“Do you remember when you were a child and you would spin around in place as fast as you could and when you stopped the world kept spinning?”

She did this every time, with every person the site told her would make a good match for her. It was both her introduction to them and her own additional screening step.

More than a few people never answered her, either ignoring the message completely or replying to it with a lot of personal details she had already gleaned from her profile or questions about what she was into. She ignored these. The questions and details were uninteresting, and the person behind them probably more or less so.

One of her matches replied to her with a detailed explanation of how this effect was caused via something called “persistence of memory”… she had no idea if this was true, and suspected that her correspondent didn’t, either. It had the ring of something that one says because it sounds good, because one cannot bear to appear ignorant.

She deleted that reply and ignored all further messages from the person.

Another person replied with “My mother always told me to stop because I was making her dizzy to watch. Honestly now I’m getting dizzy just thinking about it.” She felt a little sorry for that one and did not delete the message immediately.

The possible suitor after that asked her, “What do you mean when you say the world keeps spinning?”

A request for clarification always seemed like a fair question, so she answered, “The world keeps rushing past you while you’re spinning around, and when you stop the world seems to still be moving in your view.”

The reply came: “Do you mean your head or eyes keep spinning from momentum? That doesn’t seem likely.”

She responded: “No. It’s purely a sensory effect. You are still, the world is still, but the world seems to be moving.”

“Like a scrollbar in your head? Impossible. Your eyes must have been moving and you didn’t realize.”

She didn’t care for the tone she perceived in that text, but knowing how treacherous such things may be, she persisted.

“No,” she wrote. “It’s a physical sensation. The same objects, the same stretch of the world, the same everything is in your sight as before… but you swear that they’re moving sideways.”

“So you become delusional when you spin? Thanks for the warning.”

That was the end of her attempt to explain herself to that person, and it also damped her enthusiasm for making such explanations to anyone else in the future. She had almost decided to give up and try a different opening gambit for future matches when she got a reply from one last person she’d sent the question to.

“Yes,” it said. “Wasn’t that awesome?”

It started sometime after college. The lake is never there when the dream begins. I’ll be sitting in a classroom in my old high school, or at the mall, or walking down the street in the middle of town. The dream will start up and it might be a bunch of random nonsense or there might be something like a plot… or maybe it’s always random nonsense but sometimes I’m able to see a plot.

Whatever.

The point is that when my dreams start off they’re like anybody else’s, like mine used to be. But sooner or later the water starts to rise. It comes up through the ground or floor or whatever I’m standing on. The other surroundings are submerged, or carried away, or just seem to recede on their own. Ceilings disappear. Buildings open up. Eventually everything goes away and it’s just me and the lake, clear and calm as can be.

The lake is the same every time. It’s round, but not perfectly round. It’s maybe a few hundred yards across and maybe eight feet deep in the middle. The shores are dirt, not sand. Sometimes the ground is dry and cracked just a few feet away from the water. Sometimes it’s muddy and wet. Sometimes it’s powder. If I walk away from the lake in any direction I’ve picked, I can walk across unchanging ground until I wake up.

I’m never surprised by the arrival of the water, but I don’t expect it. If I’m dreaming that I’m in an auditorium and there are zombies trying to break in, I never think, “Gosh, I have to get out of here before it floods.” or “Maybe the water will take care of the zombies.” I accept the zombie scenario as real and deal with it like it’s the only reality that matters, until the water comes and carries it all away.

There’s nothing disturbing about the lake. The whole thing bothers me only in that I can’t explain it. I don’t know why it happens. I don’t know what it means. I’ve asked psychiatrists and psychologists about it. I’ve seen sleep experts. The first thing anyone wants to know is if I wet the bed. There’s always an“aha!” moment, a triumphant look on their face when they ask me that and a bit of disappointment or confusion when I tell them no. The worst of them tell me that they can’t help me as long as I insist on lying to them.

It doesn’t matter. None of them can help me anyway. The best I’ve ever gotten is advice: if it doesn’t cause you problems, don’t worry about it.

Good advice, but I never did worry, precisely. I just wanted to know if it meant something.

I don’t have any childhood traumas relating to water. We never lived by a lake. My parents took me swimming sometimes when I was a kid. Sometimes I liked it and sometimes I didn’t. Lakes never meant much to me before. They still don’t, really. I have no strong association for water in general or even my lake in particular.

It’s just, “Oh, here it is again.”

My girlfriend says I should try to find the lake in real life, but I don’t think it exists. It’s too perfect. Too regular. And there’s something unfinished about it that’s hard to put my finger on. She won’t let go of the idea that it existed somewhere and that there is some meaning, something I’m meant to go and see. She thinks there’s something important about the dream, something supernatural.

I don’t blame her. The first time it happened, I thought it was weird. The second time it was like, heh, that’s kind of funny. I thought that thinking about it had given me the same dream two nights in a row. The third time it was weird again. Then when it didn’t stop, I thought what she thinks: this is important. This means something.

After more than ten years of the same lake taking over my dreams every night, I’m not ruling out anything as far as a cause goes. It could be supernatural. It could mean something. But after ten years of the same dream and no sense of urgency and no change, I don’t think that supernatural necessarily means important.

