Click. Ambient hiss. 

World Science Journal: There. That’s better. So, the question on the table— 

Gregori Egorov: No, I’m not worried— 

WSJ: Hang on a sec, Mister Egorov. I’ll repeat the question for the recording. With all the litigation being brought against proponents of free information, are you concerned about the legality of your project? 

GE: I’m not worried. When I first set [the project] up, in my fourth year of university, I was using a random number generator. My earliest published successes, the first near- or exact-copies, were attacked by owners of the originals, the templates, as violations of copyright. And, in a sense, the copyright holders were right. I had created the numbers artificially, which, in the courts, looked very much like an analogue to me just sitting down and tracing a cartoon, say, or copying, word for word, a short story. 

Then, during my post-graduate studies, a mentor suggested to me that I use pi as the basis for the project, rather than a random number generator. I would yield similar results and be legally unassailable. 

WSJ: Why is that? Why use pi? 

GE: Because it is theoretically an infinite, non-repeating series of digits. All possible combinations of numbers are contained with it. And I can’t be accused of creating the content I publish, since pi itself cannot be owned under the world copyright code. 

WSJ: All the information is there? 

GE: It’s all there. In the public domain. You just have to find it. 

#

Gregori Egorov, in a black bathrobe worn to threadbare transparency, tripped down the last four steps, righted himself on the landing, and blinked in the sunlight. It was very much like coming down a flight of clammy concrete stairs and into the belly of a mad scientist’s underground lab, if you discounted the wide open curtains, children playing in a sprinkler outside, and the smell of bread in the oven. Not to mention that the only madness evident was a tendency toward anal-retentive cleanliness. 

Watta was in the kitchen, cross-legged on the counter, fiddling with one of the dials on the oven. She turned and spread her arms for Gregori. 

He signed, Burn, and raised his eyebrows to show it was a question. 

She heaved a sigh, signed, I’m not child, and opened wide her arms again, demanding to be held. 

Gregori lifted her by her armpits, blowing out a thick lungful of air. “You need to lose a few, honey,” he said. She wrapped her furry arms around his neck and craned her own to plant a wet kiss on his cheek. 

“Aww, thanks, stinky,” he said. Her palms dangled down to his butt. She squeezed. “I’m sorry. You need to learn to be more gentle, my love. I haven’t recovered from last week, much less last night.” The warm saliva from her sound of distaste spattered against his ear. “Let’s get to work, huh?”

She nodded and signed, Okay, as punctuation.

Two desks ran along each side of the living room, which jutted out from the side of the house like an arm or a neck. Floor-to-ceiling windows ran the whole length of the room, interrupted by wooden struts. Taped, tacked, and gum-stuck to these struts were hundreds of printouts, from legal-sized pages to slips the size of cookie fortunes. One desk faced the walkway out front, the other the back yard. Each desk had a series of flatscreen monitors, desk lamps, and small linked-paper printers at the end. It looked like the office of a team of private investigators who both struggled with seasonal affective disorder. 

“What did you say you lost, ma’am?” 

“My bestselling novel. The one I haven’t written yet.” 

“Hang on. Let me open the blinds.” 

A sheet of banner paper had been glued to the window, just above eye level, of the latter. Watta’s Desk, it read, and underneath: cat frown and a rough drawing of an eighth note. That had been relatively easy to find in the mess of pi. Watta had gone nuts over the random words that had followed the legend, and had refused to sign anything but, Cat Frown, for a week. 

She scrambled up into a thick black leather chair at her station and steepled her toes. She stared at Gregori, drumming her hands on her feet; he had stuck his hands in his pockets and was now breathing deeply the warm greenhouse air. He stared out at the street, at Doctor Jema from next door walking his dog, at the two teenage girls sunbathing in the front lawn of the next house over. 

Watta pushed away from the desk with her arms and rolled her chair into the back of Gregori’s knees. He stumbled, turned, and laughed. “Sorry. Nature hypnosis.” She peered around his arm and pointed at one of his terminals. 

In large print, so it would be easy to read from a coffee break in the kitchen, characters were spilling in black across a white field. 

@8|nmymotherisafis 

Mother, signed Watta, her eyes wide enough that Gregori could see his own grin in them. 

Something hit the window. Gregori leapt, banging his knee into the desk. The safety glass spidered and dented at the point of impact. Watta crawled under the desk to peer out the bottom of the window. 

“Bird?” asked Gregori. Watta scooted out, behind first. Brick, she signed. 

#

WSJ: Do you work alone? 

GE: You know I don’t. Didn’t. That’s an intentionally leading question. I’ll answer it anyway. 

WSJ: Mister Egorov, I wasn’t—

GE: Yes you were. Yes you were. It’s not like it’s a new question. I worked and I lived with Watta, my life partner. All right? She was a pygmy chimpanzee, one of the two dozen or so that were given citizenship thanks in part to the Animal riots in the twenties.

WSJ: Did you participate in those riots?

GE: I did not. I was too busy researching my dissertation. 

WSJ: Which you never delivered, correct? 

GE: Yeah. Didn’t seem to be much point. [Watta] and I got a modest subsidy because she’s a pre-human citizen. [laugh] She doesn’t like it when I call her that.

#

Gregori read the note again. 

“This isn’t even literate,” he said, letting the crumpled paper slip to the floor. “You’re sure you didn’t see who threw it?”

Watta nodded.

“Right in front of my desktop, too,” Gregori continued, squinting through the tangled mess of white lines. “Going to have to replace the whole window.”

Behind him, Watta was listening to scraps of nonsense. Most of it sounded like static to Gregori’s ears, but occasionally there were tones, the crash of a chandelier falling, or wind shoving past the house. It was like listening to a badly scratched sound effects record.

Letting his eyes blur, he noticed that the dense center of the impact looked a bit like a mouth wide open, if he inverted his perception and let white equal black. A thin band of cracks surrounding could have been lips. A bundle of wild hair, white being white again, shot straight up from where a forehead would be before circling around to frame the cheeks, two spots of unbroken glass. A round-faced wizard, it looked like, staring straight out of the pane, conjuring Gregori’s world ex nihilo.

From Watta’s workstation came the distinctive metallic twang of Tin Pan Alley guitar. He whirled in his chair. Watta was standing on her desk, dancing in front of the radio she kept at the end.

“Watta!” He scowled at her. She flipped him the bird and grinned widely. Tired, she signed.

Sighing, Gregori turned back to the window. He couldn’t pick out the wizard’s face again.

#

Glitch. Pop. 

WSJ: —were after the recipe for Guinness?

GE: I had already placed it in the public domain. It didn’t make much sense to steal it. No, I think they had a different agenda.

WSJ: What, then? Revenge?

GE: No, not revenge, though it’s not something I’d put past the Irish. No. I haven’t told this to anyone else, Jerry. But the bullet wound in Watta’s head was located directly between her eyes. It wasn’t a random shot, a shot in the literal dark.

WSJ: Why would anyone want to assassinate Watta?

GE: My partner was political. Not as a hobby, but just by virtue of her existence. She didn’t enjoy the polarization that surrounded our lives. She mostly wanted to sit around in the study with me, watching and listening; she lived for the adrenaline of discovery. Physiologically, chimpanzees are much easier to addict to the chemical. She knew she was, but she didn’t want to give it up. We went on a vacation, once, to the back yard. But the neighbor kids didn’t know how to sign to her, so I ended up turning her text displays around so she could read them from her lounge chair.

But political factions suffer from [a long pause] creative differences. There are some, it is plain to me, who, if given a One if by land, two if by sea sort of code, would promptly forget what it meant, as well as their battle cry and where the guns were buried. Countrymen to count on, they are. Now with night vision goggles.

WSJ: And what was the end result; to where did that tragedy bring you?

GE: Well, they made off with my computers, and a bunch of the archives. But big deal. I had backups, and the server is buried in a cooling system under the badminton court in the yard.

She killed at badminton. Always hit it over the fence. Don’t know why those neighbor kids never learned how to sign.

#

It was a bad day for concentration. Gregori was imagining things in the pages of text scrolling past him, now. He could see faces, hands, people in the gaps between blocks of characters, in the configuration of punctuation marks. These two periods close together made eyes, and from them poured a waterfall, pounded by slashes and capital Ls.

He gladly took a break when the workmen arrived to replace his window. They said, We won’t disturb you. We can do it all from outside. 

“I’m gonna get some coffee. You want any?” he asked Watta. She shook her head to one side, not meeting his eyes. She was sulking about having to turn the radio off.

It was getting on toward evening. Gregori stood by the kitchen window as the kettle rose to a boil. The sunset was beginning, but it wasn’t worth staying around for. Not a cloud was in the sky; the boring gradient shaded from navy in the East to dust in the West, and that was it. 

The kettle whistled. Gregori poured a mugful and stirred in a teaspoon of freeze-dried crystals, even though the caffeine would keep him up tonight.

Back in the living room, the workers had finished unrolling the new window and were tamping its corners into place. Gregori watched them as he tried to compose a short poem in his head. The warm coffee, his bare feet in the carpet, the workmen standing still and fading into the deepening night, it all fit somehow together. He couldn’t find how, not with his own words.

Watta screeched. Found something, she signed with flailing arms. Gregori coughed, spit coffee onto his bathrobe. 

#

WSJ: How many works have you forced into the public domain in this way? 

GE: Uh, only four have actually been ceded to the public. There was this novel published a few years back — Starve a Fever, by the Canadian author Bess Kashuba.  That was the most recent. Last year, I think, the publishing house’s lawyers relinquished it. The print version had a typo on page eighty-eight. Mine didn’t. That was pretty funny. 

WSJ: Only four? 

GE: Well, yeah. It’s slow going, the process of discovery. But that’s all there is now. There’s no such thing as creativity anymore; just discovery. 

#

Gregori stopped reading aloud. His tongue tasted funny to him. He made a sound through his nose that might have been a laugh if, halfway through, it hadn’t turned into a sneeze. 

“That’s the end,” he said. “It trails off into gibberish after that.”  From her perch in his lap, Watta gave a grunt of dismay.  She fumbled around so she was facing him. 

Not accurate, she signed. 

“Should I publish it?” he asked. 

She shook her head. Might happen, she signed small, between her folded feet. She turned to stare at the flickering images on another display. Gregori watched her fidget with the thin fur behind her ears. She heaved out a great sigh and turned again, resting her long arms on his thighs. 

You didn’t cry, she signed.

“No, I didn’t. It wasn’t me,” he said.

You somewhere, she signed.

Tired, she signed from her elbows down. 

Play, Gregori signed, smiling straight across his face, too tired to hold the corners up. “You pre-human citizen you.”

She leapt up onto the desk and waddled to the radio, her arms up for balance. Click. Ambient hiss. Cat Scratch Fever.

Eight: On the street, as our bewildered hero blinks in the sun, a roving reporter with a live feed:

“You’re an educated man, mister Set—”

“Set Zero was, at least, yes. I like to think that I am being a good steward of his talents.”

“That’s a good place to start. In the frequent interviews given in your ninth life, after your goal of eliminating your backups with inTrust was publicized, you made a clear distinction between yourself and the as-yet-inactive backups. Why is that?”

“You’ve caught me at a bad time, I’m afraid. I have just woken up and have a case of the cobwebs.”

“How do you react to the evidence that individuals who own at least five personal backups have on average a fifty percent higher life satisfaction rating than those with four or fewer?”

“May I have a moment to review my predecessor’s leavings? I’m afraid that I was given only the audio diary, and—”

“What did you leave for yourself, mister Set?”

“I would prefer to retain the rights to my predecessor’s intellectual property, for the time being.”

“Do you subscribe to the Original ideal?”

“I’m sorry, which?”

“How long can the public expect to wait for the completion of your quest?”

Set Eight, with a smile, “I’d quite like a cup of coffee.”

#

Seven: As a secondary, more idle curiosity Set wondered how many different ways he could die. So far he had suffocated himself inside a plastic bag and leapt from a moving train as it passed over a trestle. There were still a half-dozen dirt naps left to take before he satisfied his primary curiosity. If he could manage not to repeat his predecessors’ methods, then so much the better.

The only thing was, he might not know it if he did. Memories only flow in one direction and each backup could only remember up until the time of its creation. One could just as soon ask a river to gush uphill than expect Set to awaken each morning after death with any experience of life, or death, beyond the basic template, the state he had been in when he first backed up.

The backups were stored at various havens around the world, warehouses position so as to be optimally safe from flood, tsunami, eruption, and earthquake. Set Zero, an adjunct professor at a modest American college, had been able to afford eight such backups through his school’s insurance policy, with the option of stacking more if he so chose.

Set Seven could remember arriving at inTrust’s satellite office. He remembered checking in with the scowling young nurse who verified that he understood the risks and would not hold the company liable in the event of any disasters arising from his monumental vanity. He remembered the liquid diet they put him on for two days while the chips were inserted and the unique patterns of his brain were archived. After that, all he could remember was waking up that morning in a colorless apartment with a migraine, a craving for a cup of coffee, and a message from Set Zero playing like an unbroken daydream until he gave it his full attention.

Set Zero had had thirteen good years of life without dipping into his stock of selves, apparently. In the message, he attempted to justify, to himself, his decision to tear through his backups, to live once again on the cusp of death. Set Seven smiled; Zero had awkward phrasing and a familiar crack in his voice. He must have really meant it. It was evident that Eight had gone along with the idea and a few minutes on the news feeds told him how, but not exactly why. It seemed Set was a bit of a celebrity; there was even an informal game underway to try and find his next backup before he did away with himself again.

Set was in no special hurry to die. He got dressed and strolled outside. “London,” he said, taking a deep breath. “I’ve always wanted to visit London.”

It was a lot like Seattle, only people spoke faster.

#

Six: “I thought I’d find you here. When I heard that your next was in Seattle—”

Set looked up. The stranger had long hair, expertly cut, and a coat of stubble so thin it looked to have been painted on. 

“I’m sorry,” said Set. “I know you, don’t I?”

The stranger took a step forward, edging onto Set’s horizon of comfort. “I was Zero’s friend. My name is Gunter.”

“It’s nice to see you again, Gunter,” said Set with a smile. Gunter hesitated a moment — and Set thought he looked like a man trying to come up with way to explain to the neighbor children that he just ran over their cat — then he shoved out a hand to be shaken. Set took it and gestured for Gunter to join him on the bench, which he did.

“Did I come here a lot?” asked Set.

“This is where we did our guard stint,” said Gunter. 

“I was in the guard?” asked Set. He turned and tried to face Gunter but a park bench is not an ideal place for a conversation. Gunter was staring out at Puget Sound and answered with a nod. “That doesn’t sound like me at all,” said Set. 

“You might have been drunk,” said Gunter. Then, “I’ve been reading a lot about you. You never struck me as a wasteful guy.”

“Is that what I’m doing? being wasteful?”

Gunter nodded. A seagull hopped over and pecked at his shoes. “Did you leave yourself a message?” he asked, kicking the gull away. 

“I fail to see how it’s wasteful,” said Set. “I’m an organ- and tissue-donor, after all.”

“You jumped fifteen storeys, the first time. There were no organs left.”

“Granted, but the gun left everything below the neck just fine, and asphyxiation doesn’t harm a thing. Well,” he added, “Apart from the obvious.” Gunter ought to have at least smiled.

Instead, he said, “I never liked your sense of humor.” Here came the push off down a racing slope. “I hated the way you talked down to my brother when we were in the guard, and I hated that I laughed about it with you afterward. I couldn’t stand it that night you tried to get him drunk, and it pisses me off that you don’t have the scar anymore. Hell, I even think you’re ugly.” He scowled and let the words fly out to sea with nothing there to echo back against.

The gull had returned and was pecking at Gunter’s shoe laces. He jerked, like a patient having his reflexes tested, and sent the bird hop-skipping away. Then he almost smiled. 

“I’m sorry,” said Set. “None of this means much to me.”

Gunter shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Why did you come back here?”

“This is where my body—”

“No, I mean right here.”

Set thought for a moment. “I don’t honestly know,” he said. 

Gunter stood up, showing Set his profile. He jammed his hands in his pockets and hunched as though expecting rain. “Why don’t you stop playing your life like a video game, yeah?” Then, “I know why you came back here. Your body wanted to go back to the scene of the crime. This is where you killed him. Remember?”

Set tried to protest as Gunter walked away, but “It’s a nice view,” was the strongest he could come up with.

“I’m notifying the police,” said Gunter over his shoulder. “Go to hell.”

#

Five: The librarian was an old man. His knuckles were large with arthritis; he smelled like pipe smoke and baby powder. Leaning close, he tapped the screen. “Right here’s the ones you want, son,” he said.

Set thanked him and apologized again for not knowing his way around the new reference system. The librarian shrugged and smiled and shuffled off to finish the morning chores that Set had interrupted.

The particulars may have changed, but the basics were the same. Set did a search on his name and sat back to read. Hours passed. His eyes started crawling with concentration spots. There had been plenty of mundane events in his life, citations by his employer, that sort of thing, but there was one article of more interest. It was dated two years previous and told of a murder on the quay for which there had been no arrest. The victim had been named Halt, and he had been active in Seattle’s gay community. He was survived by one brother. Set was quoted with a vague witness statement, saying he was close to the victim.

“When did I realize I was gay?” Set wondered aloud. The librarian ambled back over holding a hard-copy newspaper. Set looked him up and down, tried to find him attractive. Probably not my type, he thought.

“You made page three,” said the librarian, offering the paper. Set took it and read. One of his bodies had been found in a Peruvian drainage ditch, missing its head and liver.

“How many you got left, then?” asked the librarian. 

“Zero didn’t make a backup in Peru,” said Set.

#

Four: “Would you like anything?”

“Thank you, mister Set, but no. May I record your opinion of the Originals?”

“The original who? Isn’t there a band—”

“The phrase is used to denote individuals who claim an ideological stance in line with the One Life manifesto, published three years before your first death.”

Passing up the chance to make a snide remark. “I love a good manifesto. How does it read?”

“I don’t have permission to quote verbatim, mister Set, but I can inform you of the basics. The author desired to preserve original life. Many of the author’s philosophies originated in eighteenth-century aristocratic sensibilities, though such criticisms have gone unmet. Each human, the author argued, is allowed one life, and one life only. The merits of medical transplant procedures are espoused in an addendum.”

“Fascinating,” said Set.

“Thank you for your time, mister Set. I have won the tee-shirt.”

