But unexpectedly, Sam got a small promotion to part-time writer's assistant. The day after this, Sam woke up dizzy and nauseated with gashes all over his chest and back. He groaned at the pain. He heard the shower running. Harry was taking a shower, humming a popular top 40 song.         

"Look what happened to me during last night's nightmares," Sam said as Harry, stark naked, walked from the bathroom into the bedroom. Sam showed Harry his chest and turned around so that Harry could see the deep red crescents on his back. "Look at these cuts!" Sam said, turning around, "somebody beat the shit out of me!" Sam eyed the demon as he said this, noticing that once again the creature's skin had escaped receiving the wounds that used to be duplicated there.

"Well, you probably deserve it," Harry replied, putting on his underwear. "For one thing, you didn't tell me about your promotion."

"You think I'm going to volunteer that information to you?"

Harry told his other half not to be so babyish. Obviously, by now he should know that hiding things only made the beatings worse. It was stupid to think he could hide his promotion from anybody.

"From anybody," Sam repeated. "Who exactly is 'anybody'?"

Harry just shrugged and said he didn't know, just that there was no way Sam could be promoted and then lie through omission without there being any consequences. The creature, Sam noticed, was much less braindead than it had been only months ago.

Though the nightly beatings did not return with a similar intensity as on this occasion, they did return. Sam became suspicious about Harry's ability to feel jealousy over the promotion when he saw that a few days after this violent beating, Harry had become interested in bettering himself. Till now, Sam focused on staying thin, going to the gym, reading the textbooks about marketing and advertising, going to the beauty salon, and just in general doing what he could to appear normal and desirable, while Harry had gradually become more carefree after getting a job, even as his open and dumb personality became more immersed in the world around him. But after Sam's promotion, Harry bought a few books. He stopped watching TV and read the newspaper instead. He set himself the task of reading ten of Shakespeare's plays. When he got to Titus Andronicus, one of Shakespeare's more brutal plays, he decided it would make most sense to begin there for staging a production.

Some of the telemarketers were surprisingly enthusiastic about putting on an abridged adaptation of the play. His coworkers urged deleting almost all the lines but keeping the more violent scenes and lurid dialogue, and Harry happily agreed. They played their roles during breaks, sometimes even in the hall that was next to the cubicles, and Harry gradually introduced more lines which the telemarketers chose to memorize and embellish, making fun of office rules or other workers and their habits or ways of talking. Harry convinced first a fraternity kid majoring in psychology, and then an aspiring violinist, also college-aged, both of whose fathers had recently lost their jobs, and each of whom was emotionally unbalanced by nature, to play Demetrius and Chiron, and one day the rape scene was simulated with enough brutality to scare an old woman telemarketer into calling the police, and when the police arrived they very angrily reprimanded the players. One of the policemen hit the violinist in the face. The girl playing Lavinia, a friendly girl, was escorted to the hospital by the policeman because the aspiring violinist, whose attentions to her had gone unreciprocated and who had as yet only reacted to her rejection of him by becoming withdrawn and pensive, had repeatedly poked her in the behind with his erection and hit her hand with a stapler.

Life at the ad agency had become a more sinister affair. Sam, still partially freed from the intensity of the nightly beatings as they had first happened after his coming back to life, felt painfully separated from Melanie, the copywriter he had become infatuated with. He started dreaming about Hebel Rhamsey, and on waking each morning he noticed a dizzy anxiety overtaking him, and this inner turmoil partially replaced the physical damage done to his body. He dimly recognized what was bothering him and then he thought about it continually: for all Hebel Rhamsey knew, he had endangered Melanie the moment he had agreed to hire Sam Kramer. This meant that Sam Kramer automatically betrayed Melanie just by existing. At work, when Sam looked at her, he could only think dimly of the weight of the past, how little of it he was able to remember or understand, and how incongruously this burden matched how sweet Melanie seemed. And the more practical worry remained -- one arbitrary word from Hebel Rhamsey to the mob about Sam, and Sam was dead. Only Harry, perhaps, had the ability to temporarily protect Sam from either the police or the mob.

Why had he kept that photo of Hebel Rhamsey and his daughter to begin with? Why did he now keep wondering if he would have killed Rhamsey's daughter? Of course he wouldn't kill her. He kept thinking about the strange puzzle: at great risk to himself, he had broken ties with the mafia. Probably, it was the mob that had already killed him once, so he had been willing to put himself in danger to get away from them and what they represented. But if Rhamsey hadn't given him the job after being threatened and had instead gone to the mob or the police and Sam then been killed or taken into police custody, who would have been the one to go and kill Rhamsey or his daughter? Nobody, because Kramer no longer had criminal ties. But somehow, the moment Sam had released Harry into the outside world, he had made the threat real and brought the violence of the past into the present. It seemed an impossible situation. One day at work he started sobbing uncontrollably at his desk, and fled to the restroom for some privacy.

Sam was anguished when he thought that Melanie probably had a boyfriend. The idea of a man's body touching hers made him angry and impulsive. He thought that if he killed the man who seemed to be causing him to feel a sense of guilt he didn't really understand, a sense of guilt that was connected to his past life, maybe his past life would go away with his guilt.

