

Law

By Ed Willis

Copyright 2012 Ed Willis

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

## To Selaine
## Credits
Part 1, Chapter 3:

"Parisian Dream" by Charles Baudelaire, from "Les Fleurs Du Mal" translated by Richard Howard, 1982.

"Do not go gentle into that good night", by Dylan Thomas, from "The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas 1934-1952", 1953.

"Find meat on bones", by Dylan Thomas, from "The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas 1934-1952", 1953.

"O Saisons, O Chateaus", from "Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works", translated by Paul Schmidt, 1967.

"The Drunken Boat", from "Arthur Rimbaud: Complete Works", translated by Paul Schmidt, 1967.

# Part 1

## Chapter 1

"Will there be any pain?"

They assure Max that there won't be much. The local anesthetic will be the worst of it, and the bone saw. He will need to be conscious throughout. There will be some unpleasantness with the vibration and noise when he's opened up, but once that's done, the brain, itself, has no receptors and so the majority of the procedure will be painless.

They cover post-operative details. Max will be moved to a room on the top floor for recovery. They offer to take him up for a look after their discussion.

He declines.

Dr. Hull sits casually atop a small filing cabinet beside the desk while Dr. Watson sits at the desk itself. They exchange a glance. Watson begins enumerating the details of the contract. He summarizes each section in turn and notes that everything has been settled except the matter of Max's compensation. Watson notes that they can be quite accommodating on this aspect of their arrangement. He suggests that charities, church, family or friends might all benefit from Max's generosity.

He declines.

The doctors seem unsatisfied by Max's response. They direct him to reconsider the matter more than once. They fall silent for a moment.

Hull clears his throat and details the care Max can expect during his recovery and afterward. He makes clear the extremes to which Hull, Watson and their colleagues will go to ensure his continuing good health. Hull is careful to point out that no further surgical procedures are permitted save for those required to sustain his health.

Watson says that should cover the last of the contract details, unless Max has any further questions.

He declines.

Watson assures him that there is no rush and suggests that he take a couple of days to think it over. Max asks if they have the contract ready now. Hull and Watson pause a moment, looking him over carefully. Watson calls his secretary in and asks for the paperwork. The secretary will need a few minutes to print it off.

Max stands up and goes to the window. He leans against the frame and looks down to the street beyond. His eyes follow the slow, halting progress of a blind man down on the pavement.

The secretary comes in with the papers. Max sits down again.

"Where do I sign?"

#

Max returns to his room. He climbs the stairs and passes two of his neighbors without greeting them. He closes the door behind him. He sits down on the edge of his bed, smoking, his unfocused eyes fixed on the wall just under the window. He realizes he'd forgotten to ask how long he'd have.

He turns on the TV and lies back on the bed, his dull eyes reflecting distorted TV images and his slack lips betraying such emptiness. They would soon be so full.

## Chapter 2

They burst into the apartment. The door slammed into the wall. John reached for the light switch, lost his balance and fell to the hallway floor.

She was on him in a second, dropping to her knees beside him and tugging at his belt. He kicked the door closed. He pulled her shirt off over her head. She had his cock free and in her mouth. Her tongue slid like a quick, darting fish on him. He rolled her on top and covered her ears, neck, and her breasts with kisses. She jumped up and ran to the bedroom, calling to him over her shoulder. John ran after her, pulling his clothes off as he went. He had one leg out of his pants when he stumbled and crashed into the wall. A picture frame fell and shattered. Glass flew everywhere. He cut his foot and left bloody footprints on the carpet. He tumbled onto the bed. He wrapped his arms around her. He felt his foot bleeding. She pulled him between her legs. He slipped in smooth, tight and perfect. He took a deep breath. Slow, so slow. He stroked her breasts. She traced her lips around him. She bucked up at him to go faster. They were covered in sweat, and the bed, too, was hot and damp. Faster and faster, then, but the movement divorced from him as their bodies raced. Abruptly, his mind broke free and jerked upwards to the ceiling. He watched their bodies below him dispassionately. A perpetual motion device made of meat. He receded further, vanishing towards the horizon. There was no pleasure.

Sudden traveling, a lurching sense of motion, of translation. He closed his eyes against the vertigo, and pictured there, he discovered a dim landscape under an even, dusky sky. A rocky plain where sky ran down to earth in an ambiguous blur, without trees, without animals, without insects.

Faintly, far below him on the ground, there were two points of light, alone on that wide, empty plain. The wind screamed utter silence through rocks and sand. He shot himself over the landscape, made right angle turns, broke the sound barrier with a shocking roar. He returned and hung himself over those two fragile spots.

She sighed.

He opened his eyes. They were finished. Their skin stuck together. The bed was soaked. The sheets were tangled around his feet and clung to him as he rolled off onto his back. She was dozing.

He closed his eyes and found himself returned miles above that colorless desert. Turning away from the ground, there were no stars for him to see, no clouds, no moon. Turning back, he strained to find again the two distant lights down below. He surged towards them. In an instant, he was there, hovering over them so near the ground. Two street lamps before a brownstone, half painting it in stark unreal mercury vapor fluorescence. Yet even within those two intersecting circles of light, all was depicted in the fainter shades of gray, the grays of dusk when color gives in to black. The brownstone stood tall, the top well beyond the reach of the street lights. The windows were yawning, blown-out mouths, and the wind made a spectral sound as it sucked at every room and doorway—a baleful moaning, the cold keening of garbage trucks before dawn. By the stairs, a sign hung on one hinge from a post, twisting and creaking in the wind. Just as he moved to it, the hinge gave way with a snap that echoed flatly around him. The sign fell to the ground, raising a cloud of dust that vanished instantly into the wind.

"You are here." You are here.

He woke up, dizzy and sick to his stomach. The sheets were stiff and stuck to his legs like a second skin. He turned on the lights. The bed was covered in blood.

## Chapter 3

Max's face is hidden in the shadow cast by the canopy that encircles the top of his head. His shaved scalp tingles and is numbed by the anesthetic spreading from the injections he's been given.

There is no pain.

Dr. Watson, standing behind him, flexes his fingers and begins.

"Scalpel."

Dr. Hull hands him the scalpel and glances back at the ECG. Max's heart rate is rising quickly.

"Relax. Close your eyes, Max. This won't hurt a bit."

Watson completes the incision in the scalp in one smooth cut. The thick flap of skin makes a sucking noise as he peels it away from the skull underneath. He pins it back out of the way.

"OK, Max, this is important. We're going to need your help throughout this procedure. Our understanding of your condition depends on it. These monitors can only tell us so much."

Max starts to speak.

Hull interrupts him. "No, not yet, we'll tell you when." He pats Max's shoulder with a gloved hand.

Max twitches at the first soft touch of the saw.

"You've got to control yourself," Hull says, "You will only make things more difficult if you can't lie still. It will be unpleasant but we'll try our best to get though it as quickly as we can. I can promise you there will be no pain."

Max's hands ball into fists as his skull is cut open in an oval from just over the top of his neck through to the middle of his forehead. The noise seems to come from everywhere at once, and his mind vanishes into it. His vision rattles and shakes with the vibration. He feels the coolant running off the saw in a steady stream down the side of his neck. He smells just a hint of smoke. He counts the torturous seconds one by one as the saw makes its slow, steady progress around the back of his head. Watson, his face tense with concentration, emerges again as the saw comes around his temple. Max closes his eyes.

Finally there is silence. His ears are ringing so badly from the howl of the saw that he can hardly hear the doctors speaking to him. Max's eyes snap open.

"That's the worst of it behind us now." Hull is smiling under the mask.

Watson stretches his fingers again. "Alright, here we go. From here on we're going to need your help to assess our progress. Essentially we need to take inventory of the different motor and sensory functions—I'll ask you to move specific muscles or tell me what you're seeing or hearing—things like that. Are you ready?"

"Yes," Max replies.

"Let's get started. Max, move your right arm. Now your right leg... your left arm now... your left leg. Blink your eyes, say something."

"My eyes are very dry—no."

"'No' what, Max?"

"I can only move them side to side. They won't go up and down."

"Now?

"Side to side's gone too."

"Good. How are they now?"

"Everything's blurry."

"Excellent, Max, excellent. And now?"

"I can't blink my eyes. Are my eyes blinking?"

Watson ignores the question and works quickly.

"Now?"

"It's like shooting stars in my peripheral vision. No, wait, they're gone now. I can't see."

