Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • Thou Shall Not Confuse Franco Columbu with Thyself

    Thou Shall Not Confuse Franco Columbu with Thyself

    One sluggish afternoon at Canyon High, as Mrs. Hanson’s freshman English class shuffled into their desks and prepared to feign interest in Romeo and Juliet, I had something far more compelling on my desk: Pumping Iron. It was my sacred text, my adolescent scripture, filled with black-and-white photos of demi-gods flexing under the Californian sun. My favorite shot was of Mr. Universe Franco Columbu, hanging upside down from a chin-up bar like a bat carved from granite.

    Next to me sat Jill Swanson—tall, sleek, with the effortless grace of a swimmer and the smile of someone who had never sweated through a protein fart. I decided this was my moment. I turned the page toward her.
    “Hey,” I said, “check out this bodybuilder at the beach.”
    She leaned in. “Holy smokes, he’s huge.”
    I nodded solemnly. “That’s me.”
    She blinked. “What?”
    “That’s me. Can’t you tell?”
    Jill squinted at the photograph, studying the Herculean Italian upside down in all his vascular glory.
    “Oh my God,” she said slowly. “That’s you?”
    “Yep.”
    And just like that, I was Franco Columbu. I spun a whole mythology—how I’d been visiting my grandparents in L.A., hanging out with my “bodybuilding friends” in Venice, when a photographer captured me mid-workout.

    For five glorious minutes, I was a god among freshmen. Then, as Jill flipped back to her notes and I basked in the afterglow of deceit, the truth curdled in my gut. The lie that had inflated me like a balloon was already leaking air. By the time I got home, I felt hollow and cheap. I stared into the bathroom mirror, splashed cold water on my face, and summoned my inner monk.

    “Master Po,” I said, “why am I such a compulsive liar?”
    “Because, Grasshopper,” he replied, “you wish to appear strong because you are weak. True strength is not forged in muscle but in mastering your inner demons.”
    “I have only one?”
    “No,” he said, “but let’s start with the demon of inadequacy—the one that makes you trade truth for applause.”
    “How do I kill it?”
    “You don’t,” he said. “You chip away at it. Great acts are made of small deeds. Each honest act is a strike against the demon.”
    “But where do I start?”
    “Stop gazing at your reflection as though it’s a sculpture to be admired,” he said. “When you cease to worship yourself, you’ll stop fearing imperfection. The sage who puts himself last finds nourishment. You, Grasshopper, are still starving.”

    I looked at my reflection—small, soft, and decidedly un-Franco-like—and realized Master Po was right. The hardest muscle to build is the one that keeps you honest.

  • Thou Shalt Find Beauty in Freakishness—or Die Trying

    Thou Shalt Find Beauty in Freakishness—or Die Trying

    By high school, I had fully accepted that I was not designed for the mainstream assembly line. Master Po—the blind sage from Kung Fu—had become my imaginary spiritual adviser, reminding me that I was a misfit, “a brooding soul misaligned with this world.” I wore that label like a second skin. While the cool kids air-guitared to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, I was hypnotized by the twelve-minute prog-rock epics of Yes, King Crimson, The Strawbs, and Genesis—bands that required liner notes and a calculator to appreciate.

    Football was for the square-jawed; I preferred curling iron plates in the garage, sculpting myself into a protein-powered statue of misplaced purpose. Worse, I wasn’t just eccentric—I was evangelical. At parties, I arrived armed with Genesis LPs, a blender, and the self-righteous zeal of a macrobiotic missionary. While everyone else chugged beer, I lectured them on amino acid assimilation. “Beer tastes like horse piss!” I declared, mid-flex, clutching a protein shake like a chalice. Girls scattered like pigeons from a lawn sprinkler. “Come back!” I shouted after them. “I’m the only one here with abs!”

    Later, alone in my room, my biceps and I sulked together under the blue glow of my bedside lamp.
    “Master Po,” I sighed, “why am I such a freak?”
    “Because you throw banana peels in people’s path to keep them from getting close to you,” he said.
    “And why would I do that?”
    “To protect yourself.”
    “From what?”
    “Everyone is broken, Grasshopper—but you are cracked to the core. Yet remember: beauty can be found even in freakishness. If you don’t draw that beauty out, it will turn inward and destroy you.”
    “How so?”
    “Because if you keep throwing banana peels for others, you’ll eventually slip on them yourself.”
    I sighed. “I think it’s already happened.”

