It was not a night to spare expense. The firm had successfully defended against their twenty-fifth anti-trust suit earlier that afternoon and, to celebrate, the senior partners had brought out all the silver, and had sprung for the champagne. The party went through the natural life cycle of this sort of office get-together, starting with the tentative first introductions and flirtations, growing into the comfortable din of a dozen concurrent conversations, lapsing into silence as guests individually realized they had nothing more to say, and then dissipating as the elderly and the far too young slouched out under heavy felt coats and identical flat-brimmed hats. By three in the morning, the only ones left in the offices were the middle-aged, those not yet over the hill but right at the summit, and one young lawyer who wanted to ingratiate himself.

The brandy came out, as did the cigars, and soon, by the alcohol heat and Havana exhales, the men were pimpled with sweat over their laser-shaven cheeks. Their ties already were loosened, so they began unbuttoning their shirts and pumping the fabric over their chests like bellows, laughing and snorting and desperate not to fall asleep, for to sleep would be a waste of time.

When it got too hot to move, they started burning money. Everybody chipped in, emptying their pockets of chits until there was a pile the size of a pumpkin on the table between them. They took turns, as a family might take turns opening presents on Christmas morning, not out of a desire to see joy flash across their coworker’s face, but to build up suspense, to revel in the fascination.

The young lawyer was last in the circle. He had never burned with these men before. He stayed quiet, some small part of him fearing that the only reason he was still there was that they hadn’t noticed him yet. He laughed at the right times, though never too loudly, but didn’t say much of anything that he came up with on his own. He stared with the others as each man in the circle placed a chit against his temple and pressed, sending recorded electronic signatures through his brain, which scrambled to adapt to the new information and, quick as you can tell your lips to smile, copied wave for wave the emotion held inside the chit.

These were mostly wonders, joys, a few lusts, which were declining in value as the market realized that lust was not necessary to fabricate. It was almost the young lawyer’s turn. He watched the features of the man to his right settle and soften until the skin was no good for holding back tears. The man had grabbed the lone nostalgia. 

“Here Johnny,” said the man on the young lawyer’s left, passing him a chit. Johnny grinned to show willing, took it, and pressed it to his temple, his sweat sealing the connection. He didn’t see the fist-shielded chuckles of the few men whose artificial emotions had already wound down, and, though he heard the humor, it didn’t sound out of place. He shot the chit, using up its charge, rendering it worthless. 

Johnny Cousin wasn’t stupid. He was going places. He was a capable lawyer; he spoke to juries with a confidence he couldn’t find tonight. He had risen from assistantship to associate to trial lawyer in just a few years, and his first solo case was this coming Tuesday. He wasn’t stupid. There are plenty of gullible people who aren’t stupid.

The emotion hit him like a bullet — that is to say so quickly that he could neither identify nor examine it. He pitched forward and vomited. His spine crawled with the glares, the hunting focus of some invisible creature. He scrambled to his feet, slipping on the puke, and tried to run. He tripped over the armchair of a laughing attorney and fell into a crouch. His hands smelled like acid and alcohol.

“What’d you give him?” someone asked. “Oh shit, that’s hilarious. You’ve got one of those? It’s like a food stamp, brother.”

“I found it in the gutter,” someone else said.

Johnny sobbed into his hands and twisted up against a wall. There was a window. He slithered away from it, settling into a corner, his fingers laced over his eyes, too afraid to either open or close them.

“Should get this on camera. You got a camera?”

The dramatics were over, though. Johnny’s terrified mind calmed like an ocean, a small derivative, the waves still present just less forceful. He pulled his hands away from his eyes and focused on the other men and their tucked-up playground leers.

Johnny wiped his chin on his sleeve; the shirt was ruined anyhow. “You bastards,” he said, lightly, as though he were in on the joke. “You royal bastards.” And, far removed from his grudging laugh, he was thinking, And that’s what he feels? My god. My god. What have I done?

#

“You receive a pension for your son’s service, do you not?”

