Everyone had that moment when he or she knew the Changes were not just some cluster of weird, implausible statistical outliers, but something profoundly, disturbingly real. For me, it was in early July of that summer five years ago when it all began. I was freelancing as a DP and camera operator in LA, and a couple of the upcoming production gigs I had been counting on had fallen through. I decided to make the best of the unexpected free time. I grabbed my kayak and set off from Oxnard on a solo tour of the Channel Islands. A wonderful decision. The gentle rise and fall of the open water and the peacefulness of the islands lifted my lagging spirits.

I remember that Tuesday morning vividly. I woke on the beach of Santa Rosa Island and looked across to the mainland as the sun eased above the distant mountains somewhere beyond Burbank. Then, as I tore open a package of instant oatmeal, that was when it happened. I watched Santa Cruz Island disappear. The whole island seemed to turn to vapor, and then it was no more. I witnessed no violent explosion. No swelling of the waves. Just, gone.

I’d like to make it clear, that was not the first such occurrence. The sudden appearance the previous week of a field of tulips as far as the eye could see in Olduvai Gorge was probably someone else’s wake-up call. Or the day before that when the Fiji national rugby team changed gender in the time it took them to cross the field and get into place—every one of them, and all on camera. The sudden appearance of breasts tugging at the fabric of their jerseys prompted them to pause and regard themselves and their teammates with obvious puzzlement. But those kind of events were half a world away. No one really believed that stuff, at least no one I knew. Chalk it up to the sensationalism of tabloid TV.

For me, that chilling sense of a world gone mad was the evaporation of Santa Cruz Island. Well, that fact compounded with the blasé reaction of people when I told them. Most just sadly shook their heads in a sort of what-are-you-going-to-do attitude. It was like I had mentioned that my favorite restaurant had lost its liquor license.

These inexplicable events were troubling in themselves, but equally so was the fact that almost no one seemed overly concerned by them. I came to the conclusion that one of the biggest, yet most subtle of these changes was an apparent global complacency, a dopey malaise settling over humanity.

My personal immunity (I guess I could call it) to this malaise placed me very much in a minority.

Unfortunately, the small percentile of humanity who weren’t overcome with complacency tended to veer far into the realm of conspiracy-obsessed paranoia.

I guess that pretty much described my friend Gilbert Falmer. Though at times he could be sane or at least somewhat sensible. For instance, he reminded me that regardless of the whys or hows of the Changes, irrational occurrences would cause irrational behavior, and as so, the possibility of nuclear war loomed greater than at any time in history.

In fact, when those tulips appeared in Africa, Falmer had given me a map of the continental US with a scattering of blue regions where one might survive the coming nuclear apocalypse, taking into account patterns of prevailing winds and such. After the incident with Santa Cruz Island, I decided to visit Mr. Falmer, to catch up on what new theories he might be entertaining. But I found the man’s apartment empty. No one in the building knew where he had gone. In fact, no one seemed to remember him at all.

Not remember Mr. Gilbert Falmer? That gregarious opinionated old man?

I found that impossible.

I decided to get out of town.Too many things were making me nervous.

I packed up my Jeep and headed to El Paso. It might not be in one of Falmer’s blue zones, but it was adjacent to one. My impulsive actions are rarely well-considered. And when it finally sunk in just how little money I had, I headed straight to the offices of the nearest El Paso TV station. I hoped they might have an opening for a man of my skills.

When I told the young man at the reception desk that I was looking for work, he didn’t say a word, just pointed to the office of the Station Manager.

The woman chain-smoking in the cramped office with all the curtains drawn was no more talkative than the man in the lobby. She stared up at me from behind her desk with the frazzled look of someone desperately in need of a vacation.

Feeling I had nothing to lose, I just began talking. She gave me an odd smile as I babbled on about my work history and that, true, I didn’t have a resume prepared, but the fact was I had over a decade of experience shooting for television and film, and even if they didn’t have an opening in the camera department, I was a quick study and eager to learn any other job.