It was night at the ad agency. There were only a few people in their office, but none of them were around the open work areas on the general floor. Rhamsey was at his office window, smoking a cigarette. Sam walked through the open door, aimed his gun carefully, and shot Rhamsey through the heart. Since Rhamsey was startled when he saw Kramer with a gun and heard it go off, he fell out the window and four stories downward, landing on the back of a truck that had temporarily parked up on the sidewalk to unload a piano. The truck, with Kramer on it, had minutes later been driven away, however, by the piano movers who had failed to notice that a body was on it.


Hebel Rhamsey's body was found the next morning, and the police who came to the ad agency hours after its discovery weren't interested in doing their jobs. The investigating detectives were more interested in flirting with the women employees than asking about Rhamsey, who had always made a special point of taunting and belittling the police past acceptable limits. The only person who took an active interest in the murder, and who also believed that some sort of cover-up might be involved, was a famous movie director, Rex Robinson, who had his camera crew setting up outside the building 24 hours after Hebel Rhamsey fell out of it. This movie director had been friends with Rhamsey, and had been contacted by Rhamsey's wife once his body had been found. The famous director decided that he wanted to film a simulated murder as it had taken place, but in reverse, and in very slow motion, so that the process of filming the body as it had been falling that night, rendered artistically, mimicked a murder investigation that would eventually expose the killer.

Production money came in, and real estate attorneys and the owners of the ad agency were paid. The director started by having set work done in Rhamsey's office. Soon the beam of a small crane was seen poking through Rhamsey's fourth floor window. The base of the crane slid on tracks that were bolted onto the floor. The cable that dropped down from the beam outside the window held a human corpse that had been procured from a morgue. Day after day, very, very slowly, the corpse would be lifted upward from its starting point, ten feet above the sidewalk.


The director ordered that the mechanism on the crane was set to pull the body up only three inches a day. Because it was the slowness of the corpse's simulated levitation that gave the investigation its integrity, Rex Robinson had ordered the engineers to make any adjustment to this speed impossible, even to Rex Robinson's own potential interference.

The idea was that many months later, when the corpse was eventually pulled through the window frame that Rhamsey had fallen out of, things would very suddenly speed up with preternatural intensity. The trajectory of the bullet would itself be over-represented by the crane's very sudden backward motion on the tracks, as the corpse would be released to fall back out of the window and the real murderer, gun in hand, would materialize from the air onto the chair attached to the back of the crane when it reached the hall. At this point, the bullet would ostensibly have flown out of the corpse's heart and into the barrel of the murderer's gun. To effect the crane's rapid motion when this grand moment came, space was being cleared in the middle of the ad floor for a large apparatus to yank the crane backward on its tracks.

Traffic outside was detoured. Pedestrians who neared the building were only permitted to walk on the opposite side of the street. Complication arose. The director, continuing to maintain that this was also a murder investigation as well as a possible film, hired private detectives and undercover actors to monitor what happened inside the building on all seven of its floors, even on floors that were rented to different enterprises, as the director or assistant directors, catheters in place so they might not miss anything, remained suspended on their perch at the edge of a crane four feet from the corpse, their eyes fixed on the camera fixed on the corpse, filming it constantly as it slowly rose.


Because of the summer heat, the body simulating Rhamsey's fall was liable to decompose quickly, and the famous director, whose fame authorized the straight-faced shenanigans of the whole production, wanted the body to look fresh while remaining as bendable as any live body in flight that had just been shot through the heart. The real Hebel Rhamsey was no day old corpse when he fell from the window. In fact, he had probably been making all sorts of jerky movements during that fall, even with that bullet in his chest. This was the other problem: the cable holding the body in the air was attached only to the back of the corpse's belt and so gravity caused the corpse's torso and legs to sag. Nobody falls out of a building continuously slumped over like that. For the first two days, every hour two assistants had to climb up ladders, wrap the body in plastic and treat it with dry ice, freezing and refreezing it twelve times during the day and four times at night. It was an awkward procedure.

Rex Robinson decided that to allow for a more natural fall, as well as for different camera angles, he had a partitioned glass platform, whose almost transparent hinges could bend the corpse at subtle angles, placed underneath the corpse. The cable still served its purpose when it was reattached to the body and the glass platform temporarily removed to make adjustments. Moreover, since the cable continued to rise on its own accord, it marked the rate at which the body should have been rising while being posed on the platform.

For the sake of efficiency in cooling the corpse, the glass platform would be tilted, and the corpse dropped into the back of what looked like a moving van, which was filled with liquid nitrogen. Soon a second camera was brought in to film the corpse as it was dropped into and then thrown out of the liquid nitrogen tank. For after the body was cooled for a few minutes, a small catapult at the bottom of the van efficiently ejected it ten feet up into the air and back onto the glass platform. Pedestrians and workers at their windows laughed at the sight of the corpse repeatedly being dropped downward and ejected upward. Behind the building's windows, actors and non-actors laughed together as the famous director quickly pointed more cameras in their direction to film these reactions.


