It’s not that I’m important or special, just that up until now there have been two tracks or timelines: the one that Rei and this little group of our friends live on, in which the future is predictable, an extrapolation from the past, a steady progression in which we are gradually turning into our own mothers and fathers, men and women who make plans and save for retirement, who go to our kids’ schools and participate in parent-teacher conferences, our adult bodies too big for the child-size furniture. Then there’s the second track, the occult track on which all this normality is a paper screen over something bloody and atavistic that is rising up out of history to meet us. I am the ragged membrane, the porous barrier between the two. Somehow, through me, through my negligence, the second track has contaminated the first. My madness, the madness for which I’ve been medicated and therapized and involuntarily detained, is about to become everyone’s madness. The proof of my sanity, my fitness to exist in the ordinary timeline of parent-teacher conferences and 401(k)s, was an acceptance that the two streams must never cross, that it was my job to keep them separate. I have not done that. Now all our throats are bared to the knife.