Does the soul remember what the mind has forgotten?

Gradie had a smear of steak sauce and a few leaves of Sam’s salad left on his plate. He reached down for his phone to check the time, and remembered it was at the bottom of the pool. So, he set his plate down on the deck under his chair and poured another drink. As he sat back to watch the sunlight die in the mid-afternoon distance, something hit him in the chest.

“Here, kid,” said Philip. Gradie looked down at what had landed on his lap. It was a wrapped cigar with a red label that said ‘Cuesta-Ray’ and ‘Centro Fino’.

“Try that with the Jameson.”

“Oh god, Philip. Don’t get him started on that shit,” said Celeste.

“We’re gonna be hunting targets in a cloud of smoke,” said Luke.

“That'll work to our advantage, cause they won't be able to get a bead on us,” said Philip. Luke laughed and tried to blow a smoke ring, but only managed an oddly shaped cloud.

“How the fuck do you do that, Lindsey?”

“Like this.” Lindsey was sitting at the edge of the pool with the water up to her knees. She leaned her head back and blew a ring that caught the dappled sunlight. Luke swore and blew another blob of smoke.

“I need a lighter,” said Gradie. Everyone looked at him. Michael's eyes flashed.

“Are you sure you don’t have one?”

“Oh. Right.” Gradie reached into his pocket, and found nothing.

“Shit,” he whispered.

“Damn. I really thought he was gonna do it,” said Luke.

“In the Hardworlds, you have your self’s memory to contend with,” said Michael. “Even if you don’t remember if you had a lighter in your pocket, he does.”

“So how do I change anything then?”

“Overpower him.”

Philip tossed over a torch lighter and then a cutter. Gradie cut the end off of the cigar, tossed the cutter back, then rolled the end of the cigar over the flame.

“You have to start small,” said Michael. “Slowly build up your belief in the malleability of this place.”

Gradie blew on the cigar and watched the cherry blaze to life, then took a draw. Philip was right. It went well with the whiskey.

“Start with this,” Michael took a coin out of his pocket.

“Aw shit. Memories,” Luke said.

“For you maybe. It wasn’t a fucking coin my first time around,” said Philip. Even through the whiskey haze, Gradie could hear the acid in the words.

“Not mine either.” Michael smiled. “But, we have a better understanding of best practices now, so—.” He flipped the coin at Gradie. It struck the armrest, bounced once, then landed perfectly flat on top of it, with barely a quarter of an inch to spare on either side.

“Heads,” said Michael, without looking. It was. Gradie glared at it and drank some more whiskey, had more of the cigar, then went back to the whiskey.

“What am I supposed to do with it?” He asked, when those hadn’t dampened his irritation.

“Make it land on tails,” said Michael.

“Ok,”

“Three times in a row.”

“All right.” He sat up, took the coin in his hand, and looked it over.

“Does being drunk help with this stuff?”

“No,” said Philip and Michael at the same time.

Gradie got the coin over his thumb and forefinger. He imagined it landing on the ground and coming up tails, then flicked his thumb.

It sailed through the sky and clattered down on the tile. He sat up until he could see it.

Heads.

Luke made a ‘waw-waw’ sound.

“I still can’t do it,” said Sam from somewhere behind Gradie.

“You’re not supposed to tell him that!” Philip Laughed.

“Why not?! I still do my job!” Sam yelled.

“I never saw the point of it,” EP said.

“The point,” Michael said, wearily. “Is to remind you that the Hardworlds are responsive. It’s a simple trick you can do at almost any time to prove this isn’t the Real.”

“Oh yeah, but I know I’m not this cool in the Real,” Sam said, dead serious.

“What was your plan, Gradie?” Michael asked.

“I imagined it landing tails.” He knew instantly the words would come back to bite him.

“Remember, don’t think of it as cause and effect,” Michael said. “You don’t imagine something happening to make it happen. You have to exist in a reality where it will happen. It has to be a state of mind, not just a thought.”

“Alright.” Somehow, that made a kind of sense to him, but it didn’t make it feel any less impossible.

“Try it again.” Michael tossed him the quarter.