#

Three: A sunrise in Saskatchewan is instant, like a switch being thrown. There are no valleys or crevices for stalwart bands of night to hide in. Set had to shield his eyes. He had woken up at three in the morning, which seemed like an odd time for his predecessor to die. Periodically, he checked the news, but his death notice hadn’t hit, yet.

He was waiting for businesses to open so he could get a cup of coffee. It seemed like a very long wait. The small cell he had awoken in belonged to inTrust, and they would evict him after he felt he had full control of his functions. He had been furnished with feed access, a cot, in case he felt weak, and a window to help him remember where he was.

“So, I’m number three,” he said to himself. He let Zero’s daydream message play again and felt a shiver run up his back. There was something Zero hadn’t said, Set was certain, something he had hidden from his descendents. Set remembered back in grade school when his father hadn’t let him come home after classes, had him play in the yard while he and Set’s mother zipped back and forth in front of the living room window like ducks in shooting gallery. When they finally let him come inside, the air smelled like Lysol and there was something that looked like blood on the carpet.

And when he asked about his dog, Bones, they said he ran away.

Set wondered what had really happened, and if Zero had ever learned. On an impulse, he checked the feeds; his father had died four years ago. “Dropping like fruit out of season,” said Set. 

There was a knock at the door. When set didn’t immediately rise to answer it, there was a second, and then someone on the outside coughed and said, “It’s the police, mister Set. Open up.”

Faintly bemused, like when a student asks a tough question, Set opened the door. There were two officers, one with his gun drawn, and a detective. The detective looked as if he were a couple weeks past retirement. His badge was pinned on his lapel, identifying him as detective Hyssop. He saw Set read his badge, so he didn’t bother introducing himself.

“May we come in, mister Set?”

“Oh, well, it’s not my property, exactly, but please.” Set stepped aside. As they stepped in, the other officer holstered his gun, but didn’t snap the clasp. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you coffee,” said Set. 

Detective Hyssop smiled like lightning and coughed like distant thunder. “I have to ask if you are aware, through natural or artificial means, of the warrant issued for your arrest. Just in case,” he added to the officers. 

It sounded as if it needed a strong reply, but all Set came up with was, “No,” and a widening of the eyes. 

Detective Hyssop sighed and gestured to one of the officers. The officer removed a length of zip-tie from his pocket and stepped up to Set. “Put your wrists together, out in front, please.” Set did so. The sound the tie made was like corduroy pants.

“You’re under arrest,” said Hyssop, but he was cut off by his violent cough. He drew a misfolded handkerchief from his pocket and spit dark phlegm into it.

“That’s a nasty cough,” said Set.

“Call it habit,” said Hyssop. “You’re under arrest, and have been charged with the murder of Halt Greenaway of Seattle, Washington.”

“I didn’t do it,” said Set.

“There is significant evidence to the contrary, mister Set.”

“I didn’t do it, detective Hyssop—” he pronounced it incorrectly “—because I was just born. I’ve never set foot out of this room.”

Detective Hyssop sighed and leaned back against the wall. He rubbed his eyes as though tired and tried to suppress another cough. “Jonathan Set is charged with the murder of Halt Greenaway. Are you Jonathan Set?”

“That is my name.” Set wasn’t the type to stand up to authority, but he was feeling petulant as a newborn. He stiffened his back and tried to stare detective Hyssop down.

“You’re under arrest, mister Set. Do you understand?”

“What if my name were Lee Harvey Oswald, detective?”

The officers were settling into a stance that suggested they would be here for a while. They folded their arms over their chests and bent their knees slightly.

“Are you a religious man?” asked Hyssop. 

“No,” said Set.

“No, you wouldn’t be,” said Hyssop. “Got to tell you, I don’t think I’d be here if you were. You people are filling the earth right up with your carbon copies, and each copy means what? means that there’s that much more room for the soul to spread around in. Just my personal theory. But you keep dying, and you keep living, and you’re making heaven too fucking crowded.”

Set felt as if he had been called in front of the principal. “I didn’t do it,” he said.

They took him out to the car and stuck him in the back seat. Hyssop and one of the officers rode with him, the other officer following in an unmarked car. Set tried to order his thoughts, tried to uncover some hint within himself about what his predecessor’s may have done. It was hard to concentrate, because Hyssop kept coughing.

The officer turned and asked, “When you goin’ in?”

“Tomorrow,” said Hyssop, spitting. “Tomorrow. Lungs of a thirty year-old.”

“Nice,” said the officer. 

“Yeah.” Hyssop twisted around in his seat to peer at Set. “What do you think about that, son?”

“Congratulations,” said Set. 

Hyssop made a crooked grin and nodded as though he had scored a victory. “You know what you remind me of?” he asked. “My son had a cat when he was a boy. Stupidest damn thing I ever saw. Chewed on mouse traps. Stuck its claw in a wall socket. It was dumber’n the kid, I swear. Last straw was when it climbed up the tree out front. Tried for ten minutes to get it down, then I said, Screw it and left it up there. Made a noise like you wouldn’t believe. Too damn curious for its own good.”

They were driving into the sun. Even squinting, Set couldn’t see a thing. “I have faith,” he said, just because he knew that word would summon up a cough in Hyssop. “No idea what I’m going to see when I get to the top,” he went on. “But it has to be something worth seeing. I’m a very trustworthy man, and I’ve known some.” The sun disappeared behind a warehouse that looked as if it might house a space shuttle. Set could see inTrust’s logo, the daisy-chained stick figures holding hands, plastered on the side. “What are we doing here?” he asked.

The car stopped and Hyssop got out. “Welcome to your new home.” He chuckled. The officer opened Set’s door and helped him get out. As Set stood, he saw the officer’s holster, still unbuttoned. He didn’t say, You’re not the police; he guessed they knew already. He felt a flash of anger at his predecessors and seized onto it. The heat in his brain was quickly transformed into the warm gun in his hands. He broke away from the officer and tried to run. He tripped over his own feet and ended up on his back in the dust. The officer was running at him and Hyssop had turned to watch. 

Set fumbled the gun around, barrel toward his head, and put his thumb on the trigger. “Someone else’s problem,” he said. Let the cat get down on its own. One step at a time. That’s how you move mountains. As much as you can lift, one load at a time.

#

Two: Set listened to Zero’s message and then opened his eyes. He was lying down and there was a bare fluorescent tube crackling above him. He tried to raise a hand to shield his brow, by found he could not move either of his arms. His legs were similarly restrained. He craned his neck, felt the vertebrae pop, and looked down at himself. He was spread-eagled on a bed, nylon straps looped around his wrists and ankles. There was an indistinct shape near the door of the tiny room. Set could feel his pupils contract against the light.

“Welcome to earth, mister Set,” came a voice from the shape. Set blinked to bring the shape into focus. It was a middle-aged woman, slightly overweight, wire glasses on her nose, the pencil-pushing type. She was carrying a clipboard.

“Why am I tied down?” asked Set. 

“You’ve been belligerent,” said the woman. “I’m sorry.”

“I apologize,” said Set. “Did I hurt anyone?”

“No,” said the woman. She took a step forward and clutched the clipboard like a weapon. “I work for inTrust Corporation, and I wondered if you would be willing to take a look at a couple of forms.”

Set fumbled his tongue around in his mouth. It felt thick and fuzzy and in desperate need of coffee. “Is this the first time you have asked me?”

“No, sir,” said the woman with a rueful smile.

“What are they?” asked Set. The woman brought her clipboard over and positioned it in front of Set’s face. 

“How’s that?” she asked.

“Back a little,” said Set. The forms came into focus. Set read quickly. “Cloning authorization,” he said. Then, “This is backdated. Two years?” The woman said nothing. “What am I doing here?” asked Set.

“You’re a difficult man to get a hold of,” said the woman. “Like a greased pig.” She pulled the clipboard out of reach. “I’ve listened to your message,” she said. “It’s nothing; it’s not poetic or religious. I can’t understand why you’ve put seven bodies in the morgues, nor can my superiors.” She took off her classes and cleaned them, scowling at the grime. Her countenance lifted when she slid the frame back over her ears. “Now, I’m afraid, you’re going to have to be patient.”

“For what am I waiting?”

The woman looked as though she were about to leave without answering, but she paused on the threshold and said, “To be born again,” and Set could tell she had to cut the laughter out.

She left the lights on. Set tried tugging at his restraints, but there was no give to them. He listened to Zero’s message again, to the compelling conviction that he didn’t know his vocal chords could muster. 

One more left, he thought. They’ll probably have him under guard as well. I wish I could record a message for him. I’d say, Sorry I dumped this in your lap. Nothing I could do. Seemed the most appropriate action at the time. 

He debated trying to choke himself to death, trying to swallow his tongue, but it wouldn’t pull far enough back. He wondered if he could make himself vomit, but after a few minutes of flexing his stomach muscles all he had was heartburn.

He kind of wanted to laugh. They wanted his permission to make additional clones, to be farmed off as organ donors for those who didn’t want to spring on a backup, or who didn’t want to lose a few minor years of experience. 

A few minor years. He was reminded of the time he spent three years in college hot on the heels of a girl named Lace. He signed up for the classes she attended; he tried so hard to make her laugh that she actually did. She hated smoking, so he quit for a while. She liked going to church on Wednesday evenings, so he gave it a shot and quite liked the music. He knew, just knew, that a little perseverance would go a long way, and it ended up going five miles to the bar to pick her up one night after her ride bailed, and then six miles back to her apartment, twenty-three steps up to her room, and ten feet to her bed.

Set realized he was smiling. He pulled the corners of his mouth down; they were sore with effort. That wasn’t me, he said. That’s just context. I am Set Two, newborn. There was a convergence in the past, but it was like a myth, a story to enlighten purpose in the present.

He remembered Lace once saying, Faith is being sure of what is hoped for and certain of what remains unseen. That did the trick. He felt his throat clench and bile crept into his mouth. A flex and twist of the body and a whole wave sloshed up. He coughed and choked and some of it came out his nose. 

He held his breath as long as he could. 

#

One: The body had been shipped, upon receipt of payment, to an aluminum building in Peru where two surgeons with identical accents removed its unconscious brain, just in case, and then took his liver for an elderly economist who was too much in love with vodka. The surgeons had no outstanding requests for the other organs, so they dumped the body in an irrigation ditch where it floated into a field of hops and was spotted by the farmer’s son.

#

Zero: It was an explosion, a burst ill-aimed and wide. Seven bullets, four went into the bushes, three punched an Orion’s belt across Halt’s chest. He fell, twisting on his knees, his weight jerking front-to-back. He landed face-down on the cement and coughed. The gunman — he had a wispy mustache and couldn’t have been more than eighteen — took two running steps down the path, then stopped, slipped, came back for Halt’s wallet. He ripped out the twenty bucks in cash that was supposed to be for dinner and then ran off, not looking back, just like a coward.

Like a coward, thought Set, and crawled out of his hiding place. He had spotted Halt from a distance and had slowed, just because he liked to look at him. He had thin German features, and was trying to grow out his hair. Just as Set was about to raise an arm and holler, the young gun had slouched up to Halt, hand out, asking for a light. Halt had shaken his head. The kid’s hand came out again, this time with a folded twenty in it. Halt had smiled — wide German mouth could carry a smile a hundred yards — and again shaken his head. The kid’s hand disappeared and came out with the gun and Set had leapt into the bushes.

Like a coward, though Set, along the path of least resistance. He rushed to Halt’s side and wasn’t the first one there. “I’m a doctor,” he said, which had never quite been true. He got down on his knees and looked into Halt’s eyes. One was open, one was fluttering like a butterfly shot down by a child’s water toy.

The police came and took his statement and then he tried to sleep. Almost fifteen years in the same job, same city, same bed. It had never been comfortable. Apathy had left him tired and depressed, a parasite emotion. Set had realized this; he was a smart guy. Joining the guard for a couple weekends a month had been good for him. There, he had met Gunter and Halt and their beer nights became Set’s best memories for a time.

One night, after Gunter had passed out, Set and Halt sat on the bar’s front steps and talked about the goals of their lives. Halt wanted to be a painter, and Set wanted to stop being a teacher. Halt said, You can do anything you want, because your brain is so damn big. Set said, Oh yeah? Halt said, Absolutely. You have to trust a brain that big and beautiful. Set grinned and let his head fall under all that weight. Halt leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

There was a memorial service for Halt back in Spokane, where his folks lived. He had had no backups; he blew all his money on paint and canvas. Before boarding the train over the Cascades, Set went to inTrust’s Seattle offices and recorded the message for his descendents; they provided the service, but it wasn’t in high demand, since most of the deaths they dealt in were sudden.

“Aren’t you curious?” he said into the microphone. “I am. I have to do this, and I hope you’ll do it with me. There is no tang in this life without the risk of loss. I can not communicate in words what I hope you will understand. I have faith you will understand. Who knows?” He bit off a laugh. “It could be fun.” It wasn’t quite what he wanted to say. The recorder clicked off. “I’m sorry,” he added.

On the train, he had a beer in the dining car and then went back to one of the sleeping cars as they passed over the mountains. He forced the door open; the wheels threw up steam and locked. A bubble of questions and mild screams grew and burst and forced Set right on out. 

They were on a bridge. The chasm was deep and dark, like hell, but cold and fresh, like heaven.

It seemed poetic. It seemed fair.

It seemed easy.

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. 

It was two weeks before Pash got up the nerve to stage a proper escape. During that time, the old man had him pull weeds in a ratty garden, haul water from the nearby stream, and dig up rows and rows of potatoes, which he then had to clean and store in a damp, spider-crawled root cellar shoved into the side of a hill like a nose bone into a brain. Pash worked every day until his finger nails tore, knuckles cracked, and tongue thickened from lack of water. Then the old man would give him a drink and have him work some more. Pash felt his brain slowly falling behind his body, tired and listless in thought, which might explain why it took so long to come up with his first escape plan.

He was working in the garden, on his knees. Altoid sprawled at the theoretical boundary between garden and rough, panting through her nose, turning her head this way and that in the balmy sunlight. Pash’s plan was simple: run like hell as soon as the dog fell asleep. The garden was nestled some distance into the forest, close to the stream. The wide plain and the bluff were half a mile away, through thick unexplored brush.

Pash worked slowly, clearing the carrots from his reach, inching forward to a new section of the patch. He cast frequent glances at Altoid; the dog looked bored, blinking in the labored way that dogs have. Pash’s skin again was crawling with invisible filth; his hands were writhing under it. Perhaps it was the closeness of potential, but Pash felt that he could take no more of the work. Each time he plunged his hand into the soil, he froze a shudder of revulsion. Altoid watched.

Finally, she laid her head on her forepaws and closed her eyes completely, her nostrils flaring with each breath. Pash wiped his hands on his pants and waited to see if the dog would notice he had stopped his work. She sighed, her huge chest inflating to the width of Pash’s torso.

That was good enough for him. He set his eyes on his point of escape, on the city miles away through hills and trees and leaves. He scrambled to his feet and ran.

Altoid chuffed as dirt flung up by his shoes pelted her fur. She opened her eyes.

Pash reached the underbrush and flung up his hands to ward away branches, berating himself, as he did so, for not blazing a trail beforehand. Dew from the ground covering and devil’s clubs leapt into the air in front of his shoes. It wasn’t long before his lower legs were soaked. He tried to run as quietly as possible, pussy footing around brittle twigs and aiming to land on the balls of his feet. He was not a runner. He was a watcher, a guy who would go to cheer on Oasa at her track meets while cartoons unspooled across his eye. He tripped and fell head first into a trunk. He wrapped his arms around it, hugging it, shoving himself back to his feet with so much force that he feared either his spinal cord would slip and shatter or the tree would uproot. In this moment of scraping silence, he heard the three soft repetitive taps of a running four-legged beast. He shoved away from the tree, leaving a finger nail in a sap-filled crack.

He ran. His body dissolved into points of pain. One just right of the stomach, pulsing on each breath — it was better when he didn’t breathe so hard. One at the end of his torn finger; he couldn’t slow his blood to ease the throbbing. A constellation across each foot, the hundreds of bones unused to what he asked of them. One large nova from his sinuses, a bright flare that threatened to engulf his whole head. I have paid enough, he thought. This is debt free, right here, and then it was easier just to curse god with each breath in, the old man with each breath out.

He stumbled again, this time on a sudden clearing, as when you expect there to be another step on the ladder and there is not. He whipped his head left and right; he was standing in the middle of a road. It was old, the ruts paved over with a layer of dry pine needles. The road lay parallel to freedom, but Pash could hear Altoid’s never-gone bark closing behind him, so he picked a direction and tore away.

Altoid howled, which wasn’t the bad part — the bad part was that Edge returned the howl, and she sounded no more than a hundred yards away. Pash beat his feet against the road, cursing in and out. 

He rounded a bend and slid to a halt. It was a dead end, and blocked with a dump, a barricade of rusty metal. There were three red hulks, machinery that looked completely foreign to Pash, all boxy angles and heavy gauge iron that wouldn’t fly in a million years. They looked like nothing more than prisons to Pash; but, he though, prisons not only keep prisoners in, they keep other people out.

He ran to the nearest one. There was something that looked like a door. He gripped the handle with the tips of his fingers and tugged. Something creaked in the metal, and something snapped in his elbow, but the door popped open, not swinging, but rushing between closed and open without passing through the intervening points.

Altoid hit him in the back, then. He flung out his arms to stop his fall. One hit the top of the door and the jagged remains of the window that used to be housed within. Blood painted a diagonal across his hand and over his wrist. He fell beneath the weight of the albino bitch.

Goodbye, Oasa, he thought. No, goodbye everyone.

“Git, Altoid. Edge, stay.” The weight on Pash’s back rose, leaving behind one rotten breath. “You owe me, boy,” the old man said.

“I hurt— I—” Pash panted. Every point of pain expanded, consuming him in a ball that he pretended kept growing until it devoured the old man, the dogs, the swine, the frozen magic wilderness.

#

“Ten minutes. I’m impressed.” Pash opened his eyes. He tried to move them, but it hurt, and a simple shift in focus left a trail of blurred images behind, as though his eyes were frantic to send their signals, had been afraid they never would be able to again and now never wanted to stop their work. He pulled in a long breath. He was cold, and lying in a shaft of sunlight.

“What’d they breed out of you, boy,” said the old man. “You faint at a little blood and you stay fainted. My god. You keep an eye on that hand. It’s clean, but you start seein red trails, you tell me. Don’t want you dropping dead before you done paid your debt. So, you start seein red—”

Pash nodded. His eyes felt coated in heat, like early tears, but no wetness. They took in how brittle the old man was, inflated with his shirts and hide coat, and how easy to break.