Every night, I dream of the lake.

That’s all.

Unfortunately for the director’s artistic vision, the producers of the first so-called of the so-called “invisible films” was sued by composer John Cage, who alleged that the soundtrack sampled extensively from his work. As his lawsuit identified no fewer than 23,520 individual points of similarity between the film’s score and his seminal work, the studio was forced to pay a crushing financial penalty and thereafter any future endeavors in the same milieu were viewed as being unacceptably risky.

There is a man whose face is haunted by the ghost of every hopeful smile that has ever died upon it.

Nearest to him… but not too near… is a woman whose face is haunted by her own murdered spirit… the spirit of a spirit, brutally killed by a hundred thousand jagged cuts. Life keeps a special set of knives for women like her. I know, because I’ve wielded them, and had them used against me.

A pair of boys, maybe ten, maybe twelve are each beset by two spectres: the men they could be and the men they will more likely become. I see both warring across their faces as they look at the woman and snicker to each other.

Some of them are haunted by failures. Some are haunted by success. Some are plagued by the things that happened to them. Some are plagued by the things that might have been. No one’s face is untouched and untroubled by spirits. Everyone is a graveyard. Everyone is a haunted house.

Everyone knows this. Everybody sees this. It’s obvious in the way that no one looks at each other. I wonder if it would be better to talk about it, acknowledge it… but then the the train stops and the other passengers get out, leaving me alone with my own ghosts.

“Probably not,” I said.

“But if there’s an infinite number of worlds, there must be at least one where that happened,” she said.

“Not really,” I said. “Infinite worlds doesn’t mean that anything you imagine has happened somewhere. There could be an infinite number of identical worlds, for instance.”

“Okay, but if we assume the infinite number of worlds hinge on every possible outcome then wouldn’t there have to be be some where people decided to call it frozen cream and ice yogurt?”

“‘Ice cream’ was actually made with ice, originally,” I explained. “Frozen yogurt came about after refrigerating technology made it possible for something to be frozen without the application of ice. The names weren’t just a random outcome… they wouldn’t make sense the other way around. So, even if there are universes where people eat ice yogurt and frozen cream, it wouldn’t be ‘just like ours’ in every other way. Other things would have to be different, too.”

“Well, that makes sense,” she said. “I guess I was being silly.”

“You’re admitting you were silly?” I asked, surprised.

“Of course,” she said. “Imagine… suggesting there might be a universe somewhere whose inhabitants occasionally give things names that don’t make strict etymological sense.”

“You’re mocking me now, aren’t you?”

“Now?”

He calls out a signal and waves. A line of soldiers in heavy gray uniforms streams down the beach, pointing their rifles down at the water and shouting out stern warnings. The man keeps his eyes on the watch and the water. After a minute, he nods and signals for the soldiers to withdraw, just as the water is withdrawing.

A short distance away, two old men sit on a bench feeding bits of stale bread to the shore birds.

“You can say what you want about this new regime,” one of the men says to the other, “but at least they make the tides run on time.”

No smoke rises from the farmhouse chimney. The frozen tide of snow has piled up against its windward side, almost completely obscuring the windows on that side. The snow has made inroads onto the other sides, creeping up to cover much of the bottom panel of the front door. There is no path cleared between the house and the barn, or anywhere else.

Not far from the farmhouse, a wolf paws at a snowy burrow, scenting its slumberous occupant. Soon it will catch another scent, and it and its fellows will make their way towards the farm.

Spring always comes, but not always in time.

“That’s incest,” I said.

“Yeah, and if you rearrange the letters in incest and add a few more, you get ‘necessity’,” she said. “If it’s necessary for the survival of their species, they should do it.”

“It’s just wrong,” I said. “He would never do that.”

“He’s dooming his own species to extinction, then,” she said. “It’s wrong of him not to do it. Morally, it’s the first thing he should have thought of when she got off the ship.”

“And what about birth defects?” I asked. “How are they supposed to get a viable breeding population from two people?”

“I don’t know, it looks like they have pretty good genes to me,” she said. “Don’t you think their home planet was the kind of place that would be all eugenic-y and stuff, anyway? And besides, who cares if you have male pattern baldness or even hemophilia when you’re going to be freaking invulnerable anyway?”

“Okay, but what if they have super birth defects? I mean, look at what happens when a clone of him goes wrong,” I said. “They could end up making a breeding population of Bizarros.”

“But look at what happens when a clone of him goes right,” she said. “I’m sure this isn’t a new idea… there was a ton of ‘Superman Family’ stuff Pre-Crisis. Where did all of that stuff come from?”

“Superman wasn’t fucking his cousin Pre-Crisis. Seriously.”

“You just don’t want any of my ships to become canon.”

“Home,” she said, still not looking.

“Well, so much for the old saying.”

“What?”

“You know… ‘you can’t go home again,’ and all that,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “As far as I know, that’s true.”

“But you said you’re going home now.”

“Yes,” she said. “For the first time. It’s always for the first time. That’s why you can never do it again.”

“It’s a caterpillar,” she told him. “They implanted it in my leg when I was little so that one day I could turn into a beautiful butterfly.”

“I’d like to be there when that happens,” he said.

“I couldn’t imagine it happening any other way.”