Chapter One: Transference

Going into the evening after his thirtieth birthday, Ezra Wormwood felt a vague sense of foreboding. Maybe it was just the knowledge that he was now in his thirties and wasn't yet sure what he was doing with his life, or perhaps he somehow had knowledge of things to come, though he certainly couldn't put anything concrete to his vague unease. So he sat in his apartment nursing his ennui and wondering whether six in the evening was too early to nurse anything a little bit stronger.

Ezra's phone buzzed… this wasn't the first time it had buzzed. Probably more belated birthday congratulations. He and his several in-town friends had gone out to Coronado's the night before, and it had been fine. Just fine. It was the sort of facsimile of revelry you could expect in Fort Wright. His parents had called, of course. He'd wondered whether Julia would call - they were still on good terms even if they weren't seeing one another anymore. She hadn't.

That was what you got when you moved a thousand miles up to Fort Wright, Oregon to work at an upstart publishing house. Your SoCal friends couldn't understand it. Hell, Ezra didn't understand it himself. Wouldn't it be better to be marginally employed in Orange County than to have your own place in Fort Wright? It sure seemed that way sometimes. Ezra felt the loneliness cultivating in his chest - maybe it was time for a drink - and he was half-way to the refrigerator when somebody started pounding on his door.

"Ezra! Eeeeezra! Open up!" A woman shouted in.

Ezra opened the door and was nearly bowled over when Anna Glass rushed into a hug. Her dark hair pressed into his nose and her olive parka pressed soft against his sweater. He pushed her away and blinked in surprise, but it was a welcome surprise.

"Anna?"

"Yes, Anna. I texted you three times, you dingus!" she laughed.

"I… I assumed that was more birthday stuff. What are you doing here?"

Sometimes Ezra thought of her as the one that got away. They'd been friends in college and, if he was being honest, he'd always crushed on Anna pretty hard. She was filled to the brim with infectious energy, and it was hard not to get caught up in her whirlwind. More than once, Anna had expressed that she found him attractive, too - the was frank like that. But whenever he wasn't in a relationship, she was seeing somebody and vice-versa, so things just never worked out. But she apparently still thought fondly enough of him to make the almost two-hour drive from Portland.

"You're in Portland now?"

She nodded. "I've been in Portland longer than you've been in Fort Bumfuck."

She'd aged in the five years since they'd last seen one another, and not in a bad way. Her hair was the same glossy black, a bit longer than she'd used to wear it, but her cute, half-Asian features had matured into something more confident and less mercurial than they'd once been. When he looked into her eyes, Ezra felt like he was observing somebody capable and purposeful and not just a bursting ball of potential. Indeed, after she slipped off her shoes, Anna found her way to the couch and curled up there, watching Ezra with a strange intensity as he poured them wine.

"I'm glad you came," he said. "My birthday party yesterday was… well, let's just say you can get better margaritas in SoCal…"

Anna wrinkled her nose. "Margaritas? In Oregon?"

He sat down next to her and noticed that she'd set a small silver case on the coffee table. He assumed it was a birthday present, but he wasn't going to presume until she said something about it. So Ezra just swished his pinot noir and savored a sip. Dark and rich, the perfect complement to your former college crush showing up out of the blue with a mysterious present. She curled her legs underneath herself and sipped at her own wine. Anna glanced between him and the case on the table, so he reached out and opened it. It was… a pipe? And a little pill jar of something?

"It's DMT," she said.

"It's… what? Is that…"

Anna nodded. "Powerful psychedelic shit. I remembered how you were always talking about wanting to try psychedelics… have you ever?"

Ezra shook his head. The only drugs he ever partook of were alcohol and weed, and weed was a once or twice a year sort of thing. "Have you?"

"Shrooms and LSD," she said. "Never DMT. But Will Forten… do you remember Unicycle Will?"

"I remember Unicycle Will," Ezra said. In college, he'd lived down the hall from him. He was the chemistry major who rode his unicycle to class wearing his chemistry lab coat. It was hard to forget Unicycle Will.

"He's at Cascadia University now… biochemistry postdoc or something and… well, it turns out he's got a home lab and on a lark he made something like ten thousand doses of DMT…"

"Ten thousand doses?"

"To hear him tell it, he estimated his yield too conservatively. He only wanted a few dozen doses, but he got like a hundred times that, so he gave me a bunch and I thought we could try it…"

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"He still has a crush on you," Ezra said.

Anna shrugged. Her sweater was a cream-colored loose knit that pooled about her sleeves and waist. "I didn't tell him to give me the DMT. But, yeah, maybe. What about you?"

"I don't have a crush on Will," Ezra said.

Anna laughed and punched his arm. "Idiot! That's okay, you don’t have to tell me…"

"I'll tell you after the DMT." Ezra wondered whether he'd really tell her after the DMT. Maybe she'd forget? Maybe he'd lie? A lot of things could happen but, yes, he realized that he absolutely still had a crush on Anna Glass.

"Fair enough," she said. "You go first."

