“I want you to be completely honest with yourself right now, George,” said Dean. “And I want you to really think about what you’re doing here. Why are you refusing to let them help you? You can’t keep on living like this forever.”

“I know, but I can’t change what I am either,” said George. “If I change what I am, then what do I become? What happens to the me that was?”

“You’ll stay the same,” said Dean. “You just won’t have these goddamned headaches all the time.”

“You don’t know that I’ll stay the same,” said George. “And by the way you don’t know the tumor won’t come back.”

“Its rate of growth is slow,” said Dean. “I’m ashamed, ashamed that your mother and I never realized it was there. We really let you down. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, but I never realized it either, and it was in my head.”

“It’s just your symptoms were so obtuse, son,” said Dean. He patted George on the head. “And then there’s the fact I wasn’t really paying attention.”

George was taken aback, but his father seemed undisturbed, just patting away at his head and smiling warmly.

“I’m sorry about that, George,” said Dean.

“You couldn’t help it. Mom kept you away.”

“Well, I’m more powerful than your mother,” said his father mildly. “In fact, I’m really powerful. It’s my fault.”

George let his head sink back into the pillow. He closed his eyes and opened them again, and there was his father, paint-stained, crazy-haired, wrinkled by the sun.

“It seemed like you said you were really powerful,” said George. “That’s funny.”

“Would be nice to have an all-powerful father around, wouldn’t it?” Dean’s eyes twinkled. “Might almost make up for missing out on visits from those other half-assed deities that have been pestering you all your life.”

George sat up quickly, his head pounding.

“What?!” he yelped.

“George, I know about your visions, remember?” said his father. “You told me. And now I’m here to tell you—I see them, too. I see them because I am one of them. Do you understand? I am one of them.”

As George watched, his father’s teeth began to straighten, his skin to smooth and pull up out of its folds and stretch firmly across his bones. He saw the paint stains on his father’s hands fade away, and then he said, “Whoa, Dad. What the hell is going on?”

“I want you to have this surgery done now, Son,” said Dean. “And if you lose the visions you’ve been having, just let them go. You will never lose me. Never. Shit as I’ve been, distracted as I’ve been, worthless as I’ve been, I will never let you down again.”

“You’re a god, too?”

Dean didn’t have to explain—George could see it in every hair on his head, every pore of his skin, and he understood his mother, and his visions, and himself.

“I don’t want to lose them,” said George. “They tell me things, things I need for work! They have given me all of my ideas, and everything I’ve done in astronomy is because of them.”

“I know you are afraid to let them go. But you should never let yourself make decisions out of fear,” said his father. “Fear is a bad reason to keep a tumor in your head. I think you should pass on, pass on to what is next.”

“What if I die?”

“Then that’s next,” said his father.

“I met that girl, Dad,” said George. “I can’t lose her. She’s so great, she’s really mouthy and smart, but she’s kind of shy and she’s really good at math.”

Dean laughed, and folded his hands over one knee.

“George, I know her. You know this. You two grew up together, when you were small, so of course I know her.”

“Right,” said George.

“And I’ve known her father forever. Like literally forever.”

George felt like his head was about to pop off, tumor and all. “What? Uncle Ray is a god?”

“Just another holy shitbag,” said Dean.

“You have got to be kidding me,” said George. “I thought he died!?”

“Yeah, that’s his out, for now. Deadbeat. Now, listen, let’s not waste time on this stuff. Let’s get your head fixed, Son. And then we can find that girl and set everything straight.”

“I have so many questions for you,” said George.

“I already promised I would be around for you more, from now on,” said Dean. “You can ask me whatever you want.”

“But what if I don’t remember? What if I don’t even remember this, that’s happening right now? What if this is just another vision, and it all goes away?”

“George,” said Dean. “I’m sorry I can’t fix it. If I could, I would.”

“I could die, Dad. I could die. I’m afraid to die.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“What if it does? What will happen?”

“If you die, you will just dream. The best dream. A dream that never ends.”

