Doing it All over

Epilogue

If Nina and I hadn't been such good friends, if we hadn't been so deeply in love, I don't believe our relationship would have made it through our first few years in Seattle. There was no conflict between us during this time, don't let me lead you to believe there was, but we simply had a very limited amount of time together. We spent our first year there in the college dorms; seeing each other only on nights that I didn't have to work and on the occasional weekend. When we did get to see each other we were usually tired and confined to public places. Nina was carrying twenty-one units, I was carrying eighteen. Our days went by in a haze of lectures, notes, homework, stolen kisses between classes, and the occasional date to a cheap restaurant.

We were drawn closer together during this period by the fact that we were unable to establish any real friendships with other students. Neither of us developed any sense of camaraderie with those that shared our majors. I was majoring in International Business because that was the subject that would prepare me to take the greatest advantage of my pre-knowledge. Unfortunately the only people that majored in this subject, beside myself, were aspiring future businessmen of the type that represented everything I always found distasteful about capitalism. They were all clean-cut, conservative, right wing spouting members of the young republicans. They were the people who would one day make the sorts of decisions that would destroy the lives of thousands and then go on to a three-martini lunch to celebrate. They all wanted to be millionaires by thirty and would stop at nothing to achieve this goal. They were young men and women in the process of selling their souls.

Nina's classmates were of two different varieties. There were the rich elite, those that had had their money handed to them all of their lives, who had gone to private academies and had grown up in the lap of luxury. They were the sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters of plastic surgeons, cardiac surgeons, and family practitioners to the elite. Their snobbery, Nina complained, was so entrenched within their personalities that they wouldn't even talk to you unless you had a last name that they could recognize. The second group was the super-smart nerds, the kids that had damn near aced their SATs but that had been scarred by persecution in grammar and high school. They were the kids that used to have their books knocked out of their hands, that used to be the favorite victims of the Richie Fairviews. They were better than the elite was but not much. Many of them had an inferiority complex a mile high and were so competitive that they were incapable of friendship. Nina spoke sadly of them in her discussions, not even realizing that she had been fated to be one of them.

But we had each other and that was enough. We could talk together, share our fears and frustrations together, congratulate each other, and occasionally, very occasionally that first year, make love to one another. It was always sweet.

We went home for the summer and quickly became immersed in our wedding plans. Mary proved to be a fabulous planner, taking to her task with a zeal I'd never seen or suspected. We were married on June 28th, 1985 before more than seventy guests. It was the happiest day of my life, either life, to that point. After the reception we climbed on a plane and flew to Los Angeles where we boarded a cruise ship for a seven-day trip to Mexico and back. For the first time in our relationship we had all the time in the world to enjoy each other's bodies. We missed two of the three ports of call and probably spent more time in our cabin than we did on deck.

When we returned to Spokane after the cruise we were faced with the bizarre situation of not having anyplace to stay besides either her parents house or mine. We both agreed that it was less weird to stay with mine. Less weird, but still weird. Sleeping with your new wife in your old bedroom while your parents were in the house is strange no matter how you slice it. We found ourselves making love on the floor when the urge struck us because we didn't want Mom or Dad to hear the bed squeaking.

Ironically, the best example of my business skills came our sophomore year in college, long before I picked up my degree in it. We had to rent an apartment in Seattle; there was no way we were going to stay in the dorms another year; but we needed to protect our capital from taking a serious ding from this. In order for my first major move to be successful, I needed to have as much of the twenty some-odd thousand dollars in stocks and bonds available at that time. I could not let it whittle away bit by bit paying for living expenses.

I constructed a paupers budget that had us eating Rice-a-roni, hotdogs, and bologna sandwiches a lot but that served to use up my hospital salary, the interest on the bonds, and the growth of the stocks in such a way that we were still making more than we were putting out. Our apartment was less than six hundred square feet and you practically had to do an armed reconnaissance before you dared to venture out to the car or the bus stop but we got by.

Both of us kept up our maddening pace at school, sacrificing time together in the early years because we knew it would be returned to us when we were older. We somehow managed to keep our spirits high, to keep our love strong. The best part of those years were the nights after I'd returned from work, when I would find Nina just putting her studying aside, her body clad only in a long T-shirt. We always kept a bottle of cheap white wine in the refrigerator and we would often share a glass of it before retiring to the bedroom for a lovemaking session before dropping off to sleep.

In 1986 the day I'd been waiting for since my return finally came. The business section of the Seattle newspaper announced that Microsoft Corporation would have an initial public offering of stock. The price was twenty-one dollars a share. I called my father, I called Tracy, I called Mike, I called Jack, all of whom had begun investing at my advice. I told them what they should do. I myself was probably among the first to buy when the market opened that Monday. I took everything I could spare, all my bonds, all my stocks that were simply holding money, nearly twenty-three thousand dollars worth of capital and bought Microsoft with it at twenty-one a share. That was nearly eleven hundred shares of what would eventually become the staple of the computer industry. By the end of the day that price had already risen to twenty-six a share. In less than eight hours I'd already made more than five grand. And it would do nothing but go up and up.

I continued to shove my money into Microsoft exclusively until the price rose into the forties per share. Then I began to concentrate on other IPOs that were just coming to bear.

In June of 1987, only three years after her first day of college, Nina finished her undergraduate degree. She was consistently on the honor roll and had no problem securing both admission and a student loan for the medical school. She began her classes there in September of 1987.

In January of 1988, a semester earlier than most of my classmates, I graduated with honors with a bachelors degree in International Business. Before I'd even been given my degree I was offered a job with one of the more prestigious investment firms in the Seattle area. They were impressed with my honor roll placement, my interview skills, and most of all, my portfolio. I was singled out as a rising star, going to work in a place that usually only hired those with family connections. The starting salary was forty-eight thousand a year; a considerable amount for that time period.

Nina and I stayed in our apartment, paying five hundred and twelve dollars a month in rent and stashing most of my salary into more rising stocks.

I hated every minute of it while I worked there but I learned much. I was considered somewhat of an eccentric, a square peg, but they were very impressed with the witchlike feel I had for the stock market and for picking out trends in it. It wasn't hard to do when you had knowledge of how the system worked coupled with knowledge of future events. I learned to research and invest in small, unheard of stocks that were about to benefit from some technological or sociological advance. Things like the latex glove industry in the face of the AIDS crisis.

Not surprisingly most of my brilliant insights were in the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry. For instance, I knew from my previous life that there would be a big push to equip every major fire department engine and truck company in the country with semi-automatic defibrillators. So, using the skills I'd learned, I would research which companies made those things and direct my clients to invest their money there. Invariably I was right and my clients made money. My reputation grew and I began to develop contacts; the most important thing in that business. The fact that I couldn't stand most of my clients didn't matter. I learned to put that aside. My clients were my ticket to freedom.

By 1990, just as Nina was starting her third year of medical school I had both the contacts and the impressive reputation I needed. I resigned my position with the firm and Stevens Investment Consulting was born. My price was high, higher than anyone in the Seattle area. I did not advertise in any way shape or form. But I had more clients than I could handle. Word of mouth had spread that if you wanted to make some guaranteed money, you went and saw Bill Stevens. I rented a spacious office near downtown. I hired an attractive secretary to staff the front desk. And I dispensed killer advice that never, as far as I know, cost anybody a dime in losses. Amusingly enough, a good portion of my clients were the investment counselors that I'd worked with at the firm. After all, who knew better than they how accurate my predictions were. None of my clients ever knew that I lived in a pauper's hovel in South Seattle and drove an old Datsun to work. None of them knew that I was cramming every spare penny into the same stocks I was recommending to them.

Our net worth climbed past the million-dollar mark about the time that Nina started her fourth and final year of medical school. We celebrated by making a few purchases. I bought my wife a Volvo with all the bells and whistles. I bought myself a BMW with all the bells and whistles. I bought the both of us a three-bedroom house in one of the middle-class suburbs, putting down twenty percent and assuming a thirty-year loan at seven and a half percent. The real estate agent that sold it to us thought we were mad once she got a look at our credit report and earnings sheet.

"But sir," she'd nearly pleaded. "This house is only two hundred and twenty thousand. With your income and assets, you qualify for well over nine hundred thousand. Why would you want to…"

"Ma'am?" I'd interrupted, "this is the house we want. Are you going to sell it to us or not? If not, I'll be happy to find another agent who will."

She sold it to us of course. She certainly did not want to lose her commission. We moved into our first house on September 18, 1991. We made love in the bedroom that first night before we even began to unpack.

Nina Stevens became Doctor Stevens on June 3, 1992. My parents, her parents, Tracy, even Mike and Maggie flew up for the ceremony. After they all returned home Nina was left with four weeks before her residency in emergency medicine began. I took a vacation from work, it's easy to do when you're the boss, and I rented us a condo on the leeward side of Maui. Except for our honeymoon it was our first real vacation. We spent three and half weeks relaxing on the beach, eating in restaurants, sightseeing, and making love at least twice a day; sometimes in our condo, sometimes on a deserted stretch of beach as the sun went down, and once in the bathroom of a sightseeing dinner cruise boat. That last one was not exactly making love, it was pure lustful fucking, through and through. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

When we returned to Seattle the hell of residency began for Nina. She would work thirty-six hours at a stretch at least three times a week, learning the finer points of treating medical and traumatic injuries in the busiest emergency room in Washington. If she was allowed to get any sleep there at all it was typically less than an hour at a time. When she was home she was exhausted. Many was the time that she drug herself into the house at some forbidding hour and tried to tell me about her shift but fell asleep in mid-sentence. I would carry her to bed like a child on these occasions, undress her, and tuck her in.

I concentrated on my own work during this period, spending hours at my computer terminal in the office or in the den of my house, researching companies, finding out what they made, how they made it, what kind of raw materials they used to make it with. I spent even more hours on the phone with my clients, advising them to buy this, to sell that. My reputation continued to grow to the point where I had to turn down clients because I simply didn't have the time to consult with them. And of course, under the rules of capitalism, my price went up along with the demand for me. I received so many offers of employment at outrageous salaries from large firms that I lost count of them. I had so many rich pricks offer to partner with me that I had to develop a standard speech for turning them down.

I suppose it was inevitable that one day two gentlemen in suits entered my office and approached Darla, my young secretary. They spoke a few words to her, showed her some identification, and a second later my phone was ringing on my desk. She told me about my visitors and I instructed her to let them in.

"Mr. Stevens," said the taller of the two, his eyes flitting around my office, looking for something incriminating. "I'm Special Agent Talon, FBI."

He flipped open a little leather case, displaying his credentials. "This is Agent Sparks from the Federal Trade Commission." Sparks displayed his own credentials. "Would you mind if we had a few words with you?"