“This may be your lucky day,” she said when my unfocused rambling attempt at self-promotion faltered. “Or just the opposite. Time will tell. Do you know our program, Wonders Unfolding? No? Don’t worry. That show’s producer, Silverio Moreno—call him Sy, he’s big on the whole informality thing—anyway, he just fired his camera guy. Said the man was too redheaded. There was a time when that would have us up to the neck in a lawsuit. Anyway, Sy’s supposed to interview a vampire hunter or time traveler or whatever on the other side of town in….” She turned her head to check the clock on the wall. “In one hour. I don’t have to tell you, an interview without a camera doesn’t make for good TV. So, here’s my offer. Scribble your name and social security number on this piece of paper, and then take the hallway all the way to the back. Tell Glenn that Tammy just hired you for Wonders Unfolding. He’ll give you a camera and an address.”

And that was that. The pay was horrible. But over the weeks ahead I found it easy enough to navigate Sy’s moods. The fact is, we became quite chummy.

I learned that his quirky magazine-style entertainment show had begun years back, before the Changes. The subject matter ranged from haunted pilates studios to chupacabra sightings. Stuff like that. And when the Changes came along, with even weirder things—real things that could be captured on camera—the show switched gears ever so slightly and began to highlight aspects of the impossible world that was coming into being.

I was with Wonders Unfolding for almost six months. It became very popular, and not two weeks after I began working with Sy, one of the networks picked it up for national broadcast. The production, however, remained in El Paso, and therefore all of the stories we reported on were in the southwest. That wasn’t because of any regional bias, but rather involved the uncertainly of travel during the Changes. You didn’t really want to be jetting around the country at cruising altitude only to have your destination airport just cease to exist. Still, I had my share of adventures with Sy and our small crew, as we wandered western Texas and much of New Mexico. There were plenty of wonders unfolding in our jurisdiction.

The show ended in an unexpected and very dramatic manner.

When we headed out from El Paso it had been just me and Sy in my Jeep, and our technical director, Noé, who also drove the production truck. The assignment concerned a ranch just outside of San Angelo where a stegosaurus had recently appeared. Earlier in the day we had shot some footage of the creature stripping the upper branches from a few mesquite trees. Also we had interviewed both the rancher and the local veterinarian. That prerecorded material would be mixed in during the live broadcast.

Our plan for the live action was to have the rancher and his two sons herd the stegosaurus closer to the camera as airtime approached so that the audiences at home would be able to see the creature over Sy’s shoulder as he introduced the segment. I was locking the camera to the tripod as I looked across to see the dinosaur in the distance nibbling on a bale of hay. It was untroubled by the three men who sat atop their apprehensive horses waiting on my signal. I waved to let them know they could begin nudging it in our direction.

“You’d think I would have become jaded,” Sy said, riffling the pages of the script on his clipboard. He looked at me. “You know, because of all the things I’ve seen. But a stegosaurus! I don’t know how you can be so blasé. You were right in there for a close-up of his face. That is, if he is a he.”

“We’ve got a job to do,” I said. “That’s how I see it. Besides, that thing is harmless. I think it’s a baby.”

“That’s one big baby! But I think you’re right. You know”—Sy pulled out a pen and scribbled some words onto his script—“I’m just going to call it a baby. Who’d argue that point? This is going be a good episode. People love dinosaurs. And they love babies. But a baby dinosaur? Magic!”

“Don’t you ever want to do a show about why this is all happening?”

“Me? Oh, I don’t think that’d fly. I tried journalism when I started out. Fell flat on my keister.” He held up his hands, framing his face. “No one’s going to trust this mug. A girl once told me I had the face of a used car salesman. What a thing to say!”

I had to agree, that was an unkind statement.

“You see, Morris, I like to witness at least one impossible thing every day. And with my job, not only do I get to see it, I get to share it.”

“Most days I want to know why this all is happening,” I said, watching the slow progress of the dinosaur-herding. How did a stegosaurus get here? The whole business of the Changes seemed to follow no predictable rules to allow one to even begin forming a hypothesis. Did the dinosaur get here via time travel? Had it been spontaneously created from thin air? Alien intervention? God Almighty?

“The whys and hows are for the other guys,” Sy said.