  • Your Tears Won’t Change the World

    Your Tears Won’t Change the World

    When I was thirteen, I decided the path to popularity ran straight through Soul Train. I spent months studying the dance troupe Captain Crunch and the Funky Bunch, who could pivot from the robotic precision of the Funky Robot to doing splits so fast you’d think they were animated. I practiced every night in front of my bedroom mirror until my limbs clicked like clockwork and my expression was as vacant as a mannequin’s. I was ready to unleash my Funky Robot at the Earl Warren Junior High dance.

    The playlist that night was pure chaos. Whoever the DJ was, he seemed to be drawing songs from a hat. “Free Bird” dragged like a eulogy, “Walk This Way” felt like cardiac arrest, and “Midnight at the Oasis” was exactly what it sounded like—a languid romp in the desert. But when Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” came on, I sprang into motion. My body jerked and popped with righteous purpose. I was a mechanical deity in Adidas, a human jukebox powered by insecurity.

    By some miracle of social physics, I ended up dancing all night with Cheryl Atkins—the prettiest girl there—because her boyfriend Rick hated to dance. While we funked and twirled under the mirrored ball, I noticed the misfits pressed against the gym walls like condemned prisoners. They’d ask for dances, get shot down, and limp back to their corner of despair. Watching them, I felt an unexpected pang—an ache sharper than any muscle burn.

    Meanwhile, the popular eighth-graders were perfecting a ritual called “getting wasted,” which apparently involved puking and maintaining high social standing at the same time. As a Junior Olympic weightlifter, I found this baffling. I could clean and jerk my body weight, but I couldn’t comprehend how vomiting could make you cool.

    By the end of the night, Cheryl and I won the dance contest. Vice Principal Gillis handed me a trophy, but instead of basking in my Funky Robot glory, I felt hollow. The faces of the wallflowers haunted me. That night, I dreamed of a beach where a giant elephant seal handed each lonely misfit a beautiful radio, and as they tuned it, they glowed and vanished into the horizon. I woke up certain of one thing: radios were holy.

    “Master Po,” I said, “the world is cruel. I can’t be happy knowing people like those misfits suffer.”
    “Spare me your tears, Grasshopper,” he said. “Sadness feels noble, but it’s an addiction. It comforts the ego while changing nothing.”
    “But what can I do?” I asked. “Darwin was right—the strong thrive, and the weak pay the price.”
    “Indeed,” he said. “And in case you haven’t noticed, you’re one of the weak. So tend your own garden, Grasshopper. The misfit must save himself before he can save the world.”

  • Do Not Trust the Smile of the Sea

    Do Not Trust the Smile of the Sea

    When I was twelve, my family lived briefly in Nairobi, where my father worked for the Peace Corps. One school break, we headed to Mombasa, the coastal jewel of Kenya, where the Indian Ocean was as warm as bathwater and clear enough to read your reflection in. Leopard-spotted shells glimmered beneath the surface, and purple sea urchins decorated the shallows like jeweled land mines. I was a sunburned boy in blue terry-cloth trunks printed with white lilies—half Tarzan, half tourist—determined to conquer nature with curiosity alone.

    At low tide, I discovered sea cucumbers: bulbous, indecently soft things that looked like props from a B-movie. I picked one up and chased my younger brother along the beach, brandishing it like a medieval mace, laughing so hard I forgot to breathe. Then, mid-laughter, the ocean answered back. I fell into the shallow surf, and my back erupted in white-hot agony. My father sprinted toward me, wielding a stick like an exorcist, shouting that I’d been wrapped by a Portuguese Man o’ War. By the time he peeled the translucent tentacles off my skin, the jellyfish had already written its signature in fire across my spine.

    A local doctor, somber and leathery from the sun, told us a five-year-old boy had died from the same sting just a week earlier. He handed me pain medication and ordered a long, cold bath. As I soaked, trembling and pink, I asked Master Po why the most beautiful place I’d ever seen had tried to kill me.

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “Heaven and Earth show no mercy. You thought yourself Tarzan, but you are a fragile boy—a straw dog—easily crushed by nature’s indifference. Do not be deceived by beauty. It will destroy you.”

    “I’m not fooled,” I said, “but I still want to be close to it. Surfers in Santa Cruz watch their best friend get swallowed by a great white, and a year later they’re back in the same waves. Tomorrow my brother and I will be back in the Indian Ocean. Are we fools?”

