A couple of nights later, drowsy but somewhat more sober, Ava lay in that same bed, waiting for sleep to take her.  Getting to sleep was much easier lately, now that the Mercati’s downstairs weren’t shouting all the time.  Their endless arguments, once as much a staple of late night as television talk shows, had abruptly and mysteriously disappeared.  
       The last time Ava had dropped into the store, to sweet-talk a defenseless Tony Mercati into new rugs for her flat, he and his wife had been as affectionate as newlyweds.  Tony had casually grabbed his wife’s ass as she walked by.  The short-tempered woman giggled and blew him a kiss.  Of course, Ava had her horny husband eating out of her hand five minutes later.
       Ava snuggled deeper under the blankets.  Using her hot bod to manipulate her landlord was great fun.  She enjoyed the soft yet smooth feel of her red silk pajamas against her skin.  Which was odd.  Ava didn’t own any silk pajamas.  How could she afford such an indulgence?  Yet when she had opened the drawer of her French Provincial dresser (it matched the bed frame, bedside tables and dressing table), looking for one of her old cotton nighties, she discovered instead a stack of fine silk pajamas, in different colours, along with an array of more exotic bedware.
       This latter anomaly led her to a different train of thought.  Why was she still sleeping alone, despite her silk pajamas and lace negligees and her king-size bed with the satin sheets?  When she had first arrived in the city, Ava had more immediate matters on her mind than romance.  Survival, for one.  But her situation had improved.  Or it may never have been parlous in the first place, she wasn’t sure.  Anyway, maybe it was time to find someone to share her bigger bed.
       Certainly attracting men was not an issue.  Ava felt the pleasant weight of her plump breasts – which she knew for a fact were not that big a few days ago and also she distinctly remembered them coming in when she was fourteen – as she rolled over.  At the restaurant, where all the wait staff were carefully selected for their elegance and beauty, she still shone above the other girls.  Regular patrons asked for her by name.  She garnered absurdly generous tips, even larger if she flirted a little.  She was a role model to the other waitresses.
       Still, she thought drowsily, she was only a waitress.  She could barely afford the rent on her two-bedroom flat, much less silk pajamas.  
       Wait a minute.  
       Two bedrooms?  Hadn’t she been living in a cramped one-room walk-up since she got here?  No, that couldn’t be right either.  There had to be a second bedroom, where else would Damien sleep?  On the sofa?
       Of course not.  She was half-asleep and mis-remembering.  Just as she was mis-remembering the stately gas fireplace in the livingroom.  And the oak-panelled dining room with the gleaming table and eight padded chairs.
       She was hardly a waitress, either.  She had been promoted to Maitre d’ – when was it? – some time ago, anyway.  Lorna wanted Ava to be the first sight that greeted diners as they arrived at Tavish’s and the last person they saw as they left.  Men and women alike found her charming and sexy.  The wait-staff looked to Ava for guidance on everything from the best high-heels to how to roll their hips. 
       Right now she was training the girls in the subtle art of pressing guests to drink more without appearing to do so.  The profit margin on wine was substantial.  Besides, more champagne led to more generous tips.  Refilling wine glasses meant more opportunities for the gorgeous waitresses to fuss over the men, bending over just so in their ever-so-short uniforms, flexing their hips a tiny bit so the light glinted on their hose, gazing into the man’s eyes, and parting moist, red lips into a half-pout exactly as Ava had taught them.
       Glassy-eyed patrons emptied their wallets in gratitude.  Ava’s girls could get them so turned on they hardly noticed, or cared, how much they were spending.  And if, at the end of the night, while his drowsy date nodded over her wine glass, a rich guest asked the doting waitress to add her phone number to the bill – well that was up to the discretion of the server.
       Was all of this real?  Was any of this possible?  Ava was almost asleep.  The topsy-turvy of her life was connected to Damien somehow, she was sure of that.  But how?  Why was he so troubled?  He wasn’t sleeping across the way from her that night.  He had gone to the university.  He said he was consulting with – of all people – a pair of cosmologists in the physics department. 