Hull shines a pen light into each eye in turn and examines the pupils. He closes Max's eyelids with two gloved fingers. He puts the light back on the tray beside him and nods to Watson.

"Good, Max. Now move your right arm... your right leg... your left arm... your left leg..." Max does as he is told.

Hull dips a cotton swab in a small bottle of liquid. He closes the lid on the bottle and puts it back on the tray. He holds the swab under Max's nose.

"Max, do you smell that? Tell us, what does that smell like?"

"Perfume... no... alcohol? I can't tell."

Hull discards the swab in a bin under the tray.

"That's fine, Max. What do you think this one is?"

"Is it fish? I don't know."

Max does not react as Hull opens a bottle of smelling salts and holds it below his nose.

"Good, you're doing just fine. Max, from this point forward, both now during the procedure and after it—at all times—you must keep communicating with us, do you understand? Non-stop, we've got to hear from you, OK?"

Max makes a sound, a tentative note, and then holds it.

"No, Max, not just noises. We need you to talk to us. Say anything you like, it doesn't matter what but you must keep talking to us."

Max pauses for a moment.

"'It is a terrible terrain / no mortal eye has seen—'"

"Fine, that's fine, Max. Max, now we need you to lift your right leg a few inches from the table and hold it there."

"'—whose image still seduces me / this morning as it fades—'"

Dr. Hull slips his gloved hands under Max's leg, but does not support it. Watson makes a few precise incisions and the leg drops limp into Hull's hands. He lays it on the table gently.

"'—Sleep is full of miracles!'"

"Max, can you wiggle the toes on your right leg for us?"

"Are they moving—I can't tell?"

Max's leg lies still on the table.

"Alright, now let's do the same with your left leg. Can you lift it up and hold it there?"

Through the hours, Hull works his way incrementally around the table.

"'... Though wise man at their end know dark is right, / Because their words had forked no lightning they / Do not go gentle into that good night—'"

"Now clench your stomach as if you were going to do a sit-up. Good, now hold it like that."

Little by little, muscle by muscle, working their way up the table from his feet to his head, Max is paralyzed.

"Lift your right arm... your left arm... your right arm... your right leg..."

"I can't tell what I'm doing. Am I moving?"

Max lies motionless on the table.

"Good—Max, you're doing fine. We're in the home stretch now—almost done."

"'Find meat on bones that soon have none...'"

"Tell me when you feel the pin prick."

Hull jabs the sterilized pin into Max's right foot, then his left, his right ankle, his left, and slowly moves up Max's body—his chest, his shoulders, his neck.

"There."

Watson calls for more light and makes a small cut. He nods to Hull, who pokes the needle in Max's neck, his cheek and nose.

"'O seasons, O chateaus! / Where is the flawless soul? / O seasons, O chateaus,

I learned the magic of / Felicity. It enchants us all...'"

Hull empties a syringe of bitter saline into Max's mouth and wipes it away when it drools out again from the corners of his mouth.

"'Washed in your languors, Sea, I cannot trace / The wake of tankers foaming through the cold, / Nor assault the pride of pennants and flags, / Nor endure the slave ship's stinking hold.'"

Watson stands and stretches his back. He exchanges a glance with Hull before speaking, "Max, this is it. We're just about done now. I need you to remember this one thing always—keep talking. We're helpless without you. All of this will be come to nothing if you don't keep talking to us."

Max complies.

Watson returns to his work.

"Can you hear me?"

"Yes."

"Can you hear me?

"Yes."

"Can you hear me?

"Yes—no, not now. There's nothing now."

Watson replaces the bone in the hole in Max's skull and reconnects the veins and arteries that keep it alive. He inserts pins to help the bone heal and then sews the scalp closed. Max's skin droops down the side of his face like a stroke victim, but Watson has to take care to avoid Max's furiously moving jaws and lips.

"Nolo contendre."

Watson and Hull unhook Max from the monitors and wheel him from the room. Max is still speaking, never pausing, his voice thick and hoarse, and already with just a hint of speech in a vacuum, the voice of the deaf.

"Nolo contendre, nolo contendre, nolo contendre."

## Chapter 4

"While you're up?"

"You're sure you want another?"

John nodded.

There was a comfortable lull in the conversation. John's head rolled back on a huge pillow. His limbs were scattered about him, as if he had been thrown or had fallen where he lay. A collection of refuse was arrayed around him: empty brown and green bottles, crumpled cigarette packs, a cracked Frisbee—a makeshift ashtray, brimming with cigarette butts and bottle caps. His head bobbed up again, unsteady, as though mounted on the neck of an infant.

Dick handed him a bottle.

"Thanks."

John took a long sip. The room spun in little heartbeat pulses as he looked around. Acrylic paintings on garbage bags, a CD player rescued from someone's trash, speakers spray-painted neon colors gaudy under a black light, CDs strewn about the player and down to the floor, filthy venetian blinds, long-abandoned coffee cups filled with insect suicides. And books, tattered paperbacks and cast-off remainders with torn covers crowded everywhere on bookcases of scrap wood and bricks, stacked on window sills and tucked into discarded milk crates: Kerouac, Chomsky, Nostradamus, Reich, Crowley, Artaud, Ouspensky.

A young woman returned to the room and took her seat beside Dick, completing the small gathering.

John felt discomfort growing in the silence. He smiled at Dick sitting opposite him on the couch. He looked around the room and suddenly realized he had at least a few years on everyone there.

"So what have you been up to?" Dick asked, leaning forward, his hands on his knees.

"Same old thing: books, TV, movies. One thing leads to the next."

"Anything of interest?"

"Parthenogenesis, the last little while."

"What's that now?" Dick asked.

"It's a bit of a long story."

"Please, go ahead, we're all friends here."

"Asexual reproduction—development of an organism from an egg without fertilization. It occurs naturally in some species—scorpions, fish, some birds. In lab environments they can do it with other species as well now. They take unfertilized eggs of frogs, rabbits, sheep, others too—and stimulate them somehow. Needles? Chemicals?" He shook his head. "Unfertilized, they develop into functional adults. If they can do it with other mammals, surely people can't be far behind."

"That's completely different."

"I doubt it. It's the same basic process, isn't it? It's only a matter of time. But it'd be the end of the line for man—he'd have civilized himself out of a job. Women could carry on without him."

"Oh, you always exaggerate." Dick's companion put down her drink, got up, and walked stiffly from the room.

John hesitated. The woman—or her appearance—she seemed older now than he recalled and her clothes, the white silk blouse, gray tweed skirt, pumps, jewelry... He thought back but could not remember how she'd looked to him earlier.

Dick was looking expectantly at him. John continued, "The obvious problem is evolution. There's not much genetic diversification possible without men, that's certain, but what change do women want at this point? Endangered species lists, genetic disease support group dating services—in every other way, we've declared a finish line for evolution."

Dick shot him a hard glance and loosened his tie as he stood up to go after the woman.

"You're drunk." It was another man speaking now. He stood at a bookcase across the room, nursing a mixed drink. The overhead lights caught the glass tumbler and the brass buttons on the cuffs of his dark blue blazer, sending flashes around the room with each tiny movement of his hand.

"I am." He laughed.

"Please continue—surely you're not finished?" There was something cold in the voice. John realized this man was a stranger to him.

"If women move on, what becomes of men? If you pore over history to determine the unambiguous value of man from his origins in time, perhaps some remaining use could be found for him." Earnestly concentrating, his eyes were focused absently on his feet. "After all, we have electric heaters and stoves now and we have lights but we're not done with fire."

He stopped abruptly, staring. He saw, as if for the first time, his ripped sneakers and dirty ankles, his filthy shorts, his stained work shirt. He felt the stringy locks of his unwashed hair scratching stiff at his forehead and digging into the back of his neck. His widening eyes found the Oriental rug beneath him, the Chagall and Picasso prints spot-lighted on the walls and the gleaming wooden bookcases filled with row upon row of hard covers.

"That is quite enough." Dick stormed back into the room, the long tails of his tuxedo flying behind him. He pulled up short before John, standing there looming over him.

John picked himself up from the empty beer bottles and that over-full ashtray. "Where is everyone?"

Dick winced as John sat on the leather sofa. John stood up again.

"Good Lord, what were you thinking? What gets into you? I swear I can't fathom it."