    “Foolishness,” Master Po said, “is closing your eyes to the lesson and calling it courage. Tomorrow, you may return to the sea—but this time, you’ll keep your eyes open.”

  • The Path to Enlightenment Is Paved with Horse Dung

    The Path to Enlightenment Is Paved with Horse Dung

    After sixth grade let out, the bus would drop us on Crow Canyon Road, and my friends and I would stumble across the street to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee before the long, lung-searing climb up Greenridge Road. One hot spring afternoon, as I stood under the humming fluorescent lights, brain half-frozen by cherry ice and “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” pouring from the store radio, two blonde sisters drifted in like mirages from a Beach Boys song. They were the Horsefault sisters—freckled, sunburned, and perilously beautiful, with high cheekbones and figures that looked imported from a drive-in double feature starring Raquel Welch and Adrienne Barbeau.

    “Wanna see our rabbit?” they asked.

    Normally, my interest in rabbits was zero, caged or otherwise. But I was eleven, and the sisters had the sort of gravitational pull that makes a boy agree to anything. So I said yes.

    We walked a dirt path behind the 7-Eleven, through a field glazed in golden light and peppered with horse droppings that crunched underfoot. Their farmhouse loomed ahead, half hidden behind a thicket of bushes. And there it was: the cage. A huge metal pen with its door cracked open, a thick chain dangling like a warning.

    “There,” one of them said.

    I peered inside. No rabbit. Just straw, shadows, and the faint smell of hay and mischief. Then came the cackling—witchlike, gleeful—as the sisters lunged, grabbing my arms and trying to shove me into the cage. It dawned on me that I was living a low-budget horror film: The Boy Who Should Have Stayed at 7-Eleven.

    They tugged; I resisted. Dust rose around us like smoke as we wrestled in the grass, the air thick with sweat, laughter, and the unmistakable scent of adolescence gone rogue. Chickens screamed from a nearby coop as if alerting the countryside to my peril. Then, mid-grapple, something shifted: the danger took on a strange sweetness. The idea of being locked in that cage suddenly didn’t seem so terrifying. In fact, it sounded… educational.

    But the Horsefault sisters, realizing I was enjoying this little apocalypse of innocence too much, let go. We stood, panting, brushing hay from our shirts like dazed gladiators. Without a word, they turned toward the farmhouse, and I trudged home, confused, awakened, and very much alive.

    That night, I couldn’t sleep. My body was staging a mutiny.

    “Master Po,” I whispered to the ceiling. “I seem to have a new affliction. It’s keeping me up.”

    “Your body,” came his serene voice, “is prey to desire. Do not despair. You are becoming one with nature. You should be happy.”

    “Happy? I’m miserable.”

    “To hide your desire gives it power,” he said.

    “Believe me, it’s not hidden.”

    “Excellent. Desire is both a blessing and a burden.”

    “What’s the good news?”

    “It means you’re alive and growing.”

    “And the bad news?”

    “It never ends.”

    I frowned at the ceiling. “Master Po?”

    “Yes, Grasshopper?”

    “I wish I hadn’t fought them off. I wish I were in that cage right now.”

    “It’s too late. What’s done is done. Learn from it. In time you’ll understand your desire instead of fearing it.”

    “What if there’s no future for me in that department?”

    “You’re eleven,” he said dryly. “Your future is nothing but departments.”

    “Peace seems impossible.”

    “Remember, Grasshopper,” he said, fading into the dark, “the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”

    “Then I must be radioactive,” I muttered, staring at the ceiling, waiting for peace—or the Horsefault sisters—to return.

  • Your Status Drifts Like the Waves of the Sea

    Your Status Drifts Like the Waves of the Sea

    One grim Tuesday in fifth grade, our entire class was herded into the nurse’s office for the Ishihara Colorblind Test—a bright little carnival of humiliation disguised as medical science. Each of us took turns peering into a glowing lens, where we were supposed to spot numbers hidden in a mosaic of pastel dots. My classmates breezed through like they were decoding divine messages. I, however, saw nothing but decorative oatmeal.

    The nurse grew impatient. “Can’t you see anything?” she barked, her voice slicing through the sterile air like a paper cut. The class erupted in laughter. My fate was sealed: I was the day’s designated leper, the monochrome freak in a Technicolor world.

    At lunch, I sat alone with my half-eaten cheeseburger and tater tots, brooding over my sudden fall from grace. “Why,” I asked my internal life coach, Master Po, “is everyone making such a big deal about me being colorblind?”

