nd woke to see a blue Mazda brake lights red bumpersticker saying Hit Me I Need the Cash and as the sound of heels on the sidewalk faded Joe very nearly—

crashed.

But instead he braked, too hard; the car fishtailed to the right then died. He sat there disoriented. He smelled his sweat and the leather of the car's interior; he saw the chrome and paint of the cars ahead of him and the emerald sheet of water edging the freeway; he realized he was in his BMW, on the northbound Bayshore. Traffic crawled, the hot sun was well above the brown hills to his left, to his right Candlestick Park lay like a concrete mushroom, sporing; a weekday Giants game must have just got out.

Cars were honking; he was blocking two lanes. He'd been turning the car key repeatedly without pushing in the clutch.

He shook his head, started the BMW, centered it in his lane.

As he neared the blue Mazda, he saw its license plate.

PAYUPU, it said.

He'd been paying too damn long.

He reached the Libertarian Book Store a little before eight that night. The place was in the Lower Haight, across the street from a bar called Fishdrink. Fishdrink had a blue neon light flashing above its door. Watching the light's reflection in the bookstore's window, Joe figured out the picture it made; it was a lobster, holding a martini in its pincer. Morons, he thought. Lobsters are crustaceans. Then he realized the sight of the martini was making him anxious.

A woman waved at him from inside the bookstore. Brunette, overweight but very pretty, like a cover girl who'd gone on an eating binge to protest the fashion industry's anorexic ideal. She blew him a kiss then turned to speak to the man who would be giving the lecture.

Joe shivered. She should not have recognized him. He'd erased her, the lecture, the hours from midnight to four p. m. He'd slept her away, he'd slept the world back eight hours, and he was the only one who ever remembered erased events. Probably she'd mistaken him for someone else, or had liked his face and had waved at him on impulse. Women often found him attractive.

But she had not waved at him the first time.

He went inside the bookstore. Thirteen people—the same thirteen people he'd seen the first time—were sitting on metal folding chairs. Silver-haired hippies who'd probably been living in communes twenty years ago, a skinhead with a ring through his eyebrow and a swastika tattooed beneath his ear, two guys in dark suits who must have taken the 7 bus up from the Financial District. The first time Joe had sat next to the brunette; now he sat at one end of the second row of chairs, next to a woman in a black motorcycle jacket. She had a pin stuck in the jacket's shoulder that read Ayn Rand Lives.

The brunette sat three chairs to his right.

"Thanks for coming tonight," the lecturer said, sitting down on a table set in front of the seats. He wore a plaid shirt, faded jeans, cowboy boots with scuffed heels. Hair erupted from the skin around his mouth in patches, forming a sparse goatee. The first time through, Joe had amused himself by counting the patches. "What I'm going to talk about is the foundations upon which we construct our beliefs in individual liberty. What I'm going to talk about is the notion of free will. What I'm going to talk about is freedom and determinism."

Someone whispered, "You've already heard this, haven't you?"

It was the brunette. She was sitting to Joe's left; she'd brought her chair over. She was staring at him.

"No," he said. He met her gaze then looked back at the lecturer, who was still slogging through his preamble like a newborn calf through mud.

"What do you think you'll learn this time you didn't learn before?" Her lips brushed his ear as she whispered. "Or maybe the cowboy goes too fast for you."

She had a pleasant musty odor that excited him. "I might have missed something."

"You missed me. You avoided me."

His memory of her was incomplete. It seemed they had whispered through the lecture the first time, yet he could not remember anything she said. When he erased, he never forgot conversations. Appearances, odors, fine sensory details, yes, but never conversations. Probably fatigue was getting to him. He focused on the cowboy's words:

"—and if we are organic machines, what freedoms can we have?"

"Yes, what freedoms?" Her lips touched his ear. "The freedom to sleep quietly? The freedom to wake tomorrow morning instead of this afternoon? The freedom to not erase?"

His heart raced.

"Is that it, Joseph? The freedom to not erase?"

The cowboy looked at Joe. "How do we step outside our own machinery?"

After the lecture, he hurried out of the bookstore. She followed him. "I can help you sleep better."

He stopped. "Sleeping's not the problem."

"It's the waking that's the problem, isn't it?"

He stared at her. "Who are you?"

She smiled. "A friend." She twisted a long brown lock of hair around a finger. "We talked about your problem the first time. You must have forgotten."

"Are you playing some head game with me?"

"I'm trying to help you."

Joe saw the lobster with its martini. "I appreciate your concern, but I've got to run."