"I'm sorry, I—"

Dick cut him off, "Shut up, now. Honestly, just shut up. Everyone does their best to give you the benefit of the doubt, but what do you expect of them when you behave in this manner?"

"Please, I didn't intend—"

Dick interrupted again, "I can hardly see what difference your intentions could conceivably make at this point. For God's sake, pull yourself together. Look at you—you're an awful mess." Dick paused a moment. John cowered before him. "Let's be clear. We've reached the end of our rope—we're washing our hands of you. Do you understand?"

John nodded, his head down.

"I think you'd better just leave."

John walked to the door, the skin of his bare arms and legs showing blotchy pink and white, nearly translucent under the glare of the fluorescent lights. Dick, shining in his tuxedo, followed, towering over him. John opened the door.

"Get out."

He stumbled into the hallway. The door slammed behind him.

John, sprawled in a chair in the lobby nearly unconscious, was found by the doorman a short time later. Grumbling under his breath, he picked John up by the collar of his shirt and the waist of his shorts and threw him out the front doors of the building.

"Don't come back." He shook his fist.

John looked up and down the block. He had no idea where he was. He stood, bent slightly at the waist, thinking. It must have gotten much colder while he was inside. Hideous goose flesh crawled over every inch of his skin. A thick, oily sweat coated his face, drying thickly in the cold. The wind whipped his dirty hair back and forth across his scalp. Behind him, the doors opened again.

"Move it. I'll call the cops."

John took a few halting steps. He looked behind him as the doorman turned back to the lobby. John heard the door click as it locked. He kept walking. He didn't know how to get home from here but, nonetheless, he took a small measure of comfort from the solitude of the deserted street, which offered him the possibility of centering all his scattered thoughts and of regaining the high ground within him.

## Chapter 5

The man beside him cleared his throat.

John's eyelids snapped open. His head jerked up from the man's shoulder, where it had come to rest.

John excused himself, his face red with embarrassment.

The man glared at John, then cleared his throat again and looked away. For some minutes, John fought exhaustion.

The man stood up. John's head bobbed downwards and he nearly fell over. Struggling to compose himself, John sat up straight and bit the inside of his cheek to ward off fatigue. He sneaked a look at the man he had forced out of his seat. The man did not return his gaze but his entire posture made plain his disgust.

Though it was quite crowded, John had the bench all to himself. All around him, the car's occupants stole suspicious glances at him. John leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and hung his head in his hands.

The door at the end of the subway car shuddered as some heavy mass smashed into it. A second later, the door flew back and a man sailed through. He slid to a halt at John's feet. Moaning, the man rolled over on his side and clutched his stomach with both arms. He was a thin man, black with long dreadlocks, wearing faded blue jeans and a black t-shirt.

The door was thrown back again. An older black man stormed in. Both taller and more muscular, he stood over the first man and screamed threats, curses and admonitions down at him. The man on the floor made some response that threw his shirtless attacker into a fury once more. He howled down at him, kicking him in the head and back. The thin man twisted and cried with every blow. John stared at the older man. He was surprised to find the man's expression not filled with rage but suddenly almost contemplative. John looked away in time to see a young woman come through the door after them, her long blond hair streaming behind her. She yelled at the older man and struck him. He turned, grabbed her by the shoulders and shouted at her, his lips nearly on hers. Unnoticed by them, the man on the floor had rolled onto his knees. His fingers closed on a beer bottle rattling loose by the subway doors. The older man held the woman with one hand and slapped her hard with the other, both of them screaming all the while. He shoved her away from him as the thin man broke the bottle against the floor and got to his feet. As the older man turned away from the woman, he intercepted the arc of the jagged glass. Graceful slashes opened in his face, chest and stomach. He fell to his knees.

The subway screeched and shuddered to a stop, throwing the older man into the empty seat beside John. Droplets of blood broke away from him and hung there for a moment in the air before spattering John's face and hair. Thick rivulets of blood poured down the man's face and torso. John forced himself to look. The man's face was contorted in pain, but he caught and held John's gaze. He winked at John, blood showing pink and stringy on the white of his eye.

The subway doors opened. The thin man dropped the bottle and raised his arms immediately as the police and paramedics rushed in. The police handcuffed him, read him his rights, and led him away. The woman, sobbing unashamedly, followed them out. John stood up as the paramedics crouched to treat the injured man. A policeman knelt to read the wounded man his rights. John felt certain he saw something change hands between them. The policeman looked up at John, and asked his name, a notepad and pen at the ready. He had to ask several times before John finally heard him.

John ran out between the closing doors, hearing the orders shouted behind him and feeling them propel him up to the street.

## Chapter 6

Max was reproducing by runners; cords ran from his body to sprout instruments all around him: ECG, IV, EEG... In the bed, his body made so faint an impression beneath the covers, that Hull's attention was drawn immediately to the face, where only the lips were animate.

Max was screaming.

Dr. Hull left the room and shut the door behind him, leaving Max to the nurse's ministrations. In the quiet of the hall, he leaned against the door, rubbing the back of his neck. He started down the hall to Watson's office. He passed Watson's secretary as he neared the office. As he opened Watson's door, he glanced down the hall the way he had come. His back to him, the secretary was stopped a few feet from Max's door, his head hung and his arms folded. For a few moments, he remained there, as if listening, and then he walked briskly past the door and further down the hall.

From within the office, Dr. Watson called to Hull, who was at the door, neither in nor out.

"What is it?"

Hull paused a moment before answering, "It's nothing."

Hull came in and sat in a chair across the desk from Watson. Watson leaned back in his chair, the last of a scotch and soda in his hand. He finished the drink in one swallow and put the empty glass on the desk.

"How is he doing?"

"Well enough. There's nothing we weren't anticipating."

"That's good to hear, but we'll need to be vigilant—especially during the recovery."

"Indeed."

## Chapter 7

John ran up the stairs and ducked into the doorway of a brownstone to hide. Struggling to catch his breath, he looked up and down the street. There was no one pursuing him. The street was deserted save for one man; he was making his way leisurely down the sidewalk. John took a closer look at him. From this distance, the first thing to make an impression was the seersucker suit. It was hypnotizing in the bright sunlight. The man was tall and broad-shouldered but very heavy. He lumbered down the street, as if he were unused to walking. Closer now, John noted the man's meaty hands, the knuckles dimpled like a baby's. In his right he swung a worn briefcase by his side in a wide arc with every stride he took. John examined his face. The bushy gray eyebrows middle age had given him lent his expression a sense of continual surprise that seemed out of place on his double-chinned, jowled face.

His pink lips were pursed in a small circle. John heard the tinny whistling faintly, though he could make nothing of it.

John leaned against the mailboxes in the vestibule. He closed his eyes and rested his cheek against the stone wall. The tune finally reached him. Suddenly, he recognized it.

"Give me that old time religion."

At the sound of shuffling steps, John opened his eyes. He was surprised to see the fat man hauling himself up the stoop. Halfway up, he looked at John, his expression concentrated with the effort the stairs demanded of him and yet somehow childishly agreeable at the same time. He whistled all the while.

John stood his ground.

"It's good enough..." Sweat streaming down his face, he stopped on the landing directly in front of John, and blew two tremendous blasts. "... for me."

John's brow wrinkled.

"Well, it's a fine enough day for it, isn't it?" The fat man didn't seem to expect an answer. He continued, "Let's get on with it, then, there's no time like the present." He winked. "Hope I haven't kept you waiting too awfully long."

John looked at him.

"Johnny Anomie, is it not?" The fat man put his hands on his hips and inclined his head slightly.

"It is, yes, but there must be some mistake. I have no appointment here today. This is the first I've heard of this."

"Now let's have a look here." The fat man reached into his breast pocket for his date book. He leafed through it for several long seconds, making little exclamations now and then at what he read there. John shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot.

"No, here it is—Johnny Anomie. Right there in black and white." He pointed with his stubby index finger to the underlined name in the book. "No, there's no mistake, son, if anything you're a bit early. Now, if you'll follow me."

John stood motionless as the man fussed with a great ring of keys, muttering and grumbling to himself. He jingled them loudly at arm's length, as if shaking them hard enough would make the right one appear.

"Well, my stars, look at this—I must look like a janitor with all these keys. How can I be expected to conduct any business if I can't even get in my own front door?"

John, perplexed as he was, recognized that he was under no compulsion to stay—surely he could leave at any moment. He looked up and discovered that the fat man had finally overcome the lock. He was looking expectantly at him from the open doorway.