"Not at all gentlemen," I said, suppressing my nervousness at the appearance of a couple of feds, "please sit down." I waved them to the chairs before my desk. "Can I have Darla bring you some coffee or tea? Maybe some bottled water?"

"No thank you," Talon answered for both of them. They took their seats and spent a moment just looking at me.

"What is it I can help you with?" I asked.

"Word among the investment community," Sparks said, speaking for the first time, "is that if you want to make some guaranteed money in the market, you go see Bill Stevens at Stevens Consulting."

I gave a small smile, "glad to know that my reputation proceeds me."

"Uh huh," Sparks continued. "We did a little checking on you Mr. Stevens. When we hear something like that it makes us a little curious. Guaranteed money? In the stock market? There is really no such thing. The stock market, as you surely know, is little more than a respectable form of gambling. Some have a flair for it, some do not. But nobody has the reputation that you have. Nobody."

He leaned forward, his gray eyes burning into mine. He was trying to intimidate me. "You charge nearly three times what other investment consultants do," he said. "There is no reason or justification for such an outrageous fee in a business such as this. None at all. But somehow you not only get away with it, you have more clients than you can handle. We sent one of our agents to try and sign up with you just to check you out and he was turned away, not because he's a fed but because you have no time to take on new clients, you're that booked."

"Is there something illegal about that?" I asked, starting to get a little angry.

Sparks ignored my question. "We've talked to many of your clients. It seems that you have quite the ability to spot and exploit trends in the market. An almost spooky ability. Time after time we were told how you advised them to put their money in this stock or that stock, usually something obscure that they'd never even heard of, and then low and behold, that stock begins to go up and up. Not one person we talked to complained about their stocks going down. Not a single one. Not one of them bitched about the fee you charged. Not a single one. Do you find that a little strange Mr. Stevens? Because I surely do."

"My clients TALKED to you?" I asked, appalled. I don't know why that surprised me but it did.

"Oh yes," Sparks smiled, perhaps sensing a little uplifted corner of my persona that he could pry at. "They were quite willing to talk to us once we implied to them that something illegal might be going on and that they might be implicated. Most of them happily showed us the records of their buys and sells. They sold you out in an instant at the mere suggestion that they themselves might be in danger."

"Figures," I muttered, seething at this knowledge. I recovered myself quickly. "But I'll ask you again gentlemen, have I done anything illegal?"

"I don't know Mr. Stevens," Sparks asked me, "have you? From everything we've learned it certainly looks like a fair amount of insider trading is going on here. Somebody is feeding you information, probably several somebodies inside of these corporations."

"Are you serious?" I asked, feeling myself on a little firmer ground. "You're suggesting that I have contacts inside of more than a hundred corporations that are feeding me inside info? Do you really believe that? It would have to be that many because that's how many companies I routinely advise my clients to invest in. I'm sure you know that if you've checked on me like you said. That's an awful lot of inside information, isn't it?"

"So you say you're doing nothing wrong?" Sparks asked, "that you're just very adept at picking the right stocks time and time again. So adept that you never guess wrong?"

"Basically, yes." I nodded.

"Would you mind if we took a look through your files?" Sparks asked next.

I laughed out loud, not able to help myself. "Let you look through my files?

Are you mad?"

He gave me a reasonable look. "If you have nothing to hide Mr. Stevens," he said, "then why should you mind letting us take a look?"

I shook my head at them. I'd had about enough of this. "Gentlemen," I asked, "this is the United States of America, is it not?"

"Yes Mr. Stevens," Sparks nodded.

"Good. Then I'm protected by a little document called the constitution am I not? A little addition to that document known as the fourth amendment? If you want to look through my files than you go get a judge to give you a warrant allowing you to do so. But you can't do that, can you? Because you don't have any probable cause that I've committed any crime. You're just here on a fishing expedition, hoping that I'll break down in front of you and bust open some international inside trading conspiracy. Well sorry to disappoint you gentlemen, but that's not going to happen. There is no conspiracy and you will not be looking at any of my files."

Talon took a deep, angry breath. "Mr. Stevens," he said, "I have some very good friends at the Internal Revenue Service. I can make a few phone calls and you would find yourself under very intense scrutiny every time you filed your taxes."

"You're threatening me?" I barked, laughing. "You've got to be shitting. You know damn well you've already had your buddies at the IRS look into my background. You could probably recite my net worth as well as I can. You want to have them audit me every year? Go ahead, bring it on. They'll find nothing. I pay every penny of capital gains tax and income tax that I'm responsible for. I take no questionable deductions. I'm sure my clients have told you that I'm somewhat of a weirdo in that regard. When they bitch about their capital gains tax I always tell them they should be proud to pay it, that there is not nearly enough distribution of wealth in this country. I tell them I think the tax should be greater than it is, that the rich should be hammered with taxes. Bring on the audits guys, you can't threaten me with that."

They both stared for a moment, feeling the balance of power shifting on its axis. "Mr. Stevens," Talon started again.

"Gentlemen," I said, standing up. "I'm a very busy man and I have work to do. I think the time has come to put an end to our discussion. If you wish to talk to me again, please call in advance and set up an appointment. I'll be sure to have a lawyer present. Good day."

Despite my bravado in the face of the feds, the encounter disturbed me greatly. They might not have known what they were dealing with but the fact remained that I had been noticed. I did not like to be noticed. I went home that night and found Nina in the bathtub, fragrant bubbles covering her body as she soaked after an exhausted sleep. She was due back at the hospital at six the next morning.

I leaned next to the tub and gave her a kiss. Somehow my hand just happened to drop into the water and land against her slippery thigh. The kiss deepened and two minutes later I was naked in the tub with her. A considerable amount of water splashed onto the carpet in the next fifteen minutes.

After, as we lay in our bed naked, staring at the ceiling fan going around and around I told her about my visit from Talon and Sparks. She was very alarmed by it.

"Feds?" she asked, looking at me. "You're not in any trouble are you Bill?"

"No," I shook my head. "They were just harassing me. They thought my record was a little suspicious and were trying to see if I was doing anything wrong."

"But you haven't been," she protested sternly. Nina was well aware of my prowess at picking stocks. She used to express doubt that I was committing so much of our net worth to a particular issue but she'd long since learned to trust my "instincts". How could she argue with constant success? If she had any suspicions about where my knowledge was coming from, if she ever thought it was more than just my own common sense and thorough study, she never mentioned it, either directly or indirectly.

"No," I said, "I've always gone out of my way to be on the up and up. I've never cheated so much as a penny on our taxes. We have nothing to worry about in that regards but at the same time I think it's time for a change."

"What kind of change?"

I told her. We talked into the wee hours of the morning. By the time she left for the hospital a decision had been made. I put it into motion the very next day.

On November 16, 1993, at the age of twenty-six, with a net worth of 1.9 million dollars, I retired from work. I was free.

I didn't spare a thought about the clients I was abandoning. After all, those assholes had talked to the feds about me, had shown them records. I could understand that. But not a single one of them, not one out of the forty or so the feds talked to had bothered to give me a little call and let me know that the FTC and the FBI was sniffing at my ass. Fuck them. They'd paid me their money and I'd advised them well. Our relationship ended right there.

Darla was another matter. The closing down of Stevens Consulting left her without a job. I'd lured her away from a job that she'd hated by offering her a handsome salary. This had been in the days before sexual harassment became the issue that it is today and Darla had been expected to offer special services to her previous boss as a condition of continued employment. Naturally she'd been prepared to offer those services to me when I hired her and had been quite surprised when I didn't request them. I had changed her view of the world as she knew it.

She became a very loyal employee, a secretary that other businessmen and women could only dream about. She also became a friend during the many hours we spent alone in the office. She was very attractive and I can't say that I hadn't enjoyed looking at her nyloned legs on occasion as she typed on her computer or answered the phone, but I never once considered bedding her. I told her the news of the closure of Stevens Consulting and she broke into tears.

Her tears dried up when I gave her her severance package. I gave her a check for twenty thousand dollars and a lifelong offer to consult in investment for her free of charge. If she played her cards right she would never have to work again and she knew it. She gave me a huge hug, a kiss on the cheek, and an unspoken offer to continue the affections in my office. I gave her an unspoken denial and we parted.

Though Nina was still locked in the rigors of residency, I had nothing but time on my hands now. Using my computer I could monitor and adjust our investments, dispense advice to my few clients: Maggie and Mike, Jack and Mary, Mom and Dad, Darla, Tracy; by checking my computer and spending less than two hours per week before it. Our net worth had reached the point where it could only get bigger as long as I kept shifting it from rising stock to rising stock. I began to spend a little on self-pleasure.

During the last two years of Nina's residency I learned to fly an airplane and purchased a Cessna that could hold four people. I learned to sail on Puget Sound, even venturing into the open water of the Pacific Ocean and learning the finer points of open sea navigation and handling. I learned to play golf, bringing my handicap from an initial twenty-six all the way down to a nine.

I learned to hunt for deer and elk, my father-in-law taking on the responsibility of teaching me. I purchased a Winchester 30-06 and fired it at a range until I could hit a target the size of a quarter from two hundred yards. My first trip to the Idaho panhandle in October I brought down a four point buck. The next October Jack and I climbed into my Cessna and I flew us to the most remote airstrip in Northern Wyoming that we could find. We spent a week camping out, drinking beer, and basking in maleness. We both bagged an elk on that trip and had to arrange for the meat to be shipped home via ground transport because it's sheer weight would have overloaded my plane.

I kept myself amused by my many pursuits during those days, never recklessly spending money, but gratefully abandoning my miserly ways at the same time. We remained in our simple three-bedroom house, our neighbors never knowing or suspecting that we were multi-millionaires. In fact, since they knew Nina was a doctor in residency, they kind of figured that I was some sort of unemployed loser that had latched onto her. I never bothered to correct this impression.

As the end of her residency began to come into view we began to talk about what was next. Where we would go, what we would do. It wasn't a long discussion. Both of us longed to leave Seattle behind. We hated the weather, we hated the bustle of living in such a large city. We both wanted to go home.

Three things happened in the last six months of her residency. The first was that Nina began looking for a position in a Spokane emergency room. The trauma center expressed immediate interest in her and the employment process began. I flew her back and forth for interviews three times and she was offered the position. Her starting date was to be two weeks after she passed her final boards.

The second thing occurred directly because of the first. I began to scout out locations for our future home. We had long talks about our dream house during this time. I assured her that we could afford whatever it was that we came up with and that I would make it happen. We both listed what we wanted and compared the lists. Eventually we came up with a master plan. I searched out and eventually found a good architect. He flew with me to Spokane and we began scouting out land for sale in the region. It didn't take long to find exactly the plot we were looking for. I started the legal process of purchasing the land while my architect began the process of planning the house we wanted. Construction began three months before we were to leave Seattle.