“There are no other guys.”

And there weren’t. The television, newspapers, internet, they put all their energy into reporting on breathtaking weirdness. But nothing in-depth. If there were scientists out there trying to come up with a theory, the media outlets didn’t care. They didn’t want to miss out on the newest apparition, disappearance, or transformation. And Silverio Moreno was as giddy for novelty as were his audiences.

“Ideas are fine,” Sy said. “Of course they are. But give me things. Crazy things!” Sy smiled. “Abstractions, speculations? Maybe some day. But not today. Today is for the stegosaurus!”

He moved around in front of the camera, cleared his throat, and hit his stance.

“Today on Wonders Unfolding—Dinosaur Ranch!” he said with the same intense delivery he would have made if the camera was actually on. “So”—he looked at me, breaking character—“would you want to watch that, or….” He took a breath, and this time gave a more sedate delivery of: “Today on Turgid Exposition we spend an hour with Professor Snoozy McYawnman as he discusses his newest book, Anomalous Quantum Fluctuations and Scalar Field Instabilities and Their Role in the Manifestations of the Changes.”

He lifted his shoulders as he looked at me quizzically.

“Which would you rather watch?”

“But, what could it hurt? Interview a few physicists. Some government types, maybe.”

Sy tucked his clipboard under his arm. He sighed.

“Okay, look. When the network picked up our little show, well, I was wanting to offer them just that. The expanded context. I have some friends who work over at the labs in Los Alamos. No one ever interviews them. They’d love it—scientists can get so lonely. But do you know what I was told? From the network executive assholes? Don’t go poking around. That’s a direct quote. Not, Sy, dammit, people want snappy and lively. Nope. It was: Don’t go poking around. I know a warning when I hear it, my friend.”

“You’re too paranoid, Sy.”

“I like to think I’m just paranoid enough. By the way, Snoozy McYawnman is a real person. I mean, his name is Dr. Julian Marjoko. Works at Los Alamos. But I didn’t make up that book title. It’s for real. The problem is, no one wants to publish it. In fact, I have a copy of the manuscript. You can see it when we’re done. It’s in my bag back at the motel. That fact is, I would like to interview Marjoko. I just need to find the sweetest and gentlest manner in which to cajole those network assholes to say yes.”

That’s when I heard, through my headphones, Noé, the technician in the truck, tell me, over a closed channel: “Guys, your audio is going to the control room in LA. Just, you know, a heads up.”

I had forgotten that I had switched on the wireless microphone. The audio signal was feeding directly into the production truck, parked about fifty yards away.

Sy laughed. He had heard Noé as well, through his tiny hidden earpiece. He toggled the mute button on the battery pack of his wireless microphone.

“How many times did I use the phrase network assholes?” He sighed. “I guess it’s time for damage control.” Sy began walking to the production truck, shouting over his shoulder. “Look sharp, we’re on the air in eight minutes.”

When Sy closed the door behind him on the truck, I heard a low roar from above. I looked up and watched as a needle of light, slow-moving, at first, grow in thickness, brightness, and speed. It exploded into the production truck. I was thrown off my feet. When I collected himself, getting back up, I looked on to the twisted wreckage of the truck—torn apart by, what? A meteor?

I staggered over to the smoking remains.

Nothing could have survived. The whole truck had collapsed in on itself, crumpled and fused together.

There was nothing I could do. I could alert the authorities, but a doctor would be of no help, and the police, well, they had become so overworked since the Changes began, I had no reason to think they’d even bother coming out.

The most pressing thing I thought needed to be done was to contact the station back in El Paso—and the network out in LA. Explain why the signal cut out. The wasn’t so easy. Cell phones had all inexplicably died a few months back. And even though the production truck was utilizing the still functioning satellite network, all of that equipment had been on the truck.

The rancher and his sons couldn’t help me. They were galloping hard on their horses trying to catch their precious stegosaurus that was running directly away from the explosive impact. I would not have thought a stegosaurus could move so fast.

I felt weird about it, but I got in my Jeep and began to drive back to the motel.