“For when he is released, ma’am, yes,” said Johnny. Throughout the last couple of days he had been unable to stop thinking about how he had felt that night. Memory stands apart from pain, the same as a noun stands apart from the thing it represents. Still, the memory was potent and made his sinuses hurt. He hadn’t been focused on his job, on the preparations for his trial on Tuesday. Some of his coworkers, the ones who had been there that night, had come up to him and nudged him in his ribs, joked about the look on his face, pulled their own faces into rude caricatures. Johnny’s reserve of humor ran out in mere hours, and after that he just replied with, Yeah, that was great.

“And why do you want to terminate his employment prematurely?” Johnny was standing in front of the desk of a secretary to one of the senior partners; several steps removed from power, but he could feel it, the ability to effect a change, pulsing in the conditioned air.

The secretary was leaning forward on her desk, elbows on the blotter, her thin glasses centered on her eyes. She was young, or looked it; no more than a couple years older than Johnny. Her expression invited him to fill the silence; he chose to fill it with excuses.

“I didn’t realize what I was doing. The tests said he gave strong reactions and would be ideal for the mint, but—”

“So you signed him over. Terror, you said?”

“Yes,” said Johnny. The secretary nodded as if hearing from him a condemnation in that one syllable and agreeing with it, though not without sympathy. She pressed a finger into her right ear, the better to hear from the microspeaker embedded there.

“Excuse me for just one moment, mister Cousin.” The secretary left through a door behind her desk. The door clicked shut. Johnny thought of shutting doors, of putting the past in its place and locking it there, of dark impenetrable wood behind which is hidden whatever you please, of the room in the corner of a house, out of sight so the mind can gradually flush its memories away.

The door opened; the secretary breezed back to her desk. She swiveled in her chair, settling it in the right position, then smiled.

“Did you know that they now manipulate their dreams, as well? So, in essence, they are working twenty-four hours a day. That must be . . . terrible.” The secretary smiled again. “Or terrific, depending on who you are, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

Where Johnny would have rustled a sheet of paper or glanced at his watch, she fixed him on the two points of her eyes and waited for her next thought to form into words. “And your wife?” she said.

“We’re no longer together,” said Johnny. “I have full legal custody.”

“Good. That will make this less complicated.”

“You can do something?”

“We can do something, mister Cousin. But it will require an effort on your part, as well. You like your work, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Johnny, and it was partly true. He liked what the job allowed him to do; that is, he liked attending parties, and he liked being a part of the winning team, and he liked coming home way too late to a bottle of bourbon and a house, built large so as to enclose the maximum amount of silence, and with silence, comfort.

The work itself was a tool, a commodity, something for him to sell in exchange for every docile fantasy he had.

“You have done a satisfactory job in the past few months. It hasn’t escaped the notice of the senior partners.”

“Thank you,” said Johnny.

“Your first solo is on Tuesday, is it not?”

“That’s correct,” said Johnny.

“Good. The senior partners would like you to throw it.”

“What? Why?”

“I hardly think I need tell you, mister Cousin, that in some instances there can come profit from loss.” The secretary was smiling; her eyes said, I know you really are smart enough to know that, and Johnny almost believed her. An expression like that could have sold cars; it was so full of camaraderie, of earnest kinship born of shared experience.

“No,” replied Johnny.

“Good. Do not turn it into a mistrial. Weaken your case, discredit your own witnesses, hem and haw to the jury. Make a few bad jokes.” Her voice had taken on the mad Mosaic timbre of someone dispensing commandments from on high. Behind her words, Johnny could hear the low whine of the speaker in her ear. One of the senior partners telling her what to say; this woman existed only to keep supplicants at arm’s length from the power. Johnny was not a praying man, but right then he wondered how frustrating it must have been to accompany each prayer with a sacrifice, an extra wing of potency, without which the prayer would flutter helplessly in the mezzanine, easy prey for circling doubts, far removed from the shrouded presence of an Old Testament god.

Johnny almost bowed as he left. On the way out, he passed a platinum reproduction of Winged Victory of Thrace. He reflected on the meeting — his knees shaking as they had his first time addressing a judge — and what it would cost him, which was, to his estimation, fairly large. A handful of terrors made a plastic chatter in his jacket pocket. He reflected, misshapen, in winged victory.