She carefully scooped out a tiny spoonful of the DMT, fluffy white crystals of the stuff, and dumped it into a little wire mesh bowl, which she placed in the little glass pipe. She handed it to him, his fingers brushing against hers for a moment, her skin soft and warm. Ezra's heart fluttered in his chest - was he really about to do this? His lips were around the pipe. She'd flicked her lighter to life. He tasted something vaguely tangy, like the way new shoes smell…

"Breathe," Anna said.

He did - two lungsful of the stuff. Ezra wanted to cough, but he held his breath in, and his ears were already buzzing by the second exhale. Anna looked at him expectantly and, with gentle hands, took the pipe back for her own use.

Ezra's heart thudded… thudded… thudded… and stopped. At least it felt like it stopped, like he'd suddenly been separated from his body and his senses even though there were still sensations bombarding in like a swarm of butterflies pouring through a door but getting caught in a lepidopterist's net before they could actually get inside. All Ezra Wormwood could see was Anna, her eyes dark and seemingly bottomless.

He leaned forward a bit and fell… he fell into her eyes. They swelled before him, huge and black and beautiful and terrible, and Ezra was swallowed by utter, incomprehensible blackness. That wasn't quite true. As his eyes… no, his senses… he wasn't seeing with his eyes. As Ezra's senses adjusted, he noticed tiny filaments rushing past, tiny filaments of blue and violet, a little meshwork of them, undulating like the pattern of reflected ripples at the bottom of a swimming pool. And, as he paid them greater attention, they expanded before him, becoming the great universal filaments of galaxies rushing past at many millions of times the speed of light. They passed in absolute silence, incomprehensible spans of space zooming past him but growing, growing, growing, until he was swallowed in darkness once again.

There were sounds - muffled sounds, the sounds of people speaking, though he couldn't understand the words. And, for a moment, he found himself in the air above a very odd-looking hospital room, very gradually descending as if he was a birthday balloon with just a bit too little helium…

+++++

It was less like a hospital room than it was like a sanitorium, like the sorts of old-fashioned hospitals that the chronically ill might inhabit, with their painted plaster walls and olive-green tile flooring, their little time-worn metal beds, and the rest. A sour breeze from outside fluttered the dingy window shades. It was like something out of another era - not a computer in sight, and people in strange clothes.

There were five people in the room if you didn't include Ezra, who didn't seem to have a body at the moment. Just a slowly-sinking point of view from the ceiling directly over the patient's bed. The patient was a young man, sallow-faced, his hair a strangely-ashen color, seemingly-unconscious with bizarre medical devices that Ezra couldn't recognize buckled about his chest. The other four were older adults - a middle-aged couple in clothes befitting the fashions of a century before, a silver-haired doctor in an off-white medical jacket, and a dark-clad man with a… yes, he had a bird upon its shoulder.

It was a magpie if Ezra wasn't mistaken. The bird looked in his direction, made a little chirping noise, and returned its attentions to the conversation. Of course, Ezra wasn't listening with ears nor seeing with eyes… he took in the whole room all at once, though its details remained slightly grainy, and heard their utterly unfamiliar language as if listening through cotton.

The middle-aged couple were upset about something, the woman tearful and pleading, her eyes flitting between the youth on the bed and the physician. The doctor's face belied no emotion, but what he said seemed gravely serious. The middle-aged man frowned over what appeared to be an elaborate contract written in swirling script and said something terse to the dark-clad man. And that dark-clad man, dark-haired and goateed with a magpie on his shoulder, simply nodded. The magpie fluttered to retrieve something from a little case and returned with a little stack of colorful paper currency in its beak.

The middle-aged man took the money, his expression turning uncertain, stony face and steely eyes drawing up into concern. Nonetheless, he took a fountain pen and brought it to the contract with a shaky hand. The woman… presumably his wife and the boy's mother, stayed his hand with her own, her expression drawn into a grimace of grief… but then she released his hand and wept into his shoulder.

By now Ezra was about at face level, and so he could see their expressions quite well, even if he couldn't make out a single word of what they said. It was like no language he'd ever heard before - its flow reminded him of Tagalog, but some of the phonemes were utterly unfamiliar.

With the contract signed, the doctor unhooked the device from the young man's chest. The device had a sturdy metal frame and several glowing parts that Ezra assumed were readouts at first, but resolved into glowing crystals of blue and violet when he focused on them. And, within a minute of the device being removed, the young man's breath grew shallow and irregular and then stopped altogether.

The doctor placed a gloved hand to the young man's chest, nodded, and then stood aside for the dark-clad man to do his work. The grieving couple were quietly ushered from the room.

The man placed a similar device upon the young man's chest… similar to the life support device, but with different placement and coloration of the crystals. And, as Ezra's point of view sank further, the device came to block his view and, a few seconds later, he was inside the dead young man's body and could no longer hear the strange utterances the man made, though he could vaguely hear the muffled cries of the magpie, which was just about going wild about whatever was happening. The deafening crack that came next somehow managed to sound wet, too…

Then feeling shot back into Ezra's awareness - a tingling numbness suddenly filling his limbs, a deep soreness in his chest. His eyes cracked open and he saw the dark-clad man peering over him, somehow both curious and possessive. Quickly, the room became blindingly bright and pain poured into Ezra's awareness. He was vaguely aware of the magpie squawking and flying about the room, then he inhaled something that smelled like new shoes, only much, much stronger, and all sensation fled from him.