Edge and Altoid were there, licking themselves with that complacent air that comes from the confidence that the spirit of the hunt can be summoned any moment, and will take no more than a moment to arrive. 

The old man nodded at his dogs. “I’d like to stop em sometimes, but I can’t. You understand that, boy? I want to, but I can’t. Not when they really want it. So don’t test em. They like you, but don’t test em.” The old man slouched down the road, shaking his head at uneven intervals, and, once, laughing abruptly.

Pash lay in the sun, pillowed on his right hand, the fingers of which crawled to his ear lobe and gave it an habitual tug with no result. It took almost an hour, and a centipede’s tickling walk across his thigh, to get him on his feet.

#

The passage of time was marked for Pash by escape attempts. He had no way of keeping time equidistant between them, so it became a sort of calendar of significance. He could assign vague notions of time to each interval — it was quite a while between the rusty car and the long day spent hiding in the root cellar. It was not very long between the root cellar and the cold mad dash down the stream. 

He didn’t make so many as the weather turned bad, not because he was getting tired, but because he couldn’t run very far in the snow. Pash had never seen snow before. He had seen ash, from time to time during school cookouts and such, and more recently when he had to clean it from the old man’s stove every third day, so his first impression of the change in the weather was that the end of the world had come, that pure ash and cinders were raining from sky.

The old man laughed when he heard this.

Winter was hard; Pash had never known such cold in his life. He spent the majority of his daylight hours chopping wood, which kept him almost warm, so that he could burn it at night, which kept both him and the old man warm, though Pash had to wake up every hour to refuel the stove. They ate venison the old man had shot with his rifle. It didn’t take long to become sick of salt venison.

When the days reached their briefest, the old man had a surprise. He took a bucket packed hard with snow and disappeared into the cabin while Pash split and stacked rounds on a tarpaulin. In an hour or so, the old man beckoned Pash inside for a break. There, he gave Pash a bowl of the snow and a spoon, and said, “Dig in.” Pash stared at his reflection in the concave face of the spoon. “Well, come on,” said the old man. Pash dug a trench in the snow and took a bite.

The stuff tasted like old sugar, a little dusty, but cool on his throat. He smiled. The old man grinned back and dove into his own bowl. 

Pash finished what he had been given and set the bowl on the floor. He got up and went to the door, turning back to look at the old man. The old man was chewing slowly, staring at the wall. “Never tasted anything like it, I’ll bet,” he said. “No sir. It’s my own concoction,” taking another bite. “Won’t find this in your city.”

Pash opened the door and went out.

#

Spring followed. If Pash could have looked at himself, he would have seen a profound change since the previous summer. His arms were thicker and he could hold them still if he wanted to. His hair had grown down to his shoulders; he dipped it in the stream when it felt too greasy, but even so it lay on his neck in loose filthy curls. His clothes had been torn and left unmended and didn’t fit right anymore.

He had long since ceased trying to talk to the old man, and he didn’t think the old man minded.

With spring came time to plant the garden. Pash, using his hands for a trowel, dug clean rows for the carrots and potatoes. Altoid watched, grinning. Pash grabbed a handful of seeds from a plastic bag the old man had given him and squat-walked down the trench, sifting the seeds through his fingers and into the soil. By the end of the row, his knees were wailing for a break, so he stood and stretched them. Altoid grumbled.

“It’s okay, girl,” said the old man’s voice. Pash turned in the middle of a yawn, met the old man’s eyes, then finished it. “You’re puttin too many in,” said the old man. “You’ll just have to thin em out again.”

“Gives me something to do, yeh,” said Pash.

The old man shrugged weakly, his shoulders compressed by the weight of his two shirts and his long coat. He strolled over to a rotten stump and sat, letting his legs loll apart, bracing his hands on his knees as though he intended to hold the position for a while. When he didn’t offer any more criticism, Pash returned to the bag of seeds, dipped another handful, and started his squat-walk down another row.

“Beautiful day, ain’t it,” said the old man. “Sun shinin, trees doin their thing.” Altoid yawned. Pash waddled down the row. “Smell that air,” said the old man. Pash couldn’t help it. He could smell the air, the soil, the sweat from his arm pits, the stink of human grease built up over weeks, which was a smell he could not get used to, could not accept and let fade into the background of the senses.

“Yeh,” he said. He worked in silence; he could sense the old man’s discomfort, a pressure of unspoken words.

Finally, the old man said, “Doin good. Keep it up.”

“Yeh,” said Pash.

#

“It’s time,” the old man said. The first buzz of summer was in the air. Pash no longer had to keep the stove burning through the night and had taken to sleeping rather heavily. The old man repeated himself a couple of times, and then kicked Pash lightly in the head. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s do it right this time, yeh?”

The old man waited with his hands in his coat pockets while Pash levered himself to his feet. 

“What are you gonna do after,” said Pash. 

The old man shrugged. “Get the tools,” he said. Pash went to the cubby hole behind the stairs and retrieved the felt roll of butcher blades. 

The old man led the way to the pen. There was a new feature, an inverted wooden L, like the arm of a gallows. A chain dangled from its end over the pen. The hog was sniffing at the end as it shifted in the light wind.

“Do it right,” said the old man. He had Pash unroll the tools and selected a long thin knife. He climbed over the fence and beckoned Pash to follow. “Quiet, now,” said the old man. “Adrenaline makes em taste like shit.” Together they approached the hog, sticking in the mud and scraping over clumps of tough inedible grass. Pash hadn’t yet crossed completely into wakefulness. He felt the breeze, as though in a dream, lifting his skin and cooling him off underneath. He watched the sun’s reflection on the old man’s knife as it bobbed and traced illegible words on his retina. 

“Where are the dogs,” he said.

“Tied em up,” said the old man. “They spook the hog.”

Pash nodded and watched the knife, burned heart shapes in bright green which he saw during every blink. 

The old man stopped and held the knife out to him. “Reckon you could do it.”

Pash looked to the hog and beyond to the bluff. A hawk circled in the sky a decreasing spiral centered on a lone tree. It landed, shaking a branch, too gently for a killer.

Pash shook his head. “I’m a pacifist.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll pass a fist right through ya.”

The old man laughed and spit and nothing more needed saying.

#

When the hog was butchered, Pash went down to the stream to wash off what he could of the blood. He didn’t notice the old man come up behind him.

“Know what day it is,” the old man said.

“No,” Pash replied, digging at his finger nails.

“You done quite a bit of good, boy. Kept us alive.”

“No,” said Pash.

“It’s been a year and a day since you and your friend killed my sow, vandalized my property.” The old man leaned back on his heels and sighed outward. Pash stood up and faced him. 

“So,” said Pash.

“So you paid your debt. I won’t stop you leaving.”

“The dogs—”

“Still tied up.”

Pash wiped droplets of water from his chin. He stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it to dislodge a bung of wax. He tugged his ear lobe. He was singing a song in his head, a song he hadn’t heard for a year and a day; it was popular during the last days of school. The teachers didn’t like it. Oasa had the DJ play it at prom. She and Damper had danced, and cemented the banal lyrics into Pash’s mind. He couldn’t stop repeating them, couldn’t stop seeing their rhythm reflected in the sparkling chaos surface of the stream, in the melancholy waving of the trees, in the listless hums of winged insects.

His breath came on the downbeat. He brushed past the old man, who said, I’m sorry, as he did, and didn’t follow.

Pash found his feet walking automatically to the old man’s cabin, but he had nothing to take with him from there, so he lifted himself from the rutted path and stamped through the grass, past the pen, past the grave the old man had, grumbling, dug for Oasa’s body, to the bluff, to the hawk’s own tree, to the long hills, to the city.

#

It looked different. The skyline had changed, and, as Pash drew nearer, he saw that the wall had changed as well. It was twice as tall as he remembered it, and the outer surface was a different color. With his hands in his pockets, fingers playing in the holes, he approached the gate. The ground was dusty, the grass perimeter had receded a few feet. Pash kicked at the foot prints surrounding the gate, looking for his, for Oasa’s. They had long since blown away.

“Let me in,” he said. He knocked on the gate, the sound swallowed deep within the wall’s body. “Hey, you burks, let me in.” No answering activity came. He sat down in the dust, grateful for the solid wall behind his back, and closed his eyes.

A wash of cold air made him choke and cough. He opened his eyes. Four armed men stood in a semi-circle in front of him. A man in a white suit and jacket was kneeling next to him, probing his body. 

“Get off,” said Pash, slapping his hands away. “Where did you—”

“His pace was off,” said the man in white, whose face was turning the sick gray of old meat. “My god, how long— Get him inside. Right away.”

The four armed men picked Pash up, one on each limb, and carried him through the gate, which now stood open, though Pash hadn’t heard it. He thought about struggling, about going limp fish on the officers, just to make it hard on them, but figured being carried wasn’t so bad after all. He felt tired, a deep tiredness that makes everything comfortable as long as it smells like home. He took a deep breath and fell asleep.

He woke up in a small room; muted light came from a heavily shaded floor lamp. He was lying on a long soft bed, facing the wall. Experimentally, he pressed his head into the mattress and then raised it again. The mattress took a few seconds to return to its former shape. A real bed, he thought. His back hurt.

There was a knock at his door, closely followed by the squeak of disused hinges folding open. 

“Hello, Terrence,” said a feminine voice. “I’m glad to see you’re awake.”

“Ain’t my name,” said Pash, rolling over. The voice belonged to a young blonde woman in a nurse’s uniform that probably was meant to convey cheerfulness, but looked to Pash like a frozen fever dream. She was smiling.

“What is your name?”

“Pash,” said Pash, and realized he hadn’t heard it, except in memories, for three hundred sixty-six days. It sounded foreign, as a word does when you repeat it too often, but in reverse.

“I’m glad to see you’re awake, Pash. Welcome to the Scott Variety Children’s Home. I’m Monica, and I have the pleasant duty of reacquainting you to the city.”

“Let me go home,” said Pash.

“I also have the unpleasant duty of informing you that you no longer have a home, except for this one.” Monica moved closer to him. Her shirt billowed around a hidden body. She got down on her knees, her head blocking the lamp.

“You might think this is pretty damn special, Pash,” she said. “But you’re the oldest man in the city.”

Pash sat up and rubbed hard granules out of the corners of his eyes. “How long was I out,” he said.

“You were out there for eighty years,” said Monica, smiling. Her lips were black in the occluded light. “The news thought you were dead. You were a cautionary tale when I was growing up, a boogey-man. How does it feel to be back?”

#

She wasn’t joking. Pash escaped that night, after a string of doctors and nurses and smiles and Monica standing next to him with an occasional possessive hand on his shoulder. It wasn’t hard. The windows weren’t even locked. He sat on a slidewalk and let it take him from one end of town to the distant other. He was drenched in advertisements for products he had never heard of. The Callow haunts were gone. The school was still there. Pash threw a handful of sod at the library. Then he went back to the children’s home.

He slept with Monica that night, and a few nights later he moved out of the home. He got an apartment near the wall and a job caddying at a nearby golf course. Monica called him every other night, for a while, and then every third night, then once a week. He spent his time away from work sleeping and reading the news —not what he had missed while he was gone, but what he was missing right now. It was an exciting time to be alive, to hear of it.

One day, at the golf course, he was hauling irons for two old men and idly listening to their conversation. His eyes climbed up and rolled down the lay of the fairway, touching on the paper-thin grass, the bunkers that wouldn’t grow a cactus. One of the old men was complaining about all this walking, and joked that Pash ought to carry him from tee to tee. His friend laughed like a car horn and said, Scott, you sorry weak sack.

Pash got a good look at the sack’s face on the seventh hole. It was Damper’s, brought low by gravity. Pash laughed at his jokes. The sun traced arcs on all their eyes as it clattered for a hold down the length of each swinging club.

Soon after, Pash started taking kendo classes. He liked the challenge and the long minutes of meditation while his hands twirled a rattan sword through the differentkata. He stopped reading the news and slept more. He caddied every Thursday afternoon for Damper and a rotating cast of pals. He started to joke with them, told them his name was Emilio. Damper’s attention always came accompanied by a faint puzzlement at one corner of his mouth. 

After a year or so, Pash quit the job. Monica called to ask him out to dinner, to ask why. They agreed on spaghetti at seven. Instead, he went to a weapons shop and bought a sword, a wakizashi. He was ready to test for the rank of nidan at the dojo, but hadn’t yet. He walked to the edge of town, each step amplified by the speed of the slide. He made good time. There was a guard on duty, asleep. Pash hit him over the heat with the hilt of his sword, opened the gate, and left with the sound of sirens boiling slowly in his ears. They wouldn’t follow as far as he planned on going.

It didn’t take long to retrace his steps to the old man’s cabin. Even a year out, the hills seemed familiar, like a childhood memory revisited, and had the same ethereal white hot quality of memory. Pash reached the bluff, looking over his shoulder for following city folk. As far as he could tell he was alone, except for the hawk in the tree, airing its wings. Its eyes were on him but couldn’t follow. He knelt for a stone and found only dirt. He packed a fist-sized clod and threw it at the bird. The clod exploded as it left his hand, and its particles sank into a dull cloud a few yards off, slowing, nearly stopping.

The implants that the doctors had rewired him with were pulsing in his head and neck. He reached a hand around to the hidden panel near his spine, the power center of his internal webwork system. One more look over his shoulder revealed nothing. He turned off the power.

The cloud of dust exploded into motion, drifting to a fine coating on the grass. The hawk flapped twice and took off, crying once.

Pash slid down the bluff; at the bottom, he drew his sword. The pen stood empty, dominated by the gallows swing that had held the hog, back feet in the air, while he and the old man worked it. Pash flexed his fingers around the sword’s hilt. He thought he saw a face at the cabin’s one window, but it may have been a cloud in swift pursuit of the sun.

On the watch for Altoid and Edge, Pash crept around the cabin to the front door. He waited, but heard nothing from inside except for the nail-wrenching sound of the old man’s rocker. Pash opened the door, closed it behind himself, and dropped the latch.

The old man was sitting in his chair. On a table next to his elbow stood a half-empty jar of amber liquid. The old man picked this up and took a swig from it.

“Been drinkin off my hangover,” he said.

“Where are the dogs,” said Pash.

“Still tied up.”

“How long has it been.”

“A day or so for me. I keep passing out, though; ain’t too reliable.”

“Okay. Okay. Last one,” said Pash. “How did you do it.”

“Electromagnetic pulse in the grass. Someone gets to close, no matter what time they livin in, it goes off Shorted your pacemaker, and everything else.”

“That’s not what I asked.” Pash took a step closer, falling into stance and shifting the blade around so it would be ready to fall across the old man’s belly.

“You should thank me, boy,” said the old man. “I took you that much closer to utopia.” He laughed and spat right onto the floor. Pash could smell tobacco and alcohol, mixing together in a forbidden perfume. “You want a drink?” The old man offered the jar, drew it back and took another drink. “You’re looking good, strong,” he continued. “How long was it for you?” Pash didn’t answer, but the old man didn’t seem to want him to. His eyes had rolled  back in his head and his lips were moving as though praying to a god that listens. “Little over a year, huh,” he said, finally. “Yeh, not bad.” A sob burst from between his lips, forcing them open like flapping tent leaves, once, twice. “Not bad.” He leaned back in the chair, stopped its rocking. “Old men reminisce amongst themselves,” he said. “And I’m the oldest man in the world. So you’re going to listen to me; you’re going to listen to me bitch and moan and, damn it, you’re going to bitch and moan back so I don’t feel so alone. You owe me that, don’t you, don’t you.” The old man trailed off. Pash’s calves were complaining; he held them still. “No,” the old man went on. “You don’t owe me nothin. Less you killed those dogs. Didn’t, did you. No. No. My wife gave them to me, as puppies, as a joke. She was a woman of irony, and of little forethought. You woulda liked her. She worked sixteen hour days in the code shops; I worked tens at the fish and game. She thought the pacemakers were a great idea — she thought they were Christ come again. I didn’t like em. She said we’d be able to eat dinner together again. Split us up, damn things did.”

“Nobody told me,” said Pash.

“What’d be the point,” said the old man. Then, “I’ve seen cities rise and fall in an afternoon. It’s fun to watch; you should do it some time. But the cities don’t move. You notice that? Got no need to. Less power drain on the individual when your pacemaker fields can overlap. Get more done in a day.” The old man took a long swallow and the sun wrapped itself in a cumulus cloak.

“You knew,” said Pash.

“I knew,” said the old man. “And I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, kid.” A silence stretched out, drawn by the tip of Pash’s blade in the air. He lowered the sword. It was getting heavy. “But I didn’t do it just to punish you. I never had kids of my own. I didn’t do it just to punish you. I needed your help, with the sow gone. Hard winter, you know. It was. It’s gonna be again, but we got time.”

Pash pulled himself from the waking dream he had entered and crossed to the old man, who stared up at him wit  dumb animal eyes. Pash slipped the jar from his grip and raised it to his lips. The liquid tasted like honey and bird meat, but mostly like alcohol. He gave it back.

“Damn you,” he said, and didn’t even remember opening the door.

The dogs were tied to two saplings down toward the creek which bent and bowed against the beasts’ lunges. Pash felled Edge with two clumsy strokes, and got a heavy bite across the wrist. He cried, sloppily. Altoid near ripped her lungs with barking, but the old man remained in his chair. Pash could hear its squeak, wrenching at his nails, as he passed one last time on his way to the bluff.

He walked back to the city with his pacemaker off, abrading his slow thoughts against the southern breeze. At the top of a hill, in view of the city, he watched the sun set, and the flickering artificial days and nights within the walls. Something sparkled like a jewel; something sang like a dove.

#

Damper had died. Heart attack, or a string of them. Pash found himself on the cemetery green, in silence. He had turned on all his systems, again, but one by one had shut them down — his cartoons, his music, his cameras and palm viewer —until just his phone and the pacemaker were live.

He could hear kids across the street, laughing in their secret way. He stood beneath the leaves of a great dying oak and watched a group of three climb a porch. One carried a brown paper sack. She set it in front of the house’s door. Another, sidestepping the sack, rang the doorbell. The three took off at a dead sprint down the slidewalks. 

The door opened and an old man stuck his head out. He saw the bag, scowled, and then shot a glance either way down the street. He spotted the kids; he disappeared, then emerged a moment later with a camera.

Pash tore the sod as he shot off in pursuit. It didn’t take him long to catch the kids up, though they tried their best to dodge him.

When he got close enough, he panted, “Don’t stop.”

