothing because of another of Jennifer's birthday traditions, a Scotch on the side table at my elbow. The Scotch had already been depleted and refilled once, and a second replenishment would soon be due. The world seemed a very good place to be, right then.

A crash from the kitchen, a waft of something burning, a lot of very loud swearing.

"What're you up to in there?" I called muzzily, turning over a page.

"I'm multi fucking tasking!" she yelled.

I almost spilled my whiskey. It was a moment I never let her forget, so that the phrase "I'm multi fucking tasking" became a cliche between us whenever one or other of us screwed something up comprehensively.

Multi-tasking: in effect, using the same piece of time two or three times over before you're done with it.

Prestantra assured me I'd not lose that moment, I'd lose nothing of my memories, even those I wanted to lose. Instead what would go would be the opportunity to make some future memories.

They say the flow of time is like that of a smoothly flowing river.

They say wrong.

Time moves in fits and starts, even though the fits and starts are so infinitesimally separated we normally don't notice they're there.

Built into the way the universe works is the smallest possible quantity of distance – an absolute, rather like the temperature Absolute Zero, or the velocity of light in free space. This distance is called the Planck distance, after the German quantum physicist. The value of the smallest possible quantity of time – the ultimate unit of time – derives immediately from this ultimate unit of distance: it's the time light would take to cross the Planck distance.

The fact that the time dimension is not infinitely divisible – not quite – means time has many of the properties of a wave function. It also means the passage of time can be regarded as composed of particles, in the same way light and for that matter gravity are particulate in nature.

When Prestantra was explaining all this to me, I understood about one word in ten, and that word imperfectly. I'm a lawyer, for god's sake, not a theoretical physicist. I did, however, take notes – indeed, she encouraged me to do so – and afterwards I was able to make enough sense of those notes, in a series of intensive sessions in the New York Public Library, to work out what it was she'd told me. In my later meetings with her she congratulated me, smiling a little ruefully, on my persistence. I explained that my persistence – my near obsession – was because, well, like I said, I was a lawyer, for god's sake, not a theoretical physicist.

I did have the wit to raise a few questions, though.

"I'm not clear on this business of light crossing the Planck distance. That'd imply photons are smaller than the Planck distance. But if the Planck distance is the smallest possible measure of distance, then photons must be bigger than it or it isn't the smallest possible distance at all. Which is right?"

"This," she said, tapping the fingernails of one hand on the desk and gazing out through the grimy window at the grimier brick wall, "is the difficulty with trying to visualize the reality of the micro scale using the tools of the macro scale. We call them 'particles', but they're not anything we'd recognize as particles if we saw them – they're not neat little round pool balls. What do we mean by 'distance' and 'velocity' when we're thinking about things at the quantum level? What, for that matter, do we mean by 'the passage of time' on that scale? What all of these particles are, really, are nuggets of probability, of chance. If you could strip away all their extra properties – the properties that make one a photon, one a graviton, one a time particle, a chronon, whatever – what you'd be left with would be a mass of indistinguishable pieces of chance. It's only the physical laws that were hardwired into this universe from its outset that make those little components of probability manifest themselves as light, or matter, or time."

Even after my visits to the New York Public Library I still couldn't pin that one down. But I suspect that's right and proper. If I'd been able to pin down the precise meaning of what she'd said, then I'd have been misunderstanding it – trying to fit the square peg of fundamental reality into the round hole of my necessarily macro-scale comprehension. Instead, over the years, rather than trying to perform a feat of analytical understanding, I've simply embraced this as my new reality. Once I was able to do that, it all made perfect sense. I went through something like the same process, only much more quickly and easily, when someone at a dinner party, long ago, began talking about black holes. Here's what reality is. Reality doesn't care if you understand it, or if you feel it should be different. Reality's going to carry on being reality, unaffected by what you think. So get your head around it, and work from there.

I expressed this to Prestantra in the form of a gulp.

Turning back from the window, she grinned. "Nasty bastards, these fundamental particles, aren't they? But," she added, the grin fading, "they get even nastier."