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“Gimme a sec.”

He blew cigar smoke at the coin and searched for that elusive feeling that anything was possible, that he had stumbled onto the kind of molten reality he had been waiting for all his life. He remembered the voice that had whispered Hardworlder as he held the phone in his hand. How confident it had been in a world beyond this one, and his place in it.

He thought about flying in the Allworld, EPs legs in her black tights, neon eyes and floating doors, riding down the highway with the smoke from his burning life fading in the mirror, and the fact that he was sitting here, in an alternate universe, with a bunch of ‘astral warriors’.

He remembered how sure he had been that he was going to be good at this. How despite the moments of overwhelming confusion and fear, everything Michael had explained to him felt right. How it had all found a place in his mind like he wasn’t learning, but remembering. Anamnesis, it was called, some part of him knew. Was that part of him the self, or the Spirit?

“You’re overthinking it,” said Michael. His voice echoed in another world.

Gradie rolled the coin in his hand, and thought about it landing on heads, shattering his belief in his own Spirit, and throwing him back down to this dull plane of reality, forever.

But Michael was right. It didn’t matter how the coin landed. He would never go back, never again be satisfied with the self, now that the Spirit had risen.

“I give up.”

Philip laughed and someone mumbled something.

“Gradie,” Michael began.

“Fuck you,” Gradie kicked his feet up on the table and felt something roll out of his back pocket. Michael got out half a syllable before being interrupted by the sound of change hitting the concrete. Gradie didn’t look at it, but he couldn’t keep the smile off his face. Somehow, he knew.

“O.K. That’s pretty good,” said Philip. Gradie heard EP shift in her seat to look, then scoff.

“So fucking dramatic.”

“Oh come on!” Sam yelled.

Michael walked over and Gradie finally allowed himself to look down. Three quarters. All tails.

“Good Job,” Michael said dryly. “Normally, you would be asked to have it land on tails another three times, but I think you made your point. Just remember, the coin test is the first one we give because all in all, the Hardworlds don’t give a fuck what side a coin lands on.”

“So, you’re saying it’s no big deal?” Gradie snapped, then glanced at EP. She bit back a smile as Michael sighed.

“It’s important. First steps always are. Without them—”

“Then what—” Gradie was getting sick of Michael’s air that what he and the rest of them did was something Gradie would have to crawl through glass to achieve. Hadn't he found him a fucking day ago? Philip cut him off.

“He’s saying don’t get a big head just cause you pushed some coin flips, and go out on a job and try to dodge bullets.”

“More or less.” Michael smiled.

Gradie finished the whiskey and watched the cigar’s cherry glow orange in the sudden shade of a passing cloud. Despite Philip, the smile was still stuck to his face. A Hardworlder. A master of realities. Downtown’s sprawl caught his eye, and he daydreamed of car chases and gunfights, repelling down skyscrapers, dinner at a high-dollar steak house and paying the check with stolen crisp hundreds…

“Wait. Were the quarters in your pocket the whole time?” Sam said, frowning.

Gradie’s answer died as his mouth opened.

“Uh, I actually don’t remember.”

Philip bent over in laughter.

“But do you remember pushing that— Shut up Philip!” She threw an ice cube at Philip’s head, but he just kept laughing.

“I got change at a gas station near work yesterday that only took cash,” Gradie said, working through it out loud.

“Jesus Christ,” Lindsey said, smiling into her drink.

“You know what I mean! My self!”

“But do you remember if you really did that, or did you push—” Sam said.

“He won’t be able to tell you!” Philip said, recovering somewhat. “If he did push it, his self won’t know, and his Spirit’s too weak to tell the difference.”

“One of those paradoxes I’ve heard tell of,” Luke said with a smile.

Gradie tried to remember if he had realized the quarters were there, or just decided that they were, and got tripped up in his whiskey haze. Michael stood up with a defeated look.

“That’s about enough for today. But one last thing.” He took a piece of paper out of his jacket.

“When you speak to or about another member of the team in the Otherworld, unless you’re in the office or somewhere we’ve told you is secure, you need to call us by our codenames. Here.”

The paper had a list of seven initials with dashes and code names after.

