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the Hudson, so he decides on the small diner three doors down. It’s not a big chrome and tin job like he’s used to from Jersey, but the Washington Place Diner And Restaurant (Two rooms? Two menus?) looks inviting enough, with booths and a counter and even a revolving display case full of fluffy cakes and almost menacing-seeming pies. The door is wide open and exhaling nicely chilled air-conditioned air as well, and Dave can almost smell the grease of the disco fries in the air. He walks up the steps and into the vestibule, and through the second glass door separating the foyer from the diner proper (or is this the restaurant section?), he sees her.
    She’s behind the counter, a white button-up shirt and black blazer over her tank top, lifting a plate smeared with ketchup and the leftover lettuce and coleslaw of a Burger Platter Deluxe with one hand and wiping down the Formica under it with her other. He stays long enough to watch her shove the plate across the stainless steel shelf under the window that separates counter from kitchen, walk back to the counter to pocket her buck and change tip, and then take up her position, bored-looking, arms crossed, with an empty frown on her face, by the cash register. Behind her, and behind the soda fountain, and the short-order cook who stands out, as he’s a black man, Dave sees the faded blue skies and crumbling pillars of a tacky mural of the Acropolis.
    Dave turns and runs back the two blocks to the PATH train and stands on the mostly empty platform for nearly half an hour before the train going back to Jersey comes, smoldering in an inexplicable shame.

CHAPTER 7
    T he Ylem isn’t so much a place as it is the canvas places are painted on. Here I can live every decision and detail of an infinite number of me. Of course the shooting cuts a huge red slash through my personal Ylem, like a line in the financial pages after a stock market crash. Sometimes I was able to resist Eris for weeks, or months, before pulling the trigger. A couple of times she never got to me at all.
    There are endless realities shifting and swirling in the Ylem, and I’ve lived them all. Nothing else to do, really. I died a baby due to bronchitis, and never felt anything more than cold and a harsh thimble full of air. There was an “accident”—that’s what the principal called it—in eighth grade. I was accidentally cornered and kicked so hard in the ribs that splinters of bone tore right through my guts. I didn’t even die till seventh period, in World Literature.
    I never live past forty. No matter what, I never marry. No kids. Sex sometimes, in college, thanks to beer and a sad little aura of being the nicest guy in some ramshackle dorm at Stockton College. That me studied psychology. The school was close to Atlantic City, so I learned to count cards and I didn’t need to work, as long as I lost frequently enough to keep the Mafia from beating me up in an alley. I learned that trick from some guy I met in an alley. Later, I die in a car wreck.
    Those are the boring lives. Most of them are very boring, with nothing more to say for them than a really good meal, or a glimpse in the dark of a dazed smile on the face of a pretty girl I managed to get into bed and make come.
    Eris is like a pillar of flame, splashing heat and light all across the narrow hallways of my life’s labyrinth. And she put me here, to make me her slave.
    I’m not Dave Holbrook; I’m just the part of Dave Holbrook who wasn’t insane. She had so many ways and so many tricks; in the Ylem I see them all very clearly, and while poor lost Dave twists and writhes against a million predestinations, like a prisoner being prodded to the lip of a grave at bayonet point, at the crack of a whip, from the tug of a leash around his neck. Eris is truly a goddess. It’s scary to see free will in action. They control the rest of us. If they’re flame, we’re moths.
    She ignores Dave in the halls and in the classroom. Dave walks through