    “Do not worry, Grasshopper,” he said in that maddeningly tranquil voice. “Today you are mocked, but by tomorrow you will be first picked at kickball, for your mighty legs will send the ball over the fence. People’s judgments are like waves upon the sea—brief, noisy, and forgotten.”

    “I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “Teddy Leidecker smelled like pee in kindergarten, and he’s still called Pee-pee Teddy. That wave’s been breaking for five years straight.”

    “Nature does not hurry,” Master Po said serenely, “yet everything is accomplished in its time.”

    “Try telling that to Teddy Leidecker,” I muttered.

    “You must not manage the gardens of others,” he said. “You have your own plot of weeds to clear.”

    “Really encouraging, Master.”

    He nodded. “You must clear them to reveal your original nature.”

    “What if my ‘original nature’ isn’t that great?”

    “Even if you dislike yourself,” he said, “you must nurture yourself. The sage helps even the repulsive.”

    “So what you’re saying,” I said, “is that even when I do stupid things, I can be a moral lesson to myself?”

    “Precisely, Grasshopper. You are blossoming before my eyes.”

    “Yeah,” I said, stabbing a tater tot. “Into what, exactly—a dandelion?”

  • Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    When I was ten, I made the catastrophic decision to watch an ABC Movie of the Week called The Screaming Woman, based on a Ray Bradbury short story. The premise was simple: a woman buried alive, screaming for help. But to a ten-year-old with an overactive imagination, it was psychological napalm. For two weeks I couldn’t sleep. Every creak of the floorboards, every gust of wind was the muffled plea of a mud-caked corpse clawing her way out from under my bed.

    One night, trembling in a sweat-damp cocoon of sheets, I turned to my imaginary Zen tormentor, Master Po, and asked, “Why am I so stupid, Master? Why did I watch a movie designed to murder my sleep?”

    “Ah, Grasshopper,” he said, with the unhurried calm of someone who’s never paid a utility bill, “the woman buried in a shallow grave is not your enemy. She is your teacher. She shows you the short bridge between life and death. You imagine the bridge as long, but in truth it is a nub, barely the length of a thought. Horror films remind you that you are always one bad turn from the dirt nap.”

    “That’s profound, Master, but I still can’t sleep.”

    “You mustn’t flee from the woman under your bed,” he said. “You must reach into the grave and pull her out. In saving her, you save yourself.”

    “I’m not going near a grave,” I said. “I have claustrophobia.”

    “Life and death,” he replied, “are the same thing seen from opposite sides of the same coin.”

    “I prefer the life side, thank you.”

    “You cling to your vantage point because you think it’s fixed,” he said, with the patience of a man lecturing a doorknob. “But it will shift. When you accept change, death will no longer frighten you—and once that fear is gone, nothing can stop you.”

    “Nothing? Like I could hit a baseball five hundred feet like Reggie Jackson?”

    Master Po sighed. “No, Grasshopper. You will stop wanting to be Reggie Jackson. And that will be your home run.”

  • It’s Better to be Smart Than Right

    It’s Better to be Smart Than Right

    Sitting in the classroom at Independent Elementary, I’d burned through Mrs. Eckhart’s reading questions and had an hour to kill, so I launched a silent mutiny on a sheet of white art paper. I drew a submarine the size of a small nation—portholes lined up like pearls, each framing a tiny soap opera. In one, a guy flipped pancakes and invited the crew to “swing by my cabin.” In another, a woman in curlers refused to be seen “in this condition.” A cereal enthusiast raged about a missing prize. A hammock napper protested the racket. A girl clutched a shred of apple skin like it was a ticking bomb in her molar. A dozen noisy lives, each complaining, boasting, living. My plan was obvious: practice now so I could write for Mad Magazine later.

    Enter Mrs. Eckhart, patrolling the aisles like customs at the border. Red bouffant immaculate, eyebrows stepped out of a Hitchcock film. She stopped at my desk and stared down at the sub—my U.S.S. Bad Timing.

    “Is this how you spend your time in my class?”

    “I finished the assignment. I’m working quietly.”

    She read my dialogue bubbles aloud, pitch-perfect sarcasm, the kind that knives you with your own words. The class erupted. I was roast beef, she was the carving knife. Then the verdict: “Your parents should know this is how you spend classroom time.”