I'd heard of tachyons before – the word had turned up in Jennifer's crosswords sometimes. Einstein found nothing could accelerate until it was traveling faster than light. At the same time, though, the Relativity equations indicated there was nothing to stop there being things that always traveled faster than light. Of course, simply because mathematics doesn't forbid something doesn't mean the something actually exists, but it's a strong indicator – especially in the kind of probabilistic universe Prestantra was painting for me. If something can be so, chances are it is – at least if you can get the math to work. So the idea of always-faster-than-light entities – tachyons – wasn't just a wild loony guess, like the moon being made of green cheese or the existence of a god: it was what you could call a good possibility, and certainly something that could be scientifically played with.

Which, of course, scientists did.

What they found out from the mathematics of the "tachyon universe", a universe that mirrors our own and is coexistent with it but seemingly never interacts with it because of that impermeable light-speed barrier, was that, if they existed at all, tachyons follow the arrow of time in the opposite direction from the one we mundane, sub-light-speed particles follow. Put simply, they go backward in time.

"Sort of," said Prestantra. "Like most things put simply, that's such a simplification it's misleading. What tachyons actually do is annul chronons. They cancel them out. The passage of a photon across the Planck space defines a forward chronon. Give that chronon, that time particle, a plus-sign – a 'positive charge', if you like. The passage of a tachyonic particle across the Planck space defines an opposite chronon, a 'negatively charged' one. The two charges cancel out. The chronon no longer exists."

"If it ever did," I said, groping blindly.

She grinned again. "There, Mr Forbers, you're venturing into the grounds of philosophy. When everything's made up of waves or particles – same thing – of probability, what precisely does your statement mean?"

I filed that away as something to be thought about later, and took a different tack. "So what you're saying is tachyons annihilate time?"

"Near enough. Yes."

"Then, if tachyons exist, and someone learns how to manipulate them . . . jeez. You could wipe out whole swathes of human history you didn't happen to like. You could change everything. You could make it so human beings never even happened in the first place!"

"You could. And tachyons do exist. Einstein and his cronies couldn't prove it, but it's been done now. Not just that, but we have the tiger by the tail. We can't manipulate, as you said it, tachyons themselves, but we can tinker with their properties – not individually, of course, but statistically."

"I've seen nothing about this in the New York Times."

"And you won't. You won't even find it in Nature. We – myself and my colleagues – decided not to publish, for exactly the reasons you were talking about. If this technology ever got into the wrong hands . . ."

She waved the rest of the sentence away. She didn't have to explain. The implications were obvious. Terrorist organizations and tyrannies everywhere, not excluding our own government, through which the military–industrial complex was spreading its cancer ever faster, would kill to get hold of the power to alter the flow of events, past and future. You dislike the power of America? Then just blot out the years of the War of Independence. You're a bigot who wants us to go back to a racially structured society? Why, the Civil Rights years are awaiting your attention, vulnerable. You're an unrepentant Stalinist? Who's to say the Berlin Wall ever came down if the time of its doing so has been nullified?

Prestantra read my thoughts. "It's not quite that bad," she said. "You can't do much to influence the past. Sorry, I phrased that badly. It doesn't matter what you do to the past. It's an unforbidden playground. And it's a sea of constant change anyway. The one inviolable moment of time, the single moment that can't be affected by altering the flux of tachyons, is the moment we call the present. If you had a time machine, you could go back and kill your parents – alter the past with a truly personal vengeance – and it wouldn't make any difference at all to the fact that you're sitting here in front of me. Same if you tinkered with tachyons to obliterate the moment of your conception."

Again that dismissive wave of her hand. "Forget about the past. It's over. It's done with. It needn't concern you. What we can usefully do, though, is alter the events of the future."

I shifted uneasily in my chair. "Leo— My friend," I amended, then stopped. Try again: "This is all completely mind-fucking," I said. Not a lawyerly term, and not one I'd normally use in front of a near-stranger, but it'd have to do. "But I can't see how it's relevant to me. I think my friend may have misunderstood my situation when she sent me here. My problem's with the past, you see, and—"

"—the future's going to be all hunky-dory for you?" she completed.

"Well, no, not exactly, but . . ."

"The cause of your unhappiness lies in the past, Mr Forbers, and there's not anything we can do about that. You're right. But the suffering itself? That's something that's with you now, and will be for many years. Unless you change the parameters."

She gave a guilty little smile at the cliché.

I didn't know what she was talking about.

Seeing my confusion, she nodded, then explained.

