AFTER THE EVENT, I was approached by a woman who looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure where I knew her from. People were slowly leaving, many of them taking their time as they walked back to their cars. It must have been some kind of outdoor concert, or maybe a spring wedding in the countryside. It was light out, but a dim, dusky sort of light that hung in the air. We found ourselves at a small playground, and the woman took a seat on a seesaw across from me. We balanced each other out. She told me that she knew who I was, but that we had never met. She said that she worked for the BBC. The woman from the BBC had light-coloured hair, but there was mischief in her features, in the shape of her lips or behind those eyes. Then she said, sliding across the seesaw to me, “I have wanted to do this since I saw you in Dr. No,” and she began to kiss me. Ferociously. Violently. I felt like I was being consumed by her. Something about the seesaw encounter with the woman from the BBC unsettled me to my core. Especially those words she said to me while sucking on my ears, “I loved you in Thunderball.”

After we parted ways, I went home and decided to wash up. It was then that I saw what she had been talking about. There, peering back at me in the mirror, was Sean Connery, the actor who had played James Bond in the 1960s. I looked just like Connery in the mirror, the suit, the tufts of brown hair, that slightly amused expression. But how could it be? When I looked down at my hands, they were my hands, not Connery’s hands. My arms were my arms. I could make out the slope of my nose if I focused closely on it. But in the mirror I was Connery, suit, tie, and everything. When had this happened? At what point had I turned into Sean Connery?

I tried to find out more about the woman from the BBC, obtaining information from various intelligence contacts. She had once had short hair, in a Princess Diana-inspired period, and had been married to some New Wave singer who had committed suicide, or was it autoerotic asphyxiation? What was I to do about my newfound predicament? Or, well, being Sean Connery wasn’t all too bad. It had its perks, certainly. When I was in the shower, washing up, there was a knock at the door and Tarja came in, dressed in white. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” she said, “and …” Her eyes went downward and a dreamy look settled across her face. “What?” I said, lathering myself with soap. “Do you see it?” “Oh, I see it,” she said. But then I realized she was referring to my physique, not the fact that I had turned into Connery. Which made no sense. Had I merely been Connery to the woman from the BBC? Maybe every woman was seeing her own desires in me? “I have to go to Stockholm,” I told her.

“I am coming with you,” Tarja decided. She left the shower and when I exited and dried off, a towel still around my waist, I could see her white suitcase there, next to mine. But I didn’t want Tarja to accompany me to Stockholm. Wasn’t she married? How could this have ever been a good idea? A man in a 1940s suit was standing there with my things and said, “I think I see her husband coming.” “You do?” “Yes, he’s just over the hill.” “Can you please just tell her that I needed to go to Stockholm alone.” I put on my clothes, went outside and found her seated beneath a tree with her husband and children. She looked up at me sorrowfully. “It looks like we just broke up,” she said. “All on account of you. The good news is that I can come!”

“No,” I said. “I need to go to Stockholm alone!” I needed to catch the next LuxExpress bus to the capital, to get on the right ship. But Tarja’s interloping had cost me 10 minutes and when I looked back, from beneath that outdoor tree, I saw the bus drive by. The man in the 1940s suit then appeared and said, “Looks like you two will have to drive up, come I’ve got the car ready, your bags are in the trunk.” So it was settled. An overnight cabin with Tarja, an adulterous liaison. I began to miss the woman from the BBC. She had been so upfront with her feelings and desires. She just took me right there, on a seesaw. There was no weirdness, there was no hesitation. I wondered if Connery’s life had been like that. Women seizing him at parties, no questions asked. There was no way to know anymore though because the old chap was dead.