#

The guys in the office gave Johnny pats on the back and buck up pep talks. Everyone stopped by to congratulate him on a job well done, too bad the twelve went in for the other guy, but sometimes that can’t be helped. Johnny was tired and gracious and said, Just gotta get back up on the horse, he couldn’t guess how many times. The distractions came at fifteen minute intervals, sometimes the same guys more than once. No hard feelings, said the guy who had slipped him the terror that night, and it wasn’t a question. No hard feelings, said Johnny, patting the chits in his pocket.

He was annoyed at the distractions, but he didn’t know what he would have done without them. He couldn’t concentrate on the work; his monitor kept deforming every time he blinked, waves of misguided electrons sheeting to the bottom. Somewhere in the office was a crying baby, and the susurrus of its client mother hushing it up, her sibilance matching the disturbed frequency of Johnny’s screen. 

His phone rang, throwing off the baby’s howl, the mother’s whisper. He answered it.

“Mister Cousin,” said the secretary on the other end. “Have you been keeping up with the news?”

He hadn’t been. Preparing for his case had been more important in the way that circumvents any method of prioritizing; but even without the thrown case, he wasn’t much of a news hound. The things he needed to know filtered through other people to his ears, and at the end of the day he went home to a quiet house with no TV. He said as much, aware that outside of his head it sounded like rambling.

“Nine days ago, a vigilante group raided the Pac-Nor mint in Bellingham. The group’s apparent aim was to liberate the staff. Your son was one of those liberated.”

“Where is he, now?”

“Local police conducted an area search. You should read it for yourself. They turned up Contentment—” referring to the kid by the emotion she was tapped for “—huddled in an alleyway trying to wrap a sheet of rotten drywall around herself. The others didn’t turn up in the county.”

After a compliment on a job well done — which felt to Johnny no more or less than the pats on the back — the secretary hung up, saying she would leave him to it, whatever it was. His son was nine days gone from the mint. How far can a kid run in nine days? How far can a kid — who has been stuck in his own mind for fifteen years and whose only experience with running has come from escaping the monsters that visited inside injected fever dreams — go in nine days?

If it had been me, Johnny realized, I would have gone until my lungs caved in.

Rubbing his temples, he caught up on the news. As it turned out, some of the kids had gone home, authorities assuming the vigilantes had told them where to go. Anger burned a tree house down and was in custody. The mints didn’t want the kids back, now; they were spoiled goods, once earthbound and now released into the great wide unknown. The air they had known would never taste the same again.

Johnny cut out early and sped home. He pulled onto his street with the sun in his eyes and saw the silhouette of his house undamaged and was relieved.

#

Grady pulled up out front in his near-silent car; Johnny wouldn’t have noticed had he not been waiting for the man. It was a couple of weeks later, and Johnny still hadn’t decided what to do about his son, whom he had taken to calling Trey, thanks to the circling strange abstraction of the brain which turns a word around until its syllables overlap and its meaning takes second seat to the sounds themselves.

He strolled down the front walk to greet Grady. Grady wasn’t from around here; he wasn’t an American. He spoke English haltingly and with a grammar all his own. He made you feel as though every gap in communication was your fault for not speaking clearly, while your brain protested that it was his fault for fouling up the language in his head. Still, he was the best private investigator in the area and he had worked with Johnny’s firm on a number of occasions, so Johnny at least knew him by sight, as well as by his reputation.

He told himself he was collecting information, in order to make an informed decision, and couldn’t help feeling as though he were betraying someone, or, more accurately, some thing, some wordless ideal. By not upping stakes and running to Bellingham? he asked himself. Unreasonable, misguided, emotional. Came the response: how better to find your son, who has lived his whole life unreasonably, without guidance, submerged in an emotion much more powerful — therefore more valuable — than the paternal instinct.

“Nice car,” said Johnny as he extended his hand to Grady. Grady took it, then released it as though he had decided not to shake after all. He turned and examined his car from hood to trunk, then returned his attention to Johnny.

“Yes,” he said. “I enjoy a good car.”

“What is it? A Freya roadster, right? Love the color.”