All of the truly fundamental particles, from quarks to chronons, might seem to be so, well, fundamental that they couldn't possibly be anything other than featureless. Instead, though, they have properties. Quarks have properties that physicists call things like 'charm' and 'color', even though those properties bear no resemblance at all to either charm or color. (Are the properties themselves particles? I wondered, but didn't ask aloud. If they are, then there are particles more fundamental than the most fundamental particles . . . That can't be right . . . It's a conundrum I've still never been able to solve.) Prestantra called the three so-far-known properties of chronons "order", "affiliation" and "sense". The first two of these, unlike the case with quarks, bear some relationship to their names. Chronons are ordered particles: they don't just occur randomly. And they have an affiliation to a particular instant along the line of time's passage. If you could somehow pluck a chronon from one place in the shaft of time's arrow and tried to stick it in somewhere else, it just wouldn't fit.

("This is why you can do what you like to the past without it affecting the present," said Prestantra. "By interfering with the past you're shuffling chronons. Any new structure you impose upon the past lasts only so long as you're there to keep that structure in place. Once you return to your home-time – or go anywhere else in the past, for that matter – the structure collapses. And there's a barrier akin to the light-speed barrier that stops you staying in the past long enough to reach the moment when you set off for the past . . .")

The third property, "sense", is a lot harder to understand, in that it doesn't correspond at all to anything we're accustomed to in the macro-scale world. Prestantra was reluctant to explain it to me until she assured herself I wasn't going to load it with any New Agey or happy-clappy religious baggage about cosmic purpose, or some such crap.

There are statistical effects associated with large numbers of chronons – numbers so large they impact on the macro-world. The most obvious is causality: cause precedes effect, not the other way around. It's because of causality that we're able to make sense of our world; and so we tend to think of it as a basic law of the universe, even though it's really just a rule-of-thumb, an expression of the imponderably huge odds that the effect will indeed come after the cause.

At the quantum level, though, causality becomes a very unreliable rule-of-thumb: it's almost commonplace for effects to precede their causes. This is because at such a near-infinitely smaller scale you're dealing with correspondingly lower numbers of chronons. What seems on the large scale like neat, predictable certainty becomes on the small scale a mere likelihood, if that.

Unimaginably large numbers of chronons behave statistically so as to make sense out of the passage of time: we go from past to present to future. On the small scale there's no such guarantee. The property Prestantra called "sense" is the property each chronon has (or does not have) to contribute to this large-scale orderliness, even though there's no such order to the behavior of the individual chronon. It's rather as if a crowd of people were all individually moving in completely random directions yet en masse were moving in orderly fashion, all together, in a single direction – an impossibility for humans but, thanks to the degree of "sense" each time particle has, the way that chronons actually behave.

It's thanks to these three properties that Prestantra was able to do for me what she was able to do for me.

Over the next few days I tried to behave as normally as possible – which meant depressedly, as if dreading the oncoming first anniversary of that horrible day – but, inside, I was feeling this great sense of liberation. I'd paid Prestantra a lot of money, yet every single waking second seemed on its own to have been a bargain at the price.

While talking in Prestantra's nondescript office, I'd remembered Leonie's odd comment about April 17: had I ever noticed anything odd around that date?

When I thought hard about it I discovered that, yes, I had, although it hadn't seemed odd at the time. A couple of years back, one evening Pete had made a heavy play for one of the temp secretaries we'd brought in for the pool during the bad flu epidemic that had rampaged through the city all over the Easter period. He'd insisted on taking me out for a drink with her, even though I'd wanted to get home to Jennifer. After the first beer, I'd realized I was there just as a reassurance to the young woman – she was extremely pretty – that he had no nefarious intent towards her. Beginning to feel somehow pimp-like, I made my excuses and left as soon as I could . . . which presumably was exactly what Pete wanted me to do.

There'd seemed nothing strange about the incident because, that day, it had never occurred to me that Pete might be married. I'd completely "forgotten" about Leonie's existence, even though the pair of them were among my and Jennifer's closest friends.

Jennifer had "forgotten" Leonie too. When I got home and told her what Pete was up to, we laughed about the wild things she and I had both done in our bachelor days. "Some day," Jennifer said, "Pete'll find the right girl and settle down, and it'll be a relief to all of us" – something like that.

The following morning he was a married man, as he had been for years, and there was a sort of fog of uncertainty over my memories, a fog that had remained until now. Even the temp herself seemed unknowing of what had gone on. Assuming Pete had been successful in his efforts, how could it have happened that he went to bed with her and yet she woke up the next morning in (presumably) her own bed while he woke up next to Leonie in the marital bed at home?

