Breathless

Wallace as he followed the footpath through the forest after arranging for the murders of his wife and child.
    The law was a magnificent thing. His legal career had brought him wealth, a measure of fame, powerful friends in high office, a young and stunningly beautiful wife, the means to resolve problems that would daunt or destroy other men, and the freedom to make even radical changes in his life to increase his happiness and to ensure that he was always as fulfilled as he had every right to be.
    His parents and most of his teachers over the years, from preschool through law school, had stressed that nothing was more important than self-esteem, that self-esteem was
the
ticket to a satisfying life journey. In Liddon’s case, they were wasting their time preaching to a true believer who from a tender age was well aware of his many superior qualities, not the least of which was decisiveness.
    When he saw what needed to be done, he did it. Or hired someone like Rudy Neems to do it. Liddon never dithered, and once he acted, he never had remorse.
    Sometimes, if he possessed the right information, he neither had to do the job himself nor pay to have it done. A lot of people lived with secrets that could destroy them, and if you knew their secrets, you could manipulate them to do things for you that reduced them to the condition of puppets. Because Liddon had friends in high office with unlimited public funds to investigate any member of the public, he never had difficulty getting the dirt on those he targeted, assuming that they had secrets worth learning.
    As much as he loved the law and money and himself, he loved nothing more than pulling people’s strings. He was born to be the master of his universe. Power was better than sex. Power was better than wealth. Power was better than anything.
    All of these thoughts and a great many more of a diverse nature were bursting through Liddon Wallace’s ever-busy mind as he walked through the woods toward the service road along which he had parked his rental car. Preoccupied with details of universe management and with thoughts related to the oncoming changes in his life, he was all but oblivious of the beauty of the forest.
    He was not enthralled by nature as so many people seemed to be these days. He liked grass that was mown, trees artfully shaped by a talented arborist, flowers in orderly rows in well-designed beds, water contained within pools and fountains. He didn’t appreciate the riotous quality of the natural world, everything thrown together in a wild sprawling mess, the fertility, the variety, the chaos.
    Perhaps because he was unimpressed by nature, Nature decidedto give him a slap upside the head. One second he was hurrying through the fog in a fog of his own, and the next second,
wham!
    The thing happened so abruptly, he reeled from it with a cry of terror, but there was nowhere to reel
to
, because the thing happened all around him, so that he either had to surrender to it or resist and endure. Liddon Wallace had never surrendered to anything in his life, never; and he refused to start capitulating now. If any strings were going to be pulled,
he
would do the pulling, he would not be pulled, he would never yield,
never
.
    The energy of the event, the absolute power of the thing, took his breath away. Literally, he could not breathe. The air became as thick as water, compressed by an irresistible force of inconceivable might. And it seemed to him that the sunlight was being condensed, as well, concentrated not into greater brightness but into a rich golden densification, into a
substance
that he could feel and smell, into a shimmering coagulum that swelled, bent, buckled, and brought forth impossibilities.
    He sensed also that something had gone wrong with time.
Wrong
wasn’t the correct word; something about time had changed—the flow, the rules, the purpose of it. The past, the present, and the future were as one, twisted together like spaghetti on a fork, then twisted tighter, tighter, until countless millennia were wound into a single instant. He became aware of every moment of his past and of all the possibilities of his future, saw himself as a fetus, an infant, a growing child, an adolescent, an adult, a feeble octogenarian, all simultaneously.
    As deeply strange and terrifying as the event was, although it overwhelmed all the senses and oppressed the mind nearly to thepoint of mental implosion, Liddon knew instantly what was happening, the cause and