I screamed like that. Once.

The sound was fused with one of those frozen memories from my life I don’t think will ever fade or become unreliable. Each time I approached it in my mind, it refused to take on those softened nostalgic sepia hues that eventually oozed over every other recollection of mine, even those that are also tragic. It remained clinically horrific.

I was nineteen. My brother Lionel was six years older, but not the mature wiser brother I would have liked. I guess that’s unfair. He was who he was.

For as long as I could remember, it was only him and me and Aunt Marta. But Lionel wanted independence, and he tried to make a place for himself in the world on his own terms. He mostly failed. After he was kicked out of the army—for what, I never learned—he drifted from various construction jobs and lived out of a motel on the southside.

I went over one evening to try and convince him to move back home.

He didn’t answer when I knocked. I thought he couldn’t hear me over the TV, which played so loud I could tell it was one of Lionel’s favorite nature shows. The door was unlocked, so I let myself in.

I understood immediately he was dead. And had been so for several hours. He was on his back in bed, but it was the way he was lying. No one sleeps like that. I noticed the syringe placed on the bedside table. It wasn’t hanging out of his arm like in a movie I saw once. I am glad that detail wasn’t allowed into my unchanging mental tableaux.

My reaction still seemed so strange. I closed the door behind me. Turned off the TV. I looked around for a glass to pour some water in—I suddenly felt incredible thirsty. And then the enormity of it all hit. Blood rushed from my head and I dropped to the floor. I forced myself to sit up and used my feet to shove myself so my back was supported by the wall.

That was when I screamed. Not in fear. Not in surprise. It made sense, what he had done. He had been looking for a way out for years. A way out from life.

I screamed in rage—how dare he! And from a sort of deep sorrow you knew that you’d never be able to share.

That heavy scream of mine that started out so clear and ended strangled and ragged, I carried it to this day. I knew exactly how loud it got and how long it lasted.

That scream from Susan today sounded like the tormented echo of mine from six years ago. The echo finally returning.

Susan was gone, now. And that day in the motel room, that was much further in the past. But both of those screams still hung in the air as Sy ended the music and switched off the applause sign, the show now over.

Only a moment earlier, when I was in Susan’s head, she had almost climbed her way out of the fog. Her memory had begun to firm up, thicken around the edges. She had this notion that she was in heaven and would soon see her family. But when the door was being slammed shut on her, she looked down and saw that awful sight. A horror came over her that she could not even begin to process.

When I said that bit about a deep sorrow I would never be able to share, well, there was so much in the crackling, splintering turmoil careening through Susan’s brain—the numb throbbing panic and rage—that I was pretty sure she could have appreciate my experience from back then. Susan’s scream—as had my own—wasn’t just surprise, fear, and revulsion from encountering unexpected death. It, too, had been attached to something so much greater. With Susan—and I knew this to be fact—the grotesque sight at her feet of a body broken by violence, tripped a switch in her brain that made her aware in an instant that she, too had died. The crush of grief that woman felt for the loss of her own life, that was something I had not prepared myself for.

I swayed, a bit, and I stepped closer to one of the contestant chairs to steady myself.

“Hey,” Michael said to no one in particular. He looked around. “What is that stench?”

As Michael walked away, waving his hands at the air indignantly, I stepped back to Door Number One. I reached out. My fingertips made contact with the knob.

“No!” Saligia hissed from across the stage. That word, spoken so quietly, I knew only I could hear it. And yet I flinched as if it were a shout.

I looked around the studio. The tech people were shutting down their equipment. Sy had removed his new toupee and held it aloft to better admire its fluff and color. August had got to his feet along with the rest of the audience. He was the only one not looking at Valerie and Ed for instruction. His eyes were fastened on me.

Me!

I flinched again.

Stolen novel; please report.

His lips slid into a cruel smile and I remembered back on Friday morning when I surprised him. When I had felt that suffocating toxic essence of him creeping into my mind.

Valerie reached over to tap August on the shoulder. He winked at me, then turned to follow the rest of the contestants to the stairs and down to the Processing Lounge.

This place no longer felt safe.

Not just August and his inappropriate….

Death! There had been a dead man in that little closet behind Door Number One. Has Death come back? That woman, Connie, maybe she had died. Could it be that of all the world now brushed free of death, this one place, La Vida Tower, the “tower of life,” is where death is still allowed?

Or were those impossible things that had remained after the Changes receded back to wherever it came from…were they finally going away? Was Death poised, ready to spread itself again throughout the world, radiating from the tallest building in town?

Whatever was going on, I no longer saw La Vida Tower as a safe place.

In fact, in that moment, the entire world, which had fallen into its placid, drowsy, repose, like a cat lounging heavy-lidded on the rug in a patch of sunlight…it felt to me that it had all just shattered. I couldn’t imagine myself ever again imagining a place of comfort, a peaceful corner of respite, not anywhere.

