I sought her in the grayness and she wasn’t there, she was dead and she wasn’t there, she wouldn’t be there… — Fredric Brown

“But do you believe they really teleported?”

“I do. For instance, the guru with whom I spent time, under whom I studied this summer in Tibet, tells me he is certain that he has teleported twice. He is an honest man.”

“Let’s grant that. Tell me why you think he isn’t a mistaken one.”

I wish that I could believe not in mortality but in reincarnation or individual immortality; I wish that I could be living again in another body or, God help me, even watching from the edge of a fleecy cloud in Heaven or out through the dirty windowpane of a haunted house or through the dull eyes of a dung beetle or on any terms. On any terms I want to be watching, I want to be there, I want to be around, when we reach the stars, when we take over the universe and the universes, when we become the God in whom I do not believe as yet because I do not believe he exists as yet nor will exist until we become Him.

Bad, I thought, looking around me, that I’d accumulated so much. A man should never own more stuff than he can carry in his hands at a dead run. It was bad, but it had happened.