       Ava wasn’t even sure what a cosmologist did.  Something to do with make-up?  No, that was cosmetics.  Maybe she would ask Damien about it when he came back in the morning.  Right now she only wanted to –
       The room was blasted by a flash of yellow light.  Ava bolted upright.  “What was that!” she gasped.  The crack of thunder a second later rattled the windows.  What was going on?  A thunderstorm, in February?
       More lightning flashed as she rolled out of bed.  Ava did not like lightning.  The thunder was so loud it startled her.  She stepped into a pair of jewel-encrusted Turkish slippers that she had never seen before (although she distinctly remember getting a great deal on them from a specialty import shop) and tottered over to the window.  She could hear wind-driven rain beating against the glass.
       Ava pulled back the curtains.  The street lights gleamed on a scene of winter fury.  The wind howled.  Heavy snow pelted down everywhere, turning the night into a sheet of swirling grey-white.  It poured down in big, heavy flakes, driven sideways by the wind.
       Ava watched, fascinated.  The weather forecast had called for continued light drizzle.  Now, a city that rarely saw permanent snow cover was plunged into a blizzard worthy of Minnesota.  She could barely see the houses across the street.
       The wind abruptly changed direction.  Within a minute the pelting snow turned to ice pellets, then rain, then back to snow again.  Lightning strikes cast the snow-covered street in flashes of lurid relief.
       In the midst of this stormy chaos, something even odder caught Ava’s eye.  Something big, with a triangular head and long, pointed wings was flying high over the city, darkly visible against the snow.  Its wings beat in slow, steady strokes.  Ava watched it until it disappeared into the night.
       No, Ava decided, stepping back from the window.  That did not happen.  She kicked off her bejewelled slippers and climbed back into bed.  I have to stop drinking after work, she decided.  She did not see, could not have seen, a winged dinosaur flying over the city.  Time to get some sleep.
       Damien did not return the next morning.  Ava became concerned.  Her flatmate’s episodes of fugue were becoming more frequent.  He could have forgotten where he was going, or wandered off somewhere, lost in his own thoughts.
       It was a cold, wet day.  Snow and ice lay everywhere, half-melting residue from the previous night’s storm.  The improbably handsome newscaster on Ava’s sixty-inch, wall-mounted television said something about an anomalous collision of two air masses.  
       Could be.  Not nearly as anomalous as the television itself, which hadn’t been there the night before.  Unless it had been?  Anyway, not a good day to be gadding about the streets.
       Damien had not returned by the time Ava left for work.  After a few hours at the restaurant she told Lorna that she had to leave early.  Lorna was looking foxy indeed in a tiny red dress and matching heels.  
       “Oh of course, dear, that’s fine,” the older woman replied.  She had been refreshing her lipstick, bending over a big mirror in the back room.  A man standing behind her would have a fabulous view.  Her diamonds glittered.  “We can handle things now that the supper crush is over.”  
       Tavish’s was booked up pretty much every night.  “Reservations strongly recommended,” said the web site.
       Ava added Lorna’s zestful appearance, her sweet disposition, and the success of the posh, trendy restaurant where she worked, to the growing list of discrepancies in her life.  She slipped on her purple leather jacket and a pair of high-heeled, high-topped, high-fashion boots.  She took a taxi back to her flat.  The restaurant covered the tab.  The driver spent more time looking up Ava’s dress than he did watching the road.
       Ava stepped carefully toward her flat.  These heels were not made for ice.  She noticed a figure huddled on a bench in the parklet a half-block down the street.  Instinct told her to go check.  Sure enough, she found Damien shivering on the bench, staring at the ground.
       Half an hour later, warm tea in hand, Ava waited for her inscrutable flat-mate to say something.  She had quickly changed out of her work dress into her denim short-shorts and a white pullover.  Every time she threw the shorts away, they came back, looking tighter and shorter and sexier.  They now had jewels around the cuffs.
       She replaced her sexy boots with a pair of black velvet slip-ons.  She thought of them as loafers, although the wedge heels were several inches high.  A glance in a full-length mirror as she returned to the living room confirmed that she still looked smokin’.