M – Halberd

P – Outlaw eleven

Lu – Mr. MOA

Li – Nomad Nine

C – Bluebonnet

S – Monkey too

“Memorize them, with your spirit. I’ll quiz you on them back in the Otherworld. And come up with your own. Something short. Word and a number is an old standby.” Michael walked around to the counter and opened the mini-fridge.

“What about EP?” Gradie said

“EP is my code name,” she said, like it should be obvious.

“Then what’s your real name?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“Then why—”

“I need to know your real names to find you when we drop in. You don’t need to know mine.”

“What if we drop into different names?”

“That’s impossible, unfortunately,” said Lindsey. “Names and Faces.” She said the second phrase like it was a common expression.

“I’m gonna head back.” Celeste took a bottle of pills out of her purse.

“Y’all have fun. Welcome to the team, Gradie.” She tussled his hair as she strutted by.

“Make sure you take enough!” Philip yelled. She just waved.

“You need to drop that shit, Philip,” said Lindsey. She tossed her ice in the pool and stood up.

“Then you handle it If she wakes up.”

“You didn’t have to handle it last time, you could have—”

“What happens if she wakes up? Will she remember, like—” Gradie trailed off and made a vague motion with one hand, drawing shapes of smoke in the air.

“No,” said Philip. “Her self’ll freak the fuck out. Not know how she got there.”

“Just as our Spirit won’t retain the skills or knowledge from our selves when we return to the Otherworld,” said Michael “Our selves won't remember our Spirit when we leave.”

“So wait,” said Gradie. “When I leave, this me will just be at some strange house, called out of work, cops looking for him, and he won't know why?”

“No phone too,” said Luke.

“Won’t he remember what I did?”

“Maybe,” said Philip. “He might remember it all and wonder what came over him, or just have blacked out, or rationalize it some other way. There’s no normal reaction to this shit.”

“Jesus,” said Gradie. When the thought of all that stilled in his head, another question came to him.

“What about if I die, like on the job? Then what, he’s just dead?”

The wind ruffled the leaves and Celeste’s car beeped as she unlocked it on the other side of the house. Ice clinked in a glass and someone flicked a lighter. Only Michael, at last, dared to break the silence.

“You have to accept that your selves may die. How you make peace with that is up to you. Some say that the self without the spirit is just a shadow anyway,”

“Or that infinity minus one is still infinity, so it doesn’t matter how many yous die, there's still too many,” said Philip.

“Maybe the Hardworlds don’t even exist unless we’re in them,” said Lindsey.

Gradie felt a tension in their words, even through the whiskey haze, that told him this was not the first time they’d had this debate.

“Brain hurty,” said Sam, rubbing her temples. Luke choked on his drink and Philip cackled like a maniac. Gradie thought of his doppelganger waking up miles from anything, with no phone and a hangover, and an arrest warrant for arson. He let his arm hang down and the glass clink on the deck. Now fairly drunk, his mind wandered back to the Otherworld. Somehow, the freckly face of the gas station girl came to him.

“Hey, when we first met, I was already in a Hardworld, right? How does that work?”

Even in his drunken state, he noticed a few of the team members cast uneasy glances at each other.

“Most people slip into the Otherworld the first time,” Michael said from the counter. “You just happened to slip into a Hardworld instead.”

“So—” Gradie started, but Philip interrupted.

“You asking if you’re some Hardworlder savant because you followed Michael back to the Otherworld like a dog?”

“Yeah.” Gradie smiled at him. The whiskey was really getting to work now.

“Guess we’ll find out when you get shot at,” Philip said.

Bugs and birds made a clamor in the quiet. Gradie traced the lines on the leaves and dared his mind to prove he was dreaming.

“Now what?” he said to no one.

“Now we get shitty and fuck around till tomorrow,” said Luke. “Wanna try and shoot EP’s drone?”

“What are we betting this time?” EP said.

“How about…”

“No live rounds!” Lindsey reminded him.

“Does a .22 count?”

“I don’t know. Would you let me shoot you with one?”

Luke smiled at Gradie.

“I’ll get the paintball gun.”