He knows that the skies had been clear and the weather amicable and easy for him to manage for the rest of his week. So he wonders if the birds are really out there, because as far as he is concerned, there had been no signs of winged creatures anywhere even though he had been keeping an eye out for them, or perhaps he had seen them already and he'd just forgot to remember—which is an oxymoron, and that makes him laugh to himself. And he's laughing because it isn't funny, exhibiting the second irony. The third one is the fact that things had stayed the same, and it triggers an inexplicable itch inside him. Something had gone wrong with him, and the world did not reflect it, and it feels so uncanny. Is he moving in the same reality as the rest of them? Even the pale singer that is just about to wrap up his song, does not seem to mind the last five days they spent in suffocating silence.

"You okay?" Wolfgang's voice  Howie out of his reverie, sending him back into the present with a whiplash. It reminds the newbie of another time just like this, when Wolfgang asks him a similar question and he answers, "Yeah. Why?" He remembers it not being too long ago but at the same time it seems like a lifetime away. 

"Nothing. You've just been so spacey lately," the senior bartender explains. As the busy hours go on, more things have been keeping Wolfgang preoccupied, but Howie, despite appearing engaged in his job at waiting tables and delivering customer orders alongside G, had been non-interactive and borderline disinterested with the people he is serving drinks and food to.

"Are you two still fighting?" G had to in, putting an elbow on the bar counter beside Wolfgang, as the both of them look at the newbie sitting by one of the barstools. He is talking about the incident between Santi and Howie, of course, which no one had brought up again until now. The newbie simply throws a quick glance at the bar singer who is currently singing a soulful rendition of a familiar alternative song. The tune is so recognizable for Howie that he just can't help but pay attention.

"I'll request for my favorite song."

"Here he is again with Champagne Supernova. Alright, I get it. You keep telling me that as if I'm gonna forget. Your friend from university, you met each other through that song. I know. I get it. Enough already."

"You don't have to be bitter about the fact that I have had a best friend, unlike some grumpy ol' troll I know. I'm not saying it's you, but you know it is you, right?"

"Just request it and be done with it, Jesus."

"Howie?" G asks carefully. "Are you okay?" The bouncer squints his eyes at his coworker; Howie's face a concerning mixture of wide-eyed disturbance, his mouth slightly agape, his breath steadily quickening, and something about his mild stupor is quite telling of something that is causing the newbie internal stress. He is clearly having some form of panic attack, and the two friends wonder if it had been something they had said. G turns to his friend who simply shakes his head and shrugs his shoulder indicating his cluelessness.

"Is it about the fight?" whispers Wolfgang to G, whose turn it is to shake his head and shrug. 

"That's my favorite song, Champagne Supernova," Howie mutters to himself as if completely oblivious to the fact that his coworkers had been talking to him the whole time. Confusion hits him like a tidal wave, and continues to press him down again and again, keeping him under the surface, his entire body submerged in the sea of his own paranoia. His mind shifts, as if he's dreaming but his body is still fully awake, and he sees himself in one of the tables of the bar beside a round-eyed man with thick black hair and eyebrows, and the man scowls at him as Howie stands up to go over the small stage towards where Santi is waiting for him. The pale singer extends his ear to Howie, lips pursed and only looking at him through his peripheral vision as he keeps his eyes on his audience for the night.

"Hey, um...do you know any song by Oasis?" Howie is asking the bar singer. 

"Yeah, a couple. Do you have any requests?"  is Santi's response.

"Can I request Champagne Supernova? It's my favorite song."

"No problem," Santi is telling him as he smiles.

When Howie comes to, he notices that Wolfgang and G are just as surprised about his discovery as he had been. "You remember?" asks Wolfgang as G stares at him in bewilderment.

Before he could even think of answer, his eyes absently travel from where they are looking at Wolfgang and G's shocked faces to his hand turned towards him palm-side up, and an imaginary ghost of a rectangular piece of paper momentarily materializing in it, and with the same swiftness it is gone again. A thought appears in the back of his mind, and now two things are happening at the same time: he remembers a part of his past, and he also somehow gets reminded of the calling card with the code PZCY9 written on it. And as these intersections meet, he finds himself at the fork of this road that seems to lead him to a whole other direction. The separation is where he had come from, and this new third path is where he is supposed to be heading. In the dreamlike state he is in at the moment, he envisions himself swivel around to grasp the thing that has been always at the back of his mind for the entire time after having been forced to look away from it.

"Howie? Oh my god, are you alright?" There is a renewed franticness in Wolfgang's voice as G hurries towards him with too many paper napkins in his hand that he is about to shove at the newbie's face. Howie distractedly tries to stop G's hands from pushing the napkins up his nose, but he hadn't done so in time, and before he knows it, G had managed to get a firm grip of the back of Howie's head as he presses it against his other hand that tries to stop the other's nose from bleeding.

"Bro?" Howie nasally asks, his entire head is still being sandwiched between G's beefy hands. Good thing it is just mild pressure otherwise the newbie could have simultaneously asphyxiated and choked in his own nosebleed. Upon realizing the situation, he immediately gets to his feet, somehow still being able to grab the napkins so they don't fall at the same time as he snatches them from underneath G's hand, careful as to minimize the bouncer's contact with his blood as much as possible. He quickly checks for G's hand to see if there is anything on it, but thankfully the amount of paper napkins the bouncer had grabbed is able to absorb most of his blood, however that isn't enough to fully stop the bleeding, and he can still feel the liquid slowly dampening the napkins. "Wash your hands," he instructs G. "Thoroughly, okay? I will—I'll be right back," and the newbie storms out and disappears into the backrooms.

After fumbling through the doorknob to the employee's quarters and pushing the door open, he stumbles down the flight of stairs and hurries towards the bathroom. Howie retches on the sink, but nothing comes out of his empty stomach. Thick black goo trickles from his nostrils and he stares at the normal pair of sharp eyes that stares right back at him from the mirror, assessing himself for any changes but so far, he feels relatively well. The swirling images in his head remain, and that's what makes him feel sick. His knitted eyebrows reflect the discomfort of bits and pieces of his memories bulldozing their way into his brain, and he can almost sense his neurotransmitters tearing at the strain of rapid-fire information exchange. The feeling of being physically aware of his body's involuntary system makes him vomit nothing again. He is all sorts of itchy, fuzzy, tight, lose, light, heavy, electrocuted, and cloyed; there is the thick numbness at the tips of his fingers as though the skin had grown its outer layers three times over, like all of his nerve endings are communicating to him at the same time. This, Howie thinks, is what it means to have a body with a mind; a kind of existence that tells everything in reverse—that he is multiple dead stars that had been reduced to atoms; he is infinite universes contained in flesh and bones; that he is the negative space around the person that is looking at him from the other side of the mirror.

"Oh, . I feel like ," he mumbles as the hairs on his arms stand on end, his skin crawling as his limbs begin to feel limp from queasiness. He desperately tries to wash his face. He lets the water from the tap run freely as he watches it mix with his black blood before flowing into the drain.

He remembers. Not everything about his past, but now his mind is filled with things here and there that feel real and significant enough that his body reacts to them. The thought of the birds comes back in loud echoes. Birds, of all goddamned things. Why do they keep popping up in his head? He continues to mull over what this could possibly mean, all the while openin