There’s an urban legend about an immortal lighthouse keeper. They say a certain architect witnessed the lighthouse keeper’s grisly final end as his immortality was stripped away, and from that memory designed a series of seven towers that when lit would summon back the source of eversting life. They say he surreptitiously integrated these designs into a public works project but his budget was cut after only completing three of these towers.

  I have found myself in possession of the candles and candle holders that supposedly were meant to be pced inside the towers and lit as part of the summoning ritual and work has brought me to the city whose waterfront the three completed towers dwell on.

  The towers are ten or twenty feet tall and narrow with no pce for an entrance. I pce my candle into the oft-debated mechanical arm in the nook near the base of the tower and the mechanism springs to life, pulling the candle inside and carrying it to the top of the tower where it becomes a much rger fme. The other two towers yield the same result but nothing more happens once all three are lit. Disappointing but not unexpected.

  Now then comes the hard part of locating the other four towers. There are several possibilities to pursue. The first is that the architect may have hidden the other towers within the other various monuments and structures he worked on. The more troubling option is that the other four towers were never physically constructed and exist solely in mental and oneiric realms. There is a chance I might be able to detect these dream constructs with augmented reality goggles, but if that fails I will have to resort to more esoteric means.

  I try to recruit the help of a friend of mine. A hummingbird of anxiety hovers around her ear as I expin my pns. She feeds it the nectar of a happy memory and it quiets down and leaves. She points out that I’m essentially suggesting we travel around the country and get high in national parks but reluctantly agrees to join me.