       “Yes, I’ve noticed,” she said again.  “Everything keeps changing.  It’s like – I can’t even tell what’s real anymore.  Or what’s really real and what just suddenly became real.  Or something.”  She arrived at a hypothesis.  “You’re responsible for it, aren’t you.  All this confusion in my life, in my mind.  It’s coming from you.  It all started when you moved in.”
       He nodded gravely.  “Yes.  I’m sorry.  It’s not – it’s not easy to control.  Especially now.”
       “What are you talking about?”
       A long pause.  “I am Lucifer,” he replied eventually, staring into space.  “Or perhaps a fallen angel.  I am an overloaded circuit; a burned out fuse.”
       “Damien, please.  Try to stay real.”
       Another long pause.  “I’m sorry,” he said again.  He drew a deep breath.  “Let me try to explain this.  A few years ago, when I was a graduate student, I performed an ancient ritual at a stone circle in Ireland.  It was research.  Sort of, anyway.  But something happened.  I changed.  I became the conduit of some unnameable power, one of the primal forces that shape the universe.  From that moment, unmitigated agency flowed through me.  I knew, without knowing how I knew, that I could change anything – absolutely anything – simply by willing it to be so.”
       Ava tilted her head.  “Seriously?”  She couldn’t think of a better response to such an absurd proposition.
       He said:  “Do you like flowers?”
       Ava gasped.  The room overflowed with flowers.  Two dozen red roses spilled out of a golden vase on the kitchen table.  Profusely flowering bushes grew out of ceramic pots by the door.  The front windows were graced by a double row of spectacular orchids.  There were flowers in hanging baskets along the walls, in vases atop the piano (The piano?  What?), and all along the carved oak mantle over the fireplace.
       Ava turned this way and that, drinking in the sight.  Flowers everywhere, so many there was hardly room for anything else.  A giant horticultural garden had been transplanted to her livingroom.  She paused to pull out the arrangement of hibiscus flowers she had (definitely not) been wearing in her hair.  It had drawn compliments at the restaurant.  She closed her eyes for a second.  When she opened them the flowers were still there. 
       “All right,” she said.  “All right.  You weren’t kidding.”  She paused for a beat.  “I think I need something stronger than tea.”
       Damien nodded.  “There’s some Scotch in the kitchen.”
       “No there isn’t.  I don’t keep – oh for god’s sake.”  She stepped into the spacious, ultra-modern kitchen with skylights and a (flower-covered) marble-topped island.  She pulled a bottle of forty-year-old, single malt Scotch out of a brushed steel liquor cabinet that she didn’t own.  She had to move a bouquet of tulips.
       She poured herself a shot and tossed it off.  She regretted her haste at once.  Her throat burned and her eyes watered.  
       “Well, that’s – that’s strong,” she gasped, slapping the counter top.  Nevertheless, she poured a second shot.  She sipped it more slowly.  She brought the bottle with her as she returned to her seat, weaving her way among the flowers.
       “Right then,” she pronounced, setting the bottle on the coffee table (beside a deep green African violet exploding with blooms).  “Here’s how it is going to go.  You are going to explain this shameless violation of the laws of nature and common sense until I understand it.  Or I pass out.”  She drank whisky.
       “Fair,” Damien agreed.
       “So, to be clear, you can change . . . anything?”
       “Anything.  Pretty much.”
       “Including people?”
       A pause.  Then:  “Yes.”
       She had to know.  “Me?”
       Another pause.  “Only a little.”  His eyes dropped to the shimmering fabric outlining her gloriously orbulent breasts.
       She followed his gaze.  “The headlights?”  Men were predictable, god-powered or not.
       He nodded, looking abashed.  “And, you know, a general enhancement.  You were a seven to begin with, I made you a ten.  Or maybe an eleven.  Also, you won’t catch colds or the flu.”