“Good running,” said Grady. “Take me inside.” He was holding a black leather briefcase in one hand. He used it to gesture at Johnny’s house. 

“Right. Please, come in,” said Johnny.

Grady went immediately to the dining room table and sat, opening his briefcase and laying out a series of contracts and forms for Johnny to sign. Johnny, meanwhile, got himself a drink.

“Want a drink?” he asked.

Grady waved his negative. “For the driving,” he said. “Sign your life,” he said, tapping his finger on the nearest sheet of paper, then pulling a pen from his breast pocket and repeating the gesture.

“Excuse me?” Johnny took a sip of his drink and sat down opposite Grady.

“Sign your life,” said the PI. “For payment.”

Johnny couldn’t quite place Grady’s accent. There were the rolled Rs, the swallowed vowels of Russia; but he also tended to emphasize the second syllable, as Germans or Scotsmen do. The man’s looks didn’t clear anything up. His hair was gray, but looked as though it could have been artificially so. His eyebrows were triangular, pointing upwards, shadowing his eyes. His face was smooth and square and carried the sort of contemplative neutral expression that once upon a time may have caused swoons in the girls of his native land, wherever that was. 

“Sign my life?” said Johnny. Grady stared at him, licked his lips, blinked, returned to staring. Johnny bent and started reading the contracts. When he was halfway through, Grady spoke.

“I am going from America,” he said. “Tell the word around. After your money. I am going.” Johnny kept reading. “Stupid America,” Grady went on. “Sensitive to light, to shadow, to food. Babies that cry. And worthless money.”

“Worthless,” said Johnny, glancing meaningfully around his sleek unsullied rooms. 

“Gold is worthless,” said Grady. “No bullets to be made, no walls will stand. Too soft. So is your new money. Worthless.”

“Is that why you ask for so much of it?” Johnny had finished reading the contracts. Grady grinned, boxy teeth shoving his lips apart. He replied something about moving that Johnny didn’t understand and let disappear without response. He began inking his initials and names over the sheets of the contract.

When he was finished, Grady collected his copies and snapped them into the briefcase. Johnny wrote up a bank authorization, asking, “What do you want it in?”

“Wonder,” said Grady. Johnny made it so and handed over the note.

“Remember,” he said. “I don’t want him to know that his dad is looking for him. I mean, I don’t know what he’d do. I don’t want him to run. Just tell me where— just tell me if he’s all right and where he is.”

Grady nodded. “It’s in the contract.” He let himself out.

Johnny sat hunched forward on his couch, elbows on his knees. He listened to Grady’s car purr off. After a while, he got up and, shoving the loose contract aside, opened his own briefcase and caught up on a little work, scribbling notes with one hand while the other made plastic chirps with the terror in his pocket.

#

Three weeks later, Grady was sitting on Johnny’s couch, sipping a water. Johnny was sitting across from him on the corner of the coffee table, flipping through the pages of notes and photographs that Grady had brought with him.

“Oliver Kyle Cousin,” said Johnny.

“He names himself O.K.,” said Grady.

“He kept the surname.”

Johnny looked at the face of his son and recognized nothing in its features. It was wholly unique — a stranger’s face, smiling, holding a milkshake in one hand. A girl was sitting next to him with her chin in her netted fingers, dimly reflecting O.K.’s smile.

“Who is the girl?” asked Johnny.

Grady had a mouthful of water. He spit it back into the glass. After a length of silence, Johnny looked up from the picture to see what was taking so long. Grady was rubbing two wonders together between his thumb and middle finger. He nodded significantly at the chits. Johnny got the hint. Grady slipped the chits back into his pocket.

“Her house,” he said. “He eats next to her and sleeps in her window.”

“In her window?”

Grady took another drink of water. He made a face of disgust and spit this mouthful out, too.

“I am done,” he said. “Yes. Tell the word around. No more days of your independence. No more of your wives, daughters, husbands, and sons. I hate. You are the last I hate. I am tired of this hate. I need new hate, far from here.” He stood up, placing his glass on the table next to Johnny. Johnny didn’t move. “Look at you,” said Grady. “You are sitting. This is why I will leave America. Your son is in your hand and you sit down.”