"It's just inside." His broad face was split by a wide, amiable grin. John, questioning every step, found himself following the man inside. There was another wait, this one, if anything, longer than the first, as the fat man searched for the key to his office. Having triumphed over the key ring once more, the fat man opened the door and went in. He waddled around the battered, wooden desk and fell gratefully into the high-back black leather chair behind it. He called to John, who remained in the hall, "Come on in, Johnny. Take a seat. Make yourself at home."

Feeling that he'd gone along with this for too long as it was, John went in and sat down. He'd explain himself and then be on his way. "Look, I've got to make this much clear, I have no idea what this is about, Mr.—"

"Osgood," the fat man mumbled as he lit a short but very thick cigar with a match. A glass ashtray sat in the middle of the desk. Osgood pulled it towards him and put the book of matches beside it. He tried a couple of times to blow the match out but then just dropped it in the ashtray.

"Mr. Osgood."

"Doctor." He took a long haul and blew a thick geyser of smoke over his head. He gazed up at the ceiling, watching the smoke billow across it, and then looked back at John. He retrieved a form and a pen from his briefcase and put them on the blotter before him.

"Dr. Osgood," John said finally.

"Exactly so." He smiled brightly at John. "Now hang on just a moment." He pulled a pair of black framed bifocals from his shirt pocket and set them on the end of his nose to review the form.

"Let's see here." He held the form at arm's length but still struggled to read the print. "Hmm, blah blah blah... blah blah blah... alright, here we are." He put the form back on the blotter. He leaned over it, pen in hand.

"Name?" he asked without looking up. He held the pen poised over the form, waiting for a response.

"Excuse me?"

"Your name, son, I asked you—oh hell, I must be losing my mind. Right, you are: Johnny Anomie."

"John."

"I got that. Address?" This time, he looked up at John encouragingly.

Considering this procedure, at worst, an inconvenience, John sighed irritably but answered his questions. "Phone number?... Social security number?... Date of birth?... Age?... Height?... Weight?... Hair color?... Eye color?... Scars, identifying marks, or tattoos?... Marital status?" He went on this way for some time, carefully printing John's responses to each question.

"Children?"

"None."

The doctor recorded this last answer and then tossed the pen on the desk. He leaned back in his chair and retrieved his cigar, which had gone out while they'd worked their way through the form. He lit it again and blew smoke across the desk.

"I'm not cut out for this sort of thing really. I reckon I'm not a paper-pusher at heart. How about we take ourselves a little breather?" He reached forward to tip ash into the ashtray. "Did you say you've got no kids?"

"Yes, that's right."

"When are you thinking?"

"I hadn't actually given it much thought."

"Do you not want any?"

"Not really, no, now that you ask. I don't think I do."

"Son, do you mean to tell me you don't ever want children? Not ever? Is that what you're saying?" he asked.

"I think it is, doctor."

"Don't want kids... don't want kids—I can't hardly even imagine it," he muttered. He sat back again, eclipsing all but the top of the big black chair. He took off his glasses and tossed them carelessly aside on the desk. He rubbed his eyes. Shifting sideways and leaning heavily on his right arm, he pointed his right index finger at John like a gun. "Don't get me wrong now. Your business is your business. And I don't mean to pry. But you're a decent enough boy—I could tell it right off—and I wouldn't want to sit idly by and watch you make a mistake you're going to regret down the road and for the rest of your life. Just 'twixt the two of us, hell, you're still wet behind the ears, ain't you now? No offense intended. Maybe you could use a little advice from a man such as myself who's seen a thing or two—if you'll hear me out?"

John stared at him.

Undaunted, the doctor continued, "Let me give it to you straight. Life, as I see it—and recall I'm a medical doctor, an educated man—you can think of it as a big poker game where it's the good Lord himself who's dealing out the hands." He arched his eyebrows. "Before he turns you loose in this world, he deals you in, and just like stud, you get some of your cards up and you get some of your cards down. Now you may not see them all but you surely use them all. And it's not five cards or seven in your hand—it's millions. That's genetics, follow me now. Over the years, since He started up His holy game, the Lord has taken it upon himself to make sure the hands get better and better. As good as your granddaddy got it, why he got it that much better than his granddaddy before him and you're going to get it better still than the both of them. You go to Atlantic City or Vegas and find me a dealer like that. After each hand, God goes through the deck and throws out some of the low cards—just to keep things interesting, understand? He knows there ain't no one gonna bet a bad hand. But not only that, son, God wants you to win so bad, He's pulling for you so hard, why he's even gonna let you cheat."

He leaned in towards John with a lop-sided grin. "Not only will He let you look at another player's hand, He'll let you pair up with another player and take the best cards from each other and build the best hand you can. That's how the game gets richer. That's how the hands get better." Osgood hammered the desk once with his index finger. "And that's kids, son. That's the game."

John leaned back in his seat. "I'm sorry, Dr. Osgood..." The sentence died on his lips as the doctor looked down and shook his head.

"I don't mind telling you that's disappointing to me, son. Let's say it was you calling the shots, what could you do to make things any better for folks—really what in hell more could you ask for?"

John cleared his throat.

"That was a rhetorical question. I think I must be wasting my time on you, boy. Here you are, the whole damned game's rigged for you. All you got to do is play along—that's all you got to do—and you, now, what are you going to do? Why, you're gonna fold. Won't so much as ante up at the Lord's great table. I can't figure you, son. You know, when they call the roll up yonder, I don't imagine there's gonna be much room in the kingdom of heaven for you boys who never even played the game. You get it yet, boy? You fold and you're out. God don't deal you another hand. You don't play ball with the Lord, He don't play ball with you!" He looked John pointedly in the eye and waited.

"I should be going now, doctor." John started to get up. The doctor stood up as well, opening a desk drawer in the process.

"It's just as it says in the good book: 'Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?' Shoot, I must have misjudged you, son. You looked to me like you had some sense about you. You looked like a man to me then—well you look like a godless coward to me now, boy!" He reached into the drawer.

"I'm going now," John said, much more softly than he had intended.

"You've got to love the Lord, boy. You've got to love the Lord and you've got to play ball." His hand came up from the drawer holding a silver revolver. John bolted for the door, shots booming all around him, gouging great holes in the door and wall. The door jamb above him exploded in a shower of splinters.

"Play ball, boy!"

John threw the door open.

Osgood cried out in surprise and pain. The shots stopped. John heard the meaty sound the doctor's heavy body made as it collapsed to the floor. He turned around. Osgood's head and broad chest stuck out from behind the desk. The doctor pointed to his chest.

"Congested," he said in a hoarse whisper.

The fat fingers found an artery in his neck.

"Pulse... stopped..." His arm dropped limply to his side. He lay still where he was. His eyes were open, staring blankly upwards.

John ran from the office and down the stairs.

Behind him in the doorway at the top of the stoop, his suit rumpled and his shirt pulled out of his pants, the doctor dumped the spent casings into his hand and put them in his pants pocket. He wiped the sweat from his face with a pocket handkerchief and watched John race up the street and away.

"A-hee, hee, hee, oh hell, a-hee, hee, hee ..."

He tucked his shirt in, stuffed his handkerchief into the breast pocket of his jacket and, as he turned to go back to his office, he was whistling once more.

"That old time religion, it's good enough for me."

## Chapter 8

The voice came from the vicinity of the hand on the book. The leather-bound book showed well-worn in the light, but the fingers obscured the title. The alabaster hand was thin and long-fingered, the opalescent nails smooth and manicured. A gold ring set with a maroon stone glittered from one of the fingers. The blue veins on the back of the hand were so faint the hand seemed to have been cut from marble. The figure was lost in the shadows, but a narrow, smoke-filled square of light framed the still-life of the hand on the book. A polished mahogany table supported the hazy pyramid of light and, undisturbed, dust had fallen and gathered over all. Some distance away, a man in a gray suit stood with his back to the table, dust paling his shoulders. He stared out through the tall, bay windows. Rain collected and ran in streams down the glass, and through them, the sun, nearly lost in the clouds, cast a ghostly, underwater light to mottle his jacket and vest. Without turning from the window, he responded.

"The secretary?"

"Yes." The voice contained so great a silence, it could have been a whisper.