He hurried down Haight Street. He was shaking. She had probably seen him fill his Halcion prescription at Walgreens, maybe even inferred his condition from the bags beneath his eyes. But she talked about the first time.

What if she did remember being erased?

He turned the corner, reached his car, got in. He relaxed as he sank into his seat. People had it wrong: a man's castle is his car. He turned on the radio. New age polyphonics enveloped him from five-hundred dollar speakers. He closed his eyes; the music evoked desert plains beneath emerald skies, crumbling ruins at night, time stiffening like gelatin. He turned on the radio—

and jerked up in his seat. He stared at the radio's green digits as he heard half a dozen measures repeated. He must have slept for ten or fifteen seconds. The few good hours of sleep the Halcion had given him apparently hadn't been enough.

He turned the dial to a heavy metal station and started the car.

He saw her again an hour later. He was in the left lane of the Fell Street approach to 101, behind three other cars. He noticed her—standing beside his car—just as the light turned green. She was shouting something he couldn't make out over the speedriffs coming from the speakers. He hesitated until it was his turn to accelerate, then he hit the switch that unlocked the back doors.

The driver behind him honked as she climbed in.

Joe screeched up the long cement hump the southbound lanes made as they straddled the northbound lanes. He decided to take southbound 101.

The woman rolled into the passenger-side front seat, the heels of her black pumps raking against the car's ceiling. When she was sitting up, she turned off the radio.

"I need that on," Joe said.

"I'll keep you awake."

"Right." Merging onto 101, he cut off another car. Headlights blinked in the rear-view mirror. "Screw him," Joe said. Watching the speedometer, he pulled the car up to seventy, then leveled it down to sixty-five. It would be an exercise to keep him awake: keep the car within that narrow range. Dark foliage blurred by; pedestrian catwalks passed overhead. Sudden panic. "My name. How'd you know my name?"

"From the first time, Joseph."

He thought back. He remembered the intent to talk to her, but not the deed itself. He remembered leaving the bookstore, but not whether he had left alone. It was as if a fuzz had selectively accumulated around his memories of her. Everything else was vivid: the cowboy's lecture, the drive across the Bay Bridge, the speeding ticket before Sacramento, the motel in Truckee. Truckee! He stomped the gas pedal. "You were with me in the motel." Was it her? Something shadowy and feminine flickered through his brainstem. "You're an eraser, too."

"You could say that. Better slow down."

He was doing eighty and coming up on brake lights. He braked carefully; they went past the 280 interchange stonework at under sixty-five. The freeway gained two lefthand lanes; he moved over one. "I've wanted to meet another eraser for a long time. It's why I go to these stupid lectures."

"I know."

"You—" He glanced at her. Of course she knew. She was an eraser. But how could she remember things he didn't? He was the one who'd slept. Unless. "We slept together in Truckee?"

"You slept alone."

"I didn't mean it that way. I meant—"

"I didn't sleep in any sense of the word. Slow down."

Joe was doing eighty down San Francisco's final hill. He let up on the gas then pushbuttoned down the side window, driver's side. Cool air off the Bay buffeted his face.

He passed Candlestick and the place he'd woken at.

"So are you going to fill me in on things? Maybe tell me your name?"

"Krista." She kicked off her shoes, raised her right leg and clasped her hands around her knee. Her skirt was loose; it slipped to show a palmwidth of white thigh. "What is there to say? You wouldn't make love to me."

Joe's memory flashed to the motel room. Russet carpet, off-white wall with a laminated Monet print, the woman—Krista—with her skirt and baggy sweater off, reaching around to untie her black low-cut bra. Something gold hung between her breasts but when Joe tried to focus on it the memory distorted then vanished. He glanced at her. "So, explain."

"At the last second you pushed me away. You were afraid of being cured."
"That's a bizarre euphemism for sex."

"It's no euphemism. If you'd have made love to me, you would have slept quietly. You'd have fallen asleep in the motel and woken up tomorrow afternoon."

He remembered her, clothes in her arms, going naked into the bathroom to dress where he couldn't see her. "Sounds like a good cure. Screw yourself to sleep." He laughed, a little hysterically; he could hear his lack of good sleep. Of erasing sleep he'd lately had a surplus. "Once a day, after going to bed."

"That's not how it works." Her voice was humorless. "You would never have erased again."

"Just one screw would have done it?"

"Yes. Just one screw."

He heard the disapproving emphasis and it angered him. "One screw and I'd be normal? No more erasing bad dates? No more winding back the clock a day so I know which stocks to buy?" He was above eighty again, air like liquid squirting in his eyes, South San Francisco a halogen stream of hotels and ugly warehouses. "One screw and no more sleeping off speeding tickets?"

