The disoriented man walked down to where his friend stood.

Omar called up the last few steps. “The door was unlocked.”

A short, elderly hunched-back man was in view on hitting the last step. He wore a brown tweed overcoat and sat in one of the armchairs in the living room; a briefcase lay across his lap.

Omar made hasty introductions. “Mike, this is Mr. Reznicek. Mr. Reznicek, this is Remote Man B.”

Michael’s lips mimicked the familiar words. “Remote Man B?”

Omar brought him up to speed. “That’s your designated target name.”

The dawdling older gentleman pointed his walking stick at the tall man, as though to make polite conversation with it.

The painter would not be so easily seduced to cordiality. “What’s going on, Ommie?”

Omar made a preliminary sketch. “I did find out a few things in Chicago, Mike. Like I said. But this reality TV show is more realistic than anyone could ever have imagined.”

Michael sank to the sofa. “What do you mean?”

The friend picked up one of the videocassettes still in the floor from the previous day’s adventure and shoved it into the VCR.

The anxious resident, seeing what he was doing, commented, “Those are the useless videos I found in Jacques’ trash.”

Scratchy blackness streamed across the television screen, although the painter’s flashing clock was visible in the lower left-hand corner.

Omar explained, “You’ve been under hypnosis ever since the night of the strange phone call. This is you as you presently are: sleeping at a secure location.”

Michael laughed. “But I copied over that tape yesterday! That’s my busted clock upstairs on the nightstand!”

Omar ejected the tape and inserted another one; the picture was identical.

The artist leaned forward on the couch in a faint. “This can’t be?”

The friend paused to let it sink in. “Everything that’s happened to you since the phone call has been part of the contractual agreement you signed.”

Michael scoffed. “Signed what? I signed nothing.”

The elderly man broke in with a click of false teeth. “But you did, Mr. West. You gave us your blood and fingerprints.”

“That’s crazy! I gave those phony policemen my fingerprints just a couple of days ago!”

Mr. Reznicek recast it. “The events are scrambled in your mind, Mr. West. It is a precaution taken to ensure that you would have no certain recollection of the events leading into this, lest we ruin the premise of the show.” He opened his briefcase and handed a document to the fellow lawyer. “Though, rest assured, everything you’ve been experiencing has been a fabrication of your sleep.”

Omar took the pages. “I’m here in a legal capacity, Mike, as much as being here for you as a friend.”

Michael mumbled, “But that can’t be me on the TV.”

“But you know it is,” Mr. Reznicek replied. “I am not at liberty to disclose the full extent of it, but the nature of this television program is quite involved. We have developed the ability to reproduce, down to the last jot, every point of your projected reality. This is not so much a virtual reality as the outskirts of a metaphysical one. Your fruitless attempt to find cameras and induce hallucinogenic states with pills has missed the whole point of our enterprise. All this you see around us is only a figment conjured up out of what we call ‘the web of dreams.’ In our unique experiment, we are breaking down this illusion, reverse-collapsing each contiguous dreamer like so many soap bubbles until we whittle down the phenomenon to its barebones: its last conscious moment of duality. It is a brilliant scheme, but like all new technologies this Collapsing Event has had its share of kinks. Hence, some of the transmissions you’ve been receiving of late are not the ones you were intended to receive.”

Michael, stupefied, hardly listened.

Omar lifted his eyes from the document to squint out the darkening curtains. He assumed his loftier tone. “That shadow, out there, has been passing into your consciousness for some time, Mike, like pieces of an event that cannot be understood on its own terms but takes many forms as it nears. The Universe is ending, little brother. In the blink of an eye. It is happening so fast that, as it gets closer to the last trillionth of a second of consciousness, it will all but stop. All space and time will precede it imperceptibly through the pinhole.”

Michael was having none of it. “You’re my canary in the mineshaft, remember? If you’re losing it, then that means I am losing it, too!”

“I know this sounds strange, but I have always been on the level with you. You trust me, don’t you, Grasshopper?”

“Well…”

Mr. Reznicek picked up the thread. “We are convinced if we can follow this path back through a single mind, we can glimpse some aspect of the true nature of reality. We will not understand what we see, naturally. At best we are only lobbing cans over the fence into God’s backyard. But we will be, in some sense, a party to the event.”

Michael remained bogged down in details. “Even if all this nonsense were true, what on Earth would possess me to sign up for it?”

The older man was quick. “Why, for a happy ending, of course. Your life in Chicago was a miserable affair. You were only too eager to jump at this chance.”

“What…? To be plunged into a nightmare? This is my happy ending?”

The foreign man shot Michael a stare. “The Day of Eternal Noon’s producers did not intend it should be perceived as a nightmare.”

“The Day of Eternal Noon?”

“This is our working title.” The man continued, “The nightmares are most unfortunate. But, you see, my clients can only use what they have at hand in the way of your particular memories to communicate with you. The memories they chose were perfectly good ones, yet when things were thrown out of kilter during the initiation procedure, the frequency shifted to other memories. Some not so pleasant.”

“Who are your clients?” Michael snapped. “Who are these people?”

“Why the folks who put you in the house, of course. And whose names I cannot divulge as a legal matter.”

Omar was still flipping through the document. “Let’s just say—they’re from out of town.”

