anon

Mother screaming. Father screaming. Brother screaming. Tables overturned, terror on faces, and screaming. A moment before a quiet game of cards. And suddenly, the three of them, looking, in torment, at the world around them, at each other, at me, and screaming. They run out of the house, to nowhere.

I am alone. I walk to the window, and everyone, everywhere, is screaming. Howling. Weeping. I walk back and sit on the sofa, exhausted, and listen.

When things calm down a little I go out. The screams have been replaced by hollow eyes, stone calm, dead stares.

It is a year before I have the answer. It took months of diligent work. At the beginning one thing was clear – in an instant, everyone, everywhere, became someone else. Transported. Transformed. He was a clerk in Bulgaria and suddenly a pizza boy in Tennessee. She a stripper in Texas and then a taxi driver in Belize. A worldwide shift of souls. On that first day I heard so many languages. So many dialects of confusion. In a week I guessed at the shift. It made the papers, eventually, and most people seemed to like the change. Many went back, killed, were killed, you know. In some cases a man became a woman, or a woman became a man, and in journeying back to their previous selves, fell in love. Or killed. In anger, jealousy, or both. Only one man can be that man, of course, and on top of it all, who wouldn't grow to hate themselves?

The academics postulated multitudes of theories, of varying quality and obtuseness. The private positions of each individual changed constantly, of course. But great institutions integrated the average opinions to such an extent that trans-shift positions were possible. Dr. T---'s explanation was based on atmospheric phenomena: we were changing our world, and our atmosphere to such an extent, that the recurring phenomena is inevitable¹. His associate proffered the most convincing argument: we have many dream selves, in which we sequentially wake; this is a tedious process that occurs each night. We simply forget it in the morning, a morning that while distant only eight hours could be hundreds of compressed lives away. This fellow perhaps never struggled with jet lag: or at least, he thought our diurnal rhythms and mental flights were mythically universal, un-tethered by the clicking of clocks. Either way, he had many followers. But there were, truly, many to follow; ridiculous explanations abounded (most dealt in some way with God, the end of the Cold War, the impotence of antibiotics, divergence and fragmentation of language dialects, violence on television, or the ubiquity of technology in modern life). The solipsists rejoiced; the apocalyptics ranted, the Freudians felt Jung, and the various religions, in their inter-shifts, soon became one, and realized immediately after that they had always been one.

Strangely, most people dealt remarkably well. Especially with me; I think my calmness amazed them. Until they realized I had been continuous throughout.

When the hunt began I was forced to shift myself. Sentiently, of course. To others' eyes, many men passed through my clothes and skin. I cleverly betrayed others, myself, to save the same. I wanted to discover – the key. The principle to the shift, and why I remained untouched. Why I was so alone in my temporal sameness.

The mathematics alone fill pages. I'm sure it reduces to a line or two, but I'm not up to it. All that I've discovered is that through all the iterations, I remain the same. I'm not quite bright enough to follow every one of the near-infinite soul-paths, though. I had assumed that they, too, would resume their original shape, would re-cross their origin, would collide with that which they truly are. But I saw (willed?) change after change, and always a completely new shift occurred. Occasional crossovers, but by and large, a new soul-map. And each time, the people keep the manic edge, the residual panic, to a greater degree. Their eyes grow madder. Yet they, themselves, almost don't notice anymore. They never now hunt down their pasts. It has become almost an accepted rhythm of existence. The semioticians have devised a term for the decreasing length of time between shifts: they call it a 'day'.

These days I appall them. A freak. A dwarf, they say; my essential continuity terrifies. I have no chance against their number, yet evasion has sapped all of my strength.

So they will surely find me soon. And they will ask how I do it. How?, I will respond. I don't do anything, I simply live. I just got the unlucky number, became the ultimate singularity. That I will it is nothing. It's like a flower catching my eye, a conversation tickling my ear. The calculations are underneath it all and I remain untransformable to myself, but a changeling to the masses.

As I listen I hear them coming. So I leave this note to them, the rest of me, insatiable, closing in on their prey, myself. Tomorrow, it seems, I will join the others, and we will, finally and irreversibly, become whole.