I was working at a family-style restaurant (something I’ve never done in real life), and I’ve been told to hang up some flyers in the foyer by the door.  I started to hang them, when a grubby farmer walked into the restaurant, looking as if he had just stepped out of his field.  He had parked a pair of tiny tractors outside the building, next to the window of the foyer where I was hanging flyers.  Whenever I moved in the window, the fronts of the tractors would follow me.  I moved back and forth, testing them, and then turned to the farmer and said, “They’re like goats or something.”  He laughed and walked over to sit down, by which time the twin tiny tractors had driven themselves into the restaurant to park themselves near where the farmer was sitting.  A minute later, a herd of actual goats traipsed into the restaurant and filled up the entire lobby, where there were also people waiting in line to come inside the restaurant.

I finished hanging the flyers and squeezed my way through the myriad of goats to check the waiting list and start seating the people.  On my way past a woman wearing a sundress, one of the buttons of my suit jacket snagged a strap of her dress and made it fray.  “Oh my gosh,” I said, “I’m so sorry!  Wow, the only thing I could have snagged you with just happened to snag the only thing you’re wearing that could be snagged.  I wonder what the odds of that are.”  She didn’t seem concerned about it, and in fact seemed much more worried about the goat herd.

I decided it was time for my lunch break, so I made my way through the people and goats and went outside to the parking lot.  I walked to a convenience store that was at the far end of the lot.  My plan was to take a shortcut through the store to get to the main street, but once I was inside, it was extremely difficult to get out again.  Aisles turned into dead ends, and there were no other doors to speak of.  I found an enclosed seating area with a kids’ playroom, and I crawled over the wall of that to get to the street.

I was on the lookout for McFamousCrappyBurgerPlace, and there were actually two within easy walking distance.  The one to my left, across the busy street, was slightly closer, so I opted for that one.  I walked in and was greeted by a cute girl with dark blonde hair.  I ordered a chicken sandwich and some fries.  “Small.  No. . .medium.”  She told me the total would be ten dollars.

“What?  That seems a little high.”

“Well, you did order two of each.”

“No, no, it’s just me.  I only need one.  Thanks.”

She smiled and tapped some buttons on the cash register.  I handed her my debit card, which she swiped and then turned around to grab a bag of chicken nuggets, which she set on the counter in front of me as she returned my card.  “The rest will be out in just a second.”

Before long my food arrived, although not exactly as I had planned.  The girl grabbed two large, flat, clear plastic bags and filled one with an enormous amount of chicken nuggets and the other with an enormous amount of French fries.  “Um,” I said, “what am I supposed to do with all of this?  And I ordered a sandwich, anyway.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said sweetly.  “That’s all we have at the moment.”

“Well, I guess this’ll have to do,” I said, and then I smiled flirtatiously at her.  “I thought we had a relationship that was built on trust.”

“Uhh. . .we do. . .I guess,” she stammered, not wanting to play along with my little joke.

I was undeterred.  “I still trust you, for what it’s worth.”  She smiled, but didn’t say anything else.  “Well, I guess we have a relationship based on our mutual love of music, then.  Or maybe it’s just our animal attraction for each other?”  She smiled more widely, and I said, “Can I please have some ketchup and some sweet-and-sour sauce?  Maybe two?”  She retrieved them from under the counter, and dropped them into the bags I was holding open in front of her.  I gave her a smirk and walked outside with my bags of McFeces.  I reached into the chicken bag, opened the sweet-and-sour sauce, dipped a nugget, and popped it into my mouth as I walked back across the street toward work.

How in the world did the universe make sure that I would stumble across this?

Roll Out Cowboy from Roll Out, Cowboy on Vimeo.

* * * * *

I’m at my dad’s house (although he’s not my real-life dad) watching some television show about government secrets, everything from technology to covert special-ops agencies.  Just for fun, I decide to grab a piece of paper and write down some of the things that are mentioned on the show, so I can check them out on the internet some other time.  My dad comes home, and he has a couple of friends with him who I’ve not met before.  They walk into my dad’s home office room and close the door behind them.  I walk into the kitchen, and just as I do, I hear a snippet of their conversation, and they’re talking about these same secret agencies.  I compare the names to the ones I’ve written on the notepad, and they match up perfectly.  This is how I come to realize that my dad works for one of these agencies.

I leave and go home to my place, which is a small building of one-bedroom apartments that’s located on the edge of a bluff overlooking the ocean.  I live near the end of the row; there’s only one apartment behind mine, and then the hillside slopes down toward the parking lot, with another bluff behind that.  So our building is built on a jetty, of sorts, that sticks out into the ocean.  It’s a beautiful place, but very isolated, and the only other person who’s ever around is the guy who lives in the unit behind mine, at the back of the building.  His name is Raymond Hsu, a Chinese-American guy about my own age, who is very quiet and reclusive.  He’s a computer guy, and spends long hours programming.  His apartment is immaculate, and it’s obvious that he takes great pride in living there.  He has a little white cat who often comes over to visit me, but I never see Raymond and the cat together at the same time.  After a while, I begin to wonder about this non-coincidental coincidence, and finally reach the conclusion that Raymond is the cat. He can somehow morph from human form into cat form, and I am determined to find out how he does it.

The next time the cat comes over, I say, “Hello, Raymond.”  The cat looks surprised, turns away, and walks back into his own apartment.  A minute later, Raymond walks outside to where I’m standing against the railing, looking out to sea.  “So,” he says, “you’ve discovered my secret.”

“For a while now I’ve thought this was the case, but I didn’t exactly know how to bring it up.  I just had to test my theory.  Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret safe.”

“I’m too shy to interact much with people,” he says, “but I know you like cats, and I figured that would be a safe way for us to meet, even though you didn’t really know what was going on yet.  But you figured it out.  Well done.”