## Chapter 9

The elevator doors opened. John was a stone's throw from home. He moved cautiously down the hall. With silent precision, he unlocked the door, put his keys back in his pocket, went in and locked the door once more behind him. He leaned against the door, his hand still resting on the doorknob, and rested. The stench inside was overpowering: smoke, as though an entire pack of cigarettes was held, burning, just under his nose. He searched for the light switch. There were other scents as well: beer, the sickly smell of burnt coffee and stale sweat—the sweat of a week without bathing, a week sick, holed up in bed. He found the switch and flipped it up. The apartment was filled with smoke. It was so thick he couldn't see the bedroom door though he knew only twenty feet separated it from where he stood.

John made his way down the hall. Each step exposed another small area of the floor to him. The floor, every inch of it, was covered in handwritten pages. Loose leaf papers, yellow sheets from legal pads, tattered-edged pages torn from spiral-bound notebooks—papers were strewn throughout. There was no perceptible order to them. Stacks and stacks of them were everywhere he looked, piled up in unsightly heaps. John was shocked to find his house in such a state of disorder.

He stopped dead in his tracks. He remembered it all at once. He called to her. He ran through the apartment, almost blind in the fog, calling her name. He threw open the bedroom door. His mouth opened to call her name once more, but he made no sound. There, on the bed, lay her familiar silhouette in the form of a mirror, cut perfectly to her size and shape. He fell to his knees by the side of the bed. He lifted the mirror and he held it in his arms, as if he were embracing it. Smoke stinging his eyes, he did not see his reflection, but read the neat rows of words scratched into the silvering of the mirror:

Gleeful packs of murderers haul ass from one beating received to another dished out over a landscape rotting under an algae harvest moon. Watch out for the spit as they go rolling end over end. Dogs nip at the butts of their shotguns and with two working hands, I would strangle the life out of them, beneath that slag moon that starts my skin crawling.

A come drop on the eyelash of the smile that makes me hard again.

A flash of light through the broken windshield of a dying car reminds me that it's only a brief respite and I'll be back in the swamps, slaving, filthy and drenched in sweat, slaving with the idiots and the working class, slaving with guns like a jewelry that makes me hard again while a blue-green dusk closes over my eye.

Streaks of gunfire—follow the tracers backward to the hand of God. The sound slaughters this wet hell with a thunder that sets your teeth on edge. To watch in silence and hear it speak my voice, it makes me hard again, but I know that with two working legs, I would run bitching and moaning back to the faggots and the Jews and the blacks—and the women— the pious ones who raised a child in a university of boundless solitude for an illimitable battle for the control of genes.

But I'm up to my old tricks, of course: plotting murder and misery in darkened rooms with a small smile that I hide from my stare.

You, at least, always knew it: black is my favorite color because it makes me hard again. With two working eyes, I would see it in every face, splashing like a playful tide into every corner of the funeral bodies of the six continents of God.

In my right eye, you're a knife, in my left, a syringe. Why come now, or at all? You have insinuated yourself through the watchful gazes of a roomful of agents to keep me company in a primordial bus stop that opened before I remember and will close after I forget—to hold my hand and pass me the buck and tell funny stories softly in my ear. And my eyes get wide with delight. You pull me in close, we're thick as thieves.

Salt in a wound is the stuff I am made of. Salt in a wound is the stuff that I know. With time enough to birth my body unbroken, I would get it hard again. But what now? One last joke for me? You're quite an amusing fellow, for a killer.

Out with it, you bastard, don't you keep me waiting.

The mirror shattered in a thousand tiny shards in his hands. Slivers scattered across the bed and onto the floor. Smoke muffled the thin volume of his hoarse voice, shrieking.

## Chapter 10

He pawed through drawers, closets, bookshelves, wheezing in the thick smoke. He returned periodically to the phone, picking it up and replacing it again without dialing. He wandered the rooms, silently forcing the truth down like the bitter pill it was.

He left the apartment. He paced the elevator all the way down and nearly leaped out when the doors opened onto the lobby. He went outside. The streets ran off in all directions in apartment buildings, one after the next in gray lines disappearing into the horizon. Undaunted, he set off through the streets, hunting for her in bars, supermarkets, drugstores, liquor stores—he searched for her all through the morning and into the afternoon.

It was nearly dusk when he finally stopped running. He rested against a mailbox near the library to catch his breath. By the entrance was a small, unruly crowd. They were shouting but John couldn't see what provoked their agitation. He moved to join them. A haggard, disheveled man stood on a small shipping crate—it was to him that the crowd directed their jeers and catcalls. As John came within earshot, the orator answered his critics.

"No, make no mistake. It's human congress that's the root of it. Run from your fellow man—run! He's a monster, rest assured! He's a thief come to steal you away and shame you and convert you by forcing your surrender in a dead-end you can only exit through still greater disgrace. He knows you've got no choice—you have to play along. But he's an animal, I tell you. He'll come to press his advantage and get you drunk and call you names. He'll beat you up and take your money. And he'll dig deep in his bag of tricks. He'll teach you to shave and dress for success and make your fortune and then piss it away."

"Idiot!" someone called. The crowd laughed and called insults up to the orator. John took his place behind them, listening attentively. The orator stood on the crate waiting calmly for a break in their shouts of condemnation. John looked him over. His once handsome suit was tattered and filthy. His tie guttered gently in the wind under his bruised and battered face.

The crowd finally exhausted themselves of abuses to heap on him and he continued, "Fifty-six generations of cellular division over nine months take the embryo from fertilized egg to infant—but consider this: is it even remotely possible that this process is completed correctly?"

"Yes, why not? I can't see why not?" John's face was clouded by concentration. The mob around them quieted to hear their exchange.

The orator seemed not in the least surprised to hear an earnest response to his arguments. "Think carefully. You're making the mistake thinking of them—these fifty-six generations—as being equivalent. There's no shame in it—I was myself deluded in precisely the same manner, but I can see the truth now. Indeed, fifty-six tasks, not so difficult, really. Surely anyone could perform fifty-six tasks without error, given even a modest degree of prudence—why it must happen all the time!"

"Yes, exactly. That shouldn't be so hard."

The crowd was talking amongst themselves, losing interest in the exchange. Some had started to move on down the street.

"Ah, but you see the tasks are not at all equivalent. At each division there is twice as much work to be done than there was the generation before. Tell me now, could you perform fifty-six tasks successfully if each succeeding one was twice as hard as the one before? Imagine your job is to load rice onto a truck. Just fifty-six trips and your day is done. The first bag contains only a single pound of rice. You can nearly put it in your pocket. It's a cushy job, yes? Far from it! The second bag holds two pounds, the third four, then eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred twenty-eight, two hundred fifty-six and then that's where you're done in. After you've loaded that two hundred fifty-six pound sack, you can't possibly manage the next one, five hundred twelve pounds—a quarter ton. You're finished after loading only nine bags. Why, you didn't even make it to lunch time! The job is preposterous, it's out of reach—and so too is embryology's job. And consider what happens when the inevitable failures occur—the suspect cells propagate their mongrel lineage through the remaining generations until birth. Constructing a man is an absurd, futile business—and so all men are broken, monstrous, improbable, near miscarriages, every last one of them around you."

Most of the crowd had dispersed around them. The orator stepped down from the crate and closed on him.

"I've got something for you, John." He held a white envelope in his outstretched hand. John, still sorting through the orator's argument, opened it distractedly and read the letter within:

Tiny towns flash by... I thought I saw a wisp of a rainbow through the window... Who knows what they call this little slice of death... There's a line-up at the bait and tackle shop, the locals don't look happy about it... The White Otter Motel and Coffee Shop is a make-shift mecca... As we came into town, it's nothing but gleaming cars out front of grim, rundown houses... You wonder what hell goes on behind those closed doors...

A woman crosses the street... Her mousy roots showing from forty feet away through her nightmarish red hair... Two demented brats trail behind her like vestigial organs... An old bag hops in her pick-up to drive half a block straight down the street from the department store to the bank... I wonder if she'll put it in reverse once she's got her money or drive the long way around... It's so close but not really America when you come right down to it... Close enough for me though... Misery needs no passport...

Still hours to go... On the bus, two or three gruesome women... Like small, bitter men trapped in big women's bodies... Pumped up... Rabid with enthusiasm and positive outlook... I don't like the look of them... The drivel's flowing at a machine gun pace... And volume—the volume of them... God is everywhere, still you wouldn't want Him to miss out on anything ... Hateful, just hateful, I won't look at them...

