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My day is going okay this time, until I bump into Jimmy Abatzaglou. There's the usual fabulous weather, clean comfortable clothes on my back, no hunger or thirst, a busy crowd of Toys flowing past on either side. Their faces, once I get to noticing, are mainly Korean, soft and flat with that secret look to the eyes, but every once in a while there's an American tourist, a GI. Way back I was in the service-it's one of the things I'm clear about-and ended up in Seoul for eighteen months. A dull country, a lonely time, long duty hours and nothing to do otherwise. But the one thing I liked was going out on those incredibly crowded streets and just walking, with all those little people streaming by me. What got me was the way they would head straight at me and swerve aside at the last possible instant, without ever changing expression; or how they'd come up behind and press tight on either side, even give me a polite little shove, without meaning the slightest offense. It was all, I don't know, so cute somehow, like they'd made me a member of their club, but without ever really noticing me.

So today the crowds are Korean, and that's all right. But Jimmy Abatzaglou isn't. He's a face from way back, one of those memories so deep you don't even know you have it. A kid I used to hang with for a few weeks in sixth grade, I think it was. The teacher had white hair, I think, and a name that began with either S or V. There was this phase when Jimmy and I used to put our desks together for "cooperative learning" and sit there with our Math homework done, two model citizens; but secretly we would be checking out all the hot girls in class, and whenever Mrs. S or V turned her back we would start whispering, trying out our very inexact sexual knowledge in fantasies about Yolanda Turnbull and Robin Espinoza and Ann Turner. Just your basic eleven year-old fun. Once we got tired of the game we got tired of each other, too, and went back to being just nodding acquaintances, but there was a month or so when we were pretty tight. It's the kind of thing the Program has been into lately, a whole long riff based on one little germ of nostalgia.

What with the "fine fall weather" a lot of storekeepers have brought their merchandise outside, and a rack of belts is standing there on the wide sidewalk, in a place that is more and more clearly Itaewon, Seoul, ROK. That's where I spot Jimmy. He's a foot taller and going on two decades older than when I saw him last, but you know how it is with faces: I can see the kid I knew, peeking out the eyeholes of this trim thirty year-old tourist in soft jeans and a polo shirt, frowning as he fingers a wide belt. It's so off the wall that it trips me up: I stare at him, raise my hand to wave.

Then I catch myself, but it's too late: he's already giving me the I-know-you and moving toward me, amazed. I duck and try to hurry past, but he's at my elbow. "Excuse me! Excuse me, aren't you-" He has to fumble for the name, a nice touch I think. "Frank. Frank Tomlinson! Yes, you are! I can't believe it!"

There are ways to dodge these things, sometimes anyway, and I try one. "Fuck off."

"What?"

"Fuck off," I say, hurrying on. He drops out of sight for a moment-out of existence, you could say-but then his footsteps come hurrying up behind. What feels like a hand on my shoulder spins me around. "You can't talk to me like that!"

I give him my kindest, gentlest smile and say, "Of course not, sweetheart. But puppy testicles, all right? Three raisins north of here." Just random gibberish: sometimes fools the Program. Sometimes.

Not this time, though. "It's me!" he says. "Jimmy Abatzaglou! Sixth grade, remember? Mrs. Stimson's class? Math homework and razzing the chicks?"

Chicks, Jesus. "Sorry," I tell him, and try to pull away. But he hangs on to my arm. Starts going on about how we were friends once, which we weren't, but it's what he remembers. He's sort of cornered me, pushing me back against a stone facing between two tiny storefronts, leather goods on one side, embroidered silk jackets on the other. "It's been twenty years!" he cries. "How can you treat me like this?"

"You're not real," I tell him. "I mean, you probably think you are, but you're not." It's an interesting question, actually, whether they think or not. I tell him, "What it probably is, sometime during my tour, years ago, I was getting lonesome and homesick and said to myself, 'Gee, it sure would be great to see old Jimmy.' So the Program got hold of the trace and here you are, but really you're not." Explaining all this to him is illogical and even dangerous, but somehow it's what I do. An irresistible habit.

