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And it’s higher when he speaks again. Scored around the edges, and starting to fracture in the middle. “I have to now hear you say you love me in my head, and know you don’t mean me. That you will never again mean me. That someone else could succeed where I have failed a thousand times, someone I was and can never go back to,” he says, at which point I take a step forward.

I can’t speak, I can’t scoff—but maybe, I think, I could put a hand over his mouth. Stop him saying all these nonsensical things, these lies—they must be lies. He doesn’t want my love, that’s ridiculous, it’s absurd, it cannot be possible.

But when I reach up my hand, he just seems to break.

His already wavering expression folds in on itself; that strange shine to his eyes overflows. He has to put a hand over them—though it doesn’t matter that he does. I can hear his tears in his voice when he suddenly begs me. “Come away from the edge, come away. I can’t even ask you to come away, you won’t listen, you won’t hear me. I can’t make myself good enough to have you hear me,” he says.

But the thing is, I do. Even though he speaks in another language, I do.

I can understand what he’s saying somehow. It just comes over me in a wave, so unstoppable that I jerk as though struck. I stumble back, my free hand covering the one I had reached for him with. And I want to rage once I do.

Only I can feel said rage sinking down inside me.

It’s slipping out of my grasp, no matter how hard I try to hang on.

Something is really wrong here, I think, and instead of anger, a kind of dazed confusion comes out of me. Like I’m waking up from a long dream. “How do I know what that means?” I ask, and god, the despairing look on his face.

“Because you used to know. A long, long time ago.”

“So I’m older, then. Older than a few hundred years.”

“Of course you are.”

“Yet you’ve never told me.”

“You never care if I do. You can’t see past this.”

“Past what, Halsten, past what? What are you talking about?” I ask, but there’s no insistence in my voice. It sounds like it’s coming from very far away somehow. And it gets farther when he replies.

“How rotten I am, how terrible, how monstrous, how unworthy. I try every time to be worthy and it just never matters. It never works, you never believe me. You didn’t believe me over and over, oh so many times, until really it all just became a game of trying to keep you alive. God, it was always so hard to keep you alive. You always think I’m trying to kill you—though I suppose anyone would, if something so cold and terrible were trying to save them. Even in my best moments, it must have seemed so strange to you. To someone who doesn’t even remember me. It was only ever me who remembered you,” he says, each word getting quieter and quieter as he goes. While to me it feels like they get louder. It feels like he’s roaring by the end.

The inside of my head is ablaze.

Yet all I can say is:

“This can’t be. You can’t be. You’re lying.”

“You always say that.”

“But you have to be.”

“You say that, too.”

“I would be convinced that you wanted to help me if you were convincing when you did,” I finally burst out with, thinking of the filing cabinet, the tree, the hall of mirrors, the lighthouse.

Then finally: how foggy all my deaths have always seemed to me.

How many times he’s said, I didn’t do that, I didn’t strangle you, I didn’t hurt you. The missing words sometimes. The way things get all turned around and suddenly seem like something else. In my head he said he was going to turn me into his own personal percussion section—but did he really?

I don’t know, and he’s no help to me. He’s still talking himself through all of this. “That’s a new one. Just as understandable as the rest, though. I mean, there are so many times I was clumsy or too late or so easily misconstrued. I can see why you always think I throw you into trees and off buildings and into lakes—I’m somehow always the only one left around after some beast has done the deed.”

He sighs, exasperated almost. Like this is just another Tuesday.

But it isn’t for me. It can’t be for me. I’m thinking of the tree, the path below it, whatever happened before I was launched—I don’t remember his hands on me. In fact I’m suddenly struggling to ever remember his hands on me. The stairwell up to my apartment, when he went to grab me, when he bared his fangs and I thought of Jaws. Was that real, or did I just imagine it? Did I imagine all of this? The dismembered limbs, the hall of mirrors, the lighthouse, the fucking filing cabinet. I recall it being pushed, I recall it crushing me.

Do I remember him doing it?

I’m racking my brain, but suddenly it’s not coming.