He can’t tell if he’s awake. If he is, something is wrong. If not, something’s worse.

“I’m right here.” It’s a woman’s voice, but not the usual one. “I came a long way, so the least you could do is wake up and talk to me.”

“Give him some space.” That’s the usual voice, the wife.

Ryan hears sounds, scraping and grinding, but the two voices are gone. He drifts, and when he does, he is fourteen, smooth and muscular, bobbing on an inflatable raft in the shallow waves at the beach. Now he’s sailing towards the Gulf, and the raft carries him over the farthest break, toward the great wide open. He waves to a girl on the beach, and she waves back. She’s wearing a white bikini and her hair is in a ponytail, cooked blonde by lemon juice and sunshine. He sails so far the raft disappears, and so does he. The girl disappears, too.

Later, someone says, “I don’t have much time.” It’s the girl from the beach. She’s not waving, more like she’s got her hands jammed in her pockets in front of a bank of school lockers, and she’s waiting for him to get his shit together so he can walk her to class. He’ll do it, too, even though it makes him late. Ryan leans on his locker, wondering what it would be like to stick his tongue in her mouth and run the tip of it across the slick, pepperminty enamel. He feels his dick jolt, and his eyes flash wide to bright white light.

“There you are,” the girl says, but now she is older with darker hair. “Your wife says you did a real number on your head.” She leans close, and he can see her more clearly. Her eyes are familiar. They are the ones. He tries to dig up her name but can’t. She recedes, and Ryan’s eyes blur and shut and he’s back on the raft, drifting. Not a single muscle twitches so he can get back to shore.

Ryan is jostled and rammed by the disembodied voices. They cram things in and out; they lift and shove. There’s beeping and clunking, sounds like the Starship Enterprise. Later, Ryan still can’t move. The two strange voices are gone, and the two familiar ones have returned.

“You didn’t have to come,” the wife says. “It’s not like he knows you’re here.”

“You’re the one who invited me.” It’s the girl from a long time ago.

“If he hadn’t kept saying your name, I wouldn’t have bothered,” the wife says. “Too late now.”

Their energy swirls. Ryan concentrates on the tiny slips of skin covering the two slimy spheres inside his head, focusing every iota of strength to get them open, but other than a headache, nothing happens, and Ryan sinks deeper into whatever’s beneath him. The raft? Sand sifting out with the tide? A substance separating whatever this is and whatever comes next.

Later, Ryan is wet and his dick is hard, and he’s back in the bathroom of the house where he grew up. The door doesn’t shut all the way, so he has to make noise when he’s on the john so his older brother Simon doesn’t walk in on him and see him pulling a face when he’s taking a dump or catch him jerking off through the steamy shower door. Simon keeps asking for a real tub with a thick curtain and a locking door, but their parents haven’t gotten around to it, so Ryan and Simon had to create a code of coughs and groans to warn each other away.

Ryan’s hand, which should be soapy-slick and pumping hard, lies limp, and something scratchy scrubs him instead. The scrubbing stops and a voice says, “Someone will check on you soon.”

Ryan drifts. Behind his eyelids are layers of sunset, orange and pink with ripples of coral. The air smells of salt and tanker petroleum, coconut tanning lotion, seagull shit on the packed brown sand, and cinnamon waffle cones from the stand down the Galveston Seawall as the air thickens to dusk. The girl is there in an oversized T-shirt, licking ice cream off her knuckles, then crouching to pick up a shell—smooth and pink like her cheeks—that she holds up for him to see. He steps closer to get a better look.

Kat. Her name is Kat.

“Wake up, fucker. I know you’re in there,” Kat says.

He wants to say, I’m trying, I swear. He wants to wake up and see her. Ryan forces his fingers to curl, so she can see he’s still alive, and he’s sixteen again, gripping the wheel of his beater convertible, driving north on I-45 over the Galveston bridge. Kat’s in the passenger seat, arms in the air, howling with the radio, swinging her head to the beat. Ryan doesn’t want to go home. He wants to drive clear to Dallas and beyond with this girl swinging and shouting beside him.

“I’ll take over now,” the wife says.

“He just moved,” Kat says, as fiery as he remembers. “Watch his hands.”

“I said you can go.”

Ashley. That one is Ashley.

Later there is whirring and scraping and cold spots on Ryan’s head. “Do you have to do that?” Ashley says. “It looks horrific.”

“You’ve always looked horrific,” Kat whispers close by. If only Ryan could pry open his eyelids and see her smirk like she did in tenth grade chemistry. He flicks a paper football and it lands on Kat’s desk. Instead of opening it, she sticks it in her mouth and starts chewing. The teacher says, “Katherine, no gum,” and holds out her hand. Kat drags herself to the front of the room and spits out the wad. Kat never read that note, but Ryan still remembers what it said. If only he could say those things now.