Every so often the machine-I think it's a machine-hits a rough patch, a gap in the logic that exposes everything, like you're in the wings at a play and can see backstage. That's what happens now. Suddenly Jimmy has backed up about ten paces, his face is purple, and he's holding, so help me, a knife. It's just a non sequitur, preposterous, the Jimmy I knew (I think I knew) would never grow up to be someone who carries a wicked-looking four-inch switchblade. But there it is: from Buddies' Reunion to Macho Showdown, sans segue. He screams, "You always thought you were better than me!" or something like that, so I gather the premise is that he's gone psycho over the years. Just the barest fig leaf for the nutty plot change.

So then my choices get very limited. Jimmy comes at me and I vault a rack of shirts, maybe five feet high, backwards. He darts into the shirts, comes out on my side, lunges with the knife again, so close the blade tears my sleeve as I twist away. Drama, you know. Martial arts. By now a crowd has gathered and is yelling "Joe! Joe!" in a way that means "Look at these crazy Americans!" It's a true detail, they really do yell that, or used to.

We scramble out from behind the shirts and Jimmy comes at me with big, stagey, slashing motions. I do kung fu things, leaps and spins and other moves I don't even know the names of. Part of what is a little bogus is that I seem to see it from every side, like it's been shot with three cameras. Jimmy's nose goes bloody, then a lip, and he starts to get this desperate expression, like he senses the end is near. So I move in. We grapple and get locked up tight against the side of a wooden stall (a key shop, I think; or one of those tiny three-bottle bars that used to appear like mushrooms in the fall, in Seoul)-me with his knife hand in both mine, him choking me. I knock his hand once, twice, against the wood of the stall and the knife goes flying. We race after it and I get there first, kick the knife away, then turn to finish knocking him out with my fists. This is generally what I do, a nice bloodless finale.

Then it all goes loopy and bad. Maybe I didn't really kick the knife. Maybe it hit something and bounced back, or maybe just nothing. There are gaps in the logic, like I said. Anyway there the knife is, right back in Jimmy's hand, and then here it is, coming right up into my gut, before I can do a thing.

Then pain, pain like nothing I can remember. It goes rocketing around in my insides and up and down my spine and I hear this voice screaming and know it's me and Jesus, it's the real thing, pure D, the signed original, no fucking bullshit. Perfect simulation, is what this is.

But what's funny is that after a second it's not that bad. With major injuries your nerves all max out, I read somewhere, so after a second you don't feel it so much. Anyway there's not many nerves deep inside. When Jimmy's knife goes through one of my organs, the liver maybe, I hear a sort of puckery, popping sound, but there's not much sensation, and when it lodges in a bone there's just this strange kind of pressure, like a dentist's pick scratching away at a tooth that's been numbed.

And it's true about the peaceful feeling that comes at the end. I find I'm sitting down. I'm on the curb, the knife still buried deep in my gut, and Jimmy is backing away, blood all over him, bug-eyed. The look of a sated maniac, second thoughts beginning to dawn. There's sunlight, early afternoon, and I'm surprised that I didn't notice till now how beautiful it is. Somebody is sobbing, other voices muttering. Sirens far off, and a bird chirps uncertainly. None of it matters terribly, one way or the other, but it's all rather sweet. When death comes it's exactly the way I always thought it would be: like an old movie, black and white, getting grainier and grainier till at last there's nothing but pure black. Absolutely fucking weird.

When I come back I'm in one of those halfway resets you get sometimes. Same season, same time of day, same shirt and pants, but there's a cord jacket that's new. The sirens have carried over, still faint, far off. No Jimmy, no knife, and no wound: or rather, the last of the new skin is just settling into place, sealing down like shrink-wrapped plastic, one of the stranger sensations I've had in a while. I can still remember everything that just happened. For a change.

I'm standing at the door of a bar, and at first I take it to be a place I used to hang out in the ROK, Hwan Li's Nashville Club, specializing in real USA country singalong, only no one ever really did, just played the juke and kept to themselves.