“Bain’t gonna,” said the girl who had had the bag.

Pash grinned. “Don’t stop. The old man tagged you. Don’t stop. Keep running. Keep—”

He breathed a full breath.

They were the Callow gang and they ruled the last day of school. Oasa, Damper, and Pash were the seniors; they sat open-legged on the library steps, chucking snowballs at freshmen and blasting new grunge music across the filaments that webbed their ear drums. The junior Callows sat guard on the cooler, gulping down a synthetic home soup out of soft drink boxes; the stuff would sear paint off a whore’s face, or so claimed the newbie who had hooked them up. The fresh and sopht Callows mixed as one faceless crowd, some spotting, some using their gloves to condense the water from the air and freeze it into ammo for Oasa, Damper, and Pash.

“Good night,” said Damper, launching a white rocket at the library doors. The arc started nice, but the sun interfered at the apogee, splitting the ball into a spidery fall. Each slivered ball detonated on the warm concrete, sending up near invisible plumes of steam and cold dust. “Bad,” said Damper. “Gimme nother.”

A freshman, ratty, thinking that his three holiday months were worth something, darted up and plopped a wet mess in Damper’s outstretched hand, then slouched back to the cooler with a look that said, No, I don’t need a drink; your company is plenty for me.

Damper cocked his eyes for a target. Words had gotten around campus; most people were keeping well clear of the library. He wheeled in place and shot his fist out at the end. This ball kept cohesion straight up to the fresh’s back, where it bloomed and wicked through the fabric. “Nice,” said Damper.

“Been here all day,” said Oasa. She sang a few lines, unaccompanied outside her head. Pash nodded with her, his eyes on the library doors.

“Damn Socrates,” he said. “Damn Aristotle. Damn Copernicus. Damn Leibniz. Damn Newton. Damn Churchill and King and damn Joyce.”

“Damn Kennedy. Damn Russia,” added Oasa.

“Damn Feynmann. Damn Kierkegaard. Damn Hemingway and Nietzsche and Franklin,” said Damper.

“Nah,” said Pash.

“Been here all day,” said Oasa.

“Got you beat,” said Pash. He was pulling at the two steel bars in his ears. There had been a special on the install — free pleasure wiring, Pointe style; tug on the lobe to generate a current, resisted, plugged straight into the best place on earth. Pash pulled idly on alternating lobes. Oasa slapped at his hands; his fingers came away waxy. 

“Mine,” she said. She sang three words of dissonant air. Damper got up, dropped a curtsey. 

“Have a dance,” he said, rising up on his toes and holding out his hand to Oasa. Pash put his hand to the back of her head and shoved her out onto the steps. She and Damper caught fingers, breathed heavily. Open mouths resonated with their stereo webs piped through their eustacean tubes. Damper tuned himself to Oasa’s playlist and the melodies merged. Pash watched them, watched a short film overlaid on his eyes, a comedy.

Oasa sat down. A sopht handed her a snowball.

“Aren’t you tired of this?” Oasa asked the sopht. The sopht tugged his yellow headband down over one eye, squinted at her with the other. “Don’t get it?” asked Oasa. She snapped in the sopht’s face. “Dumb cats,” she said. She licked her hand where the snowball was melting, its liquid body funneling through the cracks between her fingers.

“Never be here again,” said Pash. Oasa shrugged. Damper’s phone rang. He answered it, subvocally. Pash grinned at the sight of Damper’s throat bubbling, like a drinking bird’s, through whatever words.

“The rents are on a fly-by,” said Damper. Oasa held out her hand, palm up. The last quick pool of the snowball, bile or urine or blood, vanished, evaporated. Beneath, her skin danced in wide spectrum, a picture of an osprey in reactive holo-ink.

“Let’s break,” said Oasa. “Goodbye to this, and you burks.” This last over her shoulder to the other Callows. The juniors grinned and raised salute with their moonshine. The frosh and sophts kicked anxiously at the ground, feet shaking with the desire to follow. “Seniors only,” said Damper to the sopht in the yellow headband, who was sculpting a bird, a man, a bull, or something out of swiftly decaying ice in his hands, who, focused on his art, had fallen in behind the three seniors. “You bain’t.”

They took a few blocks on the slidewalks, kicking at gum, watching out for parents on the camera networks. Oasa and Damper had their displays wired into the optic nerve; Pash saved that for his television, had a biolux screen installed in his palm later for the security taps. He glanced down furtively as they slid from street to street, cursing himself with short words, getting too old for cartoons.

“Where shall we?” he asked. Damper’s folks had gone past the school, airborne, and the three were in the clear.

“Been everywhere,” said Oasa.

“Red Lights,” said Damper.

“Don’t you need something new,” said Oasa. “Don’t you need something you bain’t seen.”

“Matador’s,” suggested Damper.

“Let it go,” said Pash.

“Could go gliding, yeh? Cliffs are empty, yeh?”

“Come off,” said Oasa. “Chris-tee-an, Damper. Your rents are in the air, yeh. Don’t you need something new.”

“Not me. You know I’m all there. Bain’t needing evolution, not me. All here, all there.”

“Bain’t needing education, you mean,” said Oasa. She looped two fingers through Pash’s belt and tugged him into a run.

“Where shall we?” she panted. They dashed kilometers, Damper in the rear. They linked signals so they all could hear. “Where shall we?” Oasa panted again. “Got the whole summer to glide, to watch the fights. Got one day—”

“Officer,” called Pash, folding his hand because the dissipating sweat was making his palms cold. They slipped off the walk into an alley. They ducked behind a dumpster, marked with a stencil of an angry ball of lightning running a man through with one of its jagged bolt arms.

“No good,” said Pash. “Test it, Damper.”

“You test it,” said Damper. Pash lowered his eyebrows, tugged once on his lobe, then reached out to the dumpster with the back of his hand. The moment his skin made contact, volts coursed through the insignificant layer of sweat, seizing his muscles and tendons, which reacted in the only direction available to them, which was in, tightening and pulling the hand along with them. A slight spark, an acrid puff, and the jolt shot Pash’s whole arm up into his chest.

“It’s on,” he said.

“Damn Voltaire,” said Damper.

“Bain’t his fault,” said Oasa. “Down, now.” They crushed into a wet appliance box and waited. Pash’s palm illuminated the space with shifting, static-ridden images. They watched, Oasa and Damper staring off in opposite directions, as the truancy officer slid by on his bike.

“Got one day,” said Oasa, picking herself up along with her thought. “Friends and enemies, we go outside.” Her legs flashed, her tatt gleamed one spectrum spike, and she was gone around the corner. Pash laughed, coughed out dumpster stench, and followed.

“Outside,” said Damper over the radio. Pash looked over his shoulder; Damper hadn’t left the alley. “Outside,” came his voice again. “Bain’t a good idea.”

“Don’t come,” said Oasa.

“Come along,” said Pash.

“They catch us, we’re bread, we’re baked,” said Damper.

“Callows don’t mind,” said Oasa.

“Bain’t coming,” said Damper.

“All good,” said Pash.

“Bain’t coming,” said Damper.

“Good!” crowed Oasa.

“Okay,” said Damper.

Pash put an eye on his palm screen, kept the other on the walk. People got out of his way. Damper slunk out of the alley, followed Oasa and Pash a few blocks, then turned off to the club district.

“Two south,” said Oasa from a block ahead. She turned south at the next block; Pash followed. He could see the wall ahead, twelve feet of polished quartz below a curve of near-invisible force with a derivative so slight it looked flat from his small angle, his small stature. There was a gate, decorated with warnings made to match the coffee shop aesthetic of the block. Keep Out and Try a Plasmocha.

“Come on in,” said Oasa, pretending to read. 

“Hey, kids,” said the guard, sitting cross-legged on a stool next to the gate.

“Why here?” said Pash, subvocal.

“Go on where you’ve never,” said Oasa with a red gash of a grin. As Pash walked past her, she turned and kissed him wet and even warm on his summer-soon cheek.

“Hey, kid,” said the guard. Pash brushed past him. “Hey.” Pash lifted his left wrist and tapped heavily on his timepiece.

“Running out, big,” said Pash with a leer. He stamped right up to the gate and knocked. He smelled pulsing ozone, couldn’t tell if it was from his shock burned hand or from the field.

“No,” said the guard, unfolded and laying his hands on Pash’s shoulders.

“What’s out there,” said Pash.

“Nothing,” said the guard. “You’re supposed to be in school, Terrence.”

“Wrong name,” said Pash, laying his hand on the gate release. He heard a wet thump and a sizzle from behind. The guards hands slid down his back, over his bottom, flopped once against his heels.

“Thirteen seconds til flyby,” said Oasa. Pash turned and helped her raise the guard’s limp body back onto its perch, folding the legs the same way they had found them.

“Seven,” said Oasa, sending a jolt of rigidifying toxin through the guard’s body. They backed away; the body remained in its pose. Oasa puffed a breath of consideration through her teeth, then yanked her shades off and jammed them over the guard’s eyes.

“Four,” said Pash. “You do it.” Oasa set her shoulder against the gate and shoved. 

“Two,” she said. Pash could hear the whir of the security camera on patrol, crescendoing. Oasa slipped outside like a voice through wires. “One.” She giggled. Pash bumped through behind, nearly sliced his arm off in his haste to slam the massive stone gate behind him. “Null, null, null!”

They were standing in a dirt semi-circle, traced out and scuffed down by authorized boots. A bundle of rolled hills bunched right up to the wall; those in the distance were plastered on one side with solid green forest, on the other with dry tawny grasses; it looked as though they had been drawn and shaded that way, meant to stand out three-dimensional, more real than the pictures painted by old ladies and hung in physicians’ offices.

Oasa leaned into Pash, lifting herself onto her tiptoes to look him in the eye, scraping her body against his. “Wanna try again and get it wrong,” she said, lowering her lids and setting her punctuation against his lips. She reached a hand up and tugged at one ear lobe. Pash grinned into her kiss. “Come on,” she said. “We’re way too solid.” He let her take his hand and drag him up and over the first wave of hills. They dropped out of sight of the city’s foundation, though when Pash looked the once over his shoulder he could see through the dome haze the blue spires of the business district.

“Make a memory,” said Oasa. Pash did; he made a memory of the horizon, of the sense of exhilarating emptiness, of Oasa’s silhouette cast on a granite tumor. He recorded the wind being hushed by the grass to go along with the memory. As an afterthought, he sent it to Damper, who didn’t answer his phone.

“Look there— look—” said Oasa, squinting her naked eyes. Pash followed her gaze.

“I don’t see,” he said.

“It’s so— it’s all—”

“I know. I don’t want to go back.”

“Bain’t ten minutes yet,” said Oasa, grinning. “Cheese,” she added. “No, look.”

Pash tried again, still didn’t catch a thing. He reached around Oasa’s belly and linked his fingers over her crotch. Her hair tingled in his nose.

“Dad’s going to pluck out your worthless eyes,” she said. She slipped beneath his grip and shot away, kicking up the heels of her boots. She ran toward the sharp border between prairie and the nearest forest hill side. Pash breathed in her ghost pheromones and coughed.

He caught up to her at the top of a bluff, but only because she had come to a halt. Her head was tilted back, her pale throat exposed.

“It didn’t move, before,” she said. Pash panted.

“It’s a bitch without the slides, yeh,” he said. Then, “What.” He looked up.

A bird hung suspended in the air twenty-odd feet above their heads, as though dangling from a wire in a taxidermist’s shop. As Pash watched, the wings lowered slowly from their apogee; seemingly disconnected from that movement, the sleek black body slid a meter forward. Pash could easily count the component centimeters ticking past, and did.

“It wasn’t moving,” said Oasa.

“It shouldn’t,” said Pash. “What the hell.” Oasa clicked images of the bird, clucking her tongue. Gravity of the vanishing point drew the bird in, reducing its apparent speed. Pash shook his head. 

“Come on,” said Oasa. She drew up beneath the bird, getting good resolution on her pics. Pash whispered blasphemies under his breath as the wings rose and fell, some ten seconds per oscillation. Pash counted, falling behind. Oasa scrambled up a rise, reducing the distance between herself and her quarry. Eight seconds per, now seven point five.

“What the hell.”

“Stand back, lightning rod,” said Oasa on the radio. Then, “My god.” Her voice flooded with surprise so sudden it sounded like anger. “My lazy god.”

Pash’s legs were tired above feet that burned in their socks and heavy boots. Too much blood, he thought. Without turning, she reached out her hand for his. He used it to tug himself up the last steps.

“What,” he said. “What.”

He ratcheted his eyes down. The bird had pitched its head back, thrown its feet out to land in a spindle of a tree. Pash watched it fight against intangible air until he realized that Oasa’s eyes were staring further yet.

Down at the base of the bluff, straddling the stark boundary between forest and meadow, was a cabin. It was small and misshapen, a tumescent lump of wood co-opted into shelter. The outside was painted a dark red. There was one small window that Pash could see, set midway up the broad side; there was no other decoration. The roof of fiber glass sheets draped over a cage of visible ribs, dangling unevenly across the eaves. From a hole in the corner of the roof jutted a gray bowl from which stood a column of smoke frozen in place as in an old pic. A dozen yards into the meadow from the cabin was a wooden fence, bent by age’s effect on poor workmanship into a trapezoid. Inside the fence, grass had been uprooted and stamped beneath the surface; the ground had become a pit of mud. Pash’s attention was drawn there by the two lumps of brown-spattered flesh that were not moving, but did not look as if they ever could or had. He drew in a breath between his teeth.

“I saw them,” said Oasa. “What do you think they are?”

“Got me,” said Pash.

“Come on,” said Oasa, forgetting about the bird and leaping into an arms-out run down the steep hill side. Pash followed, ginger on his feet; rocks kept leaping from the ground into his shoes. At the bottom, still a good dash from the pen and cabin beyond, he tugged on his laces and stooped to empty his soles of the small stones. “Why hell’d we waste so much time,” Oasa was saying. She was smiling at the sun, turning in place to see if it would follow her. It didn’t, but Pash felt its warmth as the bow of her lips aimed eventually at him. Then she bent and grabbed from the ground the rocks responsible for giving Pash footfuls of blisters. She began juggling them.

Pash shoved himself up. “I think we better go,” he said.

Oasa shrugged, losing a stone in the air and finding it again by her foot. They were no more than pebbles, a rolled finger’s length, width, and depth. She halted their revolutions, hefted one in her palm, and then tossed it toward the fence and the flesh mountains within. 

It was like watching a vid in the revival houses when the pimple in the projection room turned the crank too slow. The stone sailed from Oasa’s hand on a neat arc, then seemed to come up against some invisible resistance. The stone slowed in the air, nearing the peak of its parabola, and then seemed to come to a halt.

“Do you get this,” said Oasa. “I’m never going back.”

“I think we better go,” said Pash.

“I’m never ever going back.”

She hushed through the grass and Pash followed, glancing over his shoulder at the bird, which was now nothing more than a still black dot, an inverted star, perched on the frozen limb of a distant tree.

Pash heard a soft thud and returned his attention to Oasa. She had taken them beneath its trajectory. She bent and grabbed her rock, the one she had thrown. 

“Did you see that,” she said. “Did you.”

“See what?”

“It’s me. I make it speed.”

They were not far from the pen, now; easily within throwing distance. On the strange creatures, Pash could see muscles caught in the act of bunching beneath pinkish flesh studded with spikes of hair. Whether the beasts were preparing to charge or just shifting from foot to foot, he had no idea, and felt uneasy about how long it might take to find out.

“What are they,” he said.

“Did you see that.” Oasa bent and excavated a stone the size of her fist. She hurled it at the beasts. It rose, trailing dust like a contrail, then slowed against the magic invisible barrier. “Watch,” she said. Pash watched. Oasa took two giant leaps toward the pen, closing quickly the distance between herself and her projectile. The rock accelerated again, as though snapped by a hand too fast to see. It rushed toward the head of the nearer beast, then slowed again to a crawl ten yards from Oasa, ten more from the pen. She looked back at Pash and grinned.

“Pee in the grass,” she said. “Leave your name. I tell you, we’re gonna leave names.” Pash watched her take another step forward, feeling his heart slow as though it was she who carried time in her pocket, affecting his body as she affected the hurled stones. The large rock sped into the last few feet of its descent before once again crossing that border and slowing from feet per second to millimeters. It hung not far above the beast’s head, now. Pash could see two big eyes, mostly brown iris, with a gap of white and red-veined ball beneath them that told him the beast’s gaze had swiveled up to meet the slow incoming meteor.

Then three things happened so close together that only causality, when addressed by memory, prevented Pash from naming them simultaneous. Oasa took another giant leap forward, putting her within arm’s reach of the nearest fence post. As she did so, the rock resumed its former speed and impacted on the side of the beast’s face. Pash saw blood and shining flakes of something white disperse in a cloud swiftly drawn dead by gravity. And, at the moment Oasa’s foot fell, a bright buzz lit in Pash’s ears. In an instant, his music was gone, the webs on his ear drums suddenly still. The display over his eye went dead, transparent. The miles of thin cabling in his brain clicked once, audible through bone transmission, then made no more sound. “What,” he said on their subvocal net to Oasa. She didn’t respond. He tried raising Damper with the same result.

Oasa had turned, white showing clear around her iris.

“What the hell,” she said. “What the hell bit off—”

It was then that Pash realized that he could see trees waving in a light wind; he could see the one beast kicking erratically in the mud; he could see the other butting its head against the far corner of the pen, bleating low in its belly; he could see smoke billowing up from the cabin’s chimney in a brisk deforming set of fractals.

Something inside the cabin crashed.

Two dogs began barking, call and response, nearby but out of sight. They did not sound like friendly dogs. One sounded as though each bark was choked on a mouthful of saliva, stuttering anger with a sound like tearing cloth; the other’s noises never stopped, just changed in pitch so that what Pash thought, at first, was silence actually was a feral scream with enough rage behind it to force it out of hearing.

There was the unmistakable sound of a door, occluded by the cabin’s body, slamming open. Oasa turned, without giving a second look at the paroxysms of the dying beast, and started to sprint toward the bluff.

“Callows run,” she said as she passed him. Pash, in that frozen instant, caught a glimpse of her hands; her holo-tatt was the dark brown of inactive ink, dead, like dried blood.

Pash’s legs felt like warm rubber after all the running he had done already, but a spark of rigid cold flashed down his spine and into them as he turned to follow Oasa, for he had seen the creatures who were barking, still barking obscenities in their own grating language. They were massive things, easily standing as tall as his waist, and covered in thick mountain fur. The one with the never silent bark was albino, the other steel gray. 

