Rudi Dornemann

This explains why cups of coffee placed on his desk ripple, and why some days his lunch consists of nothing but those bright orange circus peanuts.

There, under the light of the hololoops of the dearly departed, you danced.

He’s said to ride the fluorescent aisles of the metrotran ceaselessly, always seeking — never finding — a platform that isn’t just a transfer point, a destination that isn’t just a place on the way to somewhere else.

“Soothing,” he’d say, and make her cocoa in a metal cup. “Codes sent around the world for spies, supposedly.”

Her arm, too, traced red on the night, a series of symbols that hung on the air through persistence of vision.

The mirrorball was discovered by a Mr. Noel Hardy, employed at that time as the Oak and Tendril’s dishwasher and general-purpose mop wrangler. It was Hardy who first noticed that every facet reflected a view of a different world, and that none those worlds was our own.