I did feel some relief, though small it was, when the doors closed shut behind Ed and Valerie and all of the contestants.

I looked away and watched Morris stepping across the set to have a word with Myra. He appeared concerned. Did he know, too? He was way up in the booth. That should have given him a clear line of sight.

But Myra was already heading out the door with Michael. Morris turned to approach Sy. Then he held back. Sy was telling Ida about how excitingly energetic the show had been. Ida was in enthusiastic agreement—she wore a rare smile. Next, Morris looked over towards Saligia, who was walking toward me. He shook his head and left the studio.

I knew I had to tell someone.

Sy, I thought. I had to tell Sy. I began walking toward him in a daze, but I faltered. Stopped. Probably feeling what that man Morris had felt. Ida was, well, she wasn’t someone I trusted.

Saligia moved around until we stood face to face. She placed her hands on both of my shoulders. She shook her head, no, and steered me back to the set just as the studio lights shut off, replaced by the dim house lights. The workers busied themselves shutting down the studio.

Saligia dropped with a moan into the chair of Contestant Number Two.

“I had an overlap,” she said.

I had too many things to say, all crowding to get to my lips. I sat down beside Saligia on the floor and asked: “What’s an overlap?”

“I was connected with Susan when she stepped into the pod.”

“God! I felt it too! It was awful” I said, keeping my eyes on the floor, afraid that if I were to look up I’d get dizzy. “I could see what she could see. That was Hal, wasn’t it? Inside with her. On the floor. His head twisted around. Eyes bugged open and cloudy.” Saligia’s boots weren’t black, as I had thought. Up close they were two tones of gray, making a subtle leopard pattern. I decided to look up, but Saligia’s eyes were closed. “Did you see him? I mean with your eyes?”

Saligia shook her head. “I saw things the way you did, through Susan’s eyes. Maybe some of the contestants in the upper rows got a peek. Maybe Morris. I was afraid to turn. Besides, there was the overlap.”

The production crew moved around us with the sort of languid efficiency that comes from years doing the same thing until you’ve learned that when you rush things it doesn’t buy you any time in the long run. Maybe they were a bit more buoyant than usual without their boss Hal complaining—usually about his weak knees and queasy stomach. It seemed wrong. Not to tell them that Hal was dead. Every so often one would pause to smile at me or Saligia—that sort of uncharged smile of a good days work almost over. I could do nothing but smile back.

One by one, they finished putting things away and powering down equipment. The two lighting tech walked out, discussing which bar they’d go to. And the sound woman finished gathering up all the battery powered headsets and plugged them in so they could recharge. She left, too.

We were alone. Saligia and me.

“Overlap?” I said, finally breaking the silence. “I don’t know what that is.”

“It’s when images or experiences from two people or more crowd together, pushing into my mind. I’ve worked for years to make sure it doesn’t happen. Almost never does anymore. It’s awful. It’s not just the disharmony, like trying to listen to someone whispering love poetry in my left ear while on the other side of me someone with a hacksaw is cutting a bottle in half. But there’s also the crowdedness. There’s no room left in my head for me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was all ugly emotion. There was Susan, terrified. You were in there too.” Saligia touched her head. “Your memory of your brother. It was all raw. Unresolved. Even with Susan and you, I might have been okay. But the truly dark, malignant presence was August.”

“August?”

“August was excited. Aroused. He knew what was in that pod. He couldn’t see from his seat, but he knew. And I saw a distinct memory from when he killed Hal.”

“Is that true?” I felt sick.

Saligia nodded and covered her mouth with her hands.

I never told Saligia that I had found August wandering in the studio alone and unescorted the other day. Should I tell her that now? Or would it be too much for her? Or maybe she was reading me. I looked at her face, but she was staring off into space. I didn’t think so.

I got up and walked to Door Number One.

What actually was it? Or, more important, the space behind it?

Were these rooms machines utilizing some technology unknown to science—meaning science as I understood it? Or was there some mystical vortex inside? This mechanism that took the contestants away—two each night—did it work on a predetermined schedule? Maybe it was “live” for a certain duration around 7:30 each weekday night. Was there someone watching the live broadcast, perhaps out in LA, who pushed some button that transported or even disintegrated anyone or anything inside?

The hell with all that. The hell with everyone’s detached attitude that allowed them to shrug and mutter something insipid like “some things are just unknowable.” I reached out and gripped the handle of Door Number One.

I turned to Saligia, thinking she would stop me, but she didn’t.

I expected the worst. When I opened the door, the small white room with slightly curved walls was empty.

“The smell’s gone,” I said.

Saligia stood up but didn’t turn to look.

“Good to know,” she said.