Was it April 17 this had happened? Obviously I couldn't remember the exact date.

And, yes, there were other times Pete had seemed unusually different around Easter – just not different enough for me to register it.

The chronons affiliated with Leonie's existence during the period of the earth's orbit that, sidereally determined, corresponded to April 17 had been wiped out.

Each year there was a day, for her a horrific anniversary, that she didn't have to live through.

Every April 17, she didn't exist.

Or, to put it the other way round, April 17 didn't exist for her.

And the same was going to happen to me, come Ellie's birthday.

"Who was that I saw you with?"

"A guy."

"A guy?"

"Just a guy."

"Just a guy?"

She throws her arms up in exasperation. "He moved in a few weeks ago to that vacant apartment on the third floor. His name's Gregor and he's something I don't understand in the music business. We got talking in the market when I was buying asparagus and he was buying, if my memory serves me well, broccoli rabe. Or it might have been kale. We walked back from the market together, that's all. Satisfied?"

"I was only asking, Jennifer."

"You getting jealous in your old age? I suppose I should be flattered . . ."

"Has he hit on you yet?"

"'Yet'?"

"If he's not hit on you yet, he's either gay or he's going to."

"Or he's married."

"He didn't look married."

"How can you tell?"

"By the way they walk. Ouch!"

"No, Derek, my obsessionally possessive love, he hasn't hit on me, and I'd be extremely surprised if he did."

"Why? You're a babe, you like it or not."

"I'm a married babe."

"You don't look like a married babe. I mean, the way you walk is . . . Ouch!"

"

If you must know, we spent most of the time talking about you."

"Me?"

"Yes. I told him about my grumpy, possessive old misogynist husband, who keeps me locked away from the world and beats me in between the times when he uses me as a mere lust object to satisfy his lascivious desires."

"You keep my lascivious desires to yourself, do you hear?"

"I intend to."

Sometimes she smelled faintly of sex even though we hadn't been lovemaking. Just a matter of overactive pheromones, I guess.

What Prestantra hadn't told me, and what I didn't discover until the morning after the rest of the world had lived through Ellie's birthday, was the thrill of missing a day's existence. The evening beforehand I took myself out to the theater for the first time since the day of the tragedy and saw one of those Broadway musicals that Jennifer and I used to enjoy. Afterwards I had a few drinks in a shady little bar near the theater district. I was home and in bed by midnight, and surprised myself by falling asleep.

The dreams I had during the time when there was no time were of the Gara Smood. The Gara Smood was a monstrous creature, and it was threatening Jennifer. More than that I didn't know about it; even about Jennifer I knew, in my dream, very little – in fact, I think she wasn't the Jennifer I'd known in life but another Jennifer, a Jennifer of dreams, a different woman altogether, one I'd only ever seen out of the corner of my eye as she moved like Guinevere across mist-shrouded landscapes, but knew I loved her anyway. She was my belle dame avec merci – no beldame she – and I was her troubadour, her far-off lover. It was my duty as a knightly and nightly knight to protect her from the monster that wished to devour her soul.

With my trusty sword Archangel, which sometimes looked less like a sword than like a rolled-up legal document, I roamed the world in search of the dread creature that hated her so, and at last I found myself upon a darkling plain, where the skies were the monster's great shining eyes and the tangled brambles its wickedly scimitar claws. I sent all others from me, even though there had been no others with me, and held Archangel high aloft in challenge to the beast.

Which slowly turned its head and saw me.

Its eyes lit up the plain like two harvest moons, but a thousand times brighter. The world shook as the Gara Smood began its solitary stampede towards me, me alone with Archangel and my knightly courage and my dreams of Jennifer with her light-brown pubic hair.

As closer it came to me, blotting out the stars and galaxies, I saw it as if it were coming at me through a tunnel, rounding a bend and coming straight at me, screeching and screaming in its mindless wrath, its paws now churning, slowing wheels running on two rails with a third between . . .

In the last moment before I joined battle with the Gara Smood I knew that the Gara Smood was not just my foe but also my implement, as much as Archangel was my implement.

"Memory," said Kamaria Prestantra's voice amid the clashing of wills, "is what we use to alter the course of past time so that it accords with our desires."