    She scrawled a note on the back of my masterpiece and demanded signatures before I returned it. At home, Dad examined the evidence like a prosecutor smelling a plea bargain.

    “You pissed off your teacher,” he said.

    “I don’t know why. I finished my work. I was quiet.”

    “It doesn’t matter. You insulted her.”

    “How?”

    “By finishing early and doodling, you told her the work was too easy. You disrespected her.”

    “I kept quiet. That’s hardly a crime.”

    “In life, it’s better to be smart than to be right.”

    “I thought they were the same thing.”

    “Not always. Today you were technically right and strategically stupid. Go to your room and think about it.”

    In exile, I summoned my emergency therapist: Master Po, Shaolin sage of my imagination.

    “Master Po, why am I the villain for drawing a submarine? And what does ‘be smart, not right’ even mean?”

    “Grasshopper,” he said, voice like wind across stone, “the world is full of educated people who know nothing. Wisdom is entering another’s mind, seeing as they see. Your father is correct. Choose smart over right.”

    “If being right doesn’t count, why learn right from wrong at all?”

    “Model yourself on Heaven’s righteousness,” he said, “but travel the earth with tact. Know what you do not know.”

    “Know what I don’t know? That feels like a riddle you give to people you want to confuse.”

    “You strain at my words as muddy water through a sieve. Clarity will come.”

    “Meanwhile, I’m grounded and missing Hogan’s Heroes.”

    “Unfortunate,” he said, not sounding remotely sorry.

    “Life is a riddle I can’t solve.”

    “You try too hard. Relax. Let go. Answers fall like rain.”

    “I could relax more if Dad paroled me to the television.”

    “Sitting quietly is perfect. With no intention and no movement, you will, like the perfect traveler, arrive.”

    I stared at the ceiling, the paint a milky ocean, my submarine rolled into evidence on the desk. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe Mrs. Eckhart wasn’t grading my drawing so much as my social intelligence—and I’d failed the pop quiz. The adult world prized two currencies: accuracy and tact. I had exact change for the first and lint for the second.

    Still, some small part of me refused to shred the sub and plead guilty to artistic misconduct. Those porthole people—pancake guy, curler lady, apple-skin girl—were ridiculous, yes, but they were also alive, chattering in their cramped circles under a thousand fathoms of routine. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I drew a submarine; maybe the problem was I’d launched it in the wrong harbor.

    Fine. Next time I’d finish late, or pretend to. I’d ask one question with the tone of a pilgrim seeking wisdom. I’d keep the submarine for after school, where editors at Mad Magazine would understand that sometimes the only way to survive a classroom is to build your own vessel and sail beneath the noise.

    For now, I sat still, practicing the advanced art of “no intention, no movement.” If arrival meant living through this night without losing my sense of humor—or my drawing—I could live with that. Smart over right, sure. But right over silent? Not always. Sometimes you keep the submarine.

  • Master Po vs. My Perfect Alibi

    Master Po vs. My Perfect Alibi

    In 1972, on the dust-choked battlefield otherwise known as the Independent Elementary playground, Miguel Torres and I were locked in a holy war over an alleged clipping penalty. Gary Kauffman—self-appointed referee, rules committee, and prophet of doom—had flagged me during tag football, a call that would hand my team the loss. Words got hot. “Cheater” ricocheted between us like a stray bullet. Then Miguel’s fists did the talking—left, right, a percussion solo on my jaw.

    I cried—not because I stood there like a department-store mannequin while his knuckles composed a sonata on my face, but because I was blind. I hadn’t read the storm system building in my friend—barometric pressure falling, hostility rising—and I was stunned that my protest could yank that much fury out of someone who’d traded Twinkies with me at lunch.

    The recess bell shrieked. We jogged back to class, me sniffling, my face a throbbing geography lesson. Mrs. Eckhart opened My Side of the Mountain, but I heard only the drumbeat in my skull and the soft crush of my pride underfoot. I retreated inward to the place my imagination had been furnishing for months: a quiet stone courtyard outside the Shaolin Temple, the same one that glowed from our black-and-white TV. The river whispered nearby. Incense drifted like daydreams. And there stood my spiritual guide, Master Po—blind as justice, sharp as a scalpel.

    “Master Po,” I said, still tasting the copper of humiliation, “you once taught me that weakness prevails over strength and gentleness conquers. Yet my team lost, my friend rearranged my face, and I stood there helpless. Where was gentleness then?”