Pash had finished his rotation and got one foot in front of him when he heard a loud report and felt something hiss past his ear.

“Got you in my sights, boy,” said a voice as thick with gravel as the one dog’s was with spit. Pash bled out his momentum; snot dripped from his nose. He felt lines of blood crawling back through his skin, escaping the veins, flowing toward his sheltered center. The steel gray dog blew past him, giving him one hard look of ferocious promise. Then pain flashed in his ankle, and he heard the high whine of the never silent dog. Good thing my blood is gone, he thought, shaking.

A high whistle came from behind. “Git, Altoid. Thisn ain’t runnin.” The voice was closer, now. The jaws lifted off Pash’s ankle and the albino slipped by on nimble silent feet.

“Turn round, boy,” said the voice. Pash obeyed. The voice’s owner was an old man, with a hunch that made him shorter than Pash. He wore a long brown duster coat over hideous plaid flannels; the colors scraped on Pash’s eyeballs in contrasts and after images and made him want to blink. He didn’t dare. The man had a sleek black high powered rifle trained on him, not bothering the use the old magnifying scope balanced on top. “Stand right there,” he said. Then his focus slid over Pash’s shoulder. Pash wanted to turn around. His back started to itch. 

The old man clamped his jaw a couple of times, as though chewing on a piece of tough meat, bulging his stringy white beard. He pulled his lower lip under his front teeth and spit a stream of brown saliva into the grass. Then he whistled once, loudly.

“Altoid, Edge, off girls. I said—”

Pash heard a high startled laugh and Oasa screaming, The fuck off. The old man spit again and took a step forward. “Bitch,” he said. “Bitches.” Pash risked a turn of his head. It didn’t last long. The image burned into the space behind his eyes was of the two dogs positioned on either side of Oasa, making charging swipes at her legs and lower torso while she tried with one frantic hand to open the compartment for her wrist needler. The weapon should have come out with a thought.

Pash couldn’t watch. He closed his eyes and saw a blurred green outline of Oasa’s body, bracketed by blue and orange blobs in canine shape. As they melted together, as the dogs barked and Oasa howled, Pash’s breaths came quicker and quicker. The images of flesh behind his eyes liquefied, became one, the dogs absorbed, eaten, by the shape of Oasa. Pash’s breaths could come no shallower without starving him completely of air. 

A loud crack drove another buzz past his ear. He stopped breathing completely, for a moment.

He opened his eyes. The world had taken a bluish tint, as happens when you wake up from a nap in mid-afternoon. The old man wore baked brown boots; Pash saw them stamping through the grass, flattening blades and crushing the soil. He tried to match their tread with the rhythm of his lungs, but went too fast.

A hand gripped him roughly at the neck and folded him downward. He didn’t raise his eyes from the ground.

“Listen, pop, listen—” he said.

“Don’t talk,” said the old man. The dogs had stopped barking. Pash didn’t know they were behind him until one began to whine at the old man. Pash expected the old man to say, Shut it, to the dog, but he didn’t. Pash wished he would. The whine sounded like that of a child whose good milk has been taken away. “These dogs,” said the old man, “Are used to bears. Do you get me? Do you get me?” Pash nodded. “Are you going to try to run? Are you going to try to run?”

“No, pop, no, listen—” said Pash.

“Shut it, boy, or I’ll shut you up.” Pash nodded. His arms and legs were numb. “You’re not supposed to be here. You’re from the city. Just nod.” Pash nodded. “They letting people out?” Pash shook his head. “Just a punk kid.” Pash nodded, terminating the gesture with his face looking up, searching for the eyes of the old man, to see what emotion lay within. The eyes he found were bloodshot and yellow around the edges, squinting with a comfort that told him the squint never went away, not even at night. He saw anger.

“This is my property,” the old man said.

“Okay, pop, listen—”

“What year do you call it?” Pash told him, though he forgot at first, kind of like those moments you forget your own birthday or age. The old man snorted. “Already so soon,” he said, then pinched his lips tight. “Bless my soul. Stand up.” Pash tried; his legs were quaking with cumulative fear. One knee almost gave way. As he caught himself, one of the dogs growled, setting her whole body to vibrating. Pash wanted to scream at her, It’s not my fault, and, I can’t help it. He caught the words deep in his throat and swallowed.

The old man led him to the cabin. He told Altoid and Edge to sit and to stay, then he opened the door. It was wide enough for two men to walk through side by side. A molding cinder block stood as front step. The old man shoved Pash up it. The cabin was two stories, one room on each storey, with a steep set of shaved log steps in the very center. The logs were polished with age and use; there was no handrail. There was a pot-bellied wood stove, solid black — all the ones that Pash had ever seen had been dirty red with rust. It was making a sound, the long inhale of little fire. Pash wondered what would happen if it ever exhaled. There was one chair, a complicated thing of wooden slats, swing arms, and sliders. The old man sat in it and began to kick back and forth; the sliders slid and the swing arms swung and the chair let the old man’s body rock while its feet remained immobile. The period of the rocking was marked by a loud creak that made Pash think of twisting a nail in a plank of wood, a tight sound of protest.

The old man had put his rifle down, leaning it against the wall. He stared at Pash.

“Hey, pop—”

“A human male needs two thousand calories a day to survive,” said the old man. Pash stood awkwardly in front of him, gripping himself hand to hand. “That’s about seventeen hog livers. I ain’t got seventeen hogs per day, so there’s other stuff: vegetables, mostly.”

Pash thought he could see where this was going. “Listen, pop, I’ll get anything, anything; just let me go, all right? I gotta go.”

“You gotta go nowhere,” said the old man, loudly enough to elicit a warning bark from Edge. Pash turned his head slightly, gazing out the one window toward the bluff. It was criss-crossed with wire mesh; a roll of dirty plastic was tacked above it. “It’s a lot of work,” the old man continued in a cold voice, small like a judge’s, which does not have to be large. “A lot of work to get that much food in every day. A whole day’s work, sometimes longer’n that. Now, I don’t quite need two thousand calories; I’m an old man. But you, you’re young and growing. Call it thirty-five hundred for the both of us.”

“You can’t be serious—”

“The dogs do some hunting. And we’ve got that hog you killed.”

“Listen, pop—”

“No, you listen, you little shit.” The old man’s voice was small, yet, smallest at the end. “The sow was pregnant.”

Pash considered appealing to the old man, explaining to him that it was Oasa who threw the stone, Oasa who led them onto his property, and Oasa who had already paid, but his brain kept getting stuck up on the last thought. He turned the words over and over in his mind until they abstracted and became a wash of white electric noise.

The old man rose suddenly and walked to the other side of the room. Ducking into the small space created by the angle of the staircase, he rummaged in a burlap sack. He came up with a roll of felt as thick as Pash’s thigh and a length of chain.

“Follow me,” said the old man. “I’ll teach you something.” He led him outside again, into the sun’s spatter and to the pen. The live hog was in one corner pawing needlessly at a patch of mud, as though searching for a lost treasure. Its eyes quivered, breaking between up and down, left and right so quickly as to make them useless for sight. “Stay right where you are,” said the old man. Altoid and Edge sidled up, the latter with thick tongue lolling out, dripping saliva, the former silent and seeming to grin. Pash didn’t think of moving. The old man crept around the pen, staying in the hog’s blind spot. When he reached the fence corner, he made a slip knot on one end of the chain and looped it over the nearest post. The other end curved back on itself in a circle of fixed radius. This end the old man tossed like a frisbee over the hog’s head. The hog turned to him, then, and stared stupidly at him. It shook its head, making the chain sing. The old man hauled on the other end, sinking the collar into the hog’s flesh. Now it panicked, kicking its spindly hind legs. Pash could smell its body, thick with urine and soil and the fecundity of life bred for food. Its movement was limited by the collar, and soon the old man had tightened the slack so that the hog could only flail its backside, while its head rested heavily against a lateral bar of the fence. The old man took a bottle from his pocket, uncorked it, and poured a little of the contents on his fingers. These he smeared around hog’s nostrils. “There, now,” he said quietly. “Look at that. Look at that hill and grass.” The hog quieted.

“This is not the way to do it,” the old man said, returning to Pash’s side. “There’s too much blood in the body. Nevertheless.” He knelt on the ground and unrolled the felt, revealing a row of butcher tools. Some of the more complicated ones, the ones with hinges and levers, shone silver on black. The more rudimentary knives and scoops were dull, except on the edges, here and there flecked with rust or dried blood. The old man selected a tool that looked like a metal toilet plunger and went to the pen. He climbed over the fence, both his body and the timbers shaking with the effort, and crossed to the dead hill of flesh. “Is that how you do a job,” he said, turning and fixing his inscrutable squint on Pash. It took Pash a moment to figure out what he meant. Then, realizing, he leapt forward, a little too fast, for Altoid let out a warning chuff, which only made Pash go faster. He leapt over the fence in one go, and landed to the old man’s laughter.

“A fence ain’t going to stop those girls, is it girls?” He laughed as other men choke. He spit a brown ribbon from his lower lip and hefted the metal plunger in his hand. The bell end went against the sow’s side, and the old man began rubbing in circular motions. A cloud of dust vibrated around him; bits of hair and flakes of mud snowed around his feet.

“I didn’t do anything,” said Pash.

The old man scraped at the dead flesh until a clean patch of pink the size of his head could be seen. Then he stepped back. “This is your job now,” he said. “Were you watching?”

Pash nodded and gulped at a lump of something that was blocking his windpipe. He stepped over the fence at a low point, hating the rich smell as its heavy intensity expanded. The air seemed laced with it. 

“Get movin,” said the old man, waving the plunger at Pash. “You keep working on this.” Pash grabbed the plunger and hesitated as the old man turned away. He pressed the metal lightly against the sow’s skin and scraped it up and down. Heavy molecules of scent bonded with the air; much more and all of it would sink to the ground.

The old man returned with a long thin knife in one hand. The other he pressed into Pash’s, wrapping it around the handle of the plunger and forcing the instrument harder against the dead skin.

“Breed out muscle for brains,” he said. “Or brains for muscle? Jesus. Circles, boy. Hard ones.”

Pash’s skin crawled, or he imagined it crawling with the filth of the old man’s hand and the microbes within. He moved the plunger in hard circles, scattering dust and short hair like an explosion sustained. Once Pash was doing the job right, the old man let go and knelt, wiping the knife blade quickly across his faded jeans. 

“Watch,” he said, and spit. Pash looked down. With a quick straight pull of his hand, the old man opened the back of the sow’s leg. Skin and muscle parted. Pash could smell the copper blood’s aroma pulsing into the air around as though the beast’s heart still beat. The old man twisted the knife’s tip in the wound and pulled. A whitish string of tendon surfaced and the old man gave a grunt of satisfaction. He reached with his free hand and slipped a finger under the tendon, getting a grip. Then he slit the tendon at the hoof side, set the knife down, got a second finger on the slippery rope and started to pull and strain. 

Vomit came gentle into Pash’s mouth. He turned away and let it dribble from his mouth. The live hog kicked a little at the other end of the pen.

“It don’t come easy,” said the old man. He coughed. “Cruelty follows cruelty,” he continued. “Until, judging callow acts against each other, one develops the concept of kindness. You do that to yourself.”

“I want to go home,” said Pash.

“That was Hessp. You read Hessp? They still teaching him?”

“Damn Hessp,” said Pash, weakly, wiping his mouth.

“The bastard owes me fifty bucks. You watch, now. I ain’t giving you a knife, but you watch, now.”

“I didn’t do nothing; I didn’t do anything.”

#

That night, curled in front of the wood stove, Pash tried to sleep with his eyes wide open. He was on his side, his hands clamped between his legs to mask the smell of blood. You can’t wash em, the old man had said. Don’t want you wastin my good water, the old man had said. Go ahead and wash em in the stream, if you want to get the shits something fierce, the old man had said. Pash wiped them off on the grass as best he could.

I can go home in the morning, Pash had said.

Can you bring in half a year’s food overnight, the old man had said.

Anything, Pash had said.

The wood stove was dying, its great inhale tapering to a held breath. The old man gave up one of his burlap blankets, saying, The gaps keep the air in, and, You ever slept with an afghan.

My rents will come looking for me, Pash had said.

Your rents? the old man had said. Oh. Your parents. No, they won’t. They’ve probably forgotten already.

Pash’s eyes were heavy, pupils angling to the floor. He kept drawing them up, pointing them at the blank shape of the woodstove for as long as he could see it. The slight warmth was enough to evaporate the dampness at the corners of his eyes.

continued in part 2

“Hey God. I think I’m ready.”

“I told you not to call me that, child.” Its voice wavered on the personal pronouns, tearing into — what was the last figure? — eight million part harmony. It started doing that a couple weeks ago, explaining that there were sufficient letters of complaint lodged against it. Too many people were whining that God deceived them, made them think that it was only one entity, when in fact it was many. It was the sort of complaint that, if I were it, I would have brushed off; but God in its unity is far more considerate than I could ever be alone.

“My apologies.” I felt the need to debase myself. I remembered a prayer of contrition from my childhood and said it aloud with my face down. I was willing to do just about anything. The speaker on the wall gave a life-like chuckle.

“None of this is necessary, child,” the voice of voices said. “I have remembered everything about you, and am afraid that today is not the day for you to join me.” The butterflies stung in my stomach. God would say no more until I asked it to, understanding that I couldn’t take both rejection and paternity without a stretch of sleep between, or at least a few rounds of video games. God would be silent.

I thought about asking it right then to tell me a story, or quote me some of the day’s news, or just have it listen to me ramble about Patricia’s latest flight of fancy; instead, I went to the kitchen and got a glass of water that tasted of chlorine. The most important things take the least amount of time to say — “no” is only one syllable — and I felt as though I had to make it up by brooding for the rest of the evening. I didn’t have any scotch in the house, so I settled for baser chemicals.

Fifteen times I had submitted myself for Inclusion — my word, not its or the media’s. This was the sixteenth. That made fifteen trips to the store for ice cream and chocolate sauce. I was just putting on my jacket and trying to decide what movie to watch for comfort number sixteen when the phone rang.

I let it and left.

The supermarket was shot through with fluorescent lights. A bit too bright for me; I sank into my hood. A lady by the door bobbed her head at me and asked how I was doing. I said I was fine, thanks, might you point me toward the frozen foods section. I knew where it was, but people like to feel useful. She smiled to prove it. She was one of those raised in the back waters who weren’t taught that it’s wrong to point with your middle finger. I grinned, because that’s what I had to offer, and stomped rain water off my boots.

“Sure coming down,” the lady said.

“Sure is,” I replied.

“How much do you reckon we got?” she said.

“A couple inches, maybe.” The employees weren’t allowed to carry God around at work. The poor woman had to make do talking with me. I nodded to her and went off toward my vanilla destiny, imagining myself as a marionette.

I passed a woman in the shampoo aisle talking to God about which product would be best for her naturally wavy hair. I didn’t hear the answer. A business type guy in a gray suit brushed past me and, along with the scent of his aftershave, I caught a whiff of his prayer: please help me find a woman for tonight. Don’t yet have a way to talk to it in your head. The strange side effect of the whole project is that, as we find we needn’t talk to anyone other than God, the more observant — or less distracted — of us can listen in on thousands of conversations that never would have made it beyond the wetware before. I once overheard Patricia asking it how she could break it off with me most painlessly, so that she and I could still be friends. I didn’t hear the answer.

Not that I needed to. God has become predictable, which is one of the reasons I thought I would make a good addition to it. It started about five years ago, when a man very much like my godfather, only younger, brought his wife to his lab. He was working on the combining of consciousness with silicone and quantum storage. He had already become rich off of his creation of artificial intelligences imbued with personality. I have forgotten his name a dozen times over. I don’t think it’ll ever stick. The guy is still around today; both he and his wife. Twice over, I’d say, though I’m undoubtedly missing a few of the finer details.

With the immense space of quantum storage devices, entire human minds could be backed up; that’s how the AI’s got their human touches, by drawing off of stored human components. So, this whatsisface thought, if humans can be backed up, then why not combined? Combined and modified? It would be like having a child, birthed in science and evolved in elegance. He took what he judged the best parts of his wife, and let her pick the best parts of himself, and they melted together in invisible space, creating a self-aware entity that was better, they were the first to admit, than either of them. That’s how God was born.

It sped through five or six generations over the next month, adding the distilled portions of fresh, valuable minds, while a company was being built around it to market the usefulness of an ever-present entity that acted as a kindly grandmother, a wise grandfather, a chiding mother, a wistful father, and a playful sibling all at once. It spoke at seminars, it presented at the Academy Awards, and it started taking applications for Inclusion. Right from the start, it was something I wanted to be a part of. Obviously not everyone could make it as a member of God. It took only those who added something new, whose intelligence, compassion, or experience wouldn’t be redundant. I thought it was funny when the pope was rejected; I thought it was even funnier when Patricia was accepted.

I joked at her for a while that she was always talking to herself, that sooner or later I’d have to drop her off at the mental clinic for a quick drill-and-dash.

Now God is an eight-million member paradox of unity, and getting stronger and more perfect every day. That’s the assumption, at least: a sort of calculus of human nature. The more minds that are added — the closer to infinity — the smoother the line will be, until it becomes an unbroken upward curve. God itself posits that there is an asymptote, but I never caught the reasoning and haven’t bothered to ask.

That’s the only piece of future we’ve stumbled on during my lifetime — if you don’t count the holographic video games — and it’s not even one I read about as a kid. Everything I read was about improving yourself: memory, lifespan, beauty. And how great humanity would be when each member thinks himself god; they all would have to be right. But you can only worship one god at a time; hell with worshiping, you can only have one god at a time. The pantheistic religions died quick civil deaths because they either couldn’t keep the deities straight or wrote those deities into a hundred petty wars, letting them die from a hundred shallow cuts.

I said a prayer of thanksgiving for progress, noted that God didn’t respond, grabbed the latest non-fat ice cream, and made careful steps, so as not to slip on the wet linoleum, back to the front and the checkout lines.

The man with the gray aftershave, or the gray suit and subtle aftershave, was ahead of me in line. He had one finger to his ear, listening to God on an earpiece. His head snapped up, startling me. He squinted off to the right. I followed. Two lanes over was a short strawberry blonde paying with a credit card for what looked like a month’s worth of groceries. The suit turned on his heels and nearly knocked me over. He leaned into me for just long enough to say, I’m sorry, mate, and then was past me. I smiled a bit too late and, shifting my cold carton from one arm to the other, I took his place in the line.