He invites me into his apartment, where he pours two glasses of white wine, hands one to me, and shows me around.  His comfortable living room has a view of the ocean on two sides, and there are long tables of computers and monitors and bookshelves that run the length of each wall, underneath the windows, so he can gaze out the window while he’s working.  I tell him this is by far the nicest home office I’ve ever seen.

“Thank you,” he replies.  “I decided at some point that if I was going to work from home, I ought to make my home as beautiful and enjoyable as I could.  I was very lucky to find this apartment.”

“I agree,” I say.  “I love living here.”

“You’re welcome to stop by any time.  Really.  No matter what form I’m taking.”  We both laugh a little.

A woman of undeterminable age suddenly appears on the sidewalk outside our apartment building to speak with Raymond.  Actually, that’s not entirely accurate; it’s as if her age is fluctuating between ten and fifty years, slowly but perceptibly.  Her face has a greenish tinge to it that is also fluctuating.  I see her a handful of times over the next few weeks, sometimes alone and sometimes with a friend or two, and they seem to be interviewing Raymond.  Her two friends are also of fluctuating age, so I assume they are related somehow.

A few days later, while I’m out walking on the beach, I discover the nature of their interviews when I see the four of them (Raymond, the woman and two slightly younger men) in the surf, talking quietly.  The woman seems to have the ability to change herself into a frog, Raymond into a cat, and the two men have similar abilities that aren’t apparent.  I wave to Raymond and walk over to join their group.  He introduces me to Rachel and the two men.  They look a bit concerned about my presence there, but Raymond reassures them, “He’s okay.  He knows about me.”  His features become slightly more feline for a few seconds, but he retains his human form, to show me how he does it, and that he’s in control of it.  Rachel, who is the ten-year-old version of herself, starts to change to a frog, then reverses it in the same way that Raymond did.

These people are their own separate race of shape-shifters.  Rachel and the two men explain to me that they’ve been looking for others like them for quite some time, without success, so when they found out about Raymond, they wanted to be sure that he was one of The People, so they interviewed him at great length.  So far, I’m the only one outside of their race who knows of their existence.  I tell them I’m prepared to keep it that way, if that’s what they want.

The dream changes just then, and I’m back at my dad’s house watching that show again; this episode is about a series of factories in which aliens disassemble humans and rebuild them from the separate parts.  They create these humanoid creatures, and then they pull out human eyes and cut off human noses and ears, whereupon they attach them to the hideous creatures they’re creating.  This is apparently one of the secrets the government is keeping. The show continues, and talks about veterans of the armed forces who have lost body parts in various wars, and who have been restored using this kind of technology.  The process requires massive amounts of medication in order to keep the vets alive.  Most of these men are little more than deformed vegetables, whiling away their lives on beds in remote hospitals.  Some can be seen and heard crying loudly, some are merely lying prostrate and silent.  One complains into the camera about having seen people who could change into animals while he was in Iraq, and then he spirals off into stream-of-consciousness gibberish, but I decide that my new friends need to know about this.

I go back home.  Raymond sees me, comes out, and asks if I’d like to go for a walk.  “Sure,” I say, and shut the door behind me.  We walk along a narrow, curvy highway that runs along the edge of the cliff beyond the jetty on which our building is located.  He tells me he’s gay, and asks if we can hold hands.  I don’t see a problem with this, so I agree, and we hold hands the way children do, without the fingers interlocked.  He says, “That’s very nice of you.  Gay guys always want more, like kissing and all that, but sometimes it’s nice just to hold hands.”

“Well, you don’t have to worry about that with me,” I tell him.  “I’m not gay, so I don’t go for the kissing or anything, but holding hands seems like it’s harmless enough.  Besides, you’re a shape-shifter; it would never work between us.”   I laugh.

Suddenly there is lots of traffic on the highway, and we have to let go and walk single-file.  There’s been an oil spill of some sort on the road, and it’s very slick, so much so that we’re having difficulty walking, and we almost slide over the edge of the cliff a couple of times.  A truck barrels down on us, and I grab Raymond’s hand and jump into the air with him in tow behind me.  We are flying over the ocean and over various parks and places that look like they’d be safe – albeit uncomfortable – places to land.  I’m unable to land, however, so we just keep flying until we come to a place where a small river meets the ocean.  Rachel is sitting in the sand next to the river.  She sees us and waves, and I’m able to land near her.  Raymond and I land feet first and knee-deep in the mud alongside Rachel.  She claps and laughs, telling us that was an excellent landing.  Raymond and I are laughing too, and we extricate ourselves from the mud and trudge down into the river to wash the mud off ourselves.

We climb out of the river and start to walk along a path in the adjoining park.  I tell the two of them about the vet I saw on TV who seems to have seen more people like them.  We talk about how dangerous it would be to go over to Iraq, and Rachel asks, somewhat sarcastically, “Why couldn’t they be somewhere nice that’s NOT a war zone?  Why do they have to be there, of all places?”

Rachel leaves us then, and we walk home, not holding hands this time.  I decide it’s probably not the smartest idea to encourage that very often.  We arrive at home and walk down into the parking garage behind our building.  There are these huge wooden beams that support the roof over our cars, and beyond the parking lot is a small grassy area.  We walk through the wooden beams toward the grass, and as soon as we get to the grass, a very strange feeling comes over me.

“I’ve seen this before,” I tell Raymond.  “I’ve watched this discussion happen, but I’ve seen it from a different vantage point. . .from over there!”  I point to a spot in the distance, toward a group of houses nestled along the edge of the wooded hillside, trying to work out how and when this could have occurred.  Am I a time traveler, or am I merely hallucinating?  I don’t feel as though I’m hallucinating, so the answer seems to be that I’m a time traveler.