* * *

Within hours, George was on his way under. He was immobilized, his head shaved, his body loose and drugged, and he felt better and worse than he ever had in his life. His mother and his father were both with him. He was not alone. But he felt as though he needed just a bit more time, just a bit more practice before he went to sleep. The surgeon would peel back his scalp, would take out a piece of his skull, would operate via monitors with little radioactive knives, and take out the thing that was causing him so much pain, but also the thing that was causing him so many ideas, so much insight, the thing that made him who he was. And the reason he was sitting here doing it, instead of back in his room, or at home, or anywhere else but here, stubbornly refusing, was because his father had come into his hospital room and claimed to be a god.

The bad thing about having a brain tumor is that you can’t trust anyone, including yourself. But ultimately, it wouldn’t matter, because he would probably wake up not remembering anything, except that his name was Diana, and that he preferred thongs to bikinis. At least if I wake up empty, thought George, then I can fall in love with Irene again, and this time she will believe that I love her, not because of what I remember or how I was taught, but because of who I am.

* * *

Irene sat on the plane on the last leg of her journey from San Francisco back east. It was a little plane, hopping from Chicago to Toledo, and Irene was again in a window seat, but with no one sitting next to her. The curved hull of the plane made an arc around her body. Irene refused a gin in favor of an orange soda, and quickly read two article abstracts written by people she’d met at the convention. Her heart felt sick, her head thick and clouded. She found as the plane made its way east and the night deepened that she could not take her eyes off the window, could not help but look ahead to where she knew that he would be. She leaned her forehead against the cool plastic of the window and looked out into the night.

Up above, she saw all the fixed stars. The same ones Aristotle had seen when he imagined them lodged in perfect crystal spheres, hung sparkling above the dead, decaying earth. How beautiful they were, these perfect points of light, spread wide over the messy, fragile humans down below. How perfect were the gods. Irene looked down toward the earth and saw the bright streets outlined in shining lights, the clusters of houses, buildings, long stretches of parking lots, and here and there a lonely beam, a point of light in an expanse of darkness, like a single star. It reminded her of standing with George on One Seagate and looking down over all of Toledo, when he asked her how to tell the difference between the stars above and the earth below. Now it made sense to her, looking up at the sky rippled with constellations, and down at the black earth crisscrossed with roads and sparkling towns. And she knew the answer to the question: what is the difference?

Irene closed her eyes and felt the movement of this little plane. A bump, a silence, and then a shift, a deep shuddering. She felt herself slipping under that familiar fog of sleep, letting go of her senses as she crossed that grand chasm that was really as quick as a breath, as light as the flutter of a wing, between herself and what lay beyond, that stunning outerwhere: she lost herself, the plane thumped, shook, and she began to dream.

She was outside the plane and falling, falling into the city of Toledo. It was lit up and alive, cars buzzing along, boats motoring up and down the river, little clumps of people on the sidewalks, crossing streets, running to meet each other in the dark. And when she turned her head up, looking into the night sky, and all its distant perfection, all the majesty of its timelessness, its immeasurable depth, she knew. This is the difference between gods and humans. This is the difference between divinity and what exists on earth: Toledo is moving. It’s alive and changing. The myths, the stars, the fixed stories—these are static, measured only by math and memory. The men, the science they make, the roads they travel—these move, they change and grow, they cannot be mapped. It moves, she wanted to say to George. That’s the difference between Toledo and the night sky. It moves.

I love it, thought Irene. Her heart froze with happiness. Her arms spread out, as she fell down through the air, her body the shape of a star, plummeting, sailing downward into Toledo. I love what I am, this human, even if this is where I cross over, bleed, and die. This is where I become human. This polluted, human town, this love, this is what I am, more than the stars, even though they are so big, and so vast, and so perfect. They’re just so far away.

Irene fell down into the orange constellation that was Toledo, that shape that was moving, dirty, changing, alive. She closed her eyes, and passed through.