“But I’m not dead yet,” Anna said, with classic Anna deduction.

“No, of course not,” I said, withholding a smile.

“What’s so funny?”

Apparently it wasn’t working.

Anna laughed, eyes bugged, looking for the hair-brained bit.

“Nothing!” I laughed.

“What? No. Tell me!”

Her face dropped.

“Please? Just tell me. It’s stressing me out that you’re not telling me what this little book is. Please tell me.”

The Re-Anna-Mator handbook is in her hands, ha-ha-ha, was my first thought, but she wouldn’t like that.

I fussed with my pockets, eyes on the bare bedroom wall and its chipped paint, heart starting a marathon at the sound of an imaginary gunshot and began.

“Well, so. It was a joke. From, like, way back ago. You wouldn’t remember.”

Anna tried to smile, pushed hairs from her messy bun and nodded.

“It’s a long story, but this machine a kid made you in the Tinkering Lab one day, this kid named Zach, I think, he was really funny and sweet, he never came back but he really latched onto you, like so many kids that visit Tinkering Lab do, but especially this kid from, like, Idaho or wherever he and his dad were visiting Chicago from—”

“I don’t remember any of this.”

“So, he made this machine out of cardboard and toilet paper rolls and shit called the Re-Anna-Mator, and… it worked.”

She stared, eyebrows knit, and I stared, trying to look natural, scared that— who knows— telling her this information would make her clone head explode, no-crossing-the-streams, all that from the movies.

“You’re fucking crazy, man,” she said as she opened the cardboard cover, scanning the pages held together by rainbow strings through hole punches.

“Okay,” she sighed. “But. Did…”

“He ran down to Art Studio to illustrate it, and then took it with him to play in every exhibit of the museum, so the theory was, he collected some kind of cosmic playfulness power,” I said before she could wonder, knowing Anna’s brain, how there were colored pencil drawings when the Tinkering Lab doesn’t carry drawing materials.

“What the fuck,” she said as the six-year-old’s stick figure of Anna waved hi to her.

The oven beeped. Neither of us moved.

“Time to put in the pizza!” called stick figure Anna, in a light first grade voice.

“Oh. Right,” Anna muttered, eyes wobbly with tears.

I’ll get the pizza, I thought, but stood frozen.

“I… I can’t… remember any of this.”

My heart had found its groove there, but it was up and rushing again.

“Well, so. The Re-Anna-Mator Anna-fied. You pressed the button and it made this TV channel for Anna-maniacs, another one for The Anna-matrix, one for Ann-ime. Stuff like that, at first. Then more. And more. You know. All things…”

“Anna.”

Gently holding the handbook, stick figure doing jumping jacks through a pencil sketch of a Rube Goldberg, she set it back like a bomb atop the moving box of books.

She pressed her fingers hard into her eyes and for a second, I thought she would explode like in the movies.

The room remained the same.

We blinked at each other.

“This is so fucked up,” she said, finally.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Can I get a hug?”

We moved into each other, holding on, necks on shoulders, swaying in the middle of our mess of a bedroom. Everything but the bed and the lamp and the power strip with our chargers was either in the living room or at the new apartment. All this space and the place was suffocating— pressed together, we each felt the other breathe and breathed easier for it.

That’s to say I was guilty and scared and she was just plain scared, my lips on her neck which I’d long forgotten wasn’t real flesh, was replicant, was so close to the real thing, soft as in a child’s imagination.

“Am I not really me?”

I squeezed her with all my might.

“No! You’re… the realest you’ll ever be!”

“What?”

“I just mean, you’re real. You’re real to me.”

“Dude.”

She stepped back, eyes closed. Her head, I could tell, exploded. But not like that.

“I’m gonna put the pizza in,” I said.

“No. Wait. Okay.”

She collapsed onto the bed.

“I’m sorry,” I offered, all useless.

“This is so fucking fucked up, dude,” she moaned.

Slam from the kitchen. A little cartoon voice called, “I got it!”

“Thank you!” I called.

“Thanks, copy of me from the Re-Anna-Mator! Which I also am! From the fucking Re-fucking-Anna-Mator! Not the actual ME, apparently, who is some fucking elsewhere.”

“She’s in,” I stumbled. “She’s in a dimension created by a machine the Re-Anna-Mator created, the Re-Julian-Ator. She’s with a clone of me. From the Re-Julian-Ator.”

True as it was, I thought she’d laugh.

After a couple seconds and an ambulance passed, she did, a little bit.

“That’s such a worse name.”

“Yeah,” I said, sitting on the bed, rubbing her feet.

“Ooh, that tickles!”

The full-sized mirror was in the room still.

She noticed me looking at the identical version of ourselves and looked, too.

My reflection blew her reflection a kiss.

Her reflection leaned forward and we weren’t looking at our reflections anymore.