Passed another station... They're coming fast and furious now... Didn't catch the name... There was a big sign in the window: Let's Go!

Back on the bus, the grim coven is talking vacation plans... Now they pull each other in close... A confessional of sorts... A hush comes over them... All quiet whispers now... An acquaintance, a relative?... No, let's get that straight... There's a crime involved, after all... Better keep it down... The Lord can skip this part...

Another station, this one announced by garbled gibberish blasted over the speakers... There's a yellow school bus loaded with young academics sitting at a gas station... Fresh evil faces... They look like someone's going to get it...

I'd kiss the ground with happy gratitude for never having birthed a democracy... We're all going to hell and the electric chair when these monsters get their hands on the whip, believe me... Hide in the basement when they go door to door selling subscriptions to the cable democracy... I have no faith in the common folk... They do not suffer wisdom gladly...

The crowd had long since moved on. The orator was watching John patiently as he finished reading the letter.

"One task though isn't at all unreasonable, now is it? And we may as well finish that job, hadn't we?"

John looked up as a flash of light from the knife caught his eye. He was already running when the knife came down.

## Chapter 11

The secretary left the bathroom and walked back towards Watson's office. Between the two was Max's room. He slowed as he approached and then stopped at the door. He stood there thinking for a moment and then looked up and down the hall. He had the corridor to himself. He peered through the small window in the door. To the left of the bed, a nurse sat, idle, before a battery of instruments, his back to the door. Across the bed from him, a bald man in a tweed jacket sat at a small table, his back also turned to the door. He was hunched over a machine, working frantically at it with both hands. At last, the secretary turned his attention to the bed itself and the occupant lying still there. His face betrayed no emotion as he watched the regular, somnolent rhythm of the breathing; the flaccid, lifeless body just barely visible beneath the covers; the young face empty and framed by bandages, and the lips—the lips, furiously moving, spittle flying, speaking ceaselessly.

Hours later, he met his brother for a drink in a bar not far from work. They caught up a bit with one another. After some time, the secretary grew quiet.

His brother asked, "You seem preoccupied tonight. What's the matter?"

"Sorry, I'm not very good company tonight, I'm afraid. It's..."

"It's what?"

"It's just—I don't know if I should really be talking about this."

"Oh, come on now, don't be ridiculous."

"Alright. It's work."

The two pulled close together and spoke in low voices. The brother grew animated as the secretary told his story. By the end, both men were agitated.

The secretary's brother pushed back from the table and ran his hand through his hair. "Unbelievable. You know, Joey should hear this."

"Joey?"

"He's a friend—a reporter with the Times. I'll call him."

## Chapter 12

John ran up the street but then slowed and finally stopped altogether at the corner. Five streets met at the intersection. It seemed that each ended here, rather than continuing on through. The five streets met at arbitrary angles. Above him perched a nonsensical sign: Waverly Place and Waverly Place. He feared he was lost. He was still staring up at the street sign when he was spun around by the heavy hand of Sergeant O'Connor.

"Johnny Anomie?"

The policeman was an enormous figure, fully a head taller than John, with a broad, muscular frame. Though the Sergeant's white, close-cropped hair attested to his advancing age, there was an overpowering sense of strength and vitality remaining in him. His stern expression suggested equal parts of righteousness and gravitas, but his eyes held a friendly, good-natured twinkle. John imagined in the Sergeant only a feigned severity hiding a light-hearted nature beneath.

John nodded. Though he'd been standing still only a short while, the wind was freezing him through his thin shorts and his thread-bare work shirt and he was shivering enough that he didn't trust himself to speak.

"Johnny Anomie. Well, well, well... now haven't I've been hearing that name quite a lot recently. Perhaps too much, really, if you catch my meaning."

John's brow furrowed quizzically as the Sergeant continued, "But I know how it is, don't think I don't. Folks get you wrong, they don't take your proper meaning, they get all worked up over nothing—but you, now, you've surely had a hand in in all this—why I bet you've been up to all kinds of mischief, now haven't you?"

John did not respond. He was shaking violently now and staggered with every gust of wind.

"I think I'm getting you now. Perhaps you're too high and mighty to sully yourself with a personage as insignificant as silly old O'Connor. We'll fix that for you soon enough, boy—soon enough. You've got folks taking an interest in you that you'd be wise to let well alone. And look at you now—thumbing your nose at everyone you pass all your sorry way down. Johnny, can you not see that I'm trying to help here?"

John spoke through his clenched jaws, "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Sure, Johnny, you're a canny one aren't you? You wouldn't know a damn thing, now would you? I suppose it's all some foolish mistake then, isn't it? Poor old O'Connor, doddering as he is in his old age, has gotten himself all confused. He's gone off and nicked the wrong man. I'll grant you this—you don't miss a trick, you don't. Mind you, I suppose I can't fault you there, what with all the complaints piling up against you. When you come right down to it, I doubt there's much I could do for you even if I wanted to. So let's us just say I'm trying to figure you out—part of the job, then, isn't it?"

"What ... what about my wife?" John nearly shouted at the Sergeant.

"Fine, go on then, muddy the waters."

"No, she's gone."

"I'm sure, Johnny—I wouldn't presume to doubt you there. But could I trouble you perhaps for a picture of the woman in question—the better to look for her, I mean?"

He fixed John with a wry grin and waited patiently as John fumbled with his wallet.

"Here," he said, as he got out a small number of photos. The Sergeant did not take them from him but moved to stand at John's shoulder so they could see them together. His eyebrows arched as John's shaking hands exposed them one by one and let them fly into the howling wind. Each photograph was a white card fading to yellow at the edges. Each was printed with block letters. John and the Sergeant read them silently together: "WIFE SMILING ON COUCH", "WIFE AT THE BEACH RUNNING INTO THE WAVES", "WIFE AND AN OLD FRIEND LAUGHING WITH THEIR ARMS AROUND EACH OTHER".

Sergeant O'Connor chuckled softly.

"I think we'd best be on our way now," O'Connor said. John offered no resistance as O'Connor handcuffed and blindfolded him.

He was led awkwardly away and laid gently on his stomach on the metal floor of a vehicle.

The only thought in his mind was how good it felt to be out of the cold.

John had lost all track of time by the time they'd finally reached their destination. He was set on his feet again and was guided, still blindfolded, on a twisting path, onto an elevator and out again, down a hall and through a door before they finally stopped. John was set carefully in a chair. His handcuffs and blindfold were removed. John looked around and was astonished to find himself sitting in his own chair, in his own study, in his own apartment. He wondered for a moment where all the smoke had gone, and the papers.

"You'll be staying in here for a while, now, and I'll not hear from you again until we come for you—if you know what's good for you, that is," Sergeant O'Connor said quietly. He closed the door behind him as he went, leaving John alone in the room.

## Chapter 13

John paced the study anxiously. His mind was racing but he took no action. He had no desire to anger the Sergeant.

John suddenly realized how tired he was. He curled his filthy body up on the carpet in the corner of the room furthest from the door and waited impatiently for sleep. He closed his eyes and forced himself to relax. His foot tapped nervously against the baseboards and, rather than fight it, John concentrated on his foot, focusing on making each movement slower than the last. He emptied his mind into that monotony.

#

However much it might have changed around him, he felt certain he was still in his house. A quick glance down confirmed that he had no body. He panned all the way through a tight circle.

Cut to an establishing shot of the room around him.

He was certain this was still his study somehow, against all reason.

Zoom in on a corner on the room. Pan to adjacent corners.

It was the familiar outline of his study but the room was entirely empty, devoid of objects of any kind, and yet words abounded—block letters were crammed everywhere.

Zoom in on an area of mottled gray. Zoom in further, the gray blur resolves into block printed letters, hanging on dozens of distinct surfaces. Close-up on an area so thick with them, they run to black in the center of the shot. Series of shots show words everywhere, painting the room in black fading to gray. Fade out. Fade in on a tracking shot starting with the study doorway, then down the hallway and room to room in the apartment, ending in the kitchen doorway. Cut to a shot of one wall of the kitchen. The largest letters are visible: STOVE, FRIDGE, TABLE, CHAIR and CUPBOARD. Tilt up to show CEILING. Tilt down to show FLOOR. Cut to a shot of the large print word COUNTER. Just barely visible around it are smaller words: GLASS, WATER, KNIFE and SAUCER. Zoom in on SAUCER and resolve COFFEE STAIN and CIGARETTE BURN. Zoom in further to show GRAINS OF SUGAR. There are still smaller words there to read. Zoom out.

