He was born in a cave that you won’t find on a map, where whales
sew their songs into stretches of beach and the tide unpicks their work.

My first word was ‘truth’.

At eleven, he tap-danced the length of the country. The media branded
his backstory ‘unauthorised to the edge of belief’. (Calls not returned.)

I staged the moon landing in my garage.

During the war, he murdered a one-eyed man whose name no one
remembers, though it’s always on the tips of tongues, ready to leap.

I was New Zealand’s first openly bisexual violinist.

He chanted daily into a charmed mirror—I will be loved, I will be loved.
The mirror looked back at him and could never believe what it saw.

I had three wives and one husband.

He fathered twenty children over eight industrious years. When asked
whether he knew any of their names, he started naming things in the room.

I know my first name is Steven.

He was questioned by police re: an incident at the zoo (animals broke in and
vandalised an enclosure). The evidence was allegedly destroyed in a fire.

I sold the cure for cancer to an African tribe.

The royalties from a sample in a hip-hop track funded a life-long passion
project: a musical about the disappearance of Lionel from Shortland Street.

I invented water.

He died in the arms of his lover, a man raised by wolves and fluent
in equations, the sort tipped to break through to the mainstream.

My cryogenically frozen body is hidden somewhere in Lower Hutt.