“There is but one last mission you must commit to before you can go back to your wife and child for ever.”
“Well, there’s something - wait, child?”

“Your lover is ill with the child-parasite.”

“Is it mine?” I was skeptical, as she had not told me anything of a pregnancy. But that was aside the point, like a baseball was aside from a swinging bat.

“Yes, surely.”

“Oh, okay then.”

“You accept, then?”

“Yes, a thousand times, yes!” I was anticipating finally seeing her again. It would be a long drive back to Vermont, but that did not persuade me.

“You are to father another son. Not of your flesh, or your reproductive sputum.”

“What.”

“Oh, I’m glad you asked -”

“No, that’s a full time job - how will I ever get to see my wife or my b-”

“Clayton!”

“Yes, Clayton.”

“That will be all with you. You are to walk about the corner, and receive two telegrams. 	You shall have your choice of words."

“What?" I spoke, turning to face the malevolent-minded creature, and the beast was but a pure ball of darkness. He felt struck in the mind, beyond himself, both inside himself, and outside. Magic but normal. Flying, but just on the ground. There was something about it, that was beyond the reckoning, the reckoning of all. Surreal couldn't really describe what was going on. Surreal was beyond what was going on, but still quite before. So small, yet so big, he saw the infinite star springs of the universe, and inside them, he saw the platonic loving, drifting gases, and inside of that, the heat rising, just as the sun did behind me. It sank again, and rose to noon high, with the rapidity of a nervous mouse scurrying away from the clattering knives and rolling pins of the angered, insufferable housewife. Inside the heat I saw the atoms bouncing about, and the spaces between them. They were so large, but so small. Scale was beyond everything, but before nothing. Inside, inside, deeper and deeper, I saw electrons jump as I turned my head to and fro, locking in one place as I observed them and recognized them as having an individual, unique position in the time and space of the cloud that surrounded me. It graced my mind that perhaps there were things that were larger than other things, and that at this level, I was rather large, comparatively speaking. But the spaces and numbers involved were infinite, but compared from one to another, there were distinct differences between the amount of infinite space. Infinities are to segues as apples are to dirt, one could think as he plummeted from the stars above through that same infinite space, down through the atmosphere, burning, burning beyond measure.

He saw the lights of the American Union, and the tittering of the caravans that went between its provinces and shipping lanes. There was always a hub-bub about that land, and it was almost as ferocious as the need to live. Further down he fell, like a downcast angel, the further he fell, the closer the lights of New-New-Amsterdam grew in his eyes, from the side, over the curve, he could see the spire sticking out of the land at Philadelphia; it was like a bone, still calcifying, growing incrementally, sticking like a rib from the rotting carcass of the third, obstinate rock from the son. As the sparks of the welders aplenty cast to the ground, it was obvious that one could get blood from a stone, and such was the way. Stone could bleed, and in fact, all things, stone, iron and diamond were coated in the blood of some forlorn Gaia - death was everywhere, but no one cared. Through a zeppelin I did phase, seeing again those same jumping atoms ping pang around like ping pong balls from one place to another. As he slowed through the gases of the zeppelin, he saw that the helium atoms were playing a sort of tourney of balls with those same electrons; the helium atoms stared back as I stared to them, interrupting their game of balls and spheres in motion.

He passed through the film below, and he was once again in a cocktail of the most airy components - nitrogen, oxygen, and his old, glaring friends, hydrogen, hydrogen and helium. He looked over his right shoulder, and saw nothing but advertisements, as he tumbled through the cocktail to the street below. It was cathartic - yes it was.

The sun was no longer noon high in the sky, but in fact, hours before. He felt the urge to eat and to purge all at once. There was something inherently odd about this whole thing. He stared at his wrist watch, and checking the calendar function, he had been down for four days, and had remained motionless long enough to be covered in at least three inches of snow; he looked up, and there it was, in the stark day, the same ball of darkness. He had tasted, but he wanted more. “What.”

“Oh, I spoke incorrectly. I meant to say: You shall have your choice of worlds.”

“I think I have chosen.”

“Good.”