I woke from this filled with a crackling energy. Most mornings it takes me a few minutes to pull the various pieces of myself together before I can face the day, but not this one. I threw off the covers, bounded to the window, hauled open the curtains so forcefully I almost pulled them off their runners.

Morning was just creeping into existence over the city. Far below me, the yelling and honking of the motorists had already begun. Frightened by the violent movement, a pigeon that had been drowsing on my windowsill launched itself away in a clatter of wings.

The date on the digital alarm clock by the bedside read 10-4.

October 4.

October 3, Eloise's birthday, had never been.

I would never again have to live through that date.

There seemed to be an electricity flooding through me. I showered in less than a minute, shaved hazardously, threw on clothes while I was still barely dry, gobbled down half a loaf of bread from the fridge without even bothering to spread the slices, drank three or four pints of water because I couldn't face the prospect of waiting for the coffee-maker to heat up, then was out the door and down the hall to the elevator, where I pressed the call button but instead ran down the dozen flights of stairs and past a startled Carlos.

"Mr Forb . . ." His voice trailed behind me as I ricocheted through the revolving doorway out into the street.

I was halfway to the Forbers & Daniels offices when it occurred to me I was acting oddly. People were staring, especially the people I was greeting with happy good-morning-what-a-marvelous-day greetings as if I'd known them all my life.

With an effort, I slowed my stride from its half-run.

This must be what it's like to be on speed.

If I'm not careful, some cop will see me and think that's exactly what I'm on.

Act normal, you fool!

From then on I concentrated on walking more sedately. I probably looked to everyone else on the sidewalk as if still smashed from a heavy night's drinking and using that focused deliberation of movement that's supposed to disguise the fact.

Somehow I got to the office. There could be no question of taking the subway, not with images of the Gara Smood still fresh in my mind, so I walked. Despite my efforts to slow down, I still got there far more quickly than I should have. My thoughts were fizzing and popping. Every face I saw was wonderful, touched by the fingertip of a god. The women were universally beautiful, each a crystal through which shone the prismatic colors of my desire. I fell in love with thousands of them. I fell so in love with thousands of them that it was as if I'd never known what love was before.

None of the office staff or even the associates was there yet when I dropped myself down behind my desk. There was a framed photograph on the polished walnut surface of Jennifer and a nine-month-old Ellie the day I'd insisted on taking my daughter to see a cavalcade of clowns who were performing in Central Park. The clowns had terrified her, and she'd spent much of the time we were there sobbing soundlessly into her mother's shoulder, but she'd known to laugh for the camera, even though there were dirty tear-tracks on her cheeks, and Jennifer was laughing too.

Laughing at me?

Perhaps.

I put the photograph in my top left-hand drawer, among the pencils and pencil-sharpeners I never used, face-down.

I discovered the rush eventually wore off. Most of it was gone by mid-afternoon, though there were still wisps of it hanging about up to a week later.

And it was addictive.

As October wore on and became early November, the voices of my grief and guilt were growing louder and louder, warning me that Thanksgiving was just a few weeks away. Thanksgiving, with all its gathering of families around steaming roast turkey and too much low-grade domestic wine. Ellie had been too young to know what was going on during her first and only Thanksgiving, so Jennifer and I had celebrated it for her. The least I'd been able to do was make sure the wine was good, however much of a break from tradition that might be. Pete and Leonie came round to help us demolish the turkey, and I was glad I'd laid in more wine than Jennifer told me was necessary. Leonie cast the occasional watery glance in the direction of the child, and at the time I didn't appreciate her wistfulness; nor did I connect the dots later, when I overheard her quietly weeping in the bathroom.

Thanksgivings are bad at any time, but they're harshest on the bereaved.

I decided I could do without another one.

There was a new receptionist, as anonymous (butt excepted) as the old one. Kamaria – as she now insisted I call her – seemed unsurprised to see me. I was off the premises fairly quickly, since this time there was of course no need to give me the full indoctrination spiel: I knew what I'd come for, and I bought it. She even gave me a discount: "Compliments of the season, Derek."

Soon after, I bought exhilarating oblivion from the entire solstitial period, from Hanukkah right through until New Year's Day. I'm sure I was the only person in Manhattan, apart perhaps from some of the children, coma patients and a few devout Muslims, to escape a New Year hangover.

Valentine's Day.

Jennifer's birthday, March 7.