“I’ve only got one more day in this god-awful place, so you better wake up,” she says.

“You’ll have to do better,” Ashley says from far away.

Another voice, deep and grumbly, says, “We’re doing the best we can.”

Ryan is flat, a slip of white paper with nothing written on it. His wife leans close and says, “I hate you for asking for her. Why did you have to ask for her? I hate her.” Ryan remains flat, unmoving and unmoved.

There’s no way for him to measure how much time goes by. He remembers his mother’s wooden yardstick, measuring material in her sewing room, in the house where he grew up. She hums and hems, pinning fabric on half-bodied mannequins with stiff boobs and tiny waistlines and Ryan thinks, I’d like to meet a girl like that someday. “Cool your engines,” his brother says, then pings Ryan in the head with a Nerf football. A chase ensues, but Simon always gets away.

The next room down the hall has a TV, a pool table, and a pile of beanbags. Kat is there in white shorts, red Converse, and a turquoise tank top. Ryan wonders if she’s wearing a bra, so he motions her over to show her how to break the balls. “Like this,” he says.

“I already know how.”

“I’ll show you how I do it.”

“Fine.”

If Kat is teasing, Ryan can’t tell. She walks over and back up against him, allowing him to wrap his arms around her and take up the cue stick. Kat doesn’t seem to know where to put her hands. Her laugh goes off-kilter, nervous. His cheeks turn hot and he drops the cue stick. It hits the table and clatters to the floor.

Ryan steps away. “Sorry. I’m sorry,” he says, but doesn’t know exactly why.

Kat plants her hands on her hips. “What for? That boner that knocked me in the butt?”

Ryan can’t help but smile at the way she rattles stuff off, commanding molecules to freeze mid-air. He’s never known anyone else who could do that.

They check out his crotch. “I wish it would ask for my permission,” he says.

“It’s okay, dumbass,” she laughs. He laughs, too, then he throws her onto the pile of beanbags. She bites him on the neck.

Ryan’s mother’s measuring stick can’t measure time, only fabric and science fair poster board, and growing boys with little marks up the doorframe. Time is nothing but soft circles in the sand disrupted by tides and baby crab feet and a million sunsets and memories come and gone.

Patterns repeat. Cloth scrubs his skin. Machines beep and churn. Astringent smells waft as voices approach and recede. Energy swirls then disappears. Ryan floats away on the raft then drifts back again. Ashley speaks, sometimes close by and sometimes far away.

Eventually, Kat is back. He wants her to find him. Sharp pain pierces his center, grinding into bone. “Wake up!” she whispers. Her heat nearly cracks him open. “I need you to wake up.”

Ashley’s voice joins and the two begin again, one on one side, one on the other. He tries to remember how he got from Kat’s warm glow, all the way to Ashley. He tries to remember where Ashley came from.

The grass where Ryan stands is technicolor green. The buildings are red brick. A young woman with an expensive-looking leather bag floats down a flight of steps. She’s expensive-looking, too: flowing platinum hair, petal pink fingernails, rose garden scent. Her purse looks heavy, like it’s full of literature from a recent class. He moves onto the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps. She tries to skirt around him, but he won’t budge, hoping to get her name, and he winds up with her dorm and dining hall, as well. He offers to carry her bag, but she won’t allow it.

Ashley whispers, “How could you be so stupid?” Even if Ryan could answer, he’s been so stupid about so many things, he wouldn’t know what to say. “They told me you weren’t wearing a helmet,” Ashley continues.

Ryan always wore a helmet. Then one time, as he was leaving the garage, he left his helmet behind.

Ashley says nothing more.

She strings Ryan through dining hall meals, sorority functions, family brunches, dual Economics degrees. Under a halo of stained glass, Ryan holds Ashley’s hands and says I do. The country club trees drip with twinkle lights, and there are white tablecloths and silver flatware and real China plates and crystal champagne flutes and cascading flowers. Everything is perfect.

Ryan’s family and friends hover around white chairs tied with big pink bows. He looks from his guests to Ashley’s ocean of unrecognizable faces, and he wonders what the hell he’s done. Something Ryan once had a firm hold of is slipping out of his hands and is floating into the sky and now it’s gone and it’s never coming back.

Ryan grasps. There’s forced breathing and bodily functions beyond control. Someone cleans him. If he comes out of this, he wonders if Ashley will have to wipe his ass, if she’ll have to feed and bathe him. He wants to tell them that Ashley isn’t capable, but nothing comes out. Ryan longs to ride the raft over the break, into the Gulf, and keep drifting forever, but he’s on the dance floor at his wedding with his mother in his arms. She tries to smile but can’t.

“I’ll lead you off in a second, okay?” Ryan says.

Ashley’s parents spin towards them. “What a riot!” Ashley’s father says. The dance floor fills as the band blares on. Champagne flows. Ashley makes the rounds in her sparkling tiara. Ryan guides his mother off the dance floor to the safety of their family.