The third thing that happened had nothing to do with houses and jobs. Well, almost nothing. Nina and I had several long discussions and finally, two months before we returned to Spokane, a month after our new house had begun the process of being built, Nina threw away her birth control pills. October 18, 1995, the day she started her first day as a staff physician in the emergency room of the trauma center, she was two months pregnant.

We spent our first six months back in Spokane living in a house we'd rented in the River View section while construction on our dream-house was underway. Nina swoll up with pregnancy, her breasts edging into the territory of the C-cup for the first time in her life. She continued to work and I continued to oversee the construction, making sure everything was just right.

Our house was being built on four acres of shoreline property on Lake Pend Oreille. It was a very rural part of the lake, accessible only by a twisting, two-lane road. Our land was covered with evergreens and brush. No water or electricity ran there and we had to arrange to have it; as well as a septic system; put in. The location was exactly forty-two miles from the Spokane City Limits; forty-eight miles from the trauma center. Nina assured me that she didn't mind the commute. It would take her just under an hour both ways but since her schedule was only three twelve hour shifts one week and four the next, it wasn't a terrible hardship. After the horrors of internship the schedule, including the commute, seemed almost serene.

I was able to watch the land change from forbidding forest to a nice plot overlooking the lake. The house itself is nearly six thousand square feet. It has seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, a large family room, two dens, a game room, and a wine cellar. It has a built-in swimming pool that looks like a tropical lagoon (Nina's idea). It has a tennis court and a par three golf hole (my ideas). It has a large, redwood deck in the back with access from the master bedroom and the living room. The deck contains a covered hottub capable of holding eight adults in comfort. Forty-eight steps lead downward from the deck to a private dock and a huge boathouse. These days the boathouse contains a forty-foot cabin cruiser, a ski-boat, a small bass boat, and a couple of jet-skis. Real water enthusiasts are we Stevens'.

One month before Nina's due date the finishing touches were finally completed and we moved in. We kept up with tradition and made love before the boxes were even unpacked.

Laura Stevens entered the world on June 18, 1996, a tiny, red-faced infant, nearly bald, that looked so much like her mother that it was difficult to believe that I had anything to do with the conception.

Since then we've had two others. Jason, born September 20, 1997, also looks like Nina though there is at least a hint of my facial features in his form.

Megan, born October 3, 1998 is the baby of the family. God help her, she looks just like me. There's no denying paternity there.

I spend my days watching these children, caring for them on the days that Nina is at work. My life is happy. There is little else I'd rather do. I go fishing at least once a week. I go hunting once a year. I go to Mariners games in Seattle at least three times a season. I've replaced my single engine plane with a twin engine capable of holding ten. Trips to Las Vegas or Reno occur frequently.

I spend about three hours a week monitoring my investments. I was able to take huge advantage of many initial public offerings, especially over the last four years. I got in on America Online, Amazon.com, E-bay, and many other Internet stocks that went through the roof. The Stevens' family holdings have nearly tripled in the last five years. On the day I type these words our net worth is just a hair over eleven million dollars. A good thing because I've now reached the point where my pre-knowledge has run out. Obviously I've gained considerable knowledge of stocks and investments so I'll keep some money in the market but I'm planning to begin shifting the bulk of our holdings over to CDs, Mutual Funds, Treasury bonds, and other safe, quiet storage vessels.

Nina works her shifts and is a very popular doctor among the staff and her coworkers. But at the same time her superiors consider her somewhat of a pain in the ass. She doesn't work any of the many overtime shifts that are offered to her. She doesn't write papers for publication in the hospital journal. She doesn't participate in the education or training of the area's paramedics. She goes to work, does the job that she loves, and then comes home to the family that she loves.

Mike took the test for the Spokane Fire Department in June of 1985. By then he had a year of being their courier and two semesters of Fire Technology classes from the community college under his belt. He'd worked out obsessively throughout the year in fire station workout rooms and his body was an efficient, well-honed machine. He passed the written test in the high nineties but it was the physical agility test, the combat challenge, that was his shining moment. He didn't just break the previous record, he shattered it by more than eighteen seconds. His oral boards were just a formality at that point.

Early that August, while Nina and I were still sharing my old bedroom prepatory to heading back to Seattle, Mike entered the fire academy. On November 3 he was given his first assignment; an engine company very near where a girl named Julie had once thrown me out of her car. It was the busiest station in Spokane and he spent eighteen months there.

Once his probation period was up he began taking more Fire Tech courses. He collected his associate's degree in 1987 and then transferred to State College. By 1990 he held a bachelors degree.

He continued to date Maggie throughout the year prior to his hire. Unfortunately when he made the discovery as a rookie firefighter of how damn easy it was to get laid when the public adored you, he gave Maggie the old, "I think we should see other people" speech. I heard all of this from Nina, who corresponded in letters and phonecalls with Maggie. It was very apparent that Maggie did not take the speech well.

I felt sad for both of them, part of me wondering what Mike was thinking – it was obvious how he felt about her – the other half knowing exactly what he was thinking and what organ he was doing it with. Mike went on something of a rampage, very similar to what I'd done upon my recycling with exactly the same sort of blindness. I didn't interfere, didn't try to talk him out of what he was doing. I knew he wouldn't listen to me. I only hoped he would catch himself before it was too late.

Maggie was in her first year of nursing school when they broke up. She grieved for a while and then carried on, beginning to date again after a few months. She drifted back into her pattern of changing boyfriends as often as she changed her socks for about six months. She then began to date a radiology tech that she'd met during her hospital time.

They became a couple. Maggie wrote letters to Nina telling how happy she was. I read the letters and had to agree with Nina's assessment that they sounded entirely too cheery, too forced. They sounded like Maggie was trying to convince herself that she was happy.

The radiology tech asked Maggie to marry him a week before she graduated from nursing school. He didn't put a ring on her finger with his mouth, nor did he put one in a glass of champagne. In fact, he didn't even HAVE a ring when he conversationally brought up the subject of marriage to her.

Maggie said yes to him immediately. Two days later they went and picked out a ring together. The one that she liked cost more than he cared to spend so he asked her is she would mind pitching in a little for it. After all, money was tight, the republicans were fucking up the economy, etc. She pitched in. She tried to make the whole thing sound romantic in her letter but the underlying bitterness and disappointment were plainly visible between the lines.

She told Nina about their plans. They were going to get married as soon as possible, as soon as she secured employment as a nurse. He was going to quit his job and start a medical billing business that he could operate from their home.

Neither Nina nor myself had ever met this radiology tech but it certainly sounded to us like he was someone looking for a free ride. We wondered how Maggie could not see this too. Nina briefly mentioned this possibility during a phone conversation and Maggie blew up at her, slamming the phone down in anger. They made up a few days later but Maggie made it clear what the rules were: no more talking about her radiology tech.

I was forced to wonder if Maggie was following along her fated path. I hadn't known her at all in my previous life, nurse or not a nurse, she hadn't worked in any of the ERs, but I rather suspected that she was.

It was two weeks after the engagement notice, a week after her graduation, when Mike called me at our small apartment. He was in tears. We talked for more than an hour and he poured out his heart to me. He told me how much he loved Maggie, how stupid he'd been, and how he'd now lost her because he'd realized this too late.

I calmed him down – believe me, I was able to sympathize – and told him that he might be right, that it might be too late. I also told him that he didn't have a hair on his ass if he didn't at least TRY to get her back if that was how he felt about her. Even if he were still ultimately rejected he would at least not have to spend his life wondering if he COULD have. He asked how he could go about doing that.

"Do you want to marry her?" I asked him. "Is that what your goal is?"

"Yes," he answered without the slightest hesitation.

"Then in order for you to have any chance at all you're going to have to move quickly. Very quickly. You're going to have to be aggressively romantic."

"Aggressively romantic?"

I explained what that meant. We discussed a few different approaches to the problem and eventually Mike arrived at a course of action.

"Good luck," I told him after the details were worked out.

"What do you think my chances are?"

I didn't like to lie to my friends but in this case I made an exception. "About fifty-fifty."

Armed with information that I'd taken out of Maggie's latest letter to Nina, Mike was waiting for her when she emerged from a job interview at Holy Family Hospital – interestingly enough the same hospital where I'd performed a similar mission for Nina. Perhaps it was fitting. He proclaimed his love for her right there in the parking lot. He told her how wrong, how stupid he'd been. Finally he dropped to one knee and offered her an engagement ring. He told her that he would marry her that night, that hour. It was a very risky move on his part but it paid off.

She didn't accept his ring right there. She didn't gush all over him and go off into the sunset with him. But she also didn't slap his face. She left the parking lot that day by herself, her mind very troubled. But the next day she called him up and agreed to have lunch with him. By the end of that day they found themselves at Mike's house, in bed, her newest ring on her finger.

The next day she broke the news to the radiology tech. He did not take it very well. He screamed and yelled and cussed and Maggie was forced to flee in terror, honestly fearing for her safety. The words "bitch" and "cunt" and "whore" followed her to her car.

Mr. Radiology then made perhaps the worst mistake of his life. After Maggie left he went to Mike's fire station carrying an aluminum baseball bat and intending to express his displeasure with Mike in dramatic fashion. It was pretty dramatic all right. He'd failed to take a few things into consideration before launching his attack. One was that Mike was in exquisite physical shape as a result of his passion for working out. Another was that there were two other firemen in the station and firemen are fiercely loyal to each other.

The scuffle lasted approximately forty-five seconds. Radiology did not land a single blow with his bat or anything else. The Spokane Police arrived in force less than three minutes later. They charged in with their batons out, just itching to thump upon the person who had dared to storm a firehouse (the cops are VERY protective of firefighters and paramedics). What they found was their aggressor lying unconscious on the floor, bleeding from multiple places on his head and face. Radiology went to jail after a two-day stay in the Spokane Trauma Center.

The last thing that he did not take into account was that assaulting fire personnel is heavily frowned upon by the legal system, even if a deadly weapon is not involved, which in this case it was. The proverbial book was thrown at him and he ended up spending a year in the county jail which, of course, resulted in the loss of his job.

Neither Mike nor Maggie was ever bothered by him again. Less than six months later they were married. Nina and I both drove to Spokane to attend.

Did they live happily ever after? Does anybody? They are still married today and have two children that are a few years older than mine. Mike was promoted to engineer in 1989. He made Captain in 1991. He's being pressured from above to apply for Battalion Chief these days but he insists he just wants to be a Captain forever. He has his own station, his own crew, and he still gets to run into burning buildings once in a while.

