In the past 30 days since I started doing these podcasts, over a thousand people a day are have been downloading them, but of course not subscribing. I’m not too worried about that. But I’m going to keep going. What follows is testimony. A man named Mario Pavlovich gave it to me in the way men give testimony when the world has cracked open and shown them what lies beneath. He is a social worker. Croatian by birth, Canadian by circumstance. My age. I trust him because I have sat with liars and I have sat with men who have seen things, and the difference is in the eyes and in the pauses between words. This account is one I pulled from many, from chapters I mean to bind into a book if the world permits it. I chose it because the themes recur. Case after case after case, the same architecture of the uncanny, built and rebuilt in the lives of strangers who will never meet. The Shooting, Spring 2022 At 2:45am in Edmonton, Alberta, a red Ford Focus stopped one block from Ertale Lounge. Four masked men stepped out with semi-automatic handguns and opened fire on a crowded corner. Seventy rounds tore through glass, brick, flesh. People dropped screaming. One man, Imbert George, twenty-eight, was dead before sirens arrived. Seven others lay bleeding on the curb. The shooters fled, triggering a fifteen-minute chase through downtown Edmonton at highway speeds. They fired into the night and vanished into the sprawl. The neighborhood was left marked by one of the worst mass shootings in Canada’s history. Mario Pavlovich wasn’t in the lounge when the bullets flew, but his business sat in the same neighborhood, its windows facing the street where blood pooled under yellow tape. In the days that followed, customers stayed away. Foot traffic collapsed. His bar’s name became tied to a massacre. What the gunmen hadn’t destroyed with bullets, they finished with fear. The Ruin, Autumn 2022 Mario has lived with that night ever since. The silence of emptied rooms, and the weight of bills stacked higher than his receipts. And above it all the memory of the city where the violence fell, just beyond his balcony, altering not only the lives of the dead and wounded but the course of his own. Mario had grown up in Croatia, in a home stripped of God. No prayers at the table, no quiet assurances that suffering had meaning. When the night club collapsed after the shooting, when the money and the pride drained from his life, he had nothing larger to hold on to. He was alone with the ruin. The nights at the group home stretched long. He worked as a social worker now, watching over residents with disabilities in a house that looked ordinary from the street. The work kept them fed, and little more. The true labor was in his mind, holding himself back from the abyss that opened when all was lost. The Meditation, Spring 2023 With no faith to fall back on, Mario tried the only thing he could imagine might steady him; he had heard it worked for some people. He sat down, closed his eyes, and began to meditate. At first it was clumsy, ten minutes of breathing, his thoughts tumbling like stones. But over time it became his only refuge. He wasn’t after enlightenment. The work was to blunt the pain, to carry it past another night. On April 26, 2023, at 10:30pm, the rain had eased and left a skin of water on the porch boards. The clouds lay low over the city, white and depthless. Despite the hour, the sky yet held its light, a pallid glow that dies slowly this time of year in Alberta. Mario sat cross-legged on his porch in the damp air, eyes closed, breathing. He thought about his losses, about the years, about how far away home felt. He asked questions into the silence. Is there anyone out there? Is anyone listening? And in the dark behind his lids there came eyes. Not dreamt nor figment. Eyes that looked back at him. They were not wholly human but they bore weight and will. In that moment he was pierced through. Not only seen but known. When he finally opened his eyes, the world outside had gone strange. He didn’t hear the night insects, or the wind, or even the faint hum of the city. The silence was total, pressing, as though the air itself had gone still. Then he saw it. A black triangle moved slowly across the low ceiling of clouds, about a hundred yards away, and larger than any plane or helicopter he had ever seen by a factor of ten. The edges cut hard against the bone-pale sky, each corner set in dreadful clarity. There was no sound of engine nor any labor of machine. Only the slow and fated passage of the thing, black and geometric, borne across the heavens by a will unseen. Mario’s breath caught. He stared until it faded into the distance, swallowed by the night. It was the eyes he remembered most. The triangle was extraordinary, but the eyes were intimate. They followed him afterward, into his sleep, into the blank hours of his shifts, into the silence of his apartment. They made the experience