St Patrick's Day, the anniversary of my first attempt to lose my virginity. I was at college, and I'd set my heart on Alicia Sullivan, who was dark-haired and sparkle-eyed and slight-figured, and who to my astonishment eventually bent to my entreaties. In her room while her parents were out, my nervousness – complete terror – rendered me so impotent I was practically concave, until suddenly, still an erection-free zone, I ejaculated all over her Sealyham terrier puppy, which had come into the bedroom to watch the proceedings. The experience was traumatizing enough, even though Alicia was full of comfort and sympathy; what left the permanent scars was that soon my performance – or lack of it – was the talk of the college, as was the fact Alicia was boffing the captain of the basketball team.

I didn't explain to Kamaria why I wanted to negate St Patrick's Day from my private calendar. Later, on the way home, I wondered if I should have.

The Easter Weekend.

Mothers' Day.

Fathers' Day.

July 4, although I confess this was a date that held no foreboding associations for me. By now my addiction to the buzz of the time-loss aftermath was becoming more pronounced. "You carry on this way, Derek," said Kamaria, smiling yet somehow serious as well, "and you'll live to the year three thousand!"

Yom Kippur – why not get rid of that, too?

The nonexistent birthday of Ellie came and went, and now the cycle started to repeat. But the days I was missing were no longer coming frequently enough for me, and I began annulling days hither and thither purely on whim. Kamaria's greeting each time I turned up at that little unmarked door down in the Village was becoming less and less whole-hearted.

"You're dodging out of your responsibilities, Derek," she said at last.

"Responsibilities? I don't have any. I don't have anyone to be responsible to."

"To yourself?"

I laughed at her, but stopped as soon as I saw the pain of my laughter on her face.

"If that doesn't mean anything to you," she said, "what about your responsibility to everyone else?" She gestured towards the window as if there weren't bricks there.

"The world's slowly slithering down the side of the shit-heap to Hell," I said soberly. "Why should I want to be any more a part of that than I have to be? What responsibility do I have to the people who're doing this, who're letting it happen? There are times, you know, Kamaria" – I crossed my legs and cupped my knee in my hands, as if I were the presenter on some homely crafts TV show – "there are times when, if I look myself honestly in the face, I'm glad Jennifer and Ellie are dead. They're out of it. They don't have to witness the collapse of it all. It's awful to say it, but—"

"Don't you think you're perhaps one of those people you despise so much?" she said. There was something in her eyes I didn't like to see there. "You know, the ones who're just letting it happen?"

"Maybe so, but I've never pretended to be any better than I am. Like I always say, I'm a lawyer, not a human being. If the species is going down the tubes because everyone else is like me, then down the tubes is probably the place it should go."

"You're ducking out of it more than most."

"What do you mean?"

She slapped the top of her desk in irritation. It looked as if it might collapse. "Derek, have you counted how much of the year you're dodging?"

"No. It's still not enough . . ."

"It's nearly four months of it, and it seems like half the days you still retain you're coming round here buying new excisions. I wasn't really joking when I talked about you living a thousand years. You keep on going like this, you just won't actually have lived any of it."

I looked at her down the length of my nose.

"I pay you, don't I?"

And I paid her many more times after that. She never complained again.

"Seen Gregor recently?"

"'Gregor'?"

"Yes, Gregor. Your record producer, or whatever he is."

"Oh, that Gregor. He's not my anything. He's just a neighbor I bump into occasionally in the street."

"Really?"

"Derek, forget this. You've been overworking. Don't start going all paranoid on me. I've got something to tell you. Sit down – stop pacing around. You've hardly touched your wine."

"Okay, so what's the great news?"

"You ready for this?"

"Ready for what?"

"Derek, we're going to be parents . . ."

I don't remember what day it was, or even what year it was, the last time I went downtown to visit the offices that lay behind a numbered but otherwise featureless door that had been growing steadily shabbier the last few occasions I'd come here. Smog was swirling through the near-deserted streets – smog, and smoke from a stack of tires some methed-out bums were burning a couple of blocks over.

The door had changed today, though. Someone had shattered it off its hinges. It lay flat on the little landing at the bottom of the flight of stairs I'd come to know so well.

Forlorn flags of yellow drooped that had once been scene-of-crime tape.

The twitching of my hands, which normally I was able to keep almost fully under control, abruptly got a whole lot worse.

"Hello?" I called into echoes.