Maggie went to work at Holy Family hospital, moving from department to department for a few years until she found her niche in labor and delivery. She's been there ever since and is now the dayshift charge nurse.

As a couple they are considerably more wealthy than the upper-middle-class status that their income alone would have provided. Since his first year on the fire department Mike has been taking investment advice from me. He's never committed as much as I have but the net worth of the Meachen family is currently around 1.8 million dollars. They have a large house, paid for, in the River-View area of Spokane. You can see the falls from their bedroom window and their deck.

They remain our best friends. We get together either at our house or theirs no less than twice a month, sometimes more. We spend every New Year's Eve together partying the night away. We go on skiing trips, boating trips, Vegas trips, and the occasional cruise together. We couldn't ask for better friends.

Tracy, like Nina, pounded out her undergraduate degree in three years. She was accepted into the UC Berkeley law school and graduated with honors in June of 1989. She could have had a job with any number of prestigious firms as a litigator. Instead she applied and was instantly accepted at the Spokane County District Attorney's office as a deputy DA.

She moved back home in early July of 1989, saving me the bother of warning her about the impending earthquake that was going to strike the bay area in October of that year. She has been with the DA's office ever since and she has made quite a name for herself as the prosecutor that doesn't like to plea bargain. This has made her butt heads with her superiors on more occasions than she cares to count but they can't argue with her conviction rate, which is impressive indeed. She is particularly fierce when she gets her hands on a manslaughter case and even the judges seem to fear her when this happens.

It was in July of 1994 that she went to work one morning and was handed a new case file by her boss. The suspect in the case was one Dennis Castleton. He was a first sergeant in the United States Army home on leave for two weeks. The cops had filed a charge of second-degree murder against him but it was expected that the charge would be reduced to manslaughter. Sergeant Castleton was not an ordinary soldier but a member of the elite Army Rangers that had seen combat in the Persian Gulf War. The victim of the crime was a two-time loser that had been recently paroled from state prison after serving six years for armed robbery. The victim's name was Richard Fairview.

Apparently Sergeant Castleton had been leaving a bar with his wife when Fairview, a methamphetamine addict that was out of product and desperate for more, spotted what he thought was an easy mark. He approached Castleton, pushed him roughly up against a car, and demanded all of his money. Fairview had no weapon (if he'd had a gun he could have sold it for crank) and was relying solely on his intimidating size to get what he wanted. Why not? Castleton was only five foot eight and a hundred and forty pounds or so. I guess Richie hadn't learned much from his encounters with me back in high school.

When the cops arrived they found Richie Fairview dead on the pavement. An autopsy would reveal multiple skull fractures from having his head bashed repeatedly into the side of the car and a crushed trachea from having a hand chop brutally into it. Sergeant Castleton was without so much as a scratch on him.

Tracy reluctantly had herself removed from the case on the grounds that the victim had once stabbed her brother. The case eventually went to trial but the jury deadlocked 9-3 in favor of acquittal. The DA elected not to re-try it and Sergeant Castleton was released. He was given a court martial by the military and ultimately reduced one grade in rank. He would go on to fight another day. I only wished I'd had the opportunity to buy him a drink at some point.

Tracy, like many of my friends and all of my family, is considerably wealthier than her colleagues thanks to her wise choices in investments. She owns a large house not terribly far from Mike and Maggie's. She vacations in some new, exotic place each year. She's actually been to Russia, to Africa, to the Middle East, and even did a brief stint on a very expensive Antarctica tour in 1993. She always returns from her vacations refreshed and ready to get back into the fray of the Spokane County justice system.

In addition to her DA duties she is also active in many victims rights organizations. MADD is chief among them, although she is not a mother. She is very radical on the subject of DUI laws. Sometimes I think the Iranians would think her a tad radical on that subject.

Her personal life could use a little improvement. She is driven by her job and her relationships with men reflect that. She's been married twice now, both marriages conceived in passion and haste, both dissolved after less than two years. No children were produced either time. Most men have a hard time with her aggressive, pushy nature, not to mention the long hours that she works at her job and her volunteer work. Husband number one was a fellow prosecutor and you would have thought he'd have understood. He didn't. Number two was a detective sergeant with the Spokane Sheriff's department. He hadn't understood either. Both I think were drawn to Tracy by her good looks and strong personality and then driven away when they found that personality was stronger than they'd thought.

But there's hope for my sister yet I'm starting to think. She attended my birthday party five months ago and there met Brent Hartley, a colleague of Nina's and one of our family friends that we've developed. Brent had recently been utterly fucked in a divorce settlement and at times seemed on the verge of suicide. Tracy and he began chatting together and before the night was over both were smiling and being very chummy with each other. They've been dating ever since and they seem to be happy together. Who knows? Maybe something will come of it.

Mom and Dad have done well for themselves. Dad has been listening to my investment advice ever since I lived at home and as a result he was able to retire comfortably in 1990, fully five years before he retired in my previous life. Mom retired shortly after this. Their house is now paid off but they refuse to move out of it even though they could easily afford something quite nice if they wished. They love their house, have many memories attached with it and plan to die there. The longer I live in my own house, the more I understand their feelings.

What they've done instead is buy a large (and I mean LARGE) motor home which they use to tour North America with. They are often gone for months at a time, several times a year to parts as distant as you can get without leaving the continental landmass. They have taken their motor home to Alaska, to Florida, to Maine, to Arizona, and to many places in between. They are planning a trip to Cabo San Lucas later this year.

I arrange to have their place looked after while they are gone and to pay their bills in their absence. I make sure their lawn gets mowed, their Northwest Electric gets paid, and their water pipes don't freeze. I'm glad to do these tasks for them. They seem very happy in their retirement.

Jack and Mary Blackmore are still hanging in there and show no signs of stepping out anytime soon. They too have made use of my stock knowledge and are quite wealthy. Unlike my parents, their desire to move someplace very nice was stronger than their desire to stay in their house for nostalgia's sake. They live in a nice lakefront three bedroom on the shore of Lake Coeur d' Alene. When Nina and I need a babysitter it is usually they who are the first to volunteer.

Jack, Mike, and I have become frequent companions. Jack fits in with us very well and sometimes we completely forget that he is more than forty years older than we are. We all go hunting together each fall, finding the most remote airstrip we can to stage from, always spending at least a week out in the boonies somewhere, tromping around in camoflaugh gear, packing hunting rifles, drinking beer, sleeping in tents. We go fishing together several times a month on either Jack's lake or mine (usually Jack's, he's got a bitchin bass boat). We fly to Seattle for Mariners games at least four times every season. We have an annual deep-sea fishing trip that we take on a chartered boat.

Jack drinks as much beer as he always has and he's had no further heart problems. He was seventy-three years old on his last birthday but looks fifty due to frequent exercise and outdoor activities. When Viagra first came out I asked him jokingly (after several beers on the fishing boat) if he wanted me to ask Nina to write him a prescription for some.

He looked at me lecherously and said, "I certainly don't need any of THAT shit youngster. I ain't that old."

So that's how our lives have gone, how things turned out differently with pre-knowledge. I didn't change the world, just a few lives in it. Fate has seemingly accepted us, made allowances for us. We have left a wake of passage in the smooth fabric of what was supposed to be but, as I've seen, the wake has mostly closed up behind us leaving only a few ripples to mark our passage.

Only a few ripples.

On a beautiful April afternoon in 1998 I had to drive to Spokane to pick up the new fish-finder I was planning to get Jack for his birthday. Laura, who was almost three, and Jason, who was seven months, were with me since it was a day that Nina worked.

As always when I found myself in Spokane on such days, I stopped at the trauma center for a brief visit. Nina, as well as her co-workers, enjoyed seeing the kids for a few minutes and I enjoyed seeing my wife doing her job. I got the most enjoyment when we snuck in while she was in the middle of a procedure and I got to observe her at work. It was then that I could contrast the Nina that was with the Nina that should have been. It was then that I could feel how I'd thwarted fate, how I'd defied it in the control of a life.

We spent about twenty minutes in the doctor's lounge, the kids sitting on their mother's lap. Laura was babbling about something or other, using her fifty or so word vocabulary while Jason and I were munching on some chips from a dip tray that someone had brought in. Most of the crumbs from Jason's chip were tumbling down the front of Nina's scrub shirt, which was just starting to bulge outward at the abdomen from the presence of the as-yet-unnamed Megan, who was four months along in her belly.

Finally a nurse poked her head in.

"Nina," she said, "we got an ambulance three minutes out with a twenty mile an hour auto-ped. Positive loss of consciousness and repetitive questioning. Obvious tib-fib fracture too."

She sighed, "Thanks Jen," she said sourly, handing the kids over to me. "Oh well, duty calls."

We exchanged kisses and I took the kids and went outside to the ambulance bay, hanging out until the ambulance of which they'd spoken backed in.

I looked at the ambulance with nostalgia, as I always did when I found myself in such situations. It was amazing how much I remembered from my former career, how much I missed it at times. The ambulance was the 96-240.

I remembered that it was the rig with the bizarre electrical problems that sometimes caused the radios, the power windows, and the power steering to just die until you shut off the engine and started it again. The EMT that jumped out of the driver's seat was Rob Forehand, an aspiring fireman that had been my partner for a short time once. The paramedic that jumped out of the back was Jim Corgan, one of the oldest employees that we'd employed. He was number one on the seniority list and always had his choice of shifts when we bid for them. He was also cursed with a chronically sore back, a hazard of the business, and typically took off four months of every given year on work comp. I knew these two well but they had no idea who I was.

I smiled as they gave me a disinterested glance, probably figuring I was the family of a patient out for a smoke or something. They pulled their patient out of the rig. He was a street person dressed in scraggly clothes and smelling strongly of alcohol. He was strapped to a backboard, a cervical collar around his neck, two IVs plugged into his arms. They started to move him towards the entrance doors.

"Hey Rob," I said to the EMT, smiling. "Hope you get hooked up with the fire department soon."

He looked at me strangely, trying to place my face, trying to figure out if he knew me.

Before he could say anything I turned to his partner. "How you doing Jim? Good to see you. How's the back treatin' you these days?"

He gave me the same expression, finally answering, "Uh, it's okay."

"Good," I nodded, shifting Jason in my arms and grabbing Laura's hand once more. "I'll let you get back to your work."

I disappeared back to my Toyota four-runner, leaving their puzzled expressions behind me. Sometimes I just couldn't resist doing things like that.

We left the trauma center and headed for better parts of town. We picked up the fish-finder and I decided to treat my two children to some greasy fast food from a drive-through. Nina would most definitely not have approved but Jason couldn't talk yet and Laura lacked the vocabulary or the memory to rat me out.