"Slow down, Joe."

He hit ninety, used the left shoulder to pass a gray Tercel. "No more time travel? No more goddamn superman?"

"Slow down, Joseph. Superman can die."

His speedometer read one-oh-one. Same as the freeway! He laughed then remembered his exercise. Between sixty-five and seventy. He let up on the pedal. By the time he'd slowed to sixty-five, they were passing SFO. He stared at the red blinking lights on a taxiing plane, then said, "And I refused the cure, huh? The medicine too bitter?"

"No," Krista said. "You were afraid of being well."

"Bullshit." He closed the window because he could smell the dead fish in the Bay. "This talent of mine sucks. I've made money off it, but it's killing me. For a long time I only erased when I went to sleep drunk, and then it just took a beer, and now it's every time I close my eyes. It's a metabolic change I think. Middle-age rot."

"It's worse than that," she said. "Your consciousness is starting to wear thin. You're losing the sense of sequences."

"Sense of sequences?" He put force into the gas pedal. "Don't give me new age crap. What's the mechanism? Decay of dendrites in the associative cortex? Tumour in the reticular activating system?"

"The mechanism doesn't matter."

The fuck it doesn't, he was about to say, but then he smelled her sweat (like day-old roses) and he remembered: on the motel bed, rubbing his nose down the part of her hair as she kissed his chest. The memory vanished and he felt regret mix with his hysteria. It was an awkward blend. "But you could have fixed me if we'd made love?"

"Not exactly, not completely. You'd still have slept backwards sometimes when you didn't want to. You'd still have erased. But it would have kept you from decaying any further. Because without me, you're going to end up erasing back further and further, weeks and years and lifetimes. And your consciousness will get so thin it'll finally snap. Like a rubberband."

"Oh, really?" He floored the pedal. He did eighty, ninety, a hundred. He tried picturing the way she'd looked in the motel but her remembered face changed into that of the cop who'd given him the ticket. Mustache, sun-glasses, acne scars. "You think I believe any of this?"

"Some of it, yes. You'd better slow down. There's a CHP car about two miles ahead."

"Remembering the future, huh?" He braked. "You don't scare me, you know. Consciousness is a lie anyway. Along with free will, God, and television. Television! You know what TV really is? An electron beam flashing lines across the screen. You ever taken a picture of a TV screen?" He was down to sixty. "You get half a flicker and the skinny little beam. What a sham."

"You should get over a lane. This guy wants by."

Hi-beams glared behind. Joe slowed to fifty and turned the rear-view mirror so it reflected Krista's thighs. "Let him pass on the right."

"You can get a ticket for obstructing traffic."

"I'll sleep it off." The guy held his horn down behind them. Joe slowed to forty-five. "I hate tailgaters."

The car passed them on the right, the driver shaking his fist. Joe laughed and raised his hand to adjust the mirror

and the other car dropped behind them and Joe spoke in a language he didn't know and as the other guy held his horn down Joe saw the passing buildings moving forward

—it off." He swerved into the right lane; the other car shot by. "Shit, Krista." He was scared, now; his heart was racing. He yawned, shook his head. "I just erased. I just slept with my eyes open."

She turned up the mirror. "Maybe, Joseph, you should do something else to keep awake."

The beach was narrow, littered with driftwood and kelp, bounded on its inland side by a fractured cliff. The sand was fine and gummy, like clay. Krista held his hand as they walked through the surf. The cold water numbed his feet but kept him awake. He'd left his shoes and socks in the BMW.

"Here," she said. She pointed at a sand bar.

"Here what?"

"Here's where we'll build our castle. You've built sand castles, before, haven't you?"

"You tell me."

"Oh come on, no pouting. I only spent a few hours with you before. There's a lot I don't know about you." She pushed up the sleeves of her sweater, kneeled, and started scooping up sand, depositing it on the bar. "Come on! You have to help!"

Joe would have refused but the look of appeal in her face, almost impossible to see in the dark, triggered a memory of the motel: lights out, him returning to bed from the bathroom, she looking up at him from the bed. He wondered where this memory fit into the sequence. She'd left before he'd turned the lights off, hadn't she?

The memory vanished as he strained to place it. He gritted his teeth, squatted down beside her, began piling sand. The sand was cold, and too wet to work well: his bricks slumped, his blocks oozed. "At least tell me why I'm having so much trouble remembering."

"You're not the only one who erased, silly."

So she'd erased his memories, at least partially. He slopped sand into the center of the bar; he'd build a tower there. "We'd never make it together, Krista. Erasing each other's memories."