But it turns out to be someplace else. A long high bar, dark wooden stools, webbed leather seats, long mirror behind the barkeep, a TV high in one corner showing Australian Rules football while the juke plays the Stones, Beast of Burden. Signs in English, Slim Jims on the bar, and we're back in the U.S. of A, no question. There may even be a certain logic to the change. Every soldier overseas eventually has the same fantasy, of being magically transported back home for just an hour or two, for a beer or a ball game or whatever. It seems weirdly reasonable because you're not asking for so much.

The place is about two-thirds full, a youngish weekend crowd, lots of jeans and khakis and tight blouses, with the occasional tie and colored shirt. They're sitting at these long low tables that are made out of slabs of wood about four times too heavy for the job, because it's somebody's idea of folksy decor. The sort of place I could have imagined, but why would I bother? Maybe once upon a time I stopped into such a place for a beer, a phone call, a trip to the john.

The most obvious hazards-dazzling women, belligerent men-are nowhere in sight, so I head for the end of the bar. It's where I'm least likely to get drawn into a conversation, but I can still keep an eye on things. If there's a robbery or the bartender has a heart attack, maybe I can slip out in time, avoid battling the bad guys single-handed or administering CPR.

What I need is some time to collect my thoughts. The Program has sent me some weird shit before, but not like today. There's been pain, but it was always something to get past, a little sting on the way to the happy ending. Today the whole plot was Frank Dies, period, and the pain was bonus, deluxe, DVD, economy size. What if this is the start of a new trend, I keep thinking. I remember the noise the knife made, cutting through something papery and slick inside me, and I finish a double scotch, quick. I should think of some brilliant new strategy, but there aren't any ideas in the bottom of the glass. I already steer clear of anything that looks like trouble-like either trouble or bliss, in fact-and look where it gets me. I've also tried the opposite tack, picking fights, propositioning the most beautiful women. It gets me roughly the same places, just a little quicker.

You can never tell what will happen with booze. Once in Tucson (more or less, Tucson) I threw down three quarts of dark rum in an hour, walked right out without stumbling. But there are other times when the spirits do pretty much what they're supposed to, and, lucky me, today turns out to belike that. Three doubles and I'm past scared-and-shaky, well over the line into oh-well mellow. Take the moment, I'm thinking, and hope for the best, what else can you do?

But the next drink doesn't do much, and then I start noticing that there are too many beautiful women in the bar. The sweet Toys all have dates and they've slipped in unobtrusively, at least three in the last half hour that are just my type, in between several porky and plain and just-miss numbers, included as camouflage. There's one in particular that I can hardly keep my eyes off of. Petite and lively, a quick smile, great eyes, wearing a clingy blue dress that somehow convinces you she wore it "for comfort" even while it turns every head in the place. High sculpted breasts, tiny waist, flawless tan. What kills me is this sweet, pixie-ish, kid-sister look she's giving her date as she sits there holding his hand, listening to him. He's older, bright, successful, appreciative. A cute couple, all the way around, and it's just so perverted that I could walk up, introduce myself, and within an hour or two take her off to bed. Or him, for God's sake.

I put a twenty on the bar and walk out.

Only right at the door, something stops me. I walk back, take a look. There's a little alcove I hadn't noticed on the way in, and over in the corner, near a bumper-pool table, is an old arcade-style game, the kind with a button, a joystick, a little metal hood shading the screen. By fiddling the controls you manipulate a brawny cartoon figure who beats up a steady stream of goons. I stare and stare. It all looks so natural, somehow, so innocent. The cartoon figures have about four motions they can make, and they make them over and over, like puppets. Finding it here is the strangest thing that has happened to me so far today.

"You got some problem?"

Belatedly I notice the woman playing the machine. Tall, with narrow shoulders, small breasts, big hips, wearing one of those knit dresses that hits awkwardly at mid-thigh. Short dark hair in a Cleopatra cut, sharp features. More or less the exact physical type I'm not attracted to, which is reassuring; on the other hand I can see that she's an attractive woman, objectively speaking.

