It's a Sunset Boulevard moment, to be sure. The difference being, of course, that I'm not narrating this sordid tale as a disembodied voice hovering above. No, I'm standing right here at the water's edge with a baseball bat at my side, dangling from fingers too limp to hold on. Yet somehow they manage. There's dye spooling out around the back of my head, and it's spreading, carried along by chlorinated ripples. Octopus ink, black against a serene aquamarine. But you don't really want the metaphoric descriptions. You just want to know what happens next. However, like any storyteller worth his love/hate relationship with adverbs, I'm not going to give you want you want—yet. For now, how about I tell you how I got here? I know what you're thinking: Please, not another one of these flashback stories. I can't stand them. Yeah, me either. If you want, go ahead and skip to the end. I wish I could. But I'm here, poolside, watching my doppelgänger's corpse bob in the agitated water. * * * It all started after a long day at the office, full of paperwork up to my ears and phones warbling off the hook from the moment I stepped into my cubicle.
