had nightmares these last few nights where I’d die—fall off a snowy cliff into a snowy abyss, crash my plane into the side of a building, get beaten to death with pipes and bats and other heavy things—and each time I’d die, the scene would reset and I’d die again. And again. Each thing repeated twice, so I had three versions of everything that happened. Even the one instance where I turned the tables and killed the guy with my hands, ripping him apart, I had to do it three times, and by the third time I was just sick, no longer so full of rage or fear, just beige inevitability that this was going to play out in some way or other, it had to play out; I’d killed him twice already, so it was more than likely I was going to kill him again, so I made my fists very small and punched them through his eyes, through the thick plate of bone behind them and into his brain, then did Jazz Hands in his prefrontal cortex, giving it a good scramble.