Johnny picked up the water glass and set it on a coaster. Then he looked up. “You don’t understand. A decision can’t be rushed; time has to pass.”

“No. An idiot would say so. Decisions, such as decisions in a court, yes, are made long before time. Guilty, yes?”

“What are you saying?”

Grady smiled thinly, in that instant so like a grandfather, dying, prepared to leave behind a legacy of righteous fury if nothing else would stick.

“I say you should have no secrets from your son.”

Then Grady left, taking his echoes with him. Johnny moved to the couch. He thought, for quite some time, in two minds: one was a scale weighing the choices that were in front of him; the other sat in judgment on the first, growing ever more blood-fired and angry that he could even consider there to be a choice in the matter at all.

#

Wonder — the kid’s name was Delicate Jones — and her folks lived a bit north of Ashland, Oregon. According to Grady’s report, she and O.K. had jumped freight trains down from Bellingham. A conductor had spotted them in Portland, recognized them from their photos on the news, but hadn’t told the authorities; turned out he was a disgruntled citizen and had taken some pride at telling Grady of his naughty deed. The kids had thanked him. He said that the girl looked tired and was huddled into the guy. She may have been sick. The guy seemed all right. Both of them were bald.

Johnny spent the plane ride reading the report and, once the words began the give him a concentration headache, gazing at the pictures. There was one of O.K. and Delicate seen from a distance; they were sitting on the green hill of some park. It was taken on a sunny day, but they were pressed together, sealing all space between them like two hands clenched together, as though a blizzard were falling around them.

On the ground, Johnny checked into a hotel in Ashland. He ate a quick dinner in the hum of a Shakespeare-themed restaurant. He had Steak-upon-Onions. He left the waitress, who had had bad comedic timing, a joy, though he thought she’d probably burn it with her friends later that night. It was dark by the time he returned to his hotel and lay on the room’s thin bed. 

The street ran close to his first-floor window. The sound of passing cars didn’t so much bother him as the vibrations that they transmitted from street to earth to wall to bed. He found himself unable to sleep. More than once he was close, but each time came a youth with a perversely loud bottom end, or a diesel hauler, and startled him so that he felt his eyes yanked back to him from dreamland as if they were attached to his sockets by rubber bands.

He turned on the TV to distract himself. He found a movie that, after a few lines, he recognized as being one that his co-workers frequently quoted to each other around the office. It was awful. There was a laugh track.

Johnny got out of bed. When he wasn’t lying down, he didn’t feel the vibrations so strongly. They passed through his feet, up his tibia and then, though he didn’t realize it, were obliterated by the quaking in his knees.

# 

In the end, he just went ahead and did it. He waited around a frozen yogurt shop Grady had observed the kids frequenting and got a coffee. He was there when the shop opened at ten in the morning; he kept ordering coffees until O.K. and Delicate slouched in at two. Johnny tried not to look at O.K. as his son waited in a short line to order for the both of them. Delicate sat down at a table in the corner and leaned her head against the wall. She had eyes as round and dead as two pennies. Her hair was coming in, a light blonde fuzz. She was staring right at Johnny. After a few moments, he tried giving her a wink, but it wasn’t something he had practiced and it felt slow and weak.

O.K. slid into the seat across from her, back to his father. He talked quickly, barreling over the cracks in his pubescent voice. He had stories to tell — dreams to be remembered in the sugared cool air, to be exposed for the absurdities they were. He had a phrase that Johnny had never heard before: Cut the rope, man. He said it over and over. The whole shop heard them; Johnny caught the cashier grinning once. He went up to get another coffee.

“That kid come in a lot?” he asked.

“O.K.? Yeah. He’s new around here. Kid has the strangest dreams. My brother owns a bookshop on seventh; I keep trying to get O.K. to show up for the open mic nights. He’d be a treat.”

When Johnny sat down, he chose a table closer to the kids. Now he could hear Delicate, too, with her soft interjections. Her laugh came through her nose in soft chuffs like a dog sighing. O.K. had a laugh that filled the room with descending cadences. Sometimes he slapped the table, setting their spoons to vibrating.