We took our contraband to a nearby city park. Had I known something was going to happen? Had I been led there by fate for unknown reasons? Maybe. Maybe not. If so, fate does have its kind side.

The park was one that I'd once taken my daughter Becky to when she was young. Did I stop there out of nostalgia? Did I stop there because I remembered it was a good park to take kids too? I honestly don't know. I don't remember the vision of Becky coming to my consciousness at all in the decision to stop there. Thinking of Becky always made unpleasant feelings of guilt and loss to surface so my mind worked hard to keep those thoughts suppressed.

But whatever the reason, Laura, Jason, and I soon found ourselves sitting at one of the picnic tables beside the playground area. Ten or so kids of various ages and sizes were playing on the monkey bars, on the swings, on the slides, while their parents, mothers only for the most part, sat at benches or tables and kept an eye upon them.

The kids chowed down their chicken nuggets and french fries. They slurped their orange sodas dry. Finally Laura headed off to play on the jungle gym with the other kids. I carried Jason over to the swings and installed him in the baby swing. His little fists gripped the chain tightly but his face was all smiles as I began to push him in ever increasing arcs.

Then it happened.

"Swing me Mommy, swing me!" A girlish voice demanded from behind me.

I froze, waves of gooseflesh traveling up and down my entire body. I felt myself go clammy. I knew that voice, knew it well. It had been more than fifteen years since I'd last heard it. I had fought hard to keep it out of my conscious thought. But I never doubted for an instant, even before I turned around to look, that the voice was Becky.

I let my head pivot on my shoulders until I was looking at the little girl. She was about three years old, her dark hair tied into pigtails that bounced up and down as she skipped towards the swings. She was wearing a pair of blue jean overalls and sandals. It was Becky, no doubt about it, none whatsoever. Her face was slightly different than it had been, different in only the subtlest ways, ways that probably reflected the difference in paternity. But she had the same brown eyes, the same brown hair, the same upturned nose that she'd inherited from her mother. I was inundated with stark feelings of merging realities, with a horrid sense of deja vu unlike anything I'd ever experienced before.

This feeling was intensified when I saw Lisa coming up behind her. She looked exactly the same as she had when I'd last seen her. Exactly. She was wearing a light summer dress that came to her knees. It was white with blue patterns upon it. I remembered that dress, had seen Lisa wearing it many times when we'd switched off Becky according to our custody arrangement.

Becky came running up at full speed and jumped onto the swing next to mine, one of the big-kid swings, landing on her stomach. Her feet came up off the ground and her forward momentum set her swinging in that position. She didn't even notice the man next to her, staring at her, not breathing as he did so, his mouth agape in surprise. Was her name still Becky? I knew that it was, I simply knew it.

Lisa noticed me staring at her daughter and quickened her approach, her eyes looking at me suspiciously. Parents do not like to see complete strangers looking at their children in that manner. I forced my mouth closed, forced myself to commence breathing once again, forced my eyes off of the small child, forced a pleasant, non-threatening smile onto my face. My hands returned to Jason's swing, picked up the task of keeping him in motion. Lisa continued her approach, keeping a wary eye upon me, keeping her distance in case I proved to be dangerous.

I looked at her, keeping my smile upon my face. "Hi," I greeted.

"Hi," she said carefully.

"Sorry I was staring," I told her. "Your little girl there looks and sounds just like my niece. It kind of startled me for a moment when I saw her since she lives kinda far away."

This seemed to put Lisa's mind at ease a little. "That's okay," she said, "no harm done."

"Wouldn't dream of it," I assured her, giving Jason another push and trying to keep my eyes off of the little girl swinging back and forth next to me. "The resemblance was kind of startling at first. I guess I'll have to tell little Belinda she's got a twin in Spokane."

Lisa smiled for the first time as Becky climbed off the swing and then held her arms out to Lisa to be picked up, "swing me mommy, swing me!" she demanded again.

Lisa dutifully picked her up and placed her on the swing in the proper fashion. Becky grasped the chains and her mother began swinging her up and down, her rhythm matching that I was setting with Jason. As she pushed I noticed that there was one thing different about Lisa, one feature that hadn't been there the last time I'd seen her. This Lisa was wearing a wedding ring.

"Higher mommy, higher!" she demanded, giggling.

"If I swing you any higher Little Beck," Lisa replied, "you're going to go catapulting across the park."

I felt another chill as I heard Lisa use the nickname we'd routinely called Becky. I suppressed any outward display of how weird I was feeling.

"How old is yours?" Lisa asked me as she continued to push.

"Jason here is closing in on eight months," I answered, "I have a three year old over there by the monkey bars too. And yours?"

"Just turned three," Lisa answered. "We're finally out of the terrible two's thank God."

"Yeah," I nodded with genuine sympathy, "us too, at least until Jason here gets into them."

We began to talk, the polite conversation of two parents that meet in a park. At least at first that's how it was. By the time the kids got tired of swinging, by the time Becky moved off towards the monkey bars and the jungle gym, we were conversing like old friends. I could tell that Lisa was surprised by how easy I was to talk to, by how our two personalities seemed to click to a certain degree. We moved over to one of the benches that sat next to the play area, me carrying Jason in my arms, and sat down. We talked of the rigors of child-rearing in this day and age.

"My husband and I both have to work," Lisa told me, "but child-care is SO expensive. So we try to keep our schedules as opposite as we can. We don't see each other as much as we'd like to but at least Becky doesn't spend much time in daycare."

"What does your husband do?" I asked, seemingly casually.

"He's the manager of the grocery store where I work."

I knew instantly whom she was talking about and felt another little chill. In my previous life, just as Lisa and I had started flirting with each other during my many trips to her line for sandwiches, she'd been bothered by her store manager, a man named Nick Morse who obviously wanted to date her. He'd been flirty with her ever since her initial hiring at the store but had become persistent after she'd broken her ankle in the fall. Since a relationship had seemed to be developing with me, she'd shunned his advances during this time period. It eventually got to the point, just after we'd began officially dating, that she had to threaten him with a charge of sexual harassment if he didn't back off. Back off he did. Eventually, in that life, he began to date another girl that worked in the store and married her about the time that Becky was born.

But without my presence in the picture Nick had apparently been successful in his courting of Lisa. I had not asked her name during our conversation, but I would have been willing to bet my net worth that it was Lisa Morse. The little girl, my daughter, and yet not my daughter, had to be Rebecca Morse. The fact that she was still married to him a year after my marriage with her had dissolved in divorce told me that she'd found the right person, or at least a person more right than I was. There was a twinkle in her eye when she spoke of her husband, a twinkle that I'd never seen when I had been married to her.

What did all of this mean? Lisa was now with someone she actually enjoyed being married to. I was with someone that I enjoyed being married to. This had occurred because I hadn't followed the path that I was fated to follow. I had been fated to marry her, to have Becky with her, and to be unhappy with her. She was fated to be unhappy with me. By altering fate we'd both ended up happy instead of sad. We'd both ended up finding soul mates instead of finding each other. What kind of fate had arranged for the previous pattern? What kind of fate had WANTED us to not find the person that matched? Was fate cruel, or just indifferent? Who or what had written these patterns? How much damage had been done by altering them?

I didn't know. I still don't.

I never saw Becky again. It was quite enough to know that she was simply alive.

I began searching for Mr. Li shortly after Nina and I moved back to the Spokane area. I had a thousand questions to ask him, a thousand things I wanted to know about him. How had he come by this power that he had? Why had he picked me? I also felt I owed him a large debt of gratitude for what he had done for me. I wanted to make sure that he did not end his life dying in a shitty convalescent home. I wanted to try to prevent his getting terminal cancer in the first place if I could. Depending on where the cancer had started, that was surely possible.

But Mr. Li proved impossible to track down. My source of information was Tracy, who, as a deputy DA had access to a nationwide computer network of known people. This should have done the trick. Unfortunately, I did not know enough information about Mr. Li. All I knew was his last name and his age approximated to within ten years or so.

When I'd first met Mr. Li on that fated night in 1999 I didn't know that he would have a very profound impact upon me. I'm surprised I was even able to remember his last name by the time it became apparent what he'd done. When I'd gone to bed that night Mr. Li had been nothing but a vague memory of a sad event, an event that I'd been forced to stand helpless before. Paramedics train their minds not to think about such things. If we grieved for every person that died before us, if we allowed ourselves to feel saddened by all of the human suffering we saw, we would all go mad very quickly. A paramedic's mind is accustomed to purging all information the moment it is no longer relevant.

According to Tracy's computer work there were nineteen hundred and four people with the last name of Li in the State of Washington that were between the ages of fifty and eighty. And that was only in Washington. Who was to say that Mr. Li even lived in Washington back then? My task seemed quite hopeless.

But as the years rolled closer and closer to 1999 and as my hopes of preventing Mr. Li's death from cancer decreased, I knew that I could at least keep the man out of the convalescent hospital. I could have him put up in a private home with around the clock nurses and premium medical care. Hell, I'd even spring for daily blowjobs if that's what he wanted. I was determined to see that old man die in comfort, to repay him for what he'd done for me.

I made contact with several people in the administration of that particular con home in mid-1998. I passed several envelopes full of twenty-dollar bills and extracted promises that I would be called immediately the moment anyone named "Li" was admitted to their facility. I promised more little envelopes when the information arrived to me. I checked back frequently with them, more than once a week when 1999 began.

But a strange thing happened, something that I could not figure out. As 1999 wound onward towards the 7th of July, the date that I'd met him and come back, no Mr. Li appeared. He had to have been there for a while before I'd encountered him, hadn't he?

By July 2nd I was very confused. Still no Mr. Li in the con home. The man was going to die in five days, had to be wracked with cancer at that very moment. Where the hell was he? Had I imagined the whole thing? That certainly wasn't possible. How else could I have had so much knowledge of what had been unless I'd really lived through it.

July 4th came. The Stevens' family and the Meachen family celebrated by taking our cabin cruiser out onto the lake and watching the fireworks near Sandpoint. It was an annual tradition. We all got drunk and poured ourselves into bed later that night, Nina and I in our room, Maggie and Mike in a guest bedroom, Jack and Mary, who had watched our children, in another guest bedroom. The next morning, still hung over and feeling like shit, I'd called the con home once more. Still no Mr. Li.

Nor was there an admission on the 6th of July under the name Li. Very strange. Would the anniversary, the sacred date, the date of his death pass by without my ever contacting him? It seemed it would. And there was nothing I could do about it.

