He was dumbstruck.  "Feel that?" Gene breathed, seeking Sarah's gaze.

If she had, she didn't acknowledge it, instead choosing that moment to launch into a tale about her last trip abroad.

Sarah sure could talk, Gene thought, and as she did, her voice hit that taut tarpaulin of stars, bounced off, and rained back down onto the two of them.  And Gene was soaked, right through his clothes, right through his skin.  Drenched in all that talk of where she'd been and where and when she'd be going next.  What she'd done, and what she was going to do.  Who she'd met, and who she wanted to meet.  She was obsessed with the who, the what, the where, the when.

But it all rang so hollow, Gene thought.  There was something missing.

Christ, she almost didn't know he was there, and even he was beginning to doubt that he was.  So, in an attempt to break through, to at least prove to himself that he did exist, Gene spat out a compliment, something amateur about her skin reminding of flower petals.

She did stop talking, and for just a moment, the universe stopped, too, offering one second in which all was as still, perfect as a picture.

Then she laughed.

It was a laugh like the sound the moon makes when it's too full, bloated, pouring its saccharine excess over the tops of the sequoias and on down the crumbling cliff side.  It was suffocating, damaging, and something which was all too natural for her then, flowing golden from red-stained lips to Gene's pallid ears.  Laughing, her perfect white teeth glistening in the light of that ancient moon, she shone, so carefree, so vibrant, so alive.

"If I didn't know better, Mr Pleasant, I'd think I was being flirted with."  It was a cold, jeering remark.

Beside Sarah's now blazing, tangible, self, Gene gasped as he seemed to almost fade to black and white.  Beside her, leaning as the two of them were against the railing, he was little more than some faded, achromatic figure plucked from a neighbouring dimension and transposed into an otherwise dazzling picture.  This is called burn-through.  And he was it.  An undesirable image soiling an otherwise serene scene.

Sarah, vivid and fresh, began talking again, but Gene's ears were unable to pick up the sound.  He opened his mouth, but no sound would come out.  The roaring of the ocean was constant, quite rapid, increasing in violence until it collided with a crash into the growing bedlam of the distant festivities.  As the ferocious din grew, spiralling out of control, Gene's panicked soul searched for Sarah's.  She, however, was ignorant to his struggle, and continued to talk and laugh through another narrative.

And then, quick as the chaos came on, it folded in on itself, with the deafening roar rushing off in an inverted whoosh, taking with it all of the universe, leaving much less than even a silent, dead, blackness.

The shower felt good, its steaming heat almost making him forget he was dead.  Rummaging around in some open lockers, Gene found some clothes and shoes that fit all right, and slipped into a nice crisp, white lab coat.  He completed the ensemble with a green surgical cap to conceal his stitched together scalp, and studied himself in the full length mirror.

He looked damned good for a corpse, he thought.  In fact, it seemed to him that his new, paler complexion made the blue of his irises stand out a little more.  He straightened his borrowed tie, and walked back into the blood-drenched lab, his ill-fitting shoes clicking across the tile floor.

The recipient of his heart was a woman named Helen M. White.  He discovered this important detail on his own clipboard in an outgoing slot on the workbench, along with the hospital, room number, the whole lot.  Time, date, and location of transplant; the operation took place eighteen hours ago in this same hospital.

At first it seemed insane that this kind of personal information would be just strewn about for all to read.  Then, it occurred to him that it might not be expected for corpses to come back to life and start snooping.

No, whatever it was that Gene Pleasant had become was not expected, that's for sure.

Gene caught images of her now in flickering silver and black, the image of another nameless stunner.  Underdeveloped film on old stock, filled with grit and scratches.  These were stills captured from memories, weak transmissions through the great chasm of time.  A girl he once knew.  A girl he would never know again.

"What will it bring?" she asked again, her voice distant, crackling, the audio poor.  She was there for but a moment, overexposed flesh projected onto a luminous wall.  The petite, fresh features of a then-innocent face.  Jet sea of hair, blending into boundlessness.  "What will the future bring?"