No reply.

Creeping forward like a child on a late-night refrigerator raid, circumventing the prone door, I made my way to the foot of the stairs.

"Hellooooo?" I called again, more quietly.

Still no response.

The stairs creaked underfoot and there was a strong smell of shit, but I got to the top of them anyway.

I sucked in my breath.

The place was a shambles. Everything that could be moved had been taken away or burned or just beaten into splinters. Clearly people had been using the apace as a john, after they'd finished blocking up or just destroying the neat little restroom I remembered using off the reception area. There was blood on the walls, but no way of telling whose it was or how long it had been there.

I shivered, even though it wasn't cold. New York never got cold any longer, just different degrees of too hot.

Trying not to gag, I picked my way across debris and turds to peer into what had been Kamaria's office. The view was much the same in there, although at least I couldn't see any dried-up blood. In a corner was a fused lump of plastic, streaked with dull silver, that I eventually identified as her laptop puter, the puter she'd seemed never to need to replace. I looked toward the window she'd been so fond of glancing out of, even though there'd never been anything else to see through it except the brick wall on the far side of the courtyard. The brick wall was still there, but the glass had been smashed out of the frame.

I couldn't stay there any longer. Over my scores of visits I'd become fond of Kamaria – more than that, though I'd never told her. Likely she forgot me as soon as I was out of her sight. As she'd grown slowly older and I hadn't, she'd become even lovelier than when I'd first met her: not just the loveliness of her face, although that was true too, but the loveliness that glows from within. I'd thought for years I was a disappointment to her. That's no position from which to make a declaration of love, or even just to suggest a drink somewhere.

Not that there were too many safe places these days we could have gone together for a drink.

I clattered back down the stairs, ignoring the protests of the treads beneath my feet. On the sidewalk again, I looked up at the front of the building. There wasn't much to see – never had been, jigsawed in as it had been between the frontages of the grocer shop and the 99¢ store. The grocers was now a gun store, although it didn't look like it ever did any business; the bargain store had closed down years ago, been at once comprehensively looted, and been derelict ever since, even the boards where the window had once been ripped down for fuel.

Someone was coming along the sidewalk toward me. My chest started aching, my breathing got jerky. I clutched hold of the gun in my pocket like it was a talisman. Nowadays you could never be sure of anyone in Manhattan, certainly not here in the Village.

As the man approached he spread his hands to show there was nothing in them. He looked like he'd been dressed out of a dumpster, though I was in no real position to criticize him there. It had been a long time since I'd been able to find any new clothes. I still had the apartment on the Upper East Side, even though the elevator had broken down not long after Carlos died, and nobody had ever gotten around to replacing either elevator or Carlos. There were more complaints about the former than the latter.

"You got a smoke?" said the stranger.

"'Fraid not."

He stopped a few feet away, looking at me keenly. His right eye was a steely blue. On the surface of his left was a cloudy white rind, obscuring even the pupil.

"What're you here for?" he said. The question wasn't aggressive. We were just exchanging courtesies.

I nodded to where the door had been.

"You knew them?" he said.

"I did."

"You better not go asking."

"Like that, is it?"

"Uh-huh. Three, four days ago. Cops everywhere. Pulled that tarty little girl down the stairs by her hair and into the paddy van." Kamaria's latest receptionist. The infidelity robot remembered her. I didn't, much.

"What about the other one?" I said. "The tall black woman?"

My new friend looked around him, as if someone might be listening. Perhaps someone was. The wind was starting to pick up, and we took a step nearer to each other so we could talk in lower voices.

"You know how it is for blacks these days," he said.

I'd been dimly aware, during my snapshots of the changing world, that old atavisms were beginning to resurface, the hatreds and stupidities we'd once dared dream might one day die out forever.

"I know," I said, as if I did.

"Reckon someone warned her 'bout the raid, because I never saw her come out."

I could imagine the scene. A swarm of cops in riot gear and masks – the cops rarely went anywhere in the Village now except in swarms. Perhaps a couple trucks of military to back them up. Watching, a growing mob of street people and other local residents, the noise of jeering and taunting growing louder and louder. Two mobs. Who was to say which was the more barbaric?

My breathing became easier. "You think she might have escaped?"

He nodded. "Hope so. I did very surely like that woman. Hope she wasn't gitmoed. You know, disappeared, like."

I knew what he meant. Who didn't? "Me too."

