Between the here and now and there and then

A smile full of teeth, and she was sitting still. She was an Austen woman, witty and astute, but with an interesting sense of propriety. “Look at me. I’m brilliant,” she said. It was too late, however. Because once you have opened yourself up to the larger infrastructure lives within, then you seem to become something other than who you are really. Does that even make sense? I thought not. So instead I’ll think other things. Sound nice?
    I was sitting in a front room overlooking a sea rimmed in leafy greens with a woman had a smile full of teeth and repeating her worth to me over and over again as if she had herself on repeat. Shale shingles were stacked against the baseboard to my left, atop this manuscript of slats was a wealth of odds and ends, oriental-looking rugs and dismembered wooden banisters, the floor surrounding littered in jagged chips of rock and dust, the only furniture a small oak endtable with accompanying plant and the wicker chairs in which myself and my companion were currently sitting, each with a cup of tea in hand and eyeing the other as a delicious morsel to be devoured, or tasty narcotic. This is not what I'd been hoping for when I first set down upon this quiet cliffside house situated above a subtropical beach so as to be ransacked by a pocketful of fingers. I am just your usual traveling salesman, except that I have nothing to sell but my charming good humor and a few quiet quips. I'd come here because here is where she'd wanted me. If she’d asked me to go to Sri Lanka I would have. That’s just how this works.
    I give people their lives back. That sounds like a sentimental statement, but in actuality it involves losing a bit of my own, on a cat-hair covered couch for example, or over the balcony in hot chunks. The first life I lost involved a woman name of Mags had the heart of a beachcomber. She was fond of sandles and had a throat full of gravel, that throat opening in a scream the afternoon I never returned home for I had woken an alien intelligence within. My love is not my own I say, but occasionally some streaming beauty calls this a fake of mine to keep her clawing at the bathroom door while I quietly slip out back and readjust my hat on my way down a flickering street. I rearrange lives perhaps is a better way of putting it.
    For example, when I was just a little lad and stumbled in on my sister in the middle of her shower. I rearranged her life alright just then, or the mullein I touched to become lost within its cellular structure, its striated stalk forgotten against my fingers, the pulp within as if without, its skin an accident of some primary thought drives growth, my eyes gone deep and black under the afternoon sun, still as a stone in a field full of flowers. At other times? Let’s just say I am never who I say I am, and other people become other than themselves in my presence as a result. In college is when it began. I was quite calm, but when the room revolted from itself, bursting into parts and leaving only myself and a few others in the near vicinity intact, I knew what was happening. My hands were shimmering and as for them, they were all agog with quick departing glances.
    Mags lay forgotten on her bedroom floor that night wrapped in her imitation persian rug, while I was stumbling down a newly formed street had been there all along but was now rediscovered as a place where trickles of time collide like so many magnetized particles to then evaporate. A pair of adolescents were on the bench and a cluster of pigeons near a vent, but besides that I was alone with the storefronts, and a smattering of lit windows above. Those two children looked me directly in the face and when they did something changed in them. Humans are easily spooked you see. Perhaps it was that my features were no longer firmly fixed on my face, or that I could reach out and press through flesh as soft as silt to the something lives beneath. I’m not certain, and was obviously an english major before all of this happened. Long story, that. Not feeling particularly talkative on the subject either.
    As mentioned earlier, Mags would never see me again, which isn’t particularly fair, but necessary when you’ve altered in the fundamental fashion I indeed had. It was not the first in a long line of departures, but very nearly so, and over the course of my successive adventures became increasingly aware that all this merely depends on how you look at things. That’s to say, that although I am as I describe myself, I am also nothing more than a man walked out of a burning building and never returned to his former life.
    Which brings us to the front room and the woman with whom I was sitting at the beginning of this story. Her brilliance was literal, and she was rich. These two facts are important for the simple reason that they describe what I do. I take money from the rich and in return make them brilliant, not as in over-flowing with the wrinkly grey matter we call brains, but in literally glowing with a literal warmth. I am either a psychic healer or a gigolo depending on whether you’re speaking with my sister or my mum, and at the time our story begins I was approaching middle age and getting very very bored.