The TV star remained flabbergasted.

The friend attempted to focus him. “Like I said, Mike, I’m here as your counsel. They’ve brought you partially out of hypnosis to get your approval for the terms rectifying the situation. I’m here to make sure they are agreeable terms.”

The fellow lawyer laughed somberly. “Agreeable is an understatement, Mr. Bentem. The outcome here, however, depends on your client.”

Omar summed it up. “The Collapsing Event cannot be reversed, obviously. But they can guarantee, at the end at least, a happy ending, as stipulated in the first contract. However, it will require a midcourse correction.”

“What correction?”

“They need the kid.”

Mr. Reznicek interjected, “We want the child, Mr. West. If you give us the child, then we can make it right in the end.”

Michael gasped, “Who are you talking about?”

Omar was plainspoken. “They mean the kid in the bed sheet. The ghost.”

“Brae?”

Mr. Reznicek expanded on it. “The truth is, Mr. West, your nightmares began with the child. My clients believe if they can remove the child from the matrix, they can affect the result they intended. This will require a hard clean, which means all your past memories will have to be recorded over. And in their place you will be given a new one: a future memory.”

“But you’re talking about Brae?”

Omar jumped in. “This is not a betrayal, Mike. Think of it as an exorcism.”

The elderly lawyer reiterated. “Agree to turn over the child at the appointed time and all will be well, Mr. West.”

The artist was still defiant. “This is ridiculous.”

Omar stepped in as the older brother. “Mike, I don’t ask you to understand it. Just to trust me.”

Michael rubbed his temples in frustration. “So what is actually happening here? Is the Universe really ending because my mind crosses some threshold?”

Mr. Reznicek put a poetic spin on it. “You will pass into it like a whisper, Mr. West. A fond remembrance.”

“And this should make me feel better?”

Both Mr. Reznicek and Omar looked at each other curiously; Michael sensed there was more than what he was being told.

Omar handed him the new contract for a signature. “There is, of course, a generous financial settlement attached to this new contract… for your pain and suffering.”

“How do you mean?”

The friend improvised. “A suitcase of money. How’s that?”

“And how am I to spend a ‘suitcase of money’ if there is no tomorrow?”

The other lawyer piped up. “Just because there is no reality as we know it does not mean there is no reality.”

Michael puzzled, yet could not stop thinking about Emma upstairs, and his desire to pay her way through school. Hesitating, he leaned forward to press pen to paper.

Omar barked out a stipulation. “You have to sign it as Remote Man B.”

The signatory looked up. “And who is Remote Man A?”

Mr. Reznicek cleared his throat. “You are the alternate candidate in this business, Mr. West. The first choice candidate cannot fulfill his duties.”

Both lawyers shared another look.

This was nothing to do with Brae, the painter told himself. This was to do with Emma and him, and their future together: their happy ending. He signed the document.

Omar at once took the papers and gave them to Mr. Reznicek. “I don’t believe we have anymore business here.”

The elderly man placed the documents in his briefcase before rising to poke his way to the foyer. Opening the front door, he glanced back with parting words. “Though you have no reason to accept my well-wishes, Mr. West, it is my sincerest desire that you live happily ever after.”

Omar removed the videotape from the VCR and turned off the TV once the man was gone. He was to the point. “When next you hear a thumping, Mike, you will be back asleep in the matrix. You will have no recollection of this conversation. But you will remember this: You must give them the kid.”

“But what about Emma?”

“The child. Do you understand?”

With the onset of drowsiness, the painter cobbled together one last question. “Who is my benefactor, Ommie?”

Omar moved to the door, but tarried to recite a passage from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” With this, the lawyer stepped over the threshold.

Michael sat stunned after the door closed, but then remembered Emma alone in the bedroom. He bolted off the couch and up the stairs.

THUMP! THUMP! The startling noise rode up from downstairs on the back of a thunderclap, rattling sconces and picture frames in the hallway.

He swung into the open doorway to find only his sweater lying on the bed. “Emma!” he cried.

The suitcase sent him tumbling to the dark floor.

The dazed man sat up to find the luggage lid knocked open in the scuffle. The white dress inside was duller in a chilled breeze. He reached in with deadened fingers to feel folds of cotton—not satin. Gasping, he pulled the bed sheet up by its corners and peered through its two rough eyeholes. The top of the nightstand caught in the ragged view, where the crumpled phone number sat on the forgotten notepad with its scribbled plea:

Without you, I am nothing.

He knew the same hand composed both lines of text. More dots connected themselves out of his cold, hard perception: The crush note in Daedalus’ autobiography was a third match.

THUMP! THUMP!

Michael made it off his knees and out the bedroom door. “Emma!” he yelled. The steps on the stairs all but cuffed his chin. “Emma!”

Leaves greeted him at the foot of the stairs, as well as blows from the backdoor swinging under a stiff, wet wind. THUMP! THUMP!  THUMP! THUMP!

Grabbing his jacket off the back of a chair, he followed the emergent path marked-out for him on the leafy floor. The gust had knocked Jacques’ torn envelope off the corner of the kitchen counter. The videocassette inside it bore a label: Property of Peek-a-Boo Motel.

Michael stepped over it and out onto the squalling stoop. He was at last prepared to leave Spyglass Darkly House.