He was probably just getting old.

That was the uppermost thought, sustained through a pounding headache that he, as usual, smiled his way through, making his chatty customer small-talk.

Theoretically June should have been a month for at least a little casual debauchery, but the idea had flamed out after the first late Saturday night that had yielded nothing better than that headache, a temporary distaste for Lady Gaga, and a desire for better deodorant. Some other time he might have found it both unimaginable and unforgivable that he would have sat out the rest of the month, and yet he had. Each week suggested that he might, maybe, try again. Each week crawled nearer to July without his doing so.

He did not feel old, though - or at least not most of the time. He still felt like the boy he couldn’t remember being, startling himself with his own reflection half the time, absently pushing his wet hair off his temples after a shower and reassuring himself that it was still both thick and not at all speckled with grey. Thirty was the new twenty, or so they said, but although he could not remember being twenty, he knew it had not been like this.

What he did know, he knew as if he had read it in the biography of someone else. Knew that he’d gone from being a flirtatious but relatively chaste nineteen-year-old to, in the wake of the cataclysm he mercifully and cruelly could not remember, a twenty-year-old that had relinquished any idea of his own desires in service of other people’s. Engelbart curled up on the nightstand, her fur rippling into a shade of blue to match the old tie she was using as a bed, and he reflected absently that someone else in his own body had been that sort of chameleon once, to the point of not even knowing what it was that he liked or wanted.

He did not know that before the catastrophe he had been a little rebellious in his chaste flirting and his stubborn eccentricity - had seized on it as a demonstration of his own mastery of himself - and that after it, he had buckled to the lack of agency that seemed to be marked out for him, succumbing to the oppressive ease of being whatever it was that other people wanted him to be. He had no memory of being told by the wry general: you have no choice and everything it had made him feel at the time. He had no recollection of the hollow way he rattled around inside his own body, numb and smiling, lying about his age in whatever direction helped his case with whoever gave his still-boyish face and limbs a second look.

He did not know, therefore, that perhaps the self-sabotage he’d come to admit to was a subconscious correction. The impetus was too dormant for conscious recognition, and only existed as a sort of hindbrain urge: you don’t have to do that anymore. Maybe it’s better to be a little lonely than the alternative. It might have comforted him to know that his inward climbing of the walls for the sake of a little closeness was the side effect of a return to his own antediluvian ideal: a boy, not a man, who had briefly decided to no longer be compelled to do anything he didn’t want to do - or maybe he’d only have been annoyed by it and all its empty irrelevance to his current life.

What did he want, then? It had been too long without asking the question, and even if he could not remember the absence of it, his body still supplied it in the same way that it supplied old scars he had no stories for. He did not ask it, therefore, any more than he asked the reason for the thin ropes of stiffened skin that ran across the undersides of his fingers.

Whenever he went out to those ramshackle hantavirus haunts he wasn’t supposed to be, he carried a can of spray paint and a stack of mail labels. It was unlikely in the extreme that his old tag would still be kicking around ten years later. He hadn’t gotten artistic about it until later, long after he’d left the City, and instead had scrawled his chosen name at haphazard, like a dog marking its territory. It was the sort of thing that would be long since scrubbed or covered, disrespected by his fellow writers for the good reason that it deserved no respect at all. But still he carried them, unsure of why he felt the need to efface this potential evidence of a past self, and he was coming up on a year of never being called on to use them.

It was a hot evening in June and he should have been out in some throbbing crowd, indulging in anonymous closeness. But he was, instead, on his back crumpled up into the too-tight space beneath his sink, trying to fix the leak his landlord still refused to, occasionally holding up his phone to consult one of several YouTube videos that were trying to guide him through this process, surfacing to suck in lungfuls of air from the open front door after the oppressive musty stink of the cabinet that probably hadn’t been properly cleaned and refitted in over a decade.

Have you ever been confronted by someone who remembers you and who you have no memory of? Some smiling face in a line or at a party, exclaiming your name in delight and establishing your shared priors, getting absolutely nothing as you wrack your useless brain? A reminder of how fickle the memory is, that it can simply delete in silence what you have not had cause to access, even as it holds onto other irrelevant tidbits to spring them on you at strange moments.

He contorted himself back into the mildew space, turning his phone’s flashlight this way and that, and he paused, feeling - rather than a swelling of strange emotion - a strange numbness as he was confronted by a scrawl in black Sharpie, sheltered in the dark corner.

Three letters, chosen for being angular and easy to stylize; one lowercase i, to make the dotting of it fun. FIX, which he did not remember but knew as his own; a scrawl in the margins of sketchbooks his previous self had left from years before its last deployment in some city that was not Destiny City.

After a moment, he silently extricated himself from the cabinet again, heaving himself up on arms that were not as limber as they must have been when, in another life, he had left those letters there. He could not remember being that boy - who was a boy, after all, and not a man at all - but he knew that he had lived only briefly in his own apartment before being afforded a better one by the awful people who had shoved a hand into his chest. Had he left it there, then, before the ill-fated birthday party that he could not remember but which still made him instinctively quail from the idea of celebrating his birthday ever again? Or had he gone and left this mark, like a territorial dog, before leaving this place forever for what he had imagined would be a better existence for himself? Had he already, when he wrote those three letters, relinquished his fragile grip on himself?

Useless questions. He didn’t know, of course.

He stood blankly in the alcove that served as a laughable kitchen, framed by the open doorway for the neighbor that walked by and cheerfully waved, receiving in return his usual automatic, easy smile, and he looked down at the cabinet whose ten years of landlord-special shitty paint jobs had apparently been an exterior concern only.

It shouldn’t have been that surprising. He’d had almost nothing back then, and there weren’t many places in the City, then or now, that kept the rent this low. There weren’t even that many units to be had. It should have occurred to him sooner, really. But even as he stood and considered this, he grabbed for some flicker of memory that should surely have been jogged by the realization that he and that boy had lived in the same cramped, shitty room, and felt his thoughts slide off the absence of it, useless. No familiarity came that had not been won since he’d signed the lease less than a year ago.

Rather than recollection - rather than even the wry laugh he might have expected - rather than grief for what he had lost - the man whose name was now some name he did not know or care for was seized by a sudden pang of loneliness so complete that it made him sick, because his tag had not been alone, and there was another scrawled beneath it which brought no face to his mind. Maybe they had taken turns; maybe, laughing, they had squeezed in there together and jokingly fought for elbow room, and in the moment of speculation he would almost have killed again to be that near anyone.

The yawning agony of it nearly buckled him from his unconscious purpose, and he considered for a hysterical moment that there was still time to hose off the worst of his home repair sweat, to put on something cool and breezy and saunter forth into the early stages of some rainbow-festooned circuit party and submerge himself in being what someone else wanted.

Now was the time. What do you want? Well, this, obviously, if he’d thought to ask it.

No you don’t, would have answered some awful whisper, which was the truth.

He did not want the closeness. He wanted the name that sat next to the one he had chosen for himself, and knew him; perhaps even then this had been a fantasy. Maybe even then he had already been submerged in that double life, and that other name had belonged to someone who was none the wiser about what he had become. He would not cover that tag.

The loneliness subsided, as it always did, and - after he had fought down an almost hysterical urge to text Elaine - it left him feeling nothing much at all, and - as usual - like no one.