“Let’s go to the park,” O.K. suggested when their dishes were empty. Delicate nodded. She moved as though through gauze, and her slow eyes seemed clouded by the same. O.K. took her hand and escorted her out the door. Johnny followed.

The kids walked, O.K.’s right hand entwined with Delicate’s left. With his free hand, O.K. gestured and pointed, as though conducting a symphony of his own words. The park was nearby, not much more than a small hill on a triangular lot bordered by traffic. The kids sidestepped a pair of frolicking dogs and a sunbather on her stomach with her top undone. Johnny leaned against a tree just off the sidewalk.

O.K.’s hand came unbound from Delicate’s and signaled a crescendo of his laughter. Delicate shook her head, mock dismayed at whatever joke O.K. had just told. Her eyes settled on Johnny. He tried to turn away, but his own traitor eyes kept flicking back to the top of the hill to see if it was safe, if she had let her gaze drift. She hadn’t. 

So Johnny took a walk. Three blocks to the south, six blocks north, three blocks south again. He ended up at the same tree. The kids were still there, but lying on their backs, looking up at the few wispy clouds that were too faint and too high to be images of anything. Nevertheless, O.K. was pointing, tracing designs.

Johnny went halfway up the hill, past the sunbather, who looked up at him and smiled, and sat within earshot of the kids. They were silent. In that moment, Johnny was nearly content. The silence of the sun light and the silence of the children and the silence of the woman on her stomach were heavy like a drowsy lover’s body. Even the noise of traffic almost faded into background, but then the profane honking of a horn made his heart beat arrhythmic and he coughed to set the pumping right again. 

A swish of fabric came from behind. He turned in time to catch Delicate, in her flowered summer skirt, approaching. He leaned back onto his elbows, feigning comfort. She sat down beside him, cross-legged.

“I know what you want,” she said. She didn’t look up. “You want him.” The conviction in her voice was like an order. Johnny took a breath to tell her what a crazy kid she was, but she turned her face away as though expecting his protest and refusing to accept it. She stared at O.K. She spoke haltingly, and she slurred as though her tongue were too slow for the thoughts that propelled it. She said, “Please. I love him,” and, “I need him.” She turned back to Johnny, who had lost all thoughts now of anything but silence, and squeezed her eyes shut, working the muscles to force saline onto her eyelashes, staining them dark brown. She said, “I wake up,” and, “In the morning and all I have to do is roll over,” and, “I can see him through my window, on the grass,” and “You don’t know me,” and, “I used to be an angel. Yeah, I used to be an angel,” and, “Now I’m not. I need to roll over and see him. I feel so lost in the morning. It’s like heaven pulls back in the night,” and, ‘This boring world— I need him. Please. I need him. You adults can change things. You can change people. I think I understand. Please don’t change him,” and, “Please please don’t look at him again.”

She smelled of hospital air, thick with uncertainty, sickness, and skin. For her sake, Johnny resisted an urge to glance over his shoulder.

“I just wanted to apologize. Will you tell him—”

“No, please, no I won’t,” said Delicate. Then she stood up and her dress played a hush over the grass and Johnny heard her say, Hey wake up sleepy head.

That was that, then. Johnny stood up. He dug in his trouser pocket for a pair of wonders. He tossed them lightly on the grass where they’d find them if they returned the way they came.

Again, he didn’t sleep that night. He paced, thinking of writing a letter to O.K., imagining the thousands of expressions that could cross his son’s face upon reading it, and about how only one would. He went for a walk and wound up at the late night mall. Shaved heads were in this year. He saw versions of O.K. in every shop, all hunch-shouldered and loud and leaning in towards a girl’s affections.

At the arcade he dumped his pocketfuls of terror on a little boy and his friend, saying, He doesn’t need this anymore. The kids’ faces lit up for a moment before they realized how worthless all that plastic was to them. Johnny watched them lug it to the counter and trade it into a couple tokens for the games; then he watched them spend the tokens on pops of color and gunfire.

In the morning, he took a cab to the airport and bought a ticket home. While he waited for his plane to board, he leaned against the observation windows, watching the jets coast back and forth across the tarmac. Their swept-back wings summoned the constant illusion of movement, of speed, of victory.