       “Thank you.  For the last part, at least.  Forgive me, but this is not a conversation I’m much prepared for.”  She paused to refill her glass.  “I remember being ribbed about my boobs back in high school.  I was so much bigger than the other girls.  Way prettier too.  Boys were always swarming around me.  I booked dates two weeks ahead.  My maths teacher gave me A’s if I wore a tight sweater.  Which I always did.  Also, I have never taken a sick day.  Yet I am altogether certain that I was pretty normal a few weeks ago.”
       Damien nodded again.  “Changes I make are retroactive.  The universe shifts onto a slightly different time line.  One in which both your figure and your immune system are, uhm . . . rather over-developed.  Anton Wolfe calls that a Richmond Shift.”
       Ava frowned.  “Anton Wolfe is the physicist you’ve been visiting?”
       “That’s right.  He and his colleague, Roma Fyne, are the only ones who have been able to help me.  They’re trying to help me, anyway.  Anton has the great ideas.  Roma explains them to me.”
       “I don’t understand.  You have the power to change anything around you with a thought.”  She gestured at the flower shop her flat had become.  Exotic butterflies flitted about the blooms.  “Why would you need help?  From anyone.  Is changing the universe too hard?”
       “No,” he replied.  “It’s too easy.”
       “Excuse me?”
       He made a sound of exasperation.  He got to his feet.  “This part is hard to explain.  This power, this Richmond nexus, this whatever-it-is, it’s everywhere inside me.  It flows through both my conscious and unconscious mind.  I can change something by deliberate thought,” – He waved a hand and a three-tiered chandelier appeared in the middle of the ceiling –  “but I also change things unintentionally, by a stray thought, an urge, an inclination.  I hardly need to be consciously aware of it.”
       Ava was still catching up.  She stared, slack-jawed, at the sparkling chandelier now adorning her livingroom ceiling.  A ceiling, she noted belatedly, that no longer had cracks or water stains, and which was several feet higher than she remembered.  There was ample room for the chandelier.  
       Damien turned to face her.  His face was grim.  “Think about that,” he exhorted.  “What that means for everyday life.  We all have idle daydreams, fantasies.  Some of them are selfish, nasty, lustful.  All manner of dreck floats around in our unconscious minds.  To you and most people, private thoughts remain private.  But my thoughts rewrite reality.” 
       Ava drained her glass again.  “All your thoughts become real,” she whispered, when her eyes uncrossed.  She looked down at her amazing tits.  “And you are a man.  A normal, adult, sex-obsessed man.  That means – ”
       “I create walking sex fantasies everywhere I go.  I recreate women according to my particular preferences and fetishes.  I do this effortlessly, automatically.  It takes conscious effort to not do it, like walking down a busy street without looking at anyone.  It’s exhausting, frustrating, emotionally draining.  And how long can that effort be sustained?  Eventually my attention slips, for a second or two, and another middle-aged librarian turns into a sex goddess in glasses.  Or a dumpy teen with bad skin suddenly looks like – well, like you did in high school.”
       Ava was busy refilling her glass.  “High school me had a whole lot of fun,” she purred.  She smiled while she remembered:  dates four nights a week, endless flirting with students and teachers alike, skipping class to go shopping, casually stealing other girls’ boyfriends.  Ava was the most popular girl in school.  And several other schools.  She was Harvest Queen three years running – the last two by acclimation.  The school revived the defunct cheerleader squad just so Ava could be head cheerleader.
       And oh my, the sex.  She waited until she turned eighteen, in junior year, to placate her controlling father.  But then she overcompensated.  She sucked and she shagged and she seduced. Especially, she seduced.  She made teenage boys forget their fidelity and girls question their sexual orientation.  She was teen queen of the whole school.  She never outright seduced any of her teachers, mostly because it wasn’t necessary.  A wink and a pout and her blossoming tits were enough to get her out of any trouble.  By senior year she had been on a first-name basis with the Headteacher, whose twin sons she was regularly screwing.
       Ava’s smile faded.  “No, wait, you made that up,” she said.  She shook her head, confused.
       They were interrupted by a long moan, audible through the floor.  Ava recognized that sound.  The ever-shagging Mercati’s were at it again.  Over the next hour or so, Mrs. Mercati’s moans would rise in intensity and frequency until she screamed her husband’s name in climax.