The 7th of July was a hot, sticky, typical Eastern Washington summer day. I went out to get the mail about 10:00 that morning, the same time I always did. Our mailbox was out on the main road in front of our plot and it was a considerable walk from the house itself. I took Frank, our two-year old German Shepherd with me like always. He tagged along my heels, sniffing this, peeing on that as we went. I reached down and petted him a few times, talking to him as a man does his dog.

I hadn't been thinking of much of anything as I opened the mailbox and pulled out the pile of envelopes and advertising circulars that were inside.

I was flipping through them, sorting what was important from what was not when a voice called my name.

I jerked a little, startled by the voice in the stillness and looked towards its source. Our little stretch of the world was typically pretty deserted and having someone else out there when I picked up the mail was so unusual as to be unheard of. Frank barked once and then began to growl menacingly, his eyes locked onto one of the pine trees that guarded our driveway.

A man stepped out from behind it. I did not recognize him at first. He was Asian and very short. He was dressed in a pair of running shorts and a T-shirt. His face was rugged and ageless. His appearance there coupled by the fact that he knew my name, put me immediately on guard.

"Can I help you?" I asked with a voice that was not quite steady. Beside me, Frank continued to growl.

The man smiled, continuing his approach. "You don't recognize me, do you?" he asked.

I didn't say anything, just continued to watch warily.

"Not surprising," he nodded. "The last time you saw me I looked considerably worse than I do now. But I know you've been looking for me for a long time." The smile widened. "I didn't want to be found by you, didn't want to cause you undue worry. But today the time has come for you and I to have a little talk."

I stared, wondering if what I was thinking was correct. "Mr. Li?" I asked in disbelief.

He chuckled. "The one and only."

I stared in disbelief at the vision before me. He was not emaciated in the least. In fact, his body appeared to be in tip-top physical shape. His calves were muscular, his stomach flat. His face was unlined, his eyes bright and inquisitive. He had no respiratory problems, in fact seemed to be breathing quite a bit easier than I was at that moment.

"But…" I started, "you're supposed to be…"

"Dying?" he asked, smiling at me.

I nodded.

Another chuckle. "There's a lot of things that have happened in the last seventeen years that weren't supposed to happen, eh? And a lot of things that WERE supposed to happen that didn't. You've led me on a very strange journey Mr. Stevens, a very strange one indeed. But the time has come for you and I to have a little talk together, to hash out a few details." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. "This is my address.

It is imperative that you show up here tonight, alone. I believe your wife Nina is off work today, is she not? Childcare for your three lovely children should not be a problem."

"Mr. Li…"

"Take the paper," he told me, offering it. "Be there tonight at six o'clock.

Be sure you are not late. Do not tell Nina what you are doing. If you care for the life that you have built over the last seventeen years, you will do as I say."

Numbly, I took the paper from his hand. I glanced at it, seeing the address: 123 Lakefront Drive. I shivered as I read this.

"Yes," Mr. Li told me. "I live less than three miles from where we now stand. I jogged over here as a matter of fact. I'm sure you've noticed my house a time or two as you sat out on your back deck. It's the brown one you can see across the bend of the shore."

"But, how…"

"Tonight," he said, turning from me and stretching his legs a bit. "Everything will be answered tonight. Just be sure to be there."

He began trotting off down the road, his legs pumping as he ran. In less than thirty seconds he'd disappeared around the bend.

I spent that day very troubled, very uncommunicative with my wife. She commented upon it a few times and finally dismissed it as a case of PMS on my part. She retreated to her private den to study some medical journals, leaving me to keep an eye upon our brood.

I mechanically made lunch and then dinner, serving everyone about five o'clock. I only picked at my food. After Nina began doing the dishes I told her that I had to go into town to take care of some business. I don't believe that she bought the lie that I gave her but she didn't question me.

I climbed onto the Honda motorcycle I'd bought a few years before and headed off, arriving before Mr. Li's house less than ten minutes later.

It was more modest than ours was but definitely expensive. A single story, four bedroom or so with a swimming pool. I walked up the steps and rang the doorbell with a trembling hand.

Mr. Li answered the door before the echo of the doorbell even faded away. He was dressed in a pair of sweats and was shirtless, his stomach and chest without an ounce of fat upon it.

"Bill," he nodded, stepping aside. "Come in please."

I stepped in and he showed me around his house. There were indeed four bedrooms, two of which were empty. Pictures of an Asian woman were in every hallway, on every wall. She was pretty and the pictures were from various points in her life. He made no comment upon them. His den was what interested me the most. It had an expensive roll-top desk and a modern computer upon it. The window looked out over the lake and my house was plainly visible from there. A large telescope sat next to the window.

Mr. Li led me back to the living room and offered me a seat upon his couch. He disappeared for a moment and then came back holding an icy cold bottle of my favorite brand of beer. This didn't surprise me at that point, I simply took it from him and gulped down half the bottle in less than ten seconds.

"So you remember what you did for me?" I asked, although it was not a question as much as it was a statement.

"Yes," he nodded, sipping out of a bottle of Chinese beer. "I remember everything."

"How did you do what you did?" I asked. "What powers do you have?"

"Powers?" he scoffed, "I have no special powers at all. None except for one special gift that I'm allowed to pass on at my moment of death. I passed my gift on to you Bill. I shouldn't have done it, but I did. What has allowed you to do what you have done was the result of a miscalculation of thinking on a dying old man's part. An old man whose judgment was severely impaired by the effects of enough narcotic painkillers to kill an average person. An old man who'd been consumed by loneliness and loss but who should have known better. When I think of what might have happened, what could have happened, I still shudder to this day."

I stared, unable to comprehend exactly what he was saying.

"I am descended from ancient Chinese royalty," he told me. "My family has been instilled with this gift, the granting of a single wish, for the past sixty generations at least. The gift is intended to go to the first born grandchild of each recipient. It is intended that no one else but that grandchild even know about the gift. Don't ask me who gave it to us, why we have it, what entity powers it. We have this gift, I know not why. Only the bare essentials of it were explained to me when I received it for reasons which will become clear in a moment. The gift must be passed on by each holder upon his death or it is lost forever." He looked sternly at me. "I had no one to pass the gift on to, at least no one I would have trusted it to. I'd spent the years of my life thinking that it was finally going to die when my cancer took me away."

"You have no kids or grandkids?" I asked.

"My only son is dead. I have no daughters. My only grandson lives in Seattle. He is a greedy, shallow man who is only interested in himself. It is he who had me sent to that horrid place when my cancer finally reached the stage that I was unable to care for myself. If I had given the gift to him, God only knows what horrors might have occurred. I'd decided long before you were even a part of this earth Bill, that he would not receive the gift. I decided to let it die with me before he would have it."

"You were given this gift?" I asked, sipping from my beer, trying to comprehend.

"By my grandfather," Mr. Li nodded. "It was 1938 and I was nineteen years old. This was in Nanking, in Manchuria. We were under occupation by Japanese troops and it was not a gentle occupation. The Japanese were running wild in the streets, killing men at random, especially service-aged men such as myself. They were raping any women they could get their hands upon, even the elderly and children, often killing them afterward. They burned houses, temples, dug mass graves, slaughtered thousands.

"All of my family died that year at the hands of the Japanese," he continued. "I was not the one intended to receive the gift, I had two older brothers and a sister. I was the baby of the family. My oldest brothers were both killed in the army, fighting the Japanese. My parents and my sister were killed in Nanking on a night that I had been out visiting the girl I was courting. Even in the horrors of war some things still go on. Love is one of them. I was taking a great chance by leaving the safety of our family house to go see her. Had any soldiers seen me I most likely would have been shot on the spot, maybe even tortured first."

"It is perhaps ironic that I had been the one taking a huge risk in leaving the house but that while I was gone on that day, it was the house that became a deathtrap. A squad of soldiers had wandered by while my sister was out getting water. They took a liking to her and followed her back home. There, they held my family at gunpoint while they took turns raping her in front of them. Then they shot everyone, leaving the bodies there to rot while they continued about their business.

"When I returned home I found all of them dead in the living room, my mother, my father, my sister, my grandmother, all except for grandfather. Can you possibly begin to imagine the horror of finding such a thing? Can you imagine it Bill?"

"No," I answered honestly, shaking my head.

"Grandfather had been shot twice in the chest," he continued. "He was covered in blood, both his own and that of grandmother who had been shot in the head while she'd been sitting next to him. He was dying fast but he was awake when I came in, he was alert. And he was staring at me, beckoning me over to him.

"I was still trying to deal with the knowledge that my entire family had been slaughtered like pigs, worse than pigs actually, people didn't torture pigs first. I was looking at their corpses, their beloved faces that were now dead and locked in screams of terror. My sister was lying naked in the middle of the room, her legs spread wide, bruises on her body, a hole in her throat from a bayonet. Father had died trying to protect mother with his body, he was lying atop of her, more than twenty bullet holes in his back. The bullets had simply traveled straight through him and into mother.

"I wanted to scream. I wanted to go find a rifle and start killing any Japanese that I saw. I wanted to attack their headquarters in Nanking personally, seeing how many of them I could kill before they cut me down. I wanted revenge Bill.

"I knew nothing about the gift that grandfather had for me; I wasn't the one whom it was intended for remember, but grandfather knew my state of mind at that moment and he also knew his time was very short.

"The gift can be a very dangerous thing. Extremely dangerous if it is used improperly. It is customary for the giver of the gift to act as advisor to the recipient long before the time comes for the passage. It is imperative that the gift be used wisely and not for the purposes of achieving power or influence. Grandfather did not have much time to convince me of several things. One that the gift existed in the first place, two, that I should not use it to either wish for the destruction of the Japanese Empire, which I probably would have done happily considering my state of mind, or to have my family back alive again. I must not do either of those things he told me as blood ran out of his mouth and he gasped for every breath. Do you know why he told me these things Bill? I suspect that you do."

"Fate," I answered. "You would have been tampering far too much with fate. If you had wished for the destruction of the Japanese Empire, who knows what could have happened, what sort of world would have resulted. Even though the major events of World War II hadn't happened yet, it would have altered the entire historical timeline."

"Yes," Mr. Li nodded. "Grandfather explained that was not a wise choice for that very reason. And as for wishing my family back alive,"

"It would have been basically useless," I finished for him. "They were fated to die. If you had brought them back alive then they simply would have been killed again the next day or the next week."

"Correct," Mr. Li said. "Grandfather told me that the use of the wish had to come from my heart and had to be a wish aimed at personal betterment. He was going fast, reaching the end of his strength when he asked me the question at last. What was my greatest wish?"

"What was it?" I asked, fascinated.

"Song, my love, the girl I'd been out to see that day, was the only thing I had left. The only thing. I wished for her and myself to survive the war unharmed." He told me. "A very simple wish, just as yours was, but one that had far-reaching implications, just as yours did."