    You see there are two things a person must be aware of. One being the sea of distractions and the other being that I am a complete and utter lie. Not that what I’ve told you isn’t true, but rather is far from what I tell my clients. For all they know I’m a magician of the traditional variety, playing tricks on them and leaving them with the giddy sensation that they can accomplish anything now. I arrive with a flourish, and sit with legs crossed, drinking tea, my head tilted, my eyes glowing with an affection can be termed near christ-like, and this is the lie. Afterwards I often go down to the nearest pub, or KTV bar depending on what part of the world I’m in, toss back a few, my hair tousled and limbs heavy, every terrible thing I witness, such as automobile accident leaves a youth dripping blood and with a bit of bone jutting out from his upper thigh or the flat eyes of a woman in passing at the county fair framed against a display of gaudy lights blinking red white and blue and everywhere surrounding mud, every terrible thing I witness is a great relief, for in my everyday world I am far removed from the blissful being hired to acquaint my clients with their chakra. That I have created this fiction for myself in the manner of Madame Blavatsky or some other charlatan from times gone by is the latter half of that equation opened this paragraph and that I am incapable of forgetting every lost face the other.
    I become distracted easily, and so often will vanish into yet another infernal episode spent among the woodland creatures perhaps or on a series of busses each to yet another romantic location that is filled with persons not unlike the last romantic location I’d stopped at, though occasionally I’ll be reminded of the man I used to be before I became the man I am. This invariably involves a companion upsets my understanding of the shape of things, her hand slipped within the hand of an infant, her features a cloud of good intentions, her stride confident and lost. I cannot heal a damn thing, but I can convince those that are well of their health. This is what I do.
    I also dream of multi-dimensional creatures, am in fact a multi-dimensional creature myself, which is part of the reason why I’m so easily distracted, as existence within a larger dimensional spectrum often (if not always) leads to less within this singular realm we call the physical universe. Although, as will be revealed at a later point in the story, there is no distinction between the two, and what may seem to be a trip into Hades is often (thought not always) also a trip to another very physical place more than likely in a distant galaxy, as everything seems distant to those whose only experience is of Humbleton or Shropshire. But all of this will only come into play at some point in the future from the there and then I was in the middle of describing, specifically myself as a desperate creature currently pinned to a bed by an awful-smelling woman who has the most charming smile when she turns to offer me some more crackers, but is a writhing beast when she rubs her pudendum on me. Then it’s later in the evening and I am turning to my darling just as she is about to shut the lights. “I’m brilliant, aren’t I,” she said one last time before rolling over so her face was smothered in her own sweat-drenched hair, myself then rising from where I’d left her semi-conscious form to go walking on a pink beach, my hands in my pockets, my eyes on the surf.
    Something was coming you see. Perhaps it was simply the boredom and a thing lives within, but there was something different at the periphery, and I was to answer this thing shortly. The air was briny, and my connies damp. I sat down upon a rock and lifted up some kelp to view, rubbing the slippery stuff between my fingers and all the while looking up at the horizon, a pain behind the brow.
    Temporal discontinuation is specifically the moment when a person ceases to be themselves. It can happen several times over the course of a single life, but each time is like the first ever. Perhaps it is the moment you give in to some darkness reaching up from within some spinal chamber, or perhaps it is an afternoon when you pull yourself free of the tug of time and face that same portion of your psyche only to face it down. Usually it is not simply a singular instant, but also been a long time coming. That night was one of those.
    It wasn’t the screams that caught my attention, but a sense that of a sudden the sun was behind me, as if sneaking out for a peak of the moon before dawn. I turned to find my patron’s beach house in flames, and she diving off the patio screaming to her death. Tragedies such as these often will roll off the back of yours truly in the manner of moisture off a duck, but the night was still young, and the woman I saw falling to her death was also standing beside me smiling into my distracted face. “I’m brilliant, aren’t I,” she said.