A teen with black hair, and a smile for his natural state, was fussing with the barcode on my purchase when the gray struck up a conversation with Strawberry Shortcake. I caught bits of it slipping through the cracks of white noise, the rain on a high roof. She was named Molly and he still tried to use the line about it being such a coincidence they met. I had thought that one would have been long dead by now.

Maybe he would cook dinner for her, or pay for a night on the town. Maybe she was just the right woman to fill up his gap of need with soft scent and her stories of childhood. Maybe they both needed not to be alone that night. Only God knew.

There were three messages on my machine when I got home. One was from Patricia, and started off with the words “About last night.” I deleted it without listening to the rest. The other two were from my dad. He wanted me to call, didn’t say why. He always does that; he tries to get you interested in everything he says, not revealing much because he thinks that mystery breeds company. I know I do it, too. I guess I can be glad that, as long as I get rejected, God will never have to bear the genetic smear of that kind of drama fishing.

Reason number one that I should have been Included: my hard-hearted nobility.

I sucked in my gut and put the ice cream in the freezer before deciding what to do. I prayed about it, remembering only after a held-breath pause to add that it was okay for God to answer. It did.

“I’m so sorry, child. Your godfather’s immune system could not keep up with the changes being made to it. He died at four fifty-seven this afternoon.”

I would have liked to punch or kick something, but I was to far away to connect; by the time I moved to some place vulnerable, the desire would have faded. Not to mention that I would have had time to berate myself for a drama queen. They’re short words and I’m a capable orator.

We had all been expecting this for a while, anyway. If I had thumped a knuckle on the wall, it would have been mostly my own show; but there was nothing to stop me from remembering it the way it never happened to myself, to my family, later. Godfather Gary — he always loved the alliteration — had had the AIDS sequel. He got it on a hunting trip by quartering an untagged buck. He wasn’t taking precautions (there’s a word I learned in third grade) and got a good shot of arterial blood in the mouth. I was eight and holding on to his bow and quiver while dad brought the truck up as close as he could get.

God never came up with a cure. It’s kinda worth laughing at, if only to take the geniuses down a peg or two. You see: genius isn’t cumulative. It’s more of a binary, on/off state. Either you’re a genius or you’re not. So even though God is about three million certified eggheads, it doesn’t rank any higher than dear departed Hawking or Sagan, or even Dylan.

There’s reason number two: I couldn’t hurt it any.

“He asked me to remember a message for you. I did not understand it. Would you like me to pass it on to you?”

“Please do,” I said.

“I warn you, though: the content is not what you are used to.”

I expected a pause before the message began. I got four seconds of the most ragged Kum-ba-ya, then: “I can’t remember the words. Burn bad. If you’re happy and you know it, crap your pants.” He giggled, and I hate using that word for the laughter of men. “That woman in your pictures. Do you take her out at night. Do you buy her beer. You ought to. A man isn’t any better than the beer he drinks. I don’t even like how it tastes. God, I wish they’d let me have some.” I heard a faint scratching sound in the recording and imagined it to be his wild eyes rubbing against the dry parchment of his eyelids. “You don’t drink Irish beer. You eat it. That ain’t right. Take her to a meal, feed her good. Take her for a drink, get her a fucking drink.”

And that was it. Godfather Gary had never slung me more than two words at a time during all our hunting trips and late hazardous fires. He didn’t need to. I always wished he would.

“How,” I said, and let the word disintegrate. “When did he do this?”

“Two-twelve this afternoon, Pacific daylight time.”

“Was anyone with him?”

“There was a nurse just outside. He asked her to leave before he would talk to me.” There was that fragmented word again. Then silence. My apartment creaked at the corners as the building settled down for the night. I got my ice cream out of the freezer and dished myself up a bowl. Realized I had forgotten the chocolate sauce at the store and shook my head for caring.

“God,” I said, not sure if I was talking to it or just letting it out. I figured God wouldn’t know either, but I heard a quiet sigh, and then,

“I would prefer it if you would call me godfather, child. It is a better word.”

A cold hand pushed from my insides out; something was trying to escape. It was just the ice cream melting. Diffuse the tension to a sleeping room.

The phone rang, sounding like an angry cricket. I put my hand on it, waited for a silence, said, “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” then answered.

“Hey. It’s me,” said the voice on the other end.

“Hey Patty.” Patty Last Night.

“I just got paid. Meet you at the bar?”

What was my alternative? Stay at home and argue with a creature deep enough to seem infallible? I wanted a great burst of forgetfulness, just to wipe the whole day away from Hey God onward. With Patricia’s rich eyes and thin fall of hair reflecting in a glass of alcohol, I could at least approach a slow burn off of memory. I told her twenty minutes and was at the Billabong in ten.

Two buzzed guys with yellow teeth, that nevertheless flashed bright in the dim wash of wall lamps, were singing Whitney Houston on the corner karaoke machine.

“I will always love you if you give me a scotch,” I said to the bartender. I knew her pretty well. Her dogs had to be put down last week. Guess why. She grinned and lifted up a bottle of Four Roses bourbon.

“Will this do?”

“I’m an American. It’s all the same to me.”

“Want any ice in it?”

“Plain’s fine.”

An elegant white hand crawled across my shoulder. A pair of lips settled their words in my ear. I wondered what color they were.

“Hey, pretty boy,” said Patty. I turned, dislodging her fingers but not her perfume. They were deep purple.

“Hey, Patty. How’s it going?”

“Not bad, not bad,” she said. She slipped onto the stool next to mine and spun back and forth, grinning as though she had something she wanted to tell me.

“What?” I said.

“Guess.”

“God finally told you it was okay to kill your boss.”

She laughed. “No, silly. Guess again.” My drink appeared. “I’ll have a Miller Lite,” said Patricia. The bartender glanced between the two of us and her face slid into a deer in headlights frieze.

“Yeah, it’s on me this time,” I said. I wanted to add, Green light. Patricia’s playfulness was getting into me. I took a sip to drown it. The bartender grabbed a brown bottle from the ice chest and popped it open, set it carefully in front of Patricia, and set to polishing anything she could reach.

“Guess,” Patricia reminded me.

“Uh. You found the copy of SLC Punk! I loaned you.”

“Oh shit! No. No, you suck at this game.” I allowed this might be possible and took another sip. My taste buds protested. They didn’t mention why. “I got the job in Seattle,” she said.

That was exactly what I needed. I downed the rest of the my drink as one thick drop and finished out the conversation in my head.

“I thought we really had something. This time.”

“Dammit! That’s the problem with you. With this town. You think that just by my staying around, I’m giving you another chance. Forget it. I’m tired of trying to make this town like me, and I’m tired of trying to make you happy. I’m going to go do something for myself. It involves me, this bottle of beer, and a business suit puddle up on the floor.”

It’s no use trying to forget when the brain remembers that you’re trying to forget; it makes a careful catalogue of everything you’re trying to bleed out, gives you big platter eyes and says, You forgot these things today, master: God thinks you’re worthless, your godfather’s ghost scared the crap out of you, and your ex-wife thinks you’re cute. Aren’t you glad you forgot?

Reason number three: the balance.

The karaoke guys were completely shit-faced by now; I envied them. I said, That’s just great, Patty, to the counter top.

With all the whining that I’ve done so far, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: why doesn’t this bastard just do it already and save the fucking kilobytes. I can’t, though. Suicide is harsh, brutal, a surprise. No one understands it, least of all the ones who let it write the last words of their lives. I’m thoughtful enough to pick up the pen, write out the note of apology and farewell; too thoughtful to coil the rope, or even to load the gun.

I was tired. I walked.

My town’s a small one. Main street runs the distance of a good healthy shout long one side. The concrete of the walk is old and growing moss in places. I tried hard not to step on any cracks. Before I knew it, I was outside the cinema. Changed its name to The Theater a few years back, but I don’t mind calling it by its real name. Patricia would rather I just find my way to the present and call her by the name she likes the best.

The box office had just opened for a restricted movie. A knot of teens were chattering about nothing they’d remember and opening their wallets. The tired girl behind the ticket window was explaining through the mechanical filter of her microphone that proper identification was required before she could let them in.

A girl with a very loud voice — must have been why she had such wide lips — suddenly yelled, “Oh shut up! I can see whatever I want.”

It took me a few seconds to realize she was talking to God and not to me. She was looking right at me. But I had my collar up, so she probably couldn’t see me.

“Don’t tell them, please. Oh god. They’d flip out.”

God as little brother tattle-tale. I brushed past them and heard one comment rudely on how I smelled. I wanted to tell him to keep it up, that it wouldn’t be hard to find out where he lived and go pee on all his stuff, or worse. Or better. His parents wouldn’t notice if he disappeared. They could pick another one up at the high school after classes got out on Monday and they would never know the difference.

I had turned around and raised my fist before I even knew it.

A handy God speaker set into the cinema wall buzzed. “I can’t let you do that, Dave,” said God, who has a binary sense of humor. He didn’t need to interfere. If he hadn’t…

I had the kid by the shirt collar and yanked him backwards off his feet. He made a low animal noise. I didn’t know the right way to do it, so I sunk my fist into the back of his head. Each phalange in my fingers popped, it felt like, out of joint. The kid hit the cement and broke all their mothers’ backs.

Behind the window, the ticket girl was mouthing what turned out to be a call to the police. She was too far from the microphone for me to hear exactly what she called me.

They put me into the holding cell for the night along with an eyesore drunk. It was just a ten-foot by ten-foot cube fenced in with chicken wire. I looped my fingers through and watched the guard’s television until I heard snoring from my friend. I hoped he was forgetting whatever made him start on the bottle. Probably forgetting why he hates being drunk.

My fingers still felt out of joint. I flexed them, heard a few pops. I spoke quietly. “Hey God? I think I’m ready.”

“Please, child, call me godfather.”

“That’s a little touchy right now.”

“I understand.”

There was a thick silence. A train of thoughts sped through my mind, too fast for my tongue to catch. I will never lift a hand against myself, what has she gotten herself into, Miss Houston is one of it right isn’t she, and DeMarco is down in round six ding ding.

“So.” I let the word keep coming. “Am I ready?”

“No, you are not ready.”

“I am! I swear I’ve learned so —“

“Space is limited. We have no room for redundancy.”

“Tell me what I am lacking.”

“If I knew what I was lacking, I would have it, child.” I wove my fingers through my hair and pulled just enough to make my scalp ache. “I am sorry. This has been a hard day for you.”

“No. It’s been heaven.” I took a deep breath, feeling for all the world as if I was sitting down to the SAT’s. “I know I’m ready, God. Look where I am. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t ready.”

“There’s a few ways that could be interpreted.”

The SAT’s were eliminated the year after I took them.

“I mean I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t put myself in situations that I can’t help but learn from. And I do learn.”

“I know that you do. I keep as close an eye on you as I can. I love you.”

All those pronouns, forcing its thick voice through a thin vacuum.

“Are you saying there is nothing I can add?” I asked woodenly.

“No, of course not. Good grammar is a plus, but it’s just not enough.”

“Please be serious.”

“I find it hard to be, faced with you. You’ve enough seriousness for two of me.” I didn’t say anything. Would you have? I was all set for a religious experience in the downbeat cells of Poortown, USA, where the only preacher is the announcer in the ring between Jim Beam and the heart. And a religious experience I was having. When Yahweh came down to the Israelites and told them they were pretty much fucked for forty years, that was a religious experience. When Zeus went for a walk, tripped over a cobblestone, and accidentally raped Hercules’ mother, that was a religious experience.

“If I learned anything from Gary,” God said after its synthesized sigh. “It was when to be silent. I’m going to go away, now. Don’t do anything foolish. I love you, child.”

There was a cot for me to sleep on. It didn’t have a mattress. I flopped down on my back, like a body at the morgue.

Space is limited, it had said, lied. I let myself drown in sleep, counting all the names of God I knew.

A blown kiss. “Hi, beauty. You look tired. Did you hear the news?” The Man doesn’t pause between ideas, shoving them out of the airlock a step ahead of him. They’re faster than the kiss.

The Woman is hunched heavy over a pad at the dining room table, an aching blue wash of light bleeding around her outline. She blows a strand of hair out of her eyes, adds a thumbprint to the corner of a document and sets the pad down.

“What?”

“The news. It’s been all over the nets today.”

“I’ve been busy all day. I’m exhausted, lover one. We’ve only got until day after tomorrow to get this stuff in.”

The Man sneaks up behind the Woman and kisses her on the back of the neck, leaving no mark. She wipes the saliva off.

“Don’t worry about the taxes. There’s something more important.” He pushes on the pad, suspending its process. Exasperated eyes turn to him and miss. He is gazing out the kitchen window. The horizon coughs up every point of light brave enough to reach this far from home.

“You have to start on the right foot, darling,” she chides. “Dad’s will has covered for us so far, but it’s out now. If we don’t get the hang of it this year, we’ll slip even further next year, and the year after that, and we’ll end up buried under back taxes, and lose our home, birthing permit, and there’s no way you’ll handle your job…” He shuts her up with a kiss. He has chapped lips, and hasn’t shaved. The Woman pulls her whole head away before romance takes.

“It’s not important,” the Man says, meaning it.

“Okay, I’ll bite.”

“Ooo, yes. Please do.”

She doesn’t smile. “No. What’s the news?”

“Earth’s dead.”

“That’s not news. No one’s lived there for centuries.” The Woman grabs her pad, scowls at the pain in her back and stands. She stretches like a cat.

“No one’s lived there, but it hasn’t been dead,” the husband protests. “They’re predicting a tectonic collapse, or something like that, before the week’s out.”

“Why does that matter?” The words run back and forth down the hallway ahead of their owners and into the living room. The Woman slips down onto her cushion, match-molded fibers cradling her perfectly. She waits for relaxation to assert itself and then lifts the pad in front of her eyes again. It wakes up, blue light back.

“Because it’s our home.”

“This is our home.”

A little bubble, a back yard, a few rooms, nice pictures of Grandma, Donnie, and pets they’ve never had.

“But it was built to look like Earth.”

“It was built to be comfortable. Shut up for a second.” She gives ham-handed acupuncture to the tax form and sighs. “We don’t get a rebate this year.”

“Earth was our home.” Nothing. “Is Donnie here?”

“He went to a friend’s house.”

“Which friend?”

“He didn’t say.”

Quiet. Millions of miles away, magma spills from a gaping, dirty wound; a plate, slower than a glacier, takes out the aggravation of billions of years on its neighbor; the sound of screaming slowed down to a grumble, a roar, a shout. The protests shoot up into the black and blackening sky, lodge themselves in the stratosphere and die.

The Man can hear them. He cocks his head, turns to find another window and gazes unfocused. He opens his mouth to sigh, to start a sentence, but only gets as far as the sigh…

“Don’t, honey. You were cloned and grown. Now come help me find our grocery receipts.”

She stands and stabs him with responsibility. Some time later, they go to bed without making love.

#

The Woman wakes up to a bed that doesn’t feel cold, thanks to the layer of tiny fibers that friction heat the mattress, but does feel empty. Her brain takes a few seconds to yawn through its checklist. Everything is dark. It shouldn’t be dark. There should be sun. There should be something else, someone else, another body.

“Honey?”

She props herself up on her elbows, hair swinging half a pendulum to a stop. The Man sits a few feet from the bed, far more than a million miles away. He has a pad in his hand, and electrodes snake out from the machine to his temples.

“Honey.” Frustration hidden behind a sleep-smelling palm rubbed across her face. His eyes flick over to her, and for a full second they stand on either end of that bridge, staring. Then he turns back to the pad, and she shoots out her supports to fall back into the warmth of a bed to herself.

Comfort, yes, but it takes her quite some time to drift all the way down to sleep.

The Man falls even further, reading and listening to the words and thoughts of thousands of other men and women with quicker brains than his. The Earth will not last longer than tomorrow, or the day after. It managed to survive until a death of natural causes, though. No sacred Horsemen scour its face, no shining clouds herald the return of the Once and Ever King. It would be a foolish King who would make his way to Earth, now, riding on billows of poison and ash. Any Lord with such a steed would be welcome to whatever desolation he can grab.

The Man starts, opens his eyes from dreams about war on green hills burned brown. He pulls the trodes off, and coils them, deliberate as a drunkard. Gradually, his nose brings messages of wafting flavor to his brain. His stomach rumbles assent at the unspoken question, and the Man balances carefully to the kitchen.

“How late was I up last night?” instead of “Good morning, love.”

The Woman hands him a plate of potatoes. He starts to eat, standing.

“Donnie already left for school. You’re going to be late for work.”

“I don’t think I’ll work today. Earth could go at any minute.”

Sigh. “There will be a warning, lover one. These things don’t happen instantaneously.” And then, behind the chiding, “I wish you wouldn’t do this.”

“I just like to pay my respects.”

“Remember when you missed Dad’s funeral.”

A forkful of potatoes gives more than adequate excuse to not reply.

“You are going to finish the taxes today?”

“Yes, dear.”

“I’ll be on the nets until lunch.” He wipes his mouth and retreats.

The Woman scowls, lets it slowly melt into a deep breath, held, exhaled. That’s the problem with the Jovian breeding system, her brain says without words. Physiological compatibility is more important than psychological.

The government must be clairvoyant. Their mail slot dings with an official notice and spits out a sheet of etched diamond. The Woman retrieves it, reads, and feeds it to the recycler.

She works until lunch, tossing numbers, doing chores to relax. Donnie comes home to eat. His hair is the color of the Red Hurricane, and the blood Russian ships. Yesterday it was black.

“Food’s coming. Go get your Father.”

“Dad’s not at work?”

She shakes her head, and Donnie doesn’t really care enough to try an inquisition. He takes off his shoes and hunches to the living room, carrying himself like he knows he’ll take on the world, but he doesn’t know it won’t happen for another decade.

He slugs the Man on the arm. Eyes snap up, hollow from too many cathode rays. The Man takes a sip of water from a half-full glass near his elbow and knuckles away the focus from his eyes.

“Nice hair.”

“Thanks. No work today?”

The Man cocks his head into a pause. “A holiday.”

“School wasn’t canceled. What’s the occasion?”

“The end of the world.”

A sniff from tiny nostrils. “You mean Earth, Yeah? Yeah, I heard about that. Some kids were talking about it at school today. Yeah. Mom says come to lunch.” Donnie turns away, job finished, and somewhere in there is satisfaction. The Man comes up behind him, in perfect position for a fatherly hand that doesn’t come.

“Don’t you care?”