"These machines," I say, my tongue a little thick. "They don't exist."

"Sure they don't," she says, indifferent, concentrating on the game. "And neither do I. Only you do. Save it, okay?"

This remark is nearly as strange as the machine. I look at her hard and see nothing much, boredom mainly, depression, irritation. She needs a shampoo.

"Getting stared at like that does not," she mutters, pulling on the joystick, "turn me on. Anymore."

"What I mean is, they don't exist here," I tell her. "It's one of the rules. They could be mimed like anything else, why not. But it would be bad form. Like shooting a movie with the boom mike showing, or the actors talking right at the camera."

"But here it is," she says, juking the machine slightly, like it's pinball she's playing. She sucks in her bottom lip, then blows out, lifting her bangs. "Gee, this must be a red-letter day. You must be an interesting guy. But personally I think masturbation is a form of schizophrenia: playing with yourself, you know."

I can't help smiling. I've never had a Toy be quite so brassy with me, and there's something exhilarating about it. Which should warn me off, but there's the scotch. I lean against the wall for a while, watching her game. I tell her my name and get hers, Gail, and we make a little aimless small talk, like old marrieds or something. Her hero fells a goon with a nifty kick to the throat, but then another one, twice his size, tiptoes up behind, carrying a huge club, and knocks his head off. Really off: it rolls around on the ground for a second, and puddly, stringy things come oozing out the neck. Not so innocent. The GAME OVER sign flashes, with her score. Gail grimaces and turns away; then looks at me for the first time, top to bottom. The dead-bored expression does not leave her face. "They keep getting the physical type all wrong. You're skinny not stocky, your Adam's apple sticks out, and your ass is bony."

I grin at her, seeing the way this one is headed. "But it's what you've been wanting, see? Somebody who isn't just a clever mock-up of your own desires. Someone real."

"So if you're the opposite of what I want," she tells me, "then you're what I want. Not a lot to work with there, champ."

She grabs her purse and doesn't bother to say goodbye, just leaves. I hang back for a while, tantalizing myself with the thought that I won't follow. But she's got me hooked now, like a bad movie you can't resist watching to the end.

When I catch up she's trudging aimlessly along the street, looking in store windows. We're someplace with a downtown now, Midwestern, not too large. Topeka maybe, Joplin, Rockford, Columbus. The same great weather we had on the other side of the globe. So far from being surprised when I come up behind her, she doesn't even look my way. "I got killed today," I tell her. "I mean really killed. They gave me the whole number: agony, death-spasms, final numbness. It's freaking me out."

She looks at the poster in the front window of a travel agency. "One question: why are you telling me?"

I shrug. "You know how it is. If a scam keeps up long enough you fall in with it, even when you know it's a scam." A true fact of existence, I've decided, one well known to dictators and used-car salesmen, back in the world.

"Right." We've come to a street and she heads across without looking. A Ford pickup brakes hard, taps the horn. Gail doesn't even turn her head. I hurry after. "So, Frank," she says, with the air of someone commencing a conversation she'd rather avoid, "why do you want to die?"

"Whoa! It isn't my idea."

For the first time she gives me the ghost of a smile; a quick, shrewd little smirk that makes me like her and dislike her all at once. "Come off of it, Frankie boy. If it's in the Program, you ordered it somehow." She stops at a window to look at her reflection, adjusting an earring. Her voice goes dead again. "Sometimes I think that's the worst part. Knowing that you're responsible. That everything comes from some kind of ugly shit you had floating around inside, all along."

"Now you're the one telling me," I point out.

She doesn't bother to answer, which is probably the best answer when you think about it. We walk along. She's right, of course. My memory is shot to hell, but the thing I do know is that everything in the Program starts with your own wishes. Fulfilling wishes seems to be the thing it's designed for, the thing it's trying to do even when it does the opposite. I don't know. I have this big, vague memory that back in the beginning-a month ago? a year?-everything was a sweet dream, just going on and on. Maybe it was never supposed to go on so long, or maybe it was never supposed to stop. It could be there's a machine that's malfunctioning, or a demiurge that's gone wacko, or an evil fairy.