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “you mistake stubbornness for virtue. You are the rigid branch that neither sees the distant hills nor hears the cooling wind—and so you snap. Begin by seeing. Begin by listening.”

    “What am I not seeing? What am I not hearing?”

    He tilted his head. “For one, you did not hear the expletives cannoning from your mouth—shrapnel of spit landing on your friend’s cheeks. For two, you did not see your own finger spearing his chest, drilling his solar plexus as if mining for a confession.”

    “So I was ticking off Miguel without even knowing it?”

    “Precisely, Grasshopper. You cherry-pick facts to star in your favorite film—You, the Noble Victim—while everyone else auditions for Villain. Myth-making is a miraculous tool for preserving self-esteem. It is also the shortest road away from The Way.”

    “I don’t myth-make.”

    He raised an eyebrow in the patient way only the blind can. “When you were six, you slept at your aunt and uncle’s and wet the bed. Instead of accepting the weather report from your own bladder, you blamed…the Pee Fairy.”

    I winced. “I remember. It was quick thinking.”

    “What else do you remember?”

    “That I repeated the lie until it became embroidered truth. I argued anyone who doubted me into silence. The Pee Fairy did it. Obviously.”

    “Exactly,” he said. “When you muddle truth long enough, you lose your own outline. You become your costume.”

    “How do I follow The Way?”

    “Do not costume yourself. Do not curate a personality for the world like outfits for the first day of school. Let time carve you. Emerge by erosion, not construction.”

    “I’m eleven,” I said. “Time carves slowly. Also, if I don’t finish my social-studies questions by sixth period, I’ll be carving them in detention.”

    He smiled. “By doing nothing, everything is done.”

    “Try that on Mrs. Eckhart.”

    “You have much to learn, Grasshopper.”

    Back in the fluorescent glare of fifth grade, Mrs. Eckhart’s voice returned, turning pages into wind through trees. I pressed a cool palm to my cheekbone, felt the ache, and wondered if wisdom always arrived late—long after the bell, after the punch, after you realize you were yelling at a friend and mistook your echo for righteousness. Maybe gentleness isn’t an instant shield; maybe it’s a habit you grow, a small current under the noise, the kind that keeps a rigid branch from snapping when the playground becomes a courtroom and you’ve already sentenced yourself to innocence.

  • My Doppelganger in Dark Sweats

    My Doppelganger in Dark Sweats

    Last night I dreamed that a baby had been abandoned in the flower garden outside my San Francisco apartment. His thin wail rose above the city hum, but no one seemed to hear it but me. The world went on—cars passing, neighbors coming and going—while I alone stood transfixed by that cry. I lifted the baby from the dirt, his skin warm and impossibly soft, and held him against my chest. Standing at the threshold of the apartment I rented with my wife and our stray orange cat, I prayed for holiness and wept, as though the infant had been dropped from heaven for me alone to fail or redeem.

    Inside, the apartment felt like an expensive tomb—luxurious, dim, deliberately shadowed, as if light itself were rationed. I fed the child and watched him feed, marveled at the smallness of his breaths. When his parents arrived, both scientists, I confronted them. They were calm, rational, and convinced me of their legitimacy with clinical precision. Their excuse was airtight, their affect detached, and in the end, I surrendered the baby, though my faith in their explanation felt paper-thin.

    Then the parents and the baby were gone. At this point, my role inside the apartment was clear: My wife and I were educators using the apartment to host seminars on DNA and algorithms for college students. The air smelled faintly of coffee and ozone. During one of these sessions, the true apartment owner appeared: my thirty-year-old doppelgänger, tall, lean, dressed in the sleek anonymity of wealth—dark designer sweats, minimalist sneakers. He admired the apartment I had borrowed as though validating his own taste: the kitchen gadgets gleamed like relics, the food neatly arranged, the DVDs alphabetized. His presence was eerie—a reflection of my own mind rendered in a sharper resolution. We talked about the future buyer of the apartment, another iteration of us—older, familiar, running on the same mysterious algorithm encoded in our shared DNA.

    When the lecture ended, my wife and I returned the keys to my younger self and walked hand in hand along the apartment’s tennis courts. The sky had the bruised hue of evening. I told her that everything—the baby, the double, the science lectures—had overwhelmed me. I broke down, crying again for the purity I had felt when I prayed over the abandoned child. That moment at the doorstep remained the still point of the dream: holiness in the act of holding something utterly helpless, something untouched by algorithm or ownership.