Simon glances up from his hors d'oeuvres plate. “You’re missing one guest,” he says. Ryan longs for a chase, a fist fight, a Nerf to the head. “Did you even invite her?”

Ryan straightens his cuffs. The starched shirt itches like crazy. “Of course I did.”

“So she stood you up,” Simon says.

“She politely declined.”

Simon jerks his head toward the tent entrance. “Maybe not.”

A woman in a long black dress, strung like an arrow, stands in the tent entrance.

“Shit.” Ryan abandons his family and weaves through the crowd. He and Kat stand face to face, their bodies taut and ready, equally matched. This is the girl he loved so much, probably still does. “I didn’t know you were coming. There’s no extra place setting.” Kat would never enter this party, though. The music is a joke, and the guests are worse.

Kat’s laugh sounds broken. “Don’t worry, I just came to see if you would actually go through with it. Here, a wedding gift.” She holds out a fist, and Ryan takes a piece of smooth pink shell. He remembers it, from the Seawall in Galveston, now hot from Kat’s grip. “I’ve got the other half. Now we can be a memory, and that’s that.”

Ryan doesn’t want to be a memory, and tries to say so, but with the party blaring, and Ashley and her parents lurking somewhere behind him, he can’t.

“I better go,” Kat says. “Bone her real good tonight, okay?”

Ryan can’t help but laugh, but it feels more like pain than joy.

Kat turns and walks away, down the country club sidewalk. Ryan tries to keep her in view, but her black dress blends into the night, and he’s left staring into the backs of his own eyelids. How he ended up buoying inside his own head, unable to move, he can’t figure, but he knows the moment he didn’t go after Kat was the moment he split himself in two.

Later, Ryan hears music like the dance in his middle school’s gym, beat pounding in his chest, Blondie singing, I’m going to find you, I’m going to get you get you get you get you. The gym is dark and moody and smells of sweaty socks and red dodgeball rubber and adolescent anxiety. Teachers stock tables with soda and donuts. Bleachers hold rejected kids. Others hide in restrooms, swigging wine coolers. Sidelined guys pose like something from an MTV video. Clusters of girls whisper behind their hands.

Ryan and Kat break free of their friends and meet under the silver disco ball shining onto the gummy floor, and they begin to dance. Kat doesn’t crack jokes or pull away from Ryan’s body. He wants to hold on forever.

“Please wake up,” she says. “When I leave this time, I can’t come back.”

Ryan wills his eyes open, but they’re stuck shut, so he tries his fingers again. They shift slightly. Two hands clutch his arms and squeeze. He wants to yell that he can feel her. He can really feel her!

“What are you doing?” Ashley’s voice rips through the room.

“He moved,” Kat says. “Ryan, do it again. Show her.”

“He can’t hear you,” Ashley says.

Ryan wants to scream, Yes I can! I can hear you! I can hear you! He tries to move his mouth, to make a sound, but everything gums inside his head.

“He doesn’t even like this song,” Ashley says. A click and the music from the gym stops.

Ryan waits for Kat to say, Yes he does, or, I know him better than you do, but she leans in and whispers, “Here. I brought this for you.” There’s a sharp sound next to his head. Metal on wood? Glass? He wants to open his eyes and see. “See you around, dickhead,” Kat says, and then she’s gone. The vacancy is as astounding as it was on his wedding night.

Now, just as before, Ryan is alone with Ashley.

Wooden yardsticks measure nothing. Images of Ryan’s mother in her sewing room; his father home from work, leather briefcase slapping the tile in the foyer; steamy tuna casseroles and meatloaves; Scotch-taped Christmas presents crammed under the tree; plush seats and stale smoke in his grandparents’ Crown Victoria; bluebonnet fields, fire ant piles and pecan trees; Simon’s graduation gown, hat thrown high; Kat climbing a tree, Kat in a neighbor’s swimming pool, Kat throwing a frisbee down the greenbelt, Kat dressed up at Halloween, Kat playing Bang-Bang in the park, Kat in his boxers, until all Ryan sees are thousands of kaleidoscopic versions of Kat spinning and tumbling in on themselves, clinking into geometric patterns.

Something wet shrouds Ryan’s head. A water-soaked cloth. It’s cold, and inside his head, a light flickers on, so blazingly visceral that his vocal cords twinge to life and a croak erupts up his throat, out his mouth. He’s made his first new sound.

A voice says, “Oh!”

The cloth goes away and a colder one returns. Ryan’s muscles jolt and something bright stuns his brain. The slips of skin covering his eyeballs slide open, and Ryan re-enters the waking world. New light stuns his eyes, but he doesn’t dare blink.

“Hello,” a person standing over him says. The figure removes the wet cloth and replaces it with something dry and soft, and Ryan begins to cry. “I’ll go get the doctor, and your wife.”