personal, impossible to forget. The Child in the Hall, Spring 2023 The night he saw the triangle, he woke at exactly three in the morning. No sound woke him – no creak of pipes, no rustle from upstairs – just the instinct that something was there. Mario’s head turned toward the hallway. The bathroom light was on, casting a pale wedge of yellow across the basement. And in that light stood a figure. It looked like a kid. Eight, maybe ten years old. About five feet tall, slim, the body in proportion the way a child’s would be. But that was the problem. Kids don’t stand still. Kids fidget. They shift their weight, scratch their noses, shuffle their feet. This one didn’t move at all. Its stillness was absolute, the kind that belongs to mannequins or corpses, not children. Its face wasn’t a face, just a smooth impression of a head where features should have been. Mario’s chest tightened. He tried to move but his body felt unresponsive. Not fully paralyzed, but weak, sluggish. He managed to press himself up on his elbows, muscles trembling. The figure took a few steps closer, small and deliberate, like it knew there was no hurry. Mario fought his body upright, his heart hammering, his mind bracing for a fight with something he couldn’t name. And then, just like that, the fear was gone. Not lessened, not fading. Erased. In its place came a calm that didn’t belong to him, as though the figure had reached inside and flipped a switch. It kept standing there, impossibly still, as Mario stood trembling, no longer afraid but knowing he should have been. Then it spoke: Don’t be afraid. Not in some alien whisper, nor in a stranger’s voice, but in his own. The words came from inside his skull, clear as thought but not his thought, as if something had borrowed his voice to soothe him. The child-shape stood there, silent, motionless, the words still ringing in his head. Mario trembled, caught between the knowledge that he should have been terrified and the unnatural calm that held him fixed in place. He stared at it. It stared at him. And in that frozen stillness, the command repeated inside him, steady and undeniable: Don’t be afraid. And somehow, against every instinct in his body, he wasn’t. He asked it again, the words sharp in his mind: Who are you – The reply slid back in, wearing his own voice like a mask, speaking over him as if disinterested in Mario’s shock: Don’t be afraid. Time is not what you think it is. He pushed harder, his thoughts cracking with urgency, suddenly unsure of how many beings he was addressing: Who are you…guys? This time the answer changed. The words struck like a match in the dark. We are you. The phrase echoed inside him, not whispered but installed, like a truth dropped into the machinery of his brain. It made no sense. It made all the sense in the world. The child-figure didn’t move. It didn’t need to. The words had moved instead, reaching across the line between him and it and smudging it away. And then it was gone. Instantly, like a shadow when the light switches off. The basement hall was empty, but Mario could still feel it there, pulsing in his chest, repeating in his skull: Don’t be afraid. Time is not what you think it is.We are you. He stood alone in the silence, knowing he would never again be able to call himself alone. When it was gone, Mario didn’t lie back down. He couldn’t. He sat in the stillness of that basement, every nerve alive, his own voice echoing with words that weren’t his: We are you. He wasn’t afraid. That was the strangest part. Something had stolen the fear, hollowed it out, and left him calm. But the calm wasn’t the comforting kind, and more like intrusion. It was the knowledge that something could reach inside his mind and twist the dials at will. He felt stripped, re-wired, no longer entirely his own. The hours crawled. He kept waiting for the figure to return, for the words to come again. They didn’t. By sunrise he was exhausted, but he knew sleep wasn’t going to save him. The world had changed. The rules he thought held steady no longer applied. The Orbs, Spring 2024 On the night of April 8, 2024, Mario stepped onto his balcony in downtown Edmonton. The city around him was too quiet, the kind of quiet that sets the body on edge. He wanted the visitors to come back. Then he saw them. Three orbs. They were each a little bigger than a basketball. Dull metallic at first, no shine, no light of their own. They kept three or four feet apart, gliding in a line that looked practiced. Then, with no hesitation, they shifted into a triangle and held it, as if they had always intended to. From twenty feet away, Mario could see the distortion around them – a ripple in the air, like heat shimmer or water bending light. The sky blurred around the spheres. Then the distortion itself lit up, bright white, liquid in its glow. In the same instant, all three orbs transformed, their metallic skins gone, replaced by spheres of pure, radiant light. Yet