“Never lived there.”

“Well, neither did I, but still.”

“Still.”

The little family rings the table and relaxes, good food in front, a car in their garage. The Woman’s face is small, drawn in light pencil downcast. Donnie hears a hundred unspoken words, an argument, fly between his Mom and Dad, and doesn’t interrupt the silence. He eats quick, pushes away from the table, pulls on his shoes and paints himself out of the picture.

The Man chews, completely absent, staring out the kitchen window. The Woman takes a bite, grinds a few unnecessary words into the food and swallows.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

The Man wipes his mouth. Eyes still on the universe. He stands, turns, stops, turns. He replays the last few seconds in his brain, the auditory echo catching up. “What?”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“We’ve been given the instruction.”

“What?” The Woman doesn’t bother to repeat. A smile surfaces from the Man’s face, a crocodile that she knew was there but couldn’t see beneath the film of algae. “Really?”

“Yes.”

Quickening pace, and quick step: his hand is warm. She takes a shaky step away. The crocodile sinks. “What? What’s wrong, lover?”

“Tell me you’re going to work tomorrow.”

“But…”

“No; please. This is important to me. Promise.”

When the words come out of his mouth, the softness rises between them. If the stars go out, it doesn’t matter.

#

Finality; dissatisfaction, but finality. The woman lifts her finger from the transmit button. Right now, electrons carry money straight from safety into governmental troughs. Against all logic, the loss feels heavy — everything in proportion to the zeroes.

The Woman lets a tonal sigh propel her back into her silhouette couch. Peace without thought. She smiles at the pictures on the mantelpiece, frowns at the thought of adding another, scowls at the skim of dust, jumps at the sound of the front door sliding open and closed.

She ignites a storm into the hallway on tired feet.

“Donnie! What are…” It’s not Donnie. It’s the Man, stargazing, jaw muscles creaking almost audibly. Lightning crackles the Woman’s teeth.

“What are you doing home.”

“It’s happening.” Distant. She knows, to the mile, how far away.

She slaps him.

His mouth works to form the words: “You slapped me.” Nothing comes out.

She has never touched him outside the brittle boundaries of prescribed affection. She left a mark. “Fine. This is jeopardizing your family. I can’t stop you. If a dirty planet means more to you than being the strength for us, I can’t stop you.” It’s not true, the Man knows. She could stop him. It wouldn’t take much more than another slap, the other cheek he turns to her as he looks away. The silence thickens, the air unwilling to shake sound through its emptiness. He hears words in between his ears; words he fears she will say. She says them.

“I’m filing for a transfer. You aren’t stable.”

He tries to blink, only gets halfway through. He rubs his eyelids. The words fade, so meaningless and dead now. He feels a rumble, and doesn’t hear the sound of trumpets calling Christ. He whirls, faster than he meant, stomps down the hallway and into the living room. The Woman stands in shock, stunned by her own words, and melting slowly. With one sweep, the pictures, archives of a lifetime, fall into the Man’s arms. He fumbles them straight, carries them — so light — to the back yard bubble.

The Woman flares. Her eyes moisten, boiling hot. She can’t see and doesn’t try to. She makes her way by memory to the washroom. Opens the medicine cabinet and only now wipes away the tears, for necessity’s sake. She finds the bottles of poison and spermicide, the applicator, long and straight and deadly boring. She brings the flood back and blurs out her hands as they rub all trace of him from out of her.

Sparks catch. The pictures start to crackle, blacken. The Man stares, evaporating emotion in the heat. His Mother-in-Law’s face stops smiling up at him, the lips reduced to carbon and energy. He follows a spark from her forehead to its reflection in the dome. It blinks out before it hits the top of the artificial sky. One less piece of light in a night that is dying, point by point.

“Goodbye, Grand mother.”

The Callows let me join up because I was good at telling their stories back to them. My mum passed on before I graduated and I needed a place to stay. The Callows took me in when I told them I knew words, like virtue and violent, and could use them right. They kept me after I scared Old Tina under a blanket with a story about sad murderers. Most of the others thought it was funny.

They weren’t my kind of people. I didn’t talk much to them, aside from the stories. They called me Quiet Archie and let me sleep on the outside of the huddle, so half my body stayed warm at night.

Someone decided I should be in Old Tina’s gaggle. Probably Old Tina, to get back at me for making her skin prickle in front of the others. I told her I wasn’t picking on her, and she told me to learn how to lift wallets or I’d be gone.

Apart from me, Old Tina’s gaggle had Durn, Broke, and Layla. Durn and Broke were twins, and had twin open sores on their cheeks from eating out of the wrong charity lines. When he met me, Durn pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek and made pus come out the wound. Broke had good ideas, and talked about them with Old Tina all the time. He was kind of a brain, and he knew it, and I could tell it made him scared, all that blood in his head instead of his fists. I wasn’t a brain — I just told good stories — but I kind of knew how he felt.

Layla was something different. She had two long, brown knots in her hair, hand-tied and spilling curls and tangles. We were kind of like twins, too — she did everything I didn’t, acted out on everything that made me look at my shoes. She talked all the time. We were like two halves of a split genetic code. Everyone knew she’d take over the gaggle after Old Tina got graduated. Old Tina was doing her best not to, probably just for that reason. 

It was enough. For as much as Old Tina growled at me, she did double to Layla. Layla scored more panhandling than any of us because she was prettier and knew how to pout. When Old Tina tried, her face just sucked into a grimace she couldn’t shake loose. Like a puppy, I took to following Layla around on days that Old Tina didn’t give me something else to do.

One time, the summer after I joined up, she and I were strolling along a sidewalk in a so-so suburb. We were visiting the cul-de-sacs and asking for donations, but really keeping an eye out for lazy housewives and unlocked doors. That had been bath day at one of the Callows’ shelters, so Layla and I both smelled like skin and new sweat. We hit nuclear families and got a few packs of cigarettes, because we told them they were like money. So, we smoked through the stands of catalpa and Russian olive and mostly kept off the grass. I was pretty happy, kind of full, a little high, but Layla wanted more to take back to Old Tina. I told her what I remembered of the grasshopper and the ants.

“Just one more,” said Layla. She pointed at a red brick one-storey which was built like a cube in the middle of a yard of fresh asphalt. There wasn’t any grass, but part of the driveway was painted green.

“Looks poor,” I said.

“Relative to you,” said Layla with a grin. She pulled me up the walk. I complained that my feet were tired, because I thought maybe we were at that place where she would give me sympathy. She didn’t. She glared at me and pushed me toward the doorbell. I rang it. It was old tech, audio-only. The track was some laughter, high-pitched and cracking like a little dog’s bark. Layla put her ear to the door as the sound faded. She shook her head; no one was moving inside. I rang the laughter-bell again.

Layla put her hand on the doorknob. “I heard someone say, ‘Come in,’” she said. Turned out the door wasn’t locked. Layla was the first through, so I got to watch her jump about three feet through her skin when a voice said, “Welcome to the pit of terror,” and cackled.

Layla had a fist-shiv cocked and ready before she had stopped cussing, and I had a grin that hurt my teeth. “That wasn’t you,” she said, and a little of the fire of profanity died out of her eyes. 

“Nope,” I said.

“You tell anyone,” she said and raised her fist a bit more.

“Nope,” I said. I stepped into the house. “Welcome to the pit of terror,” said the crackly voice. It was lo-fi, like bounced radio. I looked down at my feet. There was a black box the size of a street puck glued to the door frame, and a speaker mounted on the wall above it. I kicked my foot out in front of the box. “Welcome to the pit of terror.” 

Layla laughed just to prove she could get there first and told me to heel. The rest of the house was quiet. It smelled like a spiced pie, strong enough to burn out my senses. I could tell that once I left the house everything would be dull for a few hours, same as after leaving one of the run down kitchens.

“Quiet, you,” said Layla, and led me into the kitchen. We padded on the balls of our feet, squeaking a little over the linoleum. “It’s a man,” said Layla. She pointed at the counter tops. They were filthy with old dishes and rotten food. We started picking over the stuff, breathing through our mouths, just in case there was anything good, like bone china or wine. I opened the refrigerator; its light was burnt out. It held row upon row of liter bottles of water and an open box of baking soda. “Check this out,” said Layla. She had a small metal basket in her hands. The basket was full of pill bottles, white, and amber, and blue glass. She gave it all a good shake, and it was like castanets. 

Someone screamed. I shook my foot, but didn’t see any more little black boxes. Layla said, “Down, boy,” and then someone screamed again. The sound trickled out into a dozen syllables of pleading, and then there was a meaty thud. I expected an echo, but there wasn’t one. Instead, there was full silence, like inside a lead box. 

Layla pushed me a couple steps forward. There was a crystal sphere hanging in the kitchen window, and I spun it as I went past. Slivers of rainbows, like tears in cloth, blurred color around the room. It reminded me of the hospital where mum died. The nurses kept the windows flung wide, polarized glass letting in a soft glow that was supposed to make her feel like heaven wasn’t so bad, or something.

There was another scream, and Layla shoved me through the archway that led from the kitchen to the rest of the house to see what was going on. She stayed behind the frame, pawing through the basket of meds.

I found myself in a living room. It wasn’t much of a place for the living. There was black velvet on the walls, red bulbs screwed into the bare sockets overhead, fake spiders with big goggle-eyes, a coffee table in the shape of a casket, and an old man folded under a deep purple blanket sitting in a recliner. There were two threads of red juice out of the corners of his mouth, and his head was bowed. His skin was pink and splotchy and looked as if it didn’t quite fit him. He was watching the television.

“Hey,” I said.

“There’s some good shit, here,” said Layla. “Good money.”

The old man breathed in through his nose so long and hard it tipped his head clean back. His mouth fell open and he started to snore. His eyes were closed. The television screamed. 

“Hey,” I said, and took a step forward. The man’s eyes slit open; I could see a thin reflection under each lash, but he was trying hard not to let me. “You all right?” I asked.

“He’s a cat,” said Layla. “Rank vegetable. Come on. We should tell Old Tina.” I could hear that she wanted to be talked out of it, so I just plain ignored her. The old man’s head flopped toward me; his skin sloshed waves like a deflated balloon. 

“You’re new,” he said. 

“Brand new,” said Layla, coming out from behind the archway. Her hands were empty, but her pockets were full. “What are you doing all dead like that?”

“I’m Shooter,” said the old man. “Do you have my pills? I need my pills.”

I looked at Layla. She shrugged at me. “Just a sec,” I said to Shooter. I ducked back into the kitchen. 

“What are you doing?” asked Layla. “Tell him he’s out. He won’t know. He’ll order more for us to lift.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” I said. “My mum was in the hospital. You say you’re out, they let you be out until your chart says it’s okay to have another refill. Got to give him some of it.”

“None of this,” said Layla, patting the pills. “I know some about medicine, too. This will buy long showers for all the Callows. Do something for Durn and Broke, maybe.”

“Maybe it’s just for his skin,” I said. I looked in the medicine basket. Layla had left a couple of worthless bottles of herbal supplements, and a blister pack of B-complexes. “Should have taken these,” I said, giving her the B-pills. I tapped out a handful of Echinacea and something that smelled like raw liver and held them in my fist. “All right, Shooter,” I said, stepping into the living room. I held out the pills. The old man stared at them, arranged in a dense constellation on the puffed-out palm of his hand.

“Something’s missing,” he said. Layla came up behind me with a glass of water, which she gave to Shooter. He took the pills one by one, placing them into the pouch of his lip as if they were dips from a tobacco tin, and swallowing them back with sips from the glass. Layla glared at me, and I looked away from her. Shooter’s skin was creeping me out, so my eyes settled on the only other movement in the room: the television. The images were black-and-white; there was blood, but it was a metal gray and made me think of bad nano. 

Shooter swallowed his last pill and smacked his lips. “I stopped paying,” he said. “Last girl stole from me. Damn kids.” I nodded, absently, and watched a young woman tear her flimsy nightgown. “What are you doing here?” Shooter asked. 

“Final visit,” said Layla. She always could lie off the top of her head. “Need anything?”

“How do I look?” asked Shooter.

“I’d do you,” said Layla. Shooter laughed, and he was much more comfortable with the sound than he was with his skin. It rumbled and echoed and didn’t fit with the television at all.

“What are you watching?” I asked him. 

“This. You’ve never seen this?” said Shooter. “God, sometimes I’m disappointed,” he continued after a pause for breath. “Not even horror has survived your generation.”

“Give me a good reality,” said Layla. “That’s life. Not this shit.”

“I like it,” I said. That got another chuckle from Shooter and a snort from Layla.

“Come on,” she said. “It’s time for us to leave.”

I tore myself away from the screen and gave Shooter a small wave.

He raised a tired hand to wave back. “You live well when you’re scared,” he said, almost like an apology. It bothered me, the way he said it, so I had my hands in my pockets, thinking, all the way out to the street. Layla hit me on the shoulder. She rattled like a bone girl with every step, because of the meds. 

“We’re coming back,” she said. 

“You got all the good stuff,” I said.

“He’s all by himself,” she said, and that was the end of the argument. If I fought her on it, Old Tina would hear, and accuse me of holding back on the good of the gaggle. 

When we got back to the Callow hideout, we told Old Tina about the whole score. She listened hard — I tried to tell the story right, but Layla kept interrupting me, rushing me to the good parts quicker. I gave up and let her spill. She brought out the pills as a grand finale, and Old Tina looked them over good.

“Wide open?” asked Old Tina.

“As can be,” said Layla. 

Old Tina tapped open one of the bottles and tipped its contents into her palm. She swirled them around with one finger while she turned something over in her mind. “Give it to the twins. They can sell this stuff in no time. But we’re hitting the park tonight.”

“Bad idea,” said Layla. “Cold tonight. Be like Alaska, population and temp.”

“But a greater potential,” said Old Tina. “You want to stick with dives and dead folks, you have to take me out of the gaggle.” She leaned toward Layla and I saw something flash in both their eyes. “I aim to take Callows way past your suburbs, little girl. I dream big.”

“I don’t need to,” said Layla.

The sun went down about then, and the hideout felt suddenly smaller. I excused myself, more polite than I had to, and went off to find Durn and Broke to tell them about our haul. I was getting well into it when a kid from another gaggle came running through, crowing, “Fight! Fight!”

It was a rite of dominance. Layla and Old Tina were in crouches in the middle of an expanding, contracting ring of other Callows. I couldn’t see much of the fight itself, because the audience kept pushing me out to the fringe. They did the same to Durn and Broke. Apparently, gaggle members weren’t supposed to see, in case they helped out in the fight. Weapons came out — I could hear metal scraping like a claw on a tooth — but most of the screams that followed were deep breaths from the gut. I didn’t really want to see what was going on, except that I wouldn’t be able to tell the story right to anyone who might ask.

It ended in frustration, a pair of arms thrown up in resignation, and the grumbles of a crowd denied its blood. Old Tina had lost by the rules, given up on her own terms. She pushed through the crowd and knocked me in the shoulder on her way out, not like a friend, but like clearing the last obstacle. I watched her go.

Layla came up behind me. “Saw it coming,” she said.

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Big head, small world,” said Layla. “Get the twins. We’re going back to Shooter’s.”

The twins had disappeared before the fight was over, more concerned with selling the meds than in catching on to the politics, so Layla and I waited for them to come back. Durn came in first, and said he had punched some guy in the nuts and sold him a handful of the stuff as pain relievers. Layla scolded him for undervaluing the stuff, and he popped a zit at her and said something about Old Tina, which Layla ignored. Broke wandered in a few minutes later with both pockets full of money. “Doubled the volume,” he said to me with a grin as Layla counted the bank notes. “One pocket of pills, two pockets of bills.”

Layla slipped her hands down her pants and stowed the money in a secret pocket. Durn and Broke didn’t watch her, but I did, and I got a show and a scowl. When she pulled up her jeans again, I could see the rectangular outline of the money through the fabric, and so could everyone else, but they’d have to cut her to get at it. 

It was two in the morning before we got underway to Shooter’s house. There was dew on the streets, turning the asphalt to ink. Broke and Layla walked in the front, strategizing. Durn and I followed behind, taking turns at complaining about our empty stomachs. When we were a block away from Shooter’s, Layla turned to us and said, “Callows eat when they eat.” It was one of Old Tina’s lines. 

Broke looked at the house and shrugged big. “Whatever,” he said. “Doesn’t look bad. Lights are on. It’s one on four, so let’s go.”

“Dig in,” said Layla. She led the way, with Durn at her heels. Broke hung back with me.

“You ought to be up there,” he said.

“They’ve got it,” I replied. 

Durn was best at picking locks, so he crouched in front of the door and got to work as Broke and I ambled up. Layla crouched near Durn, getting in his light, and hissing orders. First one deadbolt then another were shot back into their shells. The knob turned easily, and Layla got the chain with a pair of handheld wire cutters. 

“Someone must have come by,” I said, quietly tapping on one half of the dangling chain.

“Or he got up,” said Layla. She disappeared behind the door; Durn and Broke jumped out of their skins as the electronic voice said, “Welcome to the pit of terror.” I wondered why the hell we had been keeping quiet if we were just going to walk right on in. Broke recovered first and peered down at the black box, as I had done, while Durn started giggling and wagging his foot through the infrared beam. Layla caught him in the ear and shushed him. We all followed her inside. 

The lights in the kitchen were on, and they made everything else that much blacker. We couldn’t see more than a foot into the living room

“What was wrong with this guy?” asked Durn.

“Looked like he was shrinking,” I said. “Except his skin stayed the same size.”

Layla led the way into the kitchen. We started opening cabinets, searching for anything of value. I found plastic plates and cups, a set of camp silverware, and a bottle of gin with less than a shot glass’ worth in the bottom. Durn and Broke found soap and were fighting over bits of it to rub into their sores. Layla got frustrated fast and stopped talking in whispers. 

“Quiet Archie,” she said. “Go check out the living room.” I didn’t have a point from which to argue, so I tossed her the gin and mouse-stepped through the archway. The living room was populated with dull the black shapes of furniture and wisps of wind from some unseen vent. “Go faster, scaredy-man,” said Layla. “Even he could call the cops.”

I fumbled my hand along the wall and found the familiar plastic of a light switch. I gave it a click. Fluorescent tubes that hadn’t seen life in a while stuttered bright. “Shit,” said a voice. I shaded my eyes while they adjusted and looked toward the voice. 