       Even in the store the pair could barely keep their hands off each other.  But . . . wait a minute.  She remembered the Mercati’s constantly bickering.  When did they become such love birds?  She looked at Damien, frowning.  On her, the frown looked fetching.
       He must have guessed what she was thinking.  He shrugged.  “I got tired of them arguing all the time.  The endless noise.  I had a fleeting thought about a more pleasant alternative, and well, there it was.”
       “Wouldn’t it have been simpler to put sound insulation in the floor?”
       “Oh, right.  Hadn’t thought of that.”  Mrs. Mercati’s cries of ecstacy became muted.
       Ava said, “This just gets weirder.”  She sipped expensive Scotch.  Gemstones on her shorts caught her eye.  “Wait a minute here,” she said.  “These shorts.”  She waved her glass around.  “I have thrown them in the rubbish at least five times.  Yet I keep finding them back in my dresser.  And every time they fit tighter and look better.  That’s you too, innit?”
       This time he looked genuinely embarrassed.  “Uhm, right, that’s, uhm, another example.  You wore them around the flat one morning.  I thought your legs looked nice and . . . well, there we go again.  Before I could even realize what I was doing, the change was made.”
       She waved her glass at him.  “You could have changed them back.”
       “Yes, I suppose.”  He sounded reluctant.  “But I’m pretty sure I would have done it again.  You do have nice legs.”
       This time she did roll her eyes.  “Men,” she said.  Though she didn’t mind the compliment.  The buckle on the shorts was pure gold in the shape of her initials.  The asscheeks they stretched over were perfect.  For Ava, male attention was like oxygen.
       Damien was more serious.  “You begin to see the problem,” he said.  “The power makes everything too easy.  I was an ordinary man suddenly able to indulge my every whim.  I could live in luxury, be surrounded by beauty, have sex with anyone I wanted, make any woman want me.  It was simply too much for my mind to absorb.”
       Ava caught his tone.  “What happened to you?” she whispered.
       He laughed, but it was bitter and mirthless.  “I went mad.  For a while I tried to resist the temptation.  It was hopeless.  Using the power is so damned easy, and so instantly, insanely gratifying, and not using it is so boring and hard . . .”
       Abruptly he stopped speaking.  He stared into space, as if remembering something far away.  Those troubled eyes darted about.  Ava was about to say something when he started up again.
       “It was as I feared.  Once I gave in to the power, I lost all control.  I started using it all the time, without stopping to think.  I went on a bender that never ended.  I did what I wanted, indulged myself endlessly, lived like a demon king.
       “I don’t even remember everywhere I went, everything I did.  Some of it was very bad.  If I wanted something I just took it.  Or created it.  Chocolate, a mansion, a yacht, somebody’s girlfriend, it didn’t matter.  Absolute power corrupted me, ate through my morality like acid through lead pipes.  I began corrupting everyone around me.”
       “Corrupted?  How did you corrupt them?”  She was already working on a fresh drink.
       “By making them the expression of the wicked half-thoughts and fantasies buried in my psyche.  Women especially.  For the obvious reasons.  Everywhere I went, I transformed ordinary, decent women into visions that centrefold models would envy.  But I also made them vain, manipulative, seductive, as amoral as I was.  Because I could.  Because their wickedness appealed to me.
       “Other times I remolded modern, successful women into stereotypical sex toys and trophy wives for the entertainment of the men around them.  I loved making over serious women into giggling lovedolls who lived for sex.  I re-wrote their whole lives, their memories, their self-images.  
    “I told myself I was doing them a favour.  I was releasing them from lives of mediocrity and blandness.  In fact I was merely indulging myself, like a masturbating teenager.
       “I started an orgy in a college library, I think.  It started when I transformed all the female librarians into sultry sirens wearing bikinis and heels.  I dropped in on a sixth-form college graduation ceremony and turned all the female graduates – and their teachers – into big-titted, fantasy schoolgirls in knee socks and tartan micro-kilts.  The girls took turns sucking off the headmaster behind the podium, while he handed out diplomas.  Mothers in the audience felt very proud; fathers got massive hard-ons and wanted to meet their daughters’ friends.