Dissolve to the study again and an establishing shot on words describing John's body. Zoom in on SHORTS, revealing BACK POCKET and then WALLET. Zoom in further and reveal ONE DOLLAR, DRIVER'S LICENSE, and then PHOTOGRAPH OF WIFE LAUGHING ON BEAR MOUNTAIN. There are thousands of words surrounding those seven but we can make out only a fraction of them: HAWAIIAN SHIRT, BLUE JEANS, SMILE, DIMPLE.

John pored over even the tiniest words with longing, but watched in dismay as they began to slowly fade, disappearing from view. After a moment, larger words around them followed.

Pan to show words fading around the room. Cut to DESK slowly clearing itself as PEN, BLOTTER and COFFEE CUP vanish. Cut to KNOB abandoning DOOR. Cut to the hallway, where all that remain are CARPET and CEILING. Tracking shot from the study to the bedroom through an opening from which DOOR dissolves.

With overpowering sadness, John watched WIFE dissolve to nothingness. He found himself adrift in a blank, blinding universe.

Fade to white.

John awoke with awful pain in his bladder. He sat up and rocked back and forth and then tried standing but neither helped.

Given what the Sergeant had said upon leaving him here, John was reluctant to ask for permission to leave the room, and so he sat, waiting without much hope that O'Connor might happen to come in of his own accord. For perhaps a half an hour he waited.

He couldn't wait any longer. He got up and went to the window. He unlocked and opened it. His face burning with shame, he climbed up and, kneeling precariously on the sill, he sent a yellow arc streaming to the parking lot below.

A meaty, white-haired hand brought a black Billy club down hard across the back of John's neck. John collapsed under the blow, tumbling from the sill to the floor. Urine flowed over his stomach up to his chest and ran down the sides of his neck. His arms and legs shook with spasms. As darkness crept in all around him, the broad form of Sergeant O'Connor loomed above and blocked out the light, the club twitching in his hand.

"You're an animal, Johnny boy, a right fucking animal and that the God's honest truth."

John's eyes, slowly closing, just made out the smoke pouring into the room from all directions and his hands grasped helplessly at the papers flooding in around him.

## Chapter 14

At the bay window, the man in the gray suit turned slightly to face the chair, dust devils rising at his feet.

"Word will escape. Will that suffice?"

Dust traced faint movement through the pyramid of yellow light containing the hand on the book.

"No, the image."

The man in the gray suit nodded slowly and turned back to the window, looking through the reflection of the chair, the table and the hand on the book to study the scene beyond as flashes of red light danced across his back.

## Chapter 15

Strong hands grasped John under his arms and hoisted him up on his feet.

"Show time, Johnny boy." His eyes sparkled. There was just a hint of a smile on his lips.

The pain in his head was too much for him. He pitched forward and fell flat on the ground. His chin bounced on Sergeant O'Connor's black leather shoe. John's eyes shut down again in blackness.

"Oh, no you don't."

John found himself upright once more. He kept his legs under him, though he struggled to maintain his balance. Sensation flooded in. Pain hung like a yoke across his neck. His work shirt was damp with urine. His hair was plastered to his head in indivisible locks. His skin was alive with goose-flesh under the urine and sweat and the grime of untold days—a vile paste he could feel under his nails. Fatigue, powerful and beguiling, dragged him down. He could not have been unconscious for long.

John followed the Sergeant into the living room. O'Connor led John to the center of the floor and then withdrew behind him. There was no chair for John. He stood and waited. He stared at a point just in front of his feet. Looking up any higher spurred the pounding in his head and tempted the vertigo which threatened to overcome him at any moment. He succeeded in snatching only momentary glimpses of the court presiding over him. There, in his own living room, was one of his high-backed dining room chairs, standing tall on stacks of books. He could make out only the lower half of the figure seated there. The rich, black robes of office obscured his body, save for the fat, dimpled hands which rested on his knees.

John tried to force his gaze up to look the judge in the eye but got no higher than the wide chest before reeling backwards. He resigned himself to keeping his eyes downcast.

"John Anomie, there are grave and disturbing charges made against you. We will progress through them in an orderly manner. We will examine each one in turn. Ultimately, the investigation into these charges will provide the foundation upon which we will render our judgment, Mr. Anomie."

The judge paused. John had the uncertain impression that he was intended to say something in response but did not know what it might be.

From behind him, in a voice full of condemnation, "You're asking for it now, Johnny boy, and you'll be sure to get it too, you will."

"Silence," the judge said.

Deep in John's disoriented mind, a certain expectation was developing. If there was to be a trial, he imagined he knew what his crime would be. He found himself awaiting the accusation and felt sure it would not be long in coming.

"Mr. Anomie, your cooperation, though not strictly speaking necessary for the successful execution of these proceedings, would nonetheless be greatly appreciated." The judge paused once more.

John stood staring at the ground before him.

"Let the record show that Mr. Anomie understands fully the intentions of the court here convened."

John gave a small nod and pain blossomed in the back of his head.

"This court is now in session. Please enter into evidence the accounts of the first incident."

Papers rustled behind him. An emotionless voice read from the accounts of witnesses at the scene of the fight in the subway. The statements droned on and on, as numerous as they were nearly interchangeable. John soon lost count of them. Each made mention of John's interest in the altercation, his unwillingness to intervene in it, and how, finally, he had bolted from the car after a short interrogation by the police. The judge snorted each time these points were raised, but he reserved his most careful attention for the witnesses' statements regarding John's character. Periodically, he asked for certain passages to be reread, and, not a few times, he even repeated sections aloud to himself. These assessments painted a very disagreeable portrait and John was disheartened to hear them. They depicted a man cold and cynical in the extreme, both unloved and unlovable. He seemed to provoke an almost instinctual unease in those around him. That he took an unwholesome entertainment in the suffering of others was obvious to every witness, his attempts to mask his interest behind a veneer of shock notwithstanding.

Though the accusation John awaited had yet to be broached, John could see how these accounts could form a prologue to it.

The accounts carried on interminably. Over the hours, the pain in his head and neck subsided and he felt, if not well exactly, at least somewhat improved. His mind cleared a little. He realized that, excepting the very start of the trial, his participation had not been solicited in any way and, in fact, it seemed that his presence was hardly necessary. Despite his modest recuperation, John kept his eyes down and did not look directly into the judge's eyes, for fear of appearing impertinent.

When all the statements had been read, the judge announced that the investigation into the first incident was concluded. With neither break nor preamble, he called for statements regarding the second incident to be entered into evidence. This investigation concerned John's disastrous meeting with Dr. Osgood.

They were just about to read the first statement when the proceedings were interrupted by the entrance of a man in a gray suit. He walked briskly into the room and straight up to the judge. John heard them whispering together for some time but could make out nothing of what they said.

The delay and the quiet buzzing of the whispering voices seemed to sap John's remaining strength. His legs buckled under him. He righted himself, only to feel them give way once more. John allowed himself to fall to his knees. The man in the gray suit stepped neatly around him and left the room. John sat down cross-legged on the carpet and was surprised to find that no one seemed to take exception to this.

The judge noted that the doctor had elected to withdraw his charges and thus the second matter was now closed. John must have appeared to have been overly encouraged by this development as the judge quickly reminded him that two of the original three incidents remained. The judge then moved immediately to the third matter—the allegation that John maliciously libeled the Institute.

John could hardly believe his ears. With little else to occupy his thoughts though the tedious hours of the proceedings, John had played it out in his mind. Envisioning how it would unfold, he could almost hear that grave, officious voice speak her name aloud. Three incidents, all revealed now, and no mention made of any kind—and in its place this other charge. He could make no sense of it—he felt certain he'd never so much as made mention of the Institute; he couldn't fathom how he could possibly have slandered it. The explanation soon came to light, but as it did, he was no less bewildered.

The judge called for the accounts to be brought forth and read. These ones told of John's discourse, attitude and manner during that gathering which seemed so very long ago to John now; that party that had ended so poorly. They, too, included unflattering evaluations of John's character, one in particular calling careful attention to how his farcical ravings provided insight into his disregard, if not his outright contempt, for family, society, industry and the foundations that underlie them. The judge allowed only three statements to be read before halting the proceedings.

"That will suffice. We need hear no further evidence on this matter."