People enter the small white room. Ryan hears voices and sees shapes, humans and machines, shadows and light. Figures move around his bed, but he doesn’t risk closing his eyes to shut out the commotion.

When Ashley appears, Ryan tries to say her name, but the effort burns. She pulls up a chair and places her hand on his chest. Her nails are the color of red wine. He remembers a knuckle grinding his sternum, but she wouldn’t have done that.

He croaks, “Kat?”

Ashley taps her chest and says, “I’m Ashley, darling, your wife.”

Ryan scans the bedside table for a boombox, a CD, a note, any evidence of Kat’s visit. He’s sure the sharp sound he heard was Kat’s pink shell, but all he sees is a plastic water pitcher and a tissue box. “Where’s Kat?”

Ashley scoots so close he can smell her minty coffee breath. “I don’t know any Kat,” she whispers. “You’re back, and that’s all that matters. Now close your eyes and get some rest.”

Ryan doesn’t close his eyes for fear they won’t reopen. He examines his wife: slate eyes, smooth-bridged nose, blushed cheekbones, platinum braid, cardigan over a collared shirt. Ashley stands to greet the doctor and begins to discuss whatever is supposed to happen next. “I know, I know,” she says to the doctor, and he says, “I’m not sure you do.”

If Ryan stays awake, he’ll have to leave with Ashley. She’ll push him in a wheelchair and load him into a car and drive him to wherever home is. She’ll dress him and brush his hair. She’ll feed him and wipe his face and ass. Hers will be the voice he’ll have to listen to. This was why he left his helmet behind in the first place. Ryan tries to push himself up to go find Kat, but his head is like a cinder block perched on a noodle, so he flops onto his pillow and stares at the ceiling. Fluorescent lights pulse in the drop panels. Ryan can’t distinguish the ceiling from the walls, or the walls from the door. He can’t see himself as he is, only as he was, whole and healthy, smooth and strong, ready to soar. He wants to shut his eyes, to disappear and drift. He’ll close them—only for a second—then open them so Ashley can take him home.

Ryan’s eyelids slip shut. His shoulders relax, and he sinks into the bed.

His brother is sitting in a nearby chair. Music and guests hum in the distance. “Did you invite her or what?” Ryan knows who Simon is talking about, the only one they ever talk about.

“Of course I did.”

“So she stood you up.”

Ryan checks the room. “I guess she declined.”

Simon jerks his head towards the door. “Maybe not.”

Ryan props himself onto his elbows and sees Kat in the doorway. She’s dressed in black, bathed in buttery light. “I knew she’d come,” Ryan whispers.

“You didn’t know shit,” Simon says.

Ryan dangles his legs over the edge of the bed and plants his feet on the cool floor. His head is clear, vivid-bright with color. His muscles flex, and he stands. He walks to the doorway and stops in front of her. “Were you here?”

She looks at him like he’s crazy. “I am here.”

“Earlier, I mean.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Did you come to see if I’d go through with it?”

“Go through with what?” she asks.

Ryan isn’t talking about the wedding this time. He taps his head to try and convey something he can’t quite remember.

“I know,” she says. “It’s okay.”

“Are you leaving?” He’s desperate for her to stay.

“I can’t stay here forever. Neither can you.”

“Where will you go?”

She points out the doorway, into light so bright Ryan can’t see what’s beyond. He looks at his gown, his legs, and bare feet. “I’m not dressed.”

She laughs, which makes Ryan laugh, too. “Don’t be stupid. Clothes don’t matter.”

Ryan doesn’t look back. He inches his fingers under his hospital bracelet and pops it free. He unties his gown, which falls to the floor.

She turns toward the light. Two steps in, she’s in shorts and a T-shirt, hair pulled into a ponytail. Ryan stumbles close behind. Two more steps, and they’re on the Seawall, fifteen feet above the sand. Sandpipers skitter along the waterline. Fried shrimp and piña coladas waft from a nearby food stall. Seagulls cry, dive-bombing the crowd on the pier.

A voice behind Ryan calls his name as he continues westward, but he doesn’t turn to see. The girl is so far ahead now that her shape has smeared into the setting sun. Ryan slows his pace. Cotton candy clouds plume over the Gulf. The warm wall pricks Ryan’s feet with pebbles and shards of shell. He descends cement steps to the beach. Foam laps his toes as he scans the water. In the distance, a tanker sits dark and silent. Porpoise fins emerge and go under.

Ryan decides. Taking the raft in both hands, he crouches on the packed brown sand and pushes forward into the shallows. Salt spray splashes his cheeks. He paddles over the breakers, through a band of jellyfish, into deep water. The sun drops, leaving an orange streak in the sky. I could do this forever. He grips the edge of the bobbing raft as he drifts toward the horizon.