Personally I go with the machine theory, because there's a kind of memory there. A night out with a pretty little blonde-Sheila? Sherry?-food, drinks, jokes, more drinks, some grass.. All the little things you do to promise each other you're headed for the sack, but then maybe some kind of snag, she's reluctant or we fight or something. I end up in this sort of arcade place at four A.M. An ancient man with a grinning chimpanzee face taking my money, much too much money somehow, and then when I go in to play the machines there's none in there. What I see instead looks like an emergency hospital. A big room like a gym, beds in neat row after row, and on each one someone is sleeping, men and women in street clothes, with all sorts of tubes and wires poking into them. All dark and dim and quiet, apparently nothing at all going on. But after a second you see that actually there are some machines, one per customer, because a thing about the size and shape of an old two-drawer filing cabinet stands next to each bed. There are a couple of lights and dials on the front, and all the tubes and wires from each patient are plugged into it, but if there are flashing lights and crashing sounds and scoreboards and images and unfolding stories, it's all somewhere you can't see.

That's what I seem to remember, but I'll never really know. Because if that's where I am, amnesia is part of what I bought with my overpriced ticket. I've thought about this. Say you're a hotshot engineer, a genius, and you're going to build a perfect pleasure machine. Well, one of the first things you run up against is the problem of memory. Because once a person remembers something he can't enjoy it anymore, not really, not the same way. Over time you get bored, and the corollary is that you're not just a pleasure-seeker but, reluctantly, a pain-seeker. You quit choosing the shell with the pea under it, the path with the cheese at the end, and choose the other one, just for the hell of it. So memory is an obstacle you have to engineer around. And even when you can, pleasure keeps getting harder to find.

I tell Gail, "If I did want it, it's just normal. It's what anyone is going to want after a while, just being here."

She stops a minute to light a Marlboro. "Wow, what a gloomy perspective. And here I was having such a nice time." She exhales, looks away. "You've been thinking about it. I'm impressed. So what now? We go someplace fancy and you spend a lot of time staring into my eyes. You tell me about your theories, it turns out you have a plan, you're going to escape the whole nightmare. We book a room and have dynamite sex, in between discussing your plan."

"Not me," I tell her. "The only plan I've got is ducking and dodging." We get moving again. In fact her sarcasm, her whole superior attitude, is suddenly starting to annoy me. There's a limit to what I'll take from her, a Toy after all, not even all that attractive. She's got me thinking ahead, and all the possibilities look not only bad but boring.

At the next corner I take hold of her, spin her around, and slam her against the wall. Hard. "Okay, bitch. You want a plan? I'll give it to you. No dinner, no sweet talk, no long looks. Just a room, the first one we can find"-there's a TraveLodge just down the street, in fact, I see it as I speak-" and we play a few games. Rough games. We're going to work on that sarcastic attitude of yours."

She looks at me-really at me, for almost the first time-and says, "Let me go!" But her eyes are wide with surprise, and for an instant I see the little flicker there. I'm as startled as she is, I think. I'd been expecting her to feel lifeless, a big rubber doll. Instead she's shaking with fear, and it's so unexpected, so human, that I can't help it: I buy in. I'm turned on suddenly, trembling with it.

I take her by the collar, tearing her dress a little, and twist her arm up behind and start marching her along the street. Her purse flaps awkwardly against her leg, dangling from the arm I'm twisting.

"Frank," she says, pleading. "You're hurting me."

"Shut up," I say into her ear. "Let me tell you the premise for this episode, Gail. It's a killer, you'll love it. You see, we really are both real, but neither of us believes in the other. I mean, why not?"

"Please, Frank," Gail says meekly. "You're hurting me. Please let me go."