       “I transformed the entire female staff of a prominent Madrid hotel into bisexual playboy bunnies who loved working in fetish heels as much as they loved screwing the hotel patrons.  And each other.  I made over all the stewardesses on a trans-Atlantic flight into big-titted bimbos in micro-skirts and glitter-boots.  I inducted them all into the mile-high club.  I made sure everyone on the plane heard their orgasms.  Then I did the same to the pilot.” 
       Ava refilled her glass, spilling some.  “Booty bimbo stewies,” she murmured.  “Why is that making me hot.”  She ran a free hand across her chest.
       Damien was still pacing, and talking.  “I’m sorry, you’re catching some of the spillover.  As time went by I grew ever wilder, more debauched, less and less concerned about the consequences of my actions.  I remember inviting myself into the mansion of some arrogant, ultra-wealthy family in Singapore.  Of course they all saw me as a dear family friend.  Over the next week, I made every adult family member, male of female, young or old, fall madly, helplessly, in lust with household servants.
       “The old man who owned everything became hot and tongue-tied every time one of his maids entered the room.  His wife stroked herself under the table while the staff served dinner.  They quadrupled everybody’s wages.  The son bought a Lamborghini for an eighteen-year-old girl who helped in the kitchen.  He gave her mother a Lamborghini dealership.  
       “The elder daughter, a wealthy property owner, started giving her chauffeur long, loving blowjobs while he drove.  Her younger sister dolled herself up in silk lingerie and designer shoes from Milan and then eagerly offered herself to the kitchen staff.  They took full advantage.  I put all the serving girls in tight leather boots so the whole family could show their devotion by kneeling and licking.
       “I was losing my humanity, becoming a monster.  I don’t remember how long I went on like this.  It’s a wonder I didn’t kill anybody.  Or myself.
       “I remember walking down a street in the restaurant district in . . . Paris, I think.  Maybe Berlin?  As I walked along, every woman I passed, young or old, tourist or native, instantly became an absurdly sexed-up version of herself, even when I barely glanced at them.  Middle-aged matrons became voluptuous cougars; skinny, serious women became giggling exhibitionists; fiftyish women de-aged thirty years in an instant.  Yet every one of them was wearing candy-striped knee-socks, because I had just passed a schoolgirl and I thought she looked cute.
       “All the knockouts in knee socks and nano-skirts were wildly aroused.  They created a outrage: jumping their partners, coming on to total strangers, stumbling into couples at café tables.  Of course their advances were reciprocated, I made them all quite irresistable.  Mad, indiscriminate sex blossomed everywhere.  I created a kind of linear orgy down the street behind me.  The scary thing is, I had walked almost two blocks before I even noticed.  Then I walked another three blocks before I bothered doing anything about it.
       “That’s when I started to realize I was seriously screwed up.”  He sat down again.  “I hit bottom a few weeks later.  In Fiji.  When the cyclone hit.”  His voice was deflated.
       Ava moaned.  “Fiji,” she repeated.  “Now what?”  She hiccuped.  
       Damien didn’t reply.  He was looking at the floor.
       Ava said, “Damien, wha’s wrong?  What happened in hic Fiji?”  The name was hard to say.
       She reached for the whisky bottle.  Damien pulled it out of her reach.  “Hey!”
       “I want you awake for this,” he said.  “It’s important.”
       “Fine.  Tell me ‘bout Fiji.”  She turned sideways on the sofa and leaned back in a classic diva pose where she could admire her own legs.  God but I’m sexy, she thought.  She caught sight of the crystal chandelier that dominated the ceiling.  She noticed now that instead of a chain, the chandelier was dangling from the arms of a voluptuous maiden, outlined in gold.  It would have verged on tacky were it not so beautiful.  Did it look like that a minute ago?
       “All impossible, iznit,” she slurred.  “Wha’ happened in Fiji?”