"Song and I left Nanking, sneaking out past the occupation zone in the dead of night. We were never seen, never challenged. Of course not, we were guaranteed to survive the war unharmed. We made our way to Chinese controlled territory and we got married. The next day after our wedding I joined the army. For the next six years I fought the Japanese, killing as many of the bastards as I could get into my rifle sight. I charged machine gun nests in order to drop in grenades. I cleared paths for other soldiers across dangerous territory. I always took the point when out on patrols. Bullets whizzed around me so close that I could hear them. Artillery exploded all around me, sometimes close enough to knock the wind out of me, but never was I struck by anything. For those six years I was basically immortal. Then the Russians invaded Manchuria to help drive out the Japanese. The Americans dropped a couple of atomic bombs. The Japanese Empire was destroyed in the way it was fated to be destroyed and the war was over at last. The limits of my wish had run out.

"I returned home to find Song and the now five-year old son that I'd sired before heading off to fight waiting for me. It was time to start our life. It wasn't long however, before another war started, the civil war between the Communists and the old regime. I was loyal to the old regime but I wasn't protected in that war as I had been in the previous one. My immortality had ended. I did not fight. My family was among the first to flee to Taiwan. It was during the trip across the straights on a freighter that I finally received firsthand knowledge of how cruel, how vindictive fate was capable of being.

"We were strafed by a communist plane about halfway across. It came out of nowhere and only made one pass. Song was hit in the chest by a piece of metal that had been thrown from an exploding fuel tank on a jeep that had been hit. The piece of metal, no bigger than your thumb, missed every major organ but severed her spinal cord. She was left paralyzed from the chest down. She spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. She was never able to give me any more children."

"We only stayed on Taiwan for a few years before we were allowed to immigrate to the United States. We settled in San Francisco and raised our son there. I found a job at the Port of San Francisco unloading ships. It was hard labor but it paid well. I did that until my retirement in 1980, working my way up to management eventually. Song remained my faithful wife but her health was always poor. She died of congestive heart failure and pneumonia in 1977.

"My son, Chang, attended Stanford University, obtaining a law degree much like your sister. He joined an exclusive firm and worked there for many years. He became fully Americanized, changing his name to John Lee instead of Chang Li. He sired one son before his marriage was dissolved in divorce.

He might have been worthy of the gift had he survived, but he didn't. In 1980, after years of eighty hour workweeks at the firm, he developed a bleeding ulcer, what is known in medical circles as a "GI bleed" I believe. He bled to death internally one night at the office when he ignored the persistent vomiting and diarrhea filled with blood, passing it off as a case of the flu.

"That leaves only my grandson, who is now thirty-eight years old. He too went to Stanford University but his major was business. He is an evil, corrupt man and I have nothing to do with him. His interests are in money and power and mostly in his own advancement. He works in Seattle as a high-ranking corporate officer for Pacific Healthcare. He makes more than two hundred thousand a year, plus stock options. He has a wife, three children, and two mistresses at my last count. His children are exact clones of him. The whole lot of them make contact with me as little as they can get away with, which is fine by me.

"It is here Bill, that we encounter dual realities. In the first reality, the one in which I met you for the first time in 1999, I was living in San Francisco in my old house I'd purchased my second year working at the port. I was a tottering old man, without much to say to anybody, without much to do. I watched the television, I played golf on occasion, but mostly I sat at home and did nothing. I was sedentary and cared about little. Perhaps I'd begun to become a little mentally unstable? I think that possible.

"In early 1997 I began to notice that it hurt whenever I urinated. Sometimes there would be a brown tinge to my urine. Finally it began to hurt a lot and the urine was consistently the color of fresh apple cider, that dark brown. When I finally dragged myself to the doctor to be examined it was discovered that I'd had prostate cancer. I say "had" because by the time I got checked, it had moved past my prostate and into my bladder and kidneys. It was making its first attacks on my colon and liver. It was much too far-gone for me to live much longer. Even radiation and chemotherapy only slowed it down a little. My days were numbered.

"When it got to the point in January of 1999 that I was unable to care for myself anymore, my grandson, who was listed as my beneficiary, pulled a few strings within his corporation and got me admitted to that concentration camp in Spokane. It was far enough away from him in Seattle and most of all, it was cheap. He sold my house in San Francisco and pocketed most of the money. He sent lawyers out to visit me to make sure my will was updated. He made sure that my doctor brought up the "do not resuscitate" order and made sure it was initiated. He sat by simply waiting for me to die so he would have one less inconvenience to worry about. Very American attitude, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes," I nodded, knowing exactly what he was talking about. I'd been in every convalescent home in Spokane County at one time or another during my career. Of the forty or so that we have, perhaps three could be considered a quality type of place. The remaining thirty-seven were basically warehouses that people stashed their elderly relatives in to die. They were sentenced to those hellholes the moment it became inconvenient to care for them. And the vast majority of the residents of these places were not the relatives of the poor, they were not the relatives of ethnic minorities, they were the relatives of good old, white, Anglo-Saxon, middle-class Americans. Mr. Li's presence in one had been an anomaly. One did not often find Asians in con homes. Asian culture has a much greater respect for the elderly than American culture.

"So there I laid," Mr. Li continued, "for more than six months. Getting worse every day, getting weaker, my mind and judgement deteriorating. Sometimes I was delirious, sometimes I couldn't even keep track of which day it was. And then came the final day, the day I met you. All that day I felt myself becoming more and more aware, more alert than I'd been in years.

The time of my death had come and the clarity that went with the gift was manifesting itself. The clarity was there, but my judgment was impaired severely. No offense Bill, but I never would have given you what I did if I'd been in my right mind. Never.

"But I didn't think of such things as the consequences of my actions. I didn't think about how dangerous a thing I was doing, I only thought about how, after the year I'd spent seeing the worst of America, seeing myself dying in that concentration camp, someone had finally come along that possessed some basic human kindness, some empathy. Someone who treated people with respect. I decided to take a chance on you and I offered you my gift. I had no time to explain the ramifications to you; it was an impulsive decision in the last few seconds of my life. I still had the ability to withdraw the offer if you had wished for world peace or immortality or something like that. Something that would have had dire consequences to fate and the world.

"But you didn't. You asked to be fifteen again, knowing what you knew at that point. That seemed almost noble to me. You obviously didn't believe anything would come of it but you used the gift for personal betterment. That was what it was intended for. I honestly didn't see the consequences to fate that might have occurred if you had been a less moral person than I thought you were. Thankfully my instincts were mostly right about you.

"At the moment of truth, at my dying seconds, I thought it had all been for nothing. When my grandfather passed the gift on to me in that house in Nanking, I'd felt a definite power shifting from his body to mine. It was the gift. I'd felt it enter me, felt it as a presence in me ever since that day. I knew at that instant that my wish had been granted and that the gift was now mine to pass on. I knew it."

"I didn't feel anything like that when you died," I told him, confused. "Nothing like that at all. To tell you the truth Mr. Li, I didn't think much about you at all once I wrote the paperwork and left the hospital. It was my nature. I could not allow myself to get involved in the tragedy I witnessed for my own sanity. And I never felt anything enter my body. If I have the gift with me now, I don't feel it at all."

"I understand your feelings at my death Bill," he told me. "I was in war and I probably understand them better than you do. I saw human suffering and loss during the war on a scale that you probably can't even imagine. So don't feel sorry for forgetting about me after you left. But as for the passing of the gift, you didn't feel it pass to you and I didn't feel it leave me because it involved time travel. Your wish was granted but it set up a paradox. Two people cannot possess the gift at the same time. It was not passed to you because by granting your wish I was left alive. That was why I thought it didn't work.

"I remember dying. It's not an unpleasant experience I might add. In fact, it feels almost blissful when your body finally accepts its demise. I'd never felt more at peace, more free of pain. I remember grieving absently that the gift had died with me. Everything finally went black. I was at rest.

"And then, seemingly seconds later I woke up in my small house in San Francisco and it was 1982 again. My body was functioning properly, my brain was functioning properly, and I had every memory of what had just happened. I was horrified by what I had done, by what I had put at risk. I could have destroyed the world Bill if you had wished for the wrong thing or if you had treated your gift differently once you were sent back."

"I knew that I was going to have to find you immediately and keep a close eye upon you." He cast a smile, "It's a good thing that you wore a nametag with your first and last on it or I might never have found you. You never told me your name.

"I moved to Spokane, leaving my small house in the hands of a real estate company. I located you as a teenager and I've been keeping an eye on you ever since, making sure you didn't put anything at risk." He gazed at me meaningfully, a little apologetically, "I'm sorry to say that I was prepared to arrange your death if you started to go too far off the path of morality."

I was shocked. "My death?"

"Yes," he nodded. "I would have done it without hesitation if you were putting the fabric of existence at risk. You came close a few times. I must say you were not very moral when you first returned. You put at risk more than twenty relationships by your philandering. You tried to stop an historical event from happening in Beirut."

"You knew about Beirut?" I asked, astonished, "how?"

"You had copies of your letters in your house, did you not?" he asked mildly. "I simply entered it when no one was home and took a look."

"You were in my house?!"

"Bill," he said, "I don't think you realize even today what was at stake with your wish. What you wished for was something I had no right granting. It put the entire world at risk. Of course I was in your house. I was in it more than a hundred times over the years, snooping through your things, trying to see what you were up to. I've been in the house that you share with Nina now at least fifty times. I've been watching you obsessively through my telescope. I needed to make sure that you've stayed on the straight and narrow. I don't think you realize the responsibility that I feel for empowering you in this way. You could have destroyed the world by utilizing your gift in the wrong way. Literally destroyed it. I was obligated to keep an eye on you."

"Jesus," I muttered, wondering at the fact that this man had been watching my every move for the last seventeen years. It was a spooky feeling.

"It was touch and go with you for a while," Mr. Li went on. "You teetered on the very brink of temptation those first few years. Thankfully I discovered the same thing that you and Tracy did, that fate tends to keep things in line despite your interference."

I looked sharply at him, "You know what Tracy and I talked about?"

"Your house was bugged," Mr. Li said. "I had transmitters in your telephones and in every room of the house. I listened to everything that you said to anybody." He gave me a stern, disapproving father look, "I heard every one of your "study sessions". I listened when you told Tracy about your gift. I listened when you told your father about your gift. I listened to your father and Tracy when you weren't there to see if they would tell anyone else about it. I couldn't monitor Tracy at Berkeley from Spokane unfortunately but I was able to bug your father's office. He kept the knowledge to himself and so, apparently, did Tracy.