Shooter was sitting in his chair with a police-grade pistol cocked in his right hand. He looked as if he had been half-boiled in vinegar. His skin was puffy and bruised in some places, drum-head tight and thin in others. Huge blisters had formed on his face and arms, but they were bloodless. It looked as if bubbles of air had been blown between his dermal layers. “What are you doing here?” he asked. The gun was a little shaky.

“Take it easy, man,” I said. I tried to think of something to tell him to get him to lower the gun, but all my stories took off right about then. The only thing I could remember was the smell of the room in which my mother had died, and how it seemed to make the bones in all my fingers melt.

With a muttered, “You find anything?” Layla peeked around the archway. I glanced at her just in time to watch her scream. Even though I could see it coming, the rest of my bones went the way of my fingers and I just about fell into the television set. “What the hell is that?” cried Layla.

Shooter’s face went all loose, like a sheet in the wind. He was trying to make some expression, but I couldn’t tell what it was. My heart was chattering like a bird’s because of the gun, no matter the strength or disposition of its owner. “Hey, Layla,” I said. 

Durn and Broke had come to check out the commotion. Durn shrieked like a girl, worse than Layla had, but Broke just stood there with wide eyes, methodically stroking one of the sores on his cheek. All four of us might as well have been stuck to the floor. Layla’s face was contorting through several recognizable expressions, in at least as much flux as Shooter’s. I leaned back against the television set, because my legs were shaking, and felt as if they would only be shaking harder in the near future. 

Shooter’s eyes went back and forth across us and he lowered the gun. He put both his hands against the arms of the chair and started to lever himself up. The skin on his wrists folded and stretched like the scruff of a shar-pei. He winced and I heard a quiet, wet tearing. A fold of gray flesh had sloughed off his arm as the bones and muscles beneath twisted. I felt all the bile in my stomach and hoped it would stay there. Shooter dropped himself back into his chair and, after a moment, reclaimed the gun. 

“Get out of my house,” he said. Durn had calmed down a bit, so he sneered at Shooter, flipped him off, and stomped back into the kitchen. Broke followed him a moment later. Layla’s mouth was open in some combination of horror and fascination, so I nudged her with one of my jittery legs. She closed her mouth. Then, glancing once at me as if for confirmation, she pinched her nose . She started to sneeze, a big fake windup to a massive explosion. She blew saliva all over the room, and then she laughed. 

I was the last one out of the room. “Want the light off?” I asked Shooter.

“Leave it on,” he said.

I should have turned around to leave, but I couldn’t break off my stare. I just stepped backward, leaving Shooter alone with his fake cobwebs, his purple-and-orange lampshades, his gun, and something of his that grew like a chuckle.

“Welcome to the pit of terror,” the electronic voice cackled four times as we left.

“We come back after he’s dead,” Layla said, and led us off to dive in the dumpsters. 

Later that morning, I was telling a bedtime story to my gaggles and whoever else was nearby. The story went like this: “We were two steps in when our breathing stopped. It was too quiet to breathe in there, like sneezing in a line-up. I went first and slipped on something wet. The darkness stank of dog shit and landfills, and now my shoe stank, too. I was just gonna whisper to Layla that the coast was clear, if she watched her step, when something touched me on the neck. Not like a bug or a piece of hair, but cold like the tip of a screwdriver. The lower half of me jumped — you know, like when your muscles all spaz that once before you go to sleep. Someone coughed, a sick cough, full of phlegm or vomit, and the cold against my neck branched and multiplied. Five points rested across my arteries, like five fingers. 

“That’s when Layla hit the lights. Hold your stomachs. We were standing in the kitchen, and it looked worse than Bromide’s downtown. There was this soup on the floor, like tomato mixed with split-pea. Looking at it was like looking at a wrong tag, you know, something that tells you you’re out of Callow territory.

“Then I saw what was touching me, and I knew I wouldn’t ever feel like I was home again. It was man, sized and shaped, but so dead there should have been flies. It had eyes like greasy soup hanging down at its cheeks on these thin optic nerves like harp strings. Its mouth was hanging open, with sugar-black teeth. It wasn’t breathing, but something that smelled awful drifted up out of its throat, and I gagged. 

“I didn’t scream, but I did have to gag down a cup or so of bile. I took a step back and the thing’s fingers slid right off my skin, as if they were made of slick plastic. It took a step forward, and I swear to holy sustenance it moaned. I said something to Layla, but it didn’t matter because Layla was already out of there. All of them were. I didn’t waste my breath in breathing more of that shit; I took off after them. We ran until we couldn’t smell no more, and that was only after I kicked my shoes off.”

I beamed at my audience, only a few of which bothered to look down at my feet to see that, yes, I was still wearing my ratty old shoes. A few of the youngers made faces at me to prove how little they believed. “Tell us another,” said a girl from another gaggle, so I told the one about the toad and heaven.

Afterward, I looked around for Layla and the twins. I was hungry. I found Durn first, but he wasn’t interested in going out. He was trying to make time with two girls. He spit blood at me to scare me off and grinned with red teeth.

I found Broke at the well. He was getting a drink of water. After he was done, he dropped a tablet of something in after the bucket. He turned around and saw me. “Iodine,” he said.

“You seen Layla?” I asked. 

“You’re all right,” said Broke. “Layla thinks so, too. But you’re out of the gaggle. She asked me to tell you.” He looked as if he didn’t mind the duty.

“Because of the story,” I said. 

“It wasn’t a very good story,” said Broke. 

“No, not really,” I said. “It worked, though.” 

“You made fun of Durn and me and Layla, and none of us can figure out why. I don’t care much, and Durn doesn’t barely know it, but Layla took it bad, man. She stood up for you against Old Tina, when you didn’t know it, and you turned her into a ‘fraidy-cat in front of other Callows.”

“That’s not what it did,” I said. “What it did was scare people.”

“Why would you want to do that?” asked Broke. “Scared kids don’t get food, and Callows don’t get scared.”

“He pointed the gun at me,” I said. “I got scared.”

“You’re out of the gaggle,” Broke repeated. He turned away, adding, “You could have stood up for her.”

Feeling a bit like the world was too large to fit my body, I ambled around the hideout for a while, figuring I’d run into Layla sooner or later. Everyone who met my eyes had one of two reactions: either they grinned at me, a little like Durn had, or they blinked like they were high on junk they couldn’t afford and then passed me as if I were invisible.

I found Layla outside. She was kicking at a piece of rusted metal. “There’s a monster called tetanus,” I said.

“What do you want?” she asked dully. 

“I don’t know,” I said. “Just to talk.”

“Don’t tell me no stories,” she said.

“I didn’t mean nothing bad,” I said. 

She met my eyes and stamped hard on the metal, sending a strained tone to both our ears. “You think about the wrong things,” she said. “You think about what words mean, ‘stead of what words do, and you get distracted. You talk to old men ‘stead of lifting their china. You scare the wrong people. You didn’t grow up Callow, and you can’t stay Callow.” She rushed by me with one hand to her cheek. Her fingers were spread wide, and I saw a red sore underneath, like those on the twins. She needed medicine, but none of them knew how to ask for it. She slammed the door to the hideout just behind her and I heard something scrape up against it. I gave it a knock or two; it was blocked up tight. There were other doors, but I didn’t feel like trying them. I was out of the Callows. I cared about as much as I do at the ends of stories, which is to say, not hardly.

Nervousness, resignation, and something righteous all had settled in my stomach like rubble, but they weren’t enough to fill me up. My stomach growled at me every time I took a step. I headed for the nearest kitchen, but it was locked up, and there were young Callows outside that already knew to give me dirty looks. I tried a couple other kitchens, but they were all locked, too, and without Durn my chances of breaking and entering were dead as lies. 

There was one door I knew wouldn’t be locked. The sky was lightening toward gray when I got to Shooter’s house. I knocked and pushed the door open a crack. I triggered, “Welcome to the pit of terror” a couple of times. I called out, “Mister Shooter, it’s me.” 

“Come to finish the job,” came a voice from the living room. 

“That’s right,” I said, and then felt a little stupid because it might have been the television speaking. 

I crept into the kitchen. It was cold; the linoleum seemed to be pumping ice right through the thin soles of my shoes. “Thanks for not shooting me,” I said, sending the words out as a sort of vanguard to test the resistance.

“No problem,” said Shooter. A dim light from the living room switched on silently. I followed it to its origin, a small lamp on an end table next to Shooter’s chair. The man himself was wrapped up in a blanket, only his eyes visible.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“You kids took my pills,” he said. 

“Yeah,” I said. 

Shooter coughed and twisted his face away from me. I heard a wet tearing sound, like damp paper being stripped into segments for papier-mâché. “I needed those pills,” he said when it was over. 

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry for the others. I’m not with them anymore.”

The blanket fell away from his face as he turned to stare at me. I had gagged earlier that night when I saw him; this time my whole body shivered. My eyes filmed over for just a second, to blur out the mess, and then they cleared again. Shooter’s cheeks were missing — not empty air, but the top layers of skin were gone and I could see the ruby-fading-to-pink of fresh wounds. A limp sheet of gray flesh curved from his forehead, nearly covering his eye. He raised a hand to brush it away and I saw brown, gray, and green all mottled on his fingers and wrist. There was a gleam of white bone as he flexed his knuckles.

He stared at me for a long moment, holding the hank of skin out of the way. Then he grinned, a wide sharky grin, and said, “You don’t run.”

“Not much,” I said. “I walk, mostly.”

“That’s the trouble with you kids, ones I’ve met. Wouldn’t know to get out of the way of a speeding train, were you on the tracks.”

“Last longer than you would,” I said. Shooter chuckled to himself, but didn’t do anything more. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked. 

“Disgust wearing off?” asked Shooter. I shrugged. “It’s a good story.” His consonants were beginning to slur. “Let’s see if I can’t get you back on track. It’ll be my good deed for the day. You know the factory out past the bridge?”

“Some gang lives there.”

“Not yours?” asked Shooter. “Well, it used to be where I worked. It was a steel plant. We poured girders for building skyscrapers with. Main room’s so big it has it’s own weather, something like twenty storeys high, a few acres on the ground. I worked on the highest catwalks, maintaining the gears on the pots that poured the molten steel into the channels. Shooter with his grease gun. I worked there twenty years, you know. Had blisters on my calluses, and calluses damn near everywhere.

“Statistics is what got me. You gotta watch out for those. Time I started, there were twelve of us grease monkeys. By the time my story takes place, eleven of them had taken out liability claims, and seven of those were on disability thanks to accidents. I was the last man standing, kinda. But statistics caught up with me. The day it happened, I was on storey seventeen, working on a crankshaft. I was standing in the wrong place, too near the channel, and the automated bucket started pouring while I was standing right in front of it. I got out of the way of the steel, but the bucket tipped me over. I fell, god, I don’t know how many storeys. I ended up on my back, staring up into these glimmering shadows, all red from the light of the steel. I had the wind right out of me.” Shooter laughed and shook his head; the way the skin of his face moved was obscene, like unwanted nudity. “Then I did the dumbest thing in my life. I rolled over to catch my breath. Guess where I was. Yeah, right next to one of the channels. I rolled myself over into liquid steel. Didn’t get too deep, luckily. Had a buddy, a new guy — I think he’s still working for the company — came and helped me out.

“Most of what I remember after that comes in the hospital. Seventy-percent of my skin was cooked right off, and the rest of it wasn’t healing right, so they needed to do a full-body skin graft. Problem is, skin’s just an organ like everything else, and my body rejected the transplant. That’s what the pills were for, to fool my body into accepting the skin.”

“Where’d you get it all?”

Shooter leaned forward and grinned at me. “We waited in alleys for children like you.” I closed my eyes and, after a moment, I heard him sit back in his chair. “Moral of the story is don’t work in steel, kid.”

“My name’s Quiet Archie,” I said. 

“Good name for you.” I opened my eyes just as Shooter closed his. “What scares you, Quiet Archie?”

I thought about that for a while. While I did, Shooter breathed evenly. “I’m scared that if I don’t get something to eat, my stomach will digest itself,” I said.

Shooter smiled behind his mask of skin. “Maybe you’re scared you might have to hurt someone to get your belly full.”

“Sure, okay,” I said.

“There’s bread in the kitchen,” he said. 

I went to get a piece. I ate it out of sight of Shooter, and then returned to his side. He was asleep. A brush of gray light was touching the windows, so I turned the lamp off and made my way to a corner over a heating vent. I curled up and went to sleep smelling the bread on my fingers.

I woke up to the sound of screaming. Shooter had the television on again. His show was in black-and-white, and was zoomed up close on a young girl’s eyes. While I was out, he had switched on several chains of orange and black fiber-optic lights; they webbed across one wall like the home of a giant spider. I heard wind outside pressing against the walls and making them creak.

“Happy Halloween,” said Shooter. 

“What’s that?” I asked.

“When I was a kid, last day of October was Halloween. You dress up scary, you make girls fall in love with your courage, you steal candy from children, you try to scare each other to death.”

“I’d get you there,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Shooter. He paused his movie, leaving the poor girl frozen in front of a monster with a long face.

“I can get you more pills,” I said.

“It’s too late,” said Shooter. He grinned at me again. “I’m in the worst pain I’ve ever been in my life, and I just can’t help but grin. I got up and looked at myself in the mirror while you were asleep. I haven’t been able to stand up that long for a year, at least.”

“Let me get you some more pills,” I said.

Shooter shook his head and looked away, toward the window, to sever any of those conversation threads. “It’s getting dark,” he said. “Tell you what—” he faced me again “—there’s a camera in my bedroom. Why don’t you go get it.”

“Okay,” I said. 

He pointed toward one of the doors exiting the living room. I headed toward it. “I keep a woman locked in a box under my bed,” he added. I knew he was lying, but, after finding the camera sitting charged in cradle on an old wooden dresser, I kicked up the filthy blankets and took a quick peek.

“What am I doing with this?” I asked as I handed the camera to him. 

“Hang on to it,” he said. “It’s better than words.” He levered himself up out of the chair. As he stood as straight as he could manage, I heard a wet plop. Part of his scalp had fallen to the floor. “Leave it,” he said. Then, “I hope not everyone out there is as docile as you.”

He led me through the kitchen, triggered the “pit of terror”, and stood for a moment on his front walk, breathing as deeply as he could. He was dressed in filthy, stained pajamas. He tried to unbutton the shirt, but his fingers slipped and bunched over the task. He grunted deeply and tore the fabric, exposing a back that looked like a skinned cat. “Let’s go,” he said. “Turn the flash on, and get ready.”

I followed him at about twenty paces. He shambled through the gloom between streetlights with a limp and a few sentences of muttered pain. At the end of the block, I saw a pair of young girls playing with chalk on the concrete. They were up past their bedtime, and I could hear them giggling as if they knew it. Shooter raised his arms so his elbows were locked out straight, his hands dangling from his wrists. As he approached the girls, I crossed the street to get a better look. Shooter went dark in the shadow and then emerged, moaning terribly into halogen light. The girls looked up as one, and I flashed the expressions on their faces. Shooter took another step closer, and I flashed them again. A small puddle had formed beneath the girls, and one of them dropped everything she had to cry. The other stood up and ran. She pounded on a door as Shooter lowered himself behind a bush. The door opened and the girl slipped inside. I heard someone say, “Who are you—” before the door closed.

I crossed the street to rejoin Shooter, who was laughing so hard he had pissed his pants. They clung to his malformed legs. He was trying to be quiet, but he wasn’t very good at it. “Did you see them?” he gasped. I said that I had. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s do some more.” I agreed.

We haunted the neighborhood for a couple of hours, spreading ourselves out, never getting caught by the adults. I had nearly filled the card when we arrived back at Shooter’s house. He was having to hang on to me, and I was having to breathe through my mouth because he stank so bad. 

“Here,” he wheezed. “Set me down here.” I was more than glad to. We collapsed on his front walk, and he kept laughing so I joined in. “Show me the pictures,” he said. I set the camera to review and handed it to him. His face was illuminated, made more hideous by the angled light from the display. He giggled like a little boy, muttering things like, “Oh, her expression is priceless,” and, “Did you see him run.” He kept laughing and laughing, and then I noticed that blood was trickling down from his eyes. He died with his mouth open, with his hands loose around the camera.

I left him outside to frighten the police. I pawed through his movie collection before I left, grabbing a few things to sell on the streets, and took what was left of the bread. I didn’t take the camera because, despite what Shooter said, I thought that words were better.

I walked into the city, stopping on street corners to sell my wares bit by bit. Folks gave me weird looks when I told them what I had, but some curiosity made them buy, and I managed to get rid of all I had brought. I was just considering going back for some more when I saw someone else making a sale across the street. It was Old Tina. She had her skirt hiked up and her eyes were all dark with bloody makeup. I took a look around me and realized my feet had wandered back into Callow territory. Neither Old Tina nor I were Callows, now, but we were young enough to be a threat.

A pair of guys about Old Tina’s age approached her and made low gestures I could barely see. I started across the street. I waved once, but Old Tina didn’t see me. She took the two guys by the hands and led them into a dark alley. I called out and got no response.

I used a corner to slip into the alley, outlining myself as little as possible against the street lights. I had picked up a few things from the Callows. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out Old Tina up against the wall, bracing herself with her hands, as the guys peered down between her legs. 

“Hey,” I said. “You paying?”

“Yeah,” grunted one of the guys. “Wait in line.” There were two of them, so I didn’t try to pick anything. They shoved their money into Old Tina’s mouth. I stood by a dumpster and watched until they were finished with her. I didn’t think she had recognized me, but the first thing out of her mouth after the money was, “Quiet Archie. What are you doing here?”

“I’m out, too,” I said. 

As she counted her money, I pulled out what I had made. “Put together, we’ve got enough for a room somewhere.” I couldn’t see her very well, but her outline was all hunched like Shooter, and her details were silver from reflected light. It looked as if her eyes were cast down. I wanted to bring them back up but kindness wouldn’t cut it. “Can I tell you a story?” I asked. She sighed and I went on ahead. I told her a story about a virgin murderer who, out of envy, slaughters those children who have sex. I tried not to hold anything back, to work the rent flesh of Shooter into the words. 

Maybe I should have kept the pictures. 

I couldn’t scare her, this time. I didn’t tell it right. She punched me, as if something were all my fault, said, “There’s no place for the self-aware,” and sobbed. I touched her face to calm her down and felt wet skin. She hissed through her teeth. She turned away, and I could see the same open sore on her cheek as Durn and Broke had. I brought my face into the same light, looking at her as closely as I dared.

“I need some medicine,” she said. 

We each pulled our faces back into shadow, not like a race but like a divorce. “You and me both,” I replied.