Pedestrians are giving us startled, alarmed looks. I push on past, warning them off with my scowl. "You don't want me to let you go," I tell her. "You want to hear the rest of my story. We're both wired into this same machine, see, and the machine broke maybe, or someone went off and left it running-who knows?-but anyway we're trapped. The dreams don't stop like they're supposed to, they just go on and on."

"Ow," Gail says. "Please."

"I'm just coming to the good part," I tell her. "One of the bad things about this place, the worst maybe, is it's so lonely. Because all the people you're meeting are really Toys, and after a while you know that. And sometimes we feel like we could take all the other shit-the amnesia, the weird twists, the cornball plots-if only there was somebody to share it with."

"That hurts like hell," says Gail, tight, focused on her arm.

"So then we meet, see? And it's wonderful, because each of us is just what the other has been wanting: a real person, a companion. Only we can't tell that the other is real, because it feels just like another fantasy, like meeting up with the very thing we've been wanting. Is this great, or what?"

"It's great," she tells me. "I really like it. But you're hurting my arm, please-"

"I know," I tell her, giving an extra twist. "Pain is a part of it. Pain is the key. What I'm doing to you now"-I twist, she yelps-"it's the one thing I wouldn't do if I was your own fantasy. It proves I'm real."

Which is bad logic, but good enough for the situation. People tend to accept your arguments when you're twisting their arms.

"You bastard," she says, rallying. "Let-me-go!"

We've reached the TraveLodge. I turn her loose, step back, grin. "Of course," I tell her. "You don't have to do anything you don't want to do."

"You bastard," she says. "You dirty bastard."

So we get a room, but past that point it's kind of an anti-climax. I don't really have much sadism in me, can't stand to look at cuts or bruises. So after hitting her a few times, open-handed, not hard, I change to the psychological stuff. Order her to strip, make her turn around, criticize her body piece by piece. Have her get down on the carpet, naked, and lick my shoes. But it's not a good part for me, I can hear my voice and it gets less and less convincing, sort of apologetic and nervous instead of sneering, rough. Meanwhile there's something royal in her nakedness, a surprising beauty in her long pale belly and wide hips with the bush almost up to the beltline, the small dangly breasts with bumpy dark nipples. I get my clothes off and put her on her back, but it doesn't work. I come down between her legs instead of inside, wondering if it's really nerves or just schtick.

Afterwards she lies there, crying quietly. The sun has set and there are evening smells coming into the room, leaves and flowers mixed with exhaust, dust, street noises. There's no reason to feel anything for her, not even what you'd feel for a character in a book or a movie. But somehow I find myself saying, "Look, I'm sorry. I was trying to prove a point. You seem like a good person, really."

"There's no need to apologize," she says at last. "Whatever you did, it's what I must want." More tears.

"Don't be too sure," I say, patting her shoulder. I think for a while and say, "Maybe we're both Toys. We can't remember shit, so how would we know? Maybe it's like, you're always real to yourself, whether the Program cooked you up or your Mama did."

For some reason this cheers her up. She turns over and looks up into my eyes and she seems very sweet, really: much prettier than I thought at first. "You're a character," she says at last.

"I do my best," I say.

This gives her a laugh. She goes and gets her cigarettes and we lie there and smoke them, starting to talk. Offering little bits of what we take to be our real memories. After a while she leans over and gives me a long, slow kiss and says, "Don't go away," and gets up to go to the john.

When I finally get up to check, there's no one in there at all. The lid on the stool is down, the shower stall empty. When I turn back to the room, there's no sign of her purse or her clothes or her cigarettes.

So I lie back down on the bed, but I can feel right away that I'm not sleepy. It feels like it's still early afternoon, the way it was when I first saw Jimmy. At some point the weather has turned cloudy and nondescript. I can lie here for a while if I like, but sleep is not an option. One window is up a crack and lets in various noises-some distant shouts, a bird or two, a crane or bulldozer somewhere, the long steady mutter of traffic. I know none of it is really there, but it goes on and on and on.

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