"You gradually realized the proper use of the gift, for personal betterment.

You found love, which is perhaps the greatest thing on this earth. You did use the gift for money and you are very rich now, but you've never used it for power or influence. You've chosen well Bill. Only one time was I obligated to interfere in any way."

"What do you mean?" I asked, still trying to grapple with the knowledge that Mr. Li probably had logs of every time I'd taken a shit over the last seventeen years.

"Stevens Consulting," he said. "A very good idea. A wise use of the gift I might add. I used your service myself by working through an agent of mine. A man named Dean Stockwell."

"Dean Stockwell?" I gasped, remembering that he'd been one of my clients.

"Oh yes," Mr. Li grinned. "He accessed your services at my instruction. By then I was reasonably wealthy from my own insight but I wanted to make sure I was using an expert. Someone with the base knowledge to take full advantage of the knowledge we shared. But towards the end I sensed some greed in you. You had more than enough money to comfortably live out the rest of your life but you wanted more, you didn't seem to know when to stop.

I figured that you would need a little nudge to push you back on the path.

So I made an anonymous phone call, several of them as a matter of fact, to the FTC. They landed on you within days. Shortly after that, you retired."

"YOU did that?" I asked in disbelief.

He nodded. "I did. Sorry if that offends you. Anyway, while I've been monitoring you all of these years, I've also grown moderately wealthy. I've broken all contact with my son and his family. I went to see a doctor in late 1996 and they discovered the bare beginnings of prostate cancer in me. A single course of radiation and chemo and it was gone forever. I'm something of a health nut these days. I run forty miles a week. I've participated in five marathons. I have a resting heart rate of fifty and a blood pressure that is consistently in the nineties. I could probably live another twenty years at this pace." He shook his head sadly. "But I can't Bill."

"What do you mean?"

"I mentioned a paradox a few minutes ago. One has been created. The gift cannot belong to two people at once. When I woke up in San Francisco after dying in Spokane I could still feel the gift with me, could still feel it inside of me. I'd given it to you and your wish had been granted, but the gift itself had not been passed on because I remained alive as a result of the gift. That is the paradox. It is a paradox that will correct itself in a few minutes."

"Correct itself?"

He nodded. "If nothing is done, when the time of my death in the previous life occurs, everything will go back to the way it was. I will be dead, taking the gift with me. You will return to your previous existence with no memory of what has happened. You will simply wake up in bed in your apartment in Spokane as if nothing had ever happened. Your wife will once more be an unpleasant doctor married to a neurosurgeon. Your sister will be dead. The kids you've had with Nina will have never existed. The correction will have occurred."

That was the most horrifying thought that my mind had ever entertained. I would lose everything in a few minutes? Even the memories of the life I'd built? That couldn't be! It couldn't! I couldn't even speak, my horror was so complete.

"Before you ask," Mr. Li told me, "yes, I'm sure about this. We have less than twenty minutes now by my calculations. I have twenty minutes to live no matter how healthy I am, no matter what steps I've taken. Reality will simply go back to the way it was."

I shook my head in denial, in fear. Twenty minutes? Would I never see Laura or Jason or Megan again? Would I only see Nina as an enemy, not as a woman I loved, that I knew intimately? It couldn't happen, I couldn't accept it!

"But there is a solution," Mr. Li said softly.

"What is it?" I asked.

"The gift," he said. "I still have it. I can still pass it on to you."

I looked at him, not comprehending on the surface, but catching his meaning somewhat lower in my psyche. "But in order for you to pass on the gift, you have to…"

"Die," He nodded. "I'm going to be dead in twenty minutes anyway, one way or the other, no matter what happens. I cannot tell you what to wish for Bill, you have to decide for yourself, but there is a wish that you can make that will break the paradox. I've struggled over the years trying to decide if your family, which will be based upon your moral code, is worthy of having the gift transferred to or if I should simply let it die with me." He shrugged, "I don't know if I made the right decision or not but I like you Bill. I know you better than I've ever known anyone before, even my wife when she was alive. I think you deserve the chance. I will give you the gift tonight, right now and I want you to promise me that you will use it as it is intended, that you will follow the tradition, that you will teach your descendants the responsibility. Will you do that?"

"Mr. Li," I started, my body charged up. Was he talking about suicide? Right here in front of me? For the purpose of breaking the paradox? Was that really what he was talking about?

"Will you promise Bill?" He insisted, staring at me.

I continued to stare, feeling an incredible mix of emotions surging through me.

"Bill?"

"I promise," I finally said.

He smiled, nodding seriously. He picked up his beer and then took a swig of it. "Do you know what to wish for?" he asked me.

"I think so."

He reached into a pocket in his chair and pulled out a pistol. It was a chrome plated, semi-automatic. Its hammer was back. He looked at it for a moment, his hands trembling.

"Mr. Li," I said, shaking my head. "I can't go through with this. I can't sit here and watch you shoot yourself. I can't."

"Be strong Bill," he said. "It'll be over soon. Don't call anybody afterward. Just go home. The maid will find me tomorrow and start the machinery."

I was crying now, actually crying with fear. How could I sit there and let someone shoot himself? I couldn't.

"You can do this Bill," Mr. Li told me. "Remember, I'm going to be dead in a few minutes anyway. Save your family. Write your existence as it is now into the pages of fate. I've lived a full life. My last few years have been lived with good health and considerable comfort instead of dying and in pain. You've done me a favor. Now it's time for me to do you a favor."

I was trembling, crying, unable to leave, unable to stay. I've never felt so confused in my life as I did at that moment.

"There will be a few moments of clarity right before I die," he said, putting the barrel of the pistol under his chin. The contact kept his hand from shaking. "That goes with the gift. Be sure to take advantage of it Bill. Be sure to ask the right thing."

"I will," I choked, watching paralyzed as he held that gun to his chin. "I will."

The gunshot was flat and undramatic. The ejected shell casing flew across the room and landed with a clink on the fireplace bricks. A small spray of blood shot from the top of his head and his body slumped over to the left, the pistol falling forgotten to the floor at his feet. His eyes remained open, staring at me.

"Jesus," I muttered, watching blood pour from the hole in the top of his head, watching his left pupil begin to dilate. "Oh Jesus."

Mr. Li's dying lips began to move. There was blood in his mouth. Words began to form. They were choked and very liquid but perfectly understandable. "What… is your… greatest wish?" he asked me.

I took a step towards him, keeping my eyes focused on his face. It was difficult to do through the haze of tears. My own mouth opened, "I want everything to continue on as it has been." I told him.

He nodded, more blood pouring out of his mouth. "Excellent." he muttered and then his eyes began to glaze over as awareness left them. He slumped further over and his breathing began to become agonal in nature, very irregular. This went on for nearly five minutes. I kept my eyes upon him the entire time. At last he drew in a breath, let it out, and then didn't pull in the next one. His mouth became still.

At that moment I felt it. The power, the gift, leaving the dying vessel of Mr. Li and entering my body, my soul. I cannot describe exactly what it felt like. The closest thing I can come up with is the sensation of runner's high, the feeling of well being that creeps over you about two or three miles into a run as endorphins are released from glands in your body. A sensation that seems to start at the top and quickly work its way throughout, spreading from place to place, energizing you. That was the closest I could come to the sensation but that does not do it justice. All of a sudden I was empowered, I felt it take up residence in me, felt it nestling in. It was a sensation that I would carry with me always, until that moment when it was time to pass it on.

I stood there looking at Mr. Li, feeling the power in me for an unknown amount of time. Finally the sensation receded, leaving only a small core inside me. I felt like myself physically but at the same time I could feel the power tucked away, just waiting for release.

"Thank you Mr. Li," I finally said to his body. "Thank you for everything."

He had no answer for me. I left his house a few minutes later and climbed onto my Honda. I didn't head for home right away. Instead I took a long drive.

It was after midnight when I finally parked my motorcycle in the garage and carried myself into the house. My mind seemed clearer than it had been, more focused, more in perspective. I was beginning to grasp the depth of the gift I'd been given, the responsibility that went along with it. Just beginning mind you, I had a lot more growing to do, a lot more maturity to acquire.

I tossed my helmet on my workbench and forced my way between the cars and into the house. It was darkened, as you would expect at that time of night, everyone asleep, no one with any idea of how close they'd come to being simply erased or put into an alternate path.

I checked on Laura. She was three and a half years old, her face so much like her mother's. She likes to throw the covers off along with her pajamas as she sleeps. I found her curled in a ball in her room, her little butt sticking up, her thumb tucked into her mouth, her body shivering in the air conditioning. I put the covers back over her knowing it was an exercise in futility. Twenty minutes later they'll be off again.

I checked on Jason who was almost two. He is the opposite of Laura. He has covers piled thickly atop him. He has a collection of Hot Wheel cars that he can never keep confined to one place. I stepped on them in my bare feet as I gazed upon his sleeping form, as I listened to his soft breathing.

A short trip down the hall brought me to Megan's room. She was nine months old, almost ready to begin walking and talking. The first and only child to adapt my facial features. She is an aficionado of stuffed animals and they cover her bed, sometimes making it difficult to find her in there. She is also a poor sleeper, waking at the slightest noise. She hears my entrance into her room. She creaks her brown eyes open and gazes at me sleepily. I kiss her, hug her, tell her everything is okay and she drifts back to sleep.

I went to my own bedroom where Nina was sleeping soundly on her side of our King sized bed. Like Laura, she's not a big fan of either clothing or covers when sleeping. She's dressed only in a pair of panties, her breasts bare, her pillow hugged tightly to her face. In the dim light I could see the stretch marks on her stomach and the single line of scar that marks Megan's entrance into the world via caesarian section. Megan had been in the breach position. I looked at my wife with love, with deep feelings of gratitude towards Mr. Li, who made all of this possible.

I continued to stare at Nina, at her firm breasts, her bare thighs, her scarred but still flat stomach. We are happy together, still deliriously in love after more than fourteen years of marriage. We make love at least twice a week, often more. We sit together on the couch or in the bed or on the deck outside after she gets home from a day at the hospital and we do what we have always done best, we talk. Nina is still my best friend but she is still ignorant of the secret that I carry. She had no idea that a cosmic clock had nearly ticked away our life together. And she never will.

As if sensing my thoughts she mumbled in her sleep, rolling to one side, kicking the last vestiges of the covers off of her body. Her eyes opened and she saw me standing in the doorway, looking at her.

"Bill?" she asked sleepily, stifling a yawn, "what's the matter?"

"Nothing Babe," I told her reassuringly, "I was just checking on the kids. Go back to sleep."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

I gave her a smile. "Perfectly okay," I assured her. "Everything is just fine."

AN id=title>

Chapter 1