Jenkinson Metcalf, however, was not in the mood to find anything amusing. He had seen the murder take place from behind the door in Hebel Rhamsey's private bathroom, a room that Sam Kramer had not bothered to check for witnesses after shooting Rhamsey. Jenkinson Metcalf wanted to see Hebel Rhamsey resurrected, as it were, and so even a day after the murder, as Rex Robinson was only just having the tracks bolted onto Rhamsey's floor for the sliding crane, Jenkinson Metcalf had set himself the task of taking on Hebel Rhamsey's identity.

He had no acting skills, but he did his best to imitate Hebel Rhamsey. He wore similar clothes. He tried to imitate the way Rhamsey talked, and even gave Sam Kramer the same two thumbs up gesture that Rhamsey used to do every morning. He wore a "Hebel Rhamsey" nametag. As director of the advertising branch, it was Jenkinson Metcalf's order: nobody was allowed to think or act in a way that implied Hebel Rhamsey had really died, especially when Sam Kramer was near them. Despite what the newspapers had said about Rhamsey's so-called death, he himself, Jenkinson Metcalf stated bluntly to all around, was the real Hebel Rhamsey, and he irritated and enraged the agency staff when he informed them that they each had to play the role of themselves, before one by one they would be replaced by an actor assuming their identity. This was Jenkinson Metcalf's order, not Rex Robinson's, whose own undercover actors wore no nametags. Metcalf made sure they were legally prohibited from doing so. Employees would get severance, and they could sue Jenkinson Metcalf and the agency at their will, but their jobs were gone.

Jenkinson Metcalf hoped that these substitutions would make it look to Sam Kramer that Hebel Rhamsey had not died merely because of his physical likeness disappearing after Sam Kramer shot him. As the actors' nametags on their chests attested to, one can change one's form and still be alive, with the same exact name and job title at that. Following this logic, for instance, it could be asserted that Sam Kramer had shot and killed Hebel Rhamsey, and that Hebel Rhamsey was fine.

Why did Jenkinson Metcalf do this? Why all this trouble? Did he want to accomplish something extraordinary? Did he admire Rhamsey's amoral swagger and want to take part in it after his death, or did he maybe genuinely want to protect Sam Kramer's feelings and at the same time throw a wrench in Rex Robinson's so-called investigation? It was hard to say. But this is how it was that within a few months Sam Kramer found himself working at an advertising agency populated more and more by actors wearing nametags bearing the names of the fired employees that he used to work for.

When Melanie disappeared and a new Melanie replaced her, Sam Kramer became upset, and began waking up more bloody and beaten than before, with steadily worsening injuries. Sam had adored the old Melanie, and the new one's nametag looked vulgar next to her low cut blouses. In his nightmares, he saw the likeness of the old Melanie flash before his closed eyelids, and the old Melanie's face combined with the face of Hebel Rhamsey's daughter. One morning he woke up with all his toenails and two fingernails ripped out. There were numerous short cuts parallel to each other running up across his forearm. He even had a gash at the back of each wrist, with half of his right hand hanging off his wrist. This was new. These were injuries that were not easy to hide, that people at work might be able to see.

Sam got out of bed and went outside, walked to the stream, and had a cigarette. It was early morning, barely light out. Harry the dream creature, who used to crawl out of Sam's chest a few seconds after Sam woke, had for the last week begun leaving him during the night to finish sleeping inside the closet. Sam saw a great gust of wind sweep up thousands of blood-soaked leaves and carry them away. He threw the cigarette on the lawn and then lit a second cigarette, staring at the stream and thinking about Melanie. Where had Melanie gone? But it was good that she had gone, because Harry had quit his job and was staying at home in the loft, trying Sam's suits on and studying his advertising books. He was preparing to take Sam's job. Would the new Melanie be safe from Harry? He hadn't thought of that till now.

Sam felt behind his ear. His hair was soaked with what he knew was partly dried blood as soon as he touched it. The ground suddenly began boiling with reddish water which thickened into what looked like undiluted blood the further it encroached onto the property. The stream itself suddenly darkened into red and was now flickering with sparks that gave out pops and hisses as Sam moved toward it. He dropped his cigarette, and mechanically stubbed it out on the wet grass with his foot. He made his way across the stream, and a slight light crept up his shins from the water. He got to the other side, and continued walking. Slowly, his left ankle caught on fire. His arms started to shimmer and then flash abruptly as the yellow light crawling up his legs turned red. Sam Kramer stared at the ground silently. His lower back caught on fire, as did his shoulders. The flames crawled up his body continuously and soon engulfed him. Soon, there were parts of trees and grass visible behind him on that side of the stream where his body had been. He was orange and red, and then, as his body disappeared, the flames did as well, and more of the woods could be seen in transparent gaps between the flames. There was more of a tree trunk, or a spot of grass, or a tree branch where the fire had been. The flames continued vanishing with his body, and then there was nothing left, not even a trace of smoke above where he had been.