I planned to use the phone in the room to inform El Paso and LA about the situation. But, also, there was one more phone call I needed to make.

Saligia.

For several months Sy, Saligia, and I had been living together in a large adobe building in San Elizario, just outside El Paso.

When I reached the motel, I noticed that the door to our suite was standing open. No, it had been ripped opened. The frame where the bolt had been was splintered and broken, and the upper hinge had snapped off leaving the door askew.

I carefully stepped inside. There was no one. I pulled opened the curtains.

My two bags sat undisturbed on the floor by the mini fridge. Noé’s stuff was on the desk. But there was no sign of Sy’s over-sized duffel bag with the fluorescent tartan pattern he had left in the middle of his bed. No way could I miss that damn thing which Sy described as “decorated in the colors of toxic sherbet.”

Should I call the manager’s office before the other phone calls?

That was when I saw that the telephone was in the waste basket, its now useless cord had been ripped from the wall.

Was someone trying to leave me a message?

And then I realized that Sy’s missing luggage had contained, so he said, some unpublished manuscript about Anomalous Quantum Fluctuations. Was that what this had all been about?

I felt exposed—there came upon me a certainty that the longer I stayed in that room dithering on my next move, the closer I was to some unknown danger. A sudden surge of paranoia rapidly populated my imagination with malignant scaly and tentacled creatures moving down the desert highway toward my location in a seedy motel with a broken door.

I loaded up my Jeep and drove away. But not in the direction of home. I felt there was a target on my back as unmistakable as if it was the color of toxic sherbet. I told myself it would be best for me to avoid anyone I cared about. And with Sy gone, all that remained was Saligia.

I was disappearing for her safety.

Well, that’s what I told myself.

When I stopped for gas, I made an anonymous call to the television station in El Paso to explain that the production truck had exploded with no survivors. And I knew that Tammy, at the station, would alert Saligia.

I kept to the back roads whenever possible and drove for 14 hours and I didn’t stop, except for gas and food, until I reached my Uncle’s cabin in the wilds of the Jemez Mountains out beyond Santa Fe.

It’s a pattern I recognize in myself. One I’m not proud of. I run off to lay low when things get rough. I need to work on that.

But it’s also a pattern for me, eventually, to get bored. Stick my head up, like a curious turtle, peeking above the waterline. (Though it had never taken me four years before.) And then I would find my way back to the company of men. Like in that San Antonio bar. With the TV. And evidence of a very much alive Silverio Moreno. I couldn’t fathom how he survived. But, I knew quite well, stranger things have happened. Every day during the Changes, in fact.

Of course, the Changes were over. That was what everyone I met told me. Yes, some of the weirdness had remained. And some things seemed to be gone for good. The world had changed, true, but the surprises, those unexpected surprises, had ceased.

Settled down.

That was a common phrase.

And it had been that way most of the time I had been in hiding.

I felt more than slightly embarrassed about that.

As well as confronting that paranoid fantasy of mine that a meteor had been sent down upon Sy because of my suggestion that we should “go poking around.”

But, as I said, stranger things had happened.

So, it might be a bit dramatic for me to have said I killed Sy. But that’s how it had felt.

And now? Now that he was alive? It’s all better. Right?

And Saligia. She’s looking well.

The sun had set while I was sitting alone with my memories in a cafe in downtown San Antonio. I was staring into my empty coffee cup, wondering how happenstance had brought me here, when I heard the sound of a chair being dragged across the tile floor. The woman who had sold me my coffee was standing up on it to turn on a TV set.

Oh, right. Time for the show. Sy’s game show.

I watched a thin and almost elderly policeman come in off the street and take a seat at the table beside me. He glanced excitedly at his watch. It seemed to me that if you wanted to snatch a purse or knock over a bank, just wait until Serpientes y Escaleras began.

He removed his hat, placed it on the table, and leaned forward with childlike anticipation. His head tilted up. And then the theme music began.

Sy was grinning up there on the TV set. Welcoming me to “Serpientes y Escalerrrrrrrrras!”

No doubt about it. He was very much alive. Unless, of course, I, too had died and joined him here, in the wherever.