She pushed sand to the side of the bar: she was widening their castle's base. "You've got it wrong. You don't erase my memories."

"I don't? You're immune to the effects?"

"Of course. You can't erase me. I'm not part of your magnetic tape. At least no more a part of this one than any other."

"I don't follow."

"That's okay. It'll make more sense soon. Hey, can't have a tower there."

"Why not?"

"Doesn't work. But we can use the sand." She pulled the tower down, moved the sand to one end of the castle, began shaping a low rectangular slab. "Don't just sit there. The top needs to be firm and level. And you can put a post at each corner."

"A post?"

"Yeah. Bedpost."

They weren't making a castle. They were making a bed. The slab was a pillow, the wall rising at one end the beginnings of a headboard. Joe remembered the headboard at the motel: four fluted wooden columns, rising in an oblong frame. One of the columns had been loose; it had squeaked when turned. "I was crazy not to sleep with you."

"You were scared."

He finished the first crude bedpost. "Scared that you'd erase me?"

"Scared that I wouldn't."

"You're baiting me."

She laughed. "Undress."

"You kidding?" He looked out at the dark mass of the sea. "It's probably about fifty degrees."

"And the motel was too hot. Is there no satisfying you?"

"None," he said, but he pulled off his shirt, pulled off his pants. "When you get a second chance at everything, you tend to become a perfectionist."

"Really? For me, there's always the temptation to be lazy. Why give your all when you can try again? Take off the briefs, too."

He pushed them down hesitantly. Not only were they his last defense against the cold, but he had no memory of being naked in front of her before. When they were off he stood facing the sea, back toward her. The chill wasn't bad; he could stand it for a few minutes.

A light blinked at the increment of gray marking the horizon. He couldn't tell what the light was attached to; it could have been a ship, a plane, a lighthouse. Even unattached....

She hugged him from behind. Her skin fit against the contours of his back, breasts tight beneath his shoulderblades, soft thistle of pubic hair brushing against one thigh. She kissed the side of his neck, slid her hands down each of his arms, from his shoulders to his fingertips. Her touch warmed him, and the warmth remained as her hands moved on, but the places she hadn't yet touched became almost painfully cold. She seemed to realize this; she cupped his penis, and he hardened in the warm half-shell of her palms.

"Did you erase? You got undressed really fast."

"Shhhh." She moved around him, sliding close so that he could see the swellings of her breasts but not the crests. Then she began kissing his chest, and as he nuzzled the part of her hair, he had a sense of deja-vu: his memory of the motel was not strong enough to seem real.

She pushed him down onto the bed that they had made. The sand was warm beneath him, as though she had lain across it while he watched the sea. She kissed his eyes, his cheeks; she moved her tongue across his teeth, tugged at his lips with her own. Then she took him between her legs. He strained to see her breasts but there was little light, and, anyway, she was close to him, parallel to his body and the earth, moving by pushing and pulling on his shoulders. She kept kissing him, now on the mouth, now on the ears, occasionally saying, "I'm so lonely, where I'm not with you," as if time was a grid of events she moved continually across and the present a point returned to now and again; and, as part of him began to focus on the warmth shared most fervently between their groins the rest focused on her words: "I'm so lonely; the sequences are so terrible where you aren't, the futures so awful, all the dead possibilities without you the loneliness," he saw that the wages of endless erasing were not the snapping of consciousness as she had claimed but rather the loosening of its hold onto events, onto the moments that form the sequences, and that her power and also her sadness was to travel unmoored above the sphere of all possible moments, only sometimes touching down—

—and, as they came together, hot at a single point and arctic cold everywhere else, he saw they'd made love, not only in the Truckee motel room but in this point in countless other sequences.

"You saw it, didn't you."

With effort (a soft effort for there was no measure of strain or anxiety) he resisted sleep and looked at Krista kneeling beside him, at last seeing her secret hair and the swell of her hips, her full breasts and her face (even more beautiful with the rest of her unclothed); and he said, "I think you have me trapped."

"Sorry," she said. "But it's so hard without you." Then she kissed him, and stood up, and walked away carrying her clothes. He watched her for a few moments before he fell asleep.

And woke to see the red brake lights of a blue Mazda, its bumpersticker urging Hit Me I Need the Cash; and though the roar of the surf was fading, he knew it would return with the tide, and to stop it he had only to accelerate.

But instead he braked, too hard. The tail of the BMW veered into the next lane over and the car died. He sat there smelling sweat and leather, listening to the cars behind him honk, wondering why he'd been thinking about the tide. Finally he laughed.

It would be so absurd to end things now.

He might even sleep well tonight.