Gene's raft rocked a little on the waves, and, without thinking, he ran a hand across the top of his fresh-shaved scalp.  "There will forever be us," he croaked, repeating the answer aloud.  The same answer he gave to all of them.  His disembodied voice quavered on a tremulous wave of interminable distance.  "There will forever be an us in one form or another."

She flashed for a moment, the feeble connexion almost lost.  Her image flashed, and as it did, a moment of panic jetted across her fresh face.  These memories, thought Gene.  Tenuous at the best of times.

Gene shut out the world, blotting on the moon and stars, in an attempt to focus, to bring that picture back.

"So, we'll be together forever then," the image suggested, hopeful.

She was right before him, big, bright, full of expectation.  Her long, dark lashes curled.  Her lips parted with the beginning of a smile.

The camera shook as it zoomed in close, unfocused, and then focused.

She blinked, waiting, full of anticipation.

"I didn't suggest that," Gene deadpanned.  "No.  I didn't mention that at all."

It was still before dawn.  A little dark outside.  Twilight.  The hospital halls were more or less vacant, but those people Gene did pass received a genial smile.  He even threw in a few confident nods to those who might have been his fellow co-workers.  That is, if he weren't some kind of grotesque undead imposter.

It was all too simple.  He knew a little about acting, and that helped, he supposed.  If I act like I belong, I can fit in wherever, Gene thought.  He arrived at the woman's room and paused outside, his cold, dead hand clutching the doorknob.  Glancing up and down the halls, he opened the door, silent as can be, and slipped inside unnoticed.

There she was.  Sound asleep, the lone noise in the room being the soft beeping of the heart monitor and the subtle tsh tshhh of a respirator.  He saw her chest rise and fall, breathing, and imagined his heart beating inside her chest.  Moving her blood.  It would feel much too big for her, he guessed.  She'd never be able to get used to such a change, forever knowing that this big hunk of muscle in her ribcage wasn't hers, didn't belong to her.  In addition to setting things straight and recovering his personal belongings, he would, in fact, be doing her a favour in recovering it.

He crept up to her bedside, retrieving the scalpel from the pocket of his lab coat.  Blade in hand, Gene leant over the woman, allowing her breath to warm his cheek for a moment.  He watched blood pump through the big carotid in her neck.  Thump-thump.  His heart, pushing the blood of another, pumping along in her chest.

There was an open window next to him, and the gentle summer breeze carried with it the white cheesecloth curtains along with the scent of fresh cut grass.  His escape.

As he leant over her, deliberating, the scalpel's blade flashed in the pale morning light.  The woman's lashes trembled, her lids at once flicking open.  She gasped, tears gleaming.  She gasped, and Gene would've too if he needed to breathe.

Instead, Gene clapped a hand over her mouth.

"Shh," was all he said.

In that instant, she was gone, another spectral image blinking out altogether.  She was gone, and Gene was left alone in his darkened bedroom.  He tossed and turned, the water of his waterbed sloshing against the under-filled rubber bladder.  The glowing green hands of his alarm clock inched ever closer to dawn, the second hand ticking from one luminescent number to the next.  Tears of frustration welled up.  Breath caught in his throat, and his hands began to tremble.

"Shouldn't I be the one sobbing?  I'm the one who was abandoned," another feminine voice said, rustling into the room from somewhere else.  Gene squinted into the dark of his cluttered room, attempting to conjure up a face to go along with those words, that voice, but tried and failed to come up with something tangible.

"Forever leaving," another faceless voice accused.

Throat hoarse, head pounding, Gene curled up tight.  "Leave me alone," he spat, but his heart wasn't even in it.  He jerked a thin blanket up over his head.

So tired.  So altogether tired.  These fleeting glimpses of the past took too much from him.  He began to crawl through the twists and turns of his mind, through his subconscious toward where he thought the door to his unconscious should be.  The attempt was in vain, however, as he failed to find the exit.