We grinned at each other, two strangers sharing the one good memory.

"Reckon I'll be on my way now," he said after a little. "You ever run into her, you tell her Stevie-O still thinks of her fondly. She'll know who you mean. Everyone round here knows Stevie-O."

We shook hands with an odd formality, and then he was gone, slouching away along the littered sidewalk until he turned a corner and vanished from sight.

I shifted from one foot to the other, once more gazing up at the building's frontage, wondering why I wasn't following Stevie-O's example. There was nothing here for me.

I began to turn away, then something stopped me, some need for ritual, I guess. I couldn't just leave things like this. I had to offer some sort of a goodbye to Kamaria, even though she wasn't here to have a goodbye said to her. There was no way I was going to go back up to her office, but . . .

Following where my feet took me, I drifted along the sidewalk in the opposite direction from the one Stevie-O had taken.

I saw what I was seeking before I'd consciously started looking for it. Just beyond the next store – GUNS & AM UNIT ON – there was a slit of darkness hardly wider than my shoulders. I peered along it, and saw some shabby grey daylight at the far end. This must be an alley leading to the little courtyard I'd grown vicariously attached to through Kamaria's habit of looking out the window whenever she had something difficult to explain or just, I suppose, didn't want to look at me.

Looking back on it, I realize I was more than usually nuts. Blame it on the fact that I've only ever really loved two women – three, if you count Alicia Sullivan of Sealyham terrier fame. One had rejected me derisively. One was dead, along with my only and infant child. And one, the third and perhaps the most loved of all, had been the dream-Jennifer I'd aspired to protect from the Gara Smood.

Only, in the end, I hadn't protected Kamaria, had I? Any more than I'd been able to protect the real Jennifer. While I was out of existence somewhere, or just occupied with my own concerns, the Gara Smood had descended on Kamaria, wreaking the devastation I'd seen upstairs. I had not succeeded in being her knightly knight and savior.

Perhaps it was this that pushed me into that dark, ominous opening.

. . . as big as harvest moons but a thousand times brighter . . .

And the eyes of the Gara Smood lit my way.

I'd been there a few minutes before I saw her, sprawled and broken and partly chewed by wildlife, half-buried in a pile of rotting mattresses. What I first saw was her hand, miraculously unmolested although the flesh had swollen. As I sidled my way closer, unseen squeaking creatures fleeing from my footfalls, I began to be able to make out her face.

Her eyes, those warm soft eyes I'd adored so much from the far side of the desk, had been stolen. I couldn't bear to look any further.

I gazed up the rear wall of the building. From here I couldn't really see the broken window, but I could picture it well enough I saw it anyway. And again I heard the noise of the two mobs out on the street the day the cops came to take her.

But it wasn't the cops who'd thrown her through that window.

No. She'd done that herself.

A literally incalculable number of years ago she'd said to me: "If this technology ever got into the wrong hands . . ."

At the time neither of us had been truly aware that the wrong hands were those of the people who ruled us. In order to avoid them discovering how to eliminate those bits of time that offended their ideology, she'd somehow destroyed her computer and then, to forestall any possibility of the information being tortured out of her, hurled herself at the bricks . . .

For a moment, as I stood in that filthy little courtyard where Kamaria lay, I wondered why her body was still there. Hadn't anyone seen it, and thought to report it to the authorities so it could be removed?

Then I knew the answer to my own question.

No one had seen the body because everyone was too terrified they might see it.

After a while, I realized that I, likewise, was scared of seeing the wreckage of Kamaria, and so I trudged back to the alley.

Years go by quickly when there are only about seventy days in each of them. I wish I could find a way of reducing those seventy to sixty, and then to fifty, and so on until at last I reached a figure I found tolerable. I know it isn't possible, though, and I try not to think about it too often. Whenever I do, my fingers start twitching uncontrollably, as they are now.

I still battle the Gara Smood every time I don't exist. I've never defeated the monster, and likely I never will. It came stalking out of non-time eventually; its hunting of Kamaria Prestantra was only one of the many cruelties it has inflicted upon the real world. Occasionally someone wounds it – even though that someone is not, alas, me with trusty Archangel, but some other knightly knight – and I know it's getting older, and slower on its feet. Someday the beast may retreat one final time to its lair, never to emerge again.

Maybe I'll be there to see that day. Maybe I won't.