"How often has he left?" someone asked, with a taunting laugh.

Others joined in, one phantom becoming multiple, laughing and talking to and over each other.  Their taunting filled his ears with indistinct, acerbic noise.  Mocking, derisive.  The ghosts shared stories.  Laughed at his pathetic exploits.

"Just leave me alone," Gene pleaded, half-hearted.  "Please, just leave me alone."

He clapped hands over ears, and curled up, snuggling down deeper into his blankets, the waterbed bladder roiling beneath him.  Shut them out.  Just shut them all out.  Focus.  Focus on nothing.  Wipe that mind clean.

Pillow over his head, the sound of an old projector whirred somewhere in the great hereafter, the end of the film thwip, thwip, thwipping on the reel.

Though he tried to sleep then, desperate, as he did all nights, a mischievous smile danced on his lips.  I might be haunted, nattering ghosts surrounding me, Gene thought, but at least I'll never be alone.

What would he call himself?  Too solid to be a ghost, too alive to be a vampire, and too damned good-looking to be a zombie, he didn't know what to make of it all.  He was too regenerative, to immortal, to be a mere human that's for sure.

Reunited with his heart, he strode, squinting, out into the bright morning light, and breathed in deep through his nose.  It was like he was breathing air for the first time.  Smelling flowers for the first time.  Feeling the warmth of the sun for the first time.  It was a rebirth.  Eugene Allan Pleasant was born again.

His heart was beating, languid, in his chest, and starting to pump what little blood he had left in his carcass.  Turns out he was able to heal, and as he strode down the pavement from the hospital, he allowed himself to focus on that tingle, that progressive electrical tingle which he knew was sewing together his severed veins and arteries.  Stitching together his incised skin.  Fusing sawed apart bone.  Regenerating spilt blood.  There was an itching down his torso, and he shook his shirt out, allowing the now-unneeded stainless steel staples to fall tinkling to the concrete.  As an afterthought, he removed the surgeon's cap and flapped it as well, allowing a length of loose black thread to float off on the gentle breeze.

He wondered what an assumed dead screenwriter was supposed to do with himself.  A screenwriter responsible for at least two deaths.  Three, if he was brought up on manslaughter charges for Jacqueline Dupree's demise.  Perhaps I'll lie low for a while, Gene thought.  Get a job pumping gas.  Rent a little place near Fairfax.  Accumulate all of the accoutrements of a normal fellow.  Settle some bills.  Date some normal girls.  Gather some ideas.  Write some new scripts under a new name.

Gene rounded the corner, walking straight into the morning sun, and passed a cute nurse going to work.  He beamed at her, and she blushed, looking aside.  He stole a look back over his shoulder to check her out, and caught her looking, too.  He grinned and shook his head.  Some things never change.

He considered turning around and asking her on a date.  In fact, he thought he no doubt should.  Forever would be a long time to go solo.  And besides, could one little date be such a bad idea?

He stopped, turning on his heel.

"Excuse me, miss?"

He smiled when she stopped, and when she turned around - was that a look of hopefulness illuminating her face?

"Hi," she said.

Gene took a couple confident steps forward, his best pick-up lines ruffling through his brain like a Rolodex.  He'd treat this one like a real princess, he thought.  Take her somewhere nice.  Show her a real good time.

He disarmed her with a smile, crippled her with a gentle touch on the elbow, and killed her with a torrent of florid phrase, decanting his ensorcelling words into her waiting ears.

Considering that he could no longer go back to his old home, his old life, Gene decided he might even allow this gal to keep him around for a while.  Until he got on his feet, at least.  The sheer largesse of this thought warmed Gene a little inside.  It was said that the act of being generous made one feel good, and Gene did indeed feel rather good about himself knowing that he wasn't like the rest of those men.

After all, he had a heart.

Or so he thought.