Beneath him, John lay on his side with his arms around his knees. His eyes were half-closed under heavy lids.

"Mr. Anomie, this court has found you guilty on both the first and third charges against you, with the second charge having been dropped owing to the mercy of the good doctor. Do you have anything to say for yourself before we render our judgment?"

From the floor, his cheek resting on the carpet, John asked, "But of what am I guilty?"

"Mr. Anomie, you waste our time. Have you been sleeping down there?" The judge's beefy hands balled into fists and shook with rage.

"What laws have I broken? What about my wife?"

"Your wife, Mr. Anomie? I fail to see what bearing this could have on the charges against you today. Is this somehow a plea for this court's clemency, Mr. Anomie?"

John had no answer.

"Then, without further delay, we shall hand down our judgment. Having found you guilty on two charges we will take this opportunity to call out the callous and impenitent manner with which these crimes were committed. We note also your apparent disinterest, lack of cooperation and the clear absence of even the barest trace of remorse you have displayed throughout these proceedings.

"Regarding the question of your alleged wife, we would not be surprised if further investigation yielded sufficient grounds for additional charges to be brought against you. Note, however, that because this matter has yet to be brought before us, our judgment on the convictions at which we have already arrived will have to suffice for any other offenses for which you are ultimately responsible.

"In conclusion, although it seems your actions sully us through even the modest exposure we must endure to try them in this court of law, it is nonetheless our duty to pass judgment upon them. With this in the forefront of our mind, Mr. Anomie, we hereby sentence you to excommunication in perpetuity, effective immediately."

Down below on the carpet, John lay motionless, his unblinking eyes opened to mere slits.

"I'm sorry, son, there's nothing more we can do for you."

## Chapter 16

John felt a shadow darken his face. He guessed it was the judge stepping over him on his way out of the apartment.

John realized that, as things could hardly deteriorate any further, he could risk a questionable act. He wanted to see the face that had condemned him. He reached for the seat of the judge's chair to pull himself up but his strength failed him again. The chair toppled from its dais of books. As the chair fell and John fell with it, the nail of his left ring finger caught in the soft wood of the chair and ripped free. John tumbled to the floor and rolled onto his side.

Distantly, he heard the front door closing.

John got carefully to his feet. He opened his balled fists. He'd been clenching the fingernail in his left hand. There was blood dripping between his fingers. He tossed the nail on the dining room table. He looked back to the crushed, stained area of the carpet that bore silent witness to his presence at the lengthy trial. The sky behind the windows was black shot through with yellow and white street lights. Could it all have been one long night? He was standing over the high-backed chair and scattered books, looking down at them absently, when he noticed a newspaper lying beside the chair, as if it had fallen from the seat when the chair was overturned. John crouched low and craned his neck to see the headline: "One Man is an Island." His lips murmured the words of the story as he read them. He stood up again, stiffly.

He ran the shower and lay on his side in the tub. The steaming flood scalded him. He shut his eyes. The water stapled him to the void. Water was in his eyes and he squeezed them tightly, making red fireworks behind his eyelids.

Encased in a shimmering transparent container, a black hole held paling, caricatured human structures and machinery swinging in tight orbits; revolving so slowly it might just as well have been stopped. Flashes of multi-colored light played the spectrum like a scale and raced the light years to drown in the center of that carousel, exploding in the vacuum with a feeling almost like a sound. There could be laughter there, but it would never escape.

John opened his eyes. Bloody water ran spirals down the drain.

John returned to the dining room table. He lit a cigarette. He tossed his lighter down and picked up the fingernail. He looked it over, flipping it in his palm. On the underside, the nail was blue. He picked at it with his right index finger. Skin folded out from the nail in an onion skin rectangle. Holding it up in the light, he could see the blue color ran in lines across the tiny sheet of skin. He put the nail back on the table and left the room. He returned with a magnifying glass. He sat back down at the table and examined the nail. Tiny words painted the nail in blue:

It was already mid-morning when J. completed the long trek through the snow-covered streets and closed on the towering gates guarding entrance to the administration. Through the thick black bars, J. could make out the sprawling central office, a huge two story structure of coarse-cut stone, and some few of the innumerable out-buildings that surrounded it. The complex was the size of a small town itself. The continual construction within made the passages connecting the buildings more narrow with each passing year. It seemed inevitable to J. that someday the compound would be so tightly jammed up against the tall walls encircling it that they would give way and the administration would come tumbling down the hill in a landslide to engulf the town below. There were rumors whispered amongst the townsfolk about an imminent widening of the retaining walls, but to J. these were nothing more than irresponsible gossip—he had no time for them.

A tall, powerfully-built soldier stepped out from a small hut beside the road. J. was eclipsed by the guard—he must have been a foot taller than J. Out of respect for his position, J. waited patiently for him to speak first. He'd come quite close when the soldier finally addressed him.

" _Yes?" the soldier asked in a manner at once cold and commanding._

J's voice sounded almost childlike and shrill by comparison as he replied, "Good morning, sir. Forgive me for removing you from the comforts of your hut on such a cold, windy day—"

" _That is my duty, nothing more," the guard interrupted._

" _Yes, of course, but I am sorry nonetheless. It is business of an urgent nature that brings me here today—that is to say, urgent at least to me personally. If this matter did not threaten to undermine the performance of my duties as a citizen and townsman, I would not dare to trouble those within these gates, who surely have many pressing matters for their consideration, to assist me in its resolution, sir."_

He sighed irritably, "Do you take me for an officer, townsman?"

" _Now that I can see you better, no," J. admitted, "but from a distance, you understand, a man of your bearing—"_

" _I must caution you to refer to my person henceforth solely through the use of my title, Guardsman, as I am not, in fact, an officer."_

" _Please pardon my unwitting disrespect. It is the product of ignorance—certainly not my intention. This is my first visit here—I've had no formal training in the etiquette and protocols required."_

The exertion of the long walk from town had kept J. warm, but now, after some time standing in the knee-high snow, the cold began to find its way through J.'s sweaters and jackets. He shivered and found himself wishing the guard would dispense with these formalities and let him pass.

" _Be that as it may, everything must be noted." The Guardsman paused to emphasize this point before continuing. "Now what is it that troubles you so, townsman?"_

" _It is my wife, Guardsman. She was lost from my home some time ago and, after much deliberation, I have made the difficult decision to request the Board's intervention on my—and indeed her—behalf to reunite us."_

The Guardsman staggered backwards a half step and exclaimed as if J. had physically struck him. "Beyond belief! What vain insolence it must be to see no ill in troubling that august institution with this—surely the most mundane of complaints!"

J., worried that the situation had already progressed beyond all repair, responded earnestly, "I must beg your indulgence once more for my inexperience—that office is the only one whose name I know. Please rest assured that it is only my naiveté that makes me appear impertinent." He paused, shuddering as a gust of wind chilled him to the core. "I think perhaps you, a fellow man and likely married as well, will understand the importance of this to me. If I should take my inquiry elsewhere, I'd be in your debt if you could direct me appropriately."

The Guardsman snorted but otherwise seemed at least somewhat mollified. "I imagine the Department of Lost Items and Their Retrieval would be the office you seek, but all visitors must first report to the Information Office for instruction. You will find that office directly before you on the path through the gate."

" _Then you will permit my passage, Guardsman?"_

" _When have I prevented it?" he asked icily as he moved to open the gate._

" _Then I thank you, Guardsman."_

His broad back strained hardly at all to open the heavy gate and, as he closed it again behind J., he called out one last direction, "Straight ahead, straight ahead, a blind man could find it."

J. waved and then, eager to be on his way, turned and began trudging purposefully through the drifting snow. He kept up a brisk pace, stamping the cold from his feet with every step. The Guardsman had not been mistaken, for after only a short walk, he found the office. It was a simple one story building, indistinguishable from the neighboring offices save for a small sign on the door. J. entered straight away.

" _Shut the door!" someone shouted from within. J. hastened to do so. The windowless office was without furnishings of any kind save for a small desk and chair set against the far wall of the structure's single, very generous, room. Behind the desk, a harried civil servant took questions from the people crowding the room from wall to wall. J. could scarcely find a place for himself in the mob. From their dress, J. was sure that these were townsmen like him, but from where had they all come? He'd had the road to himself all the long walk from town. It was hard to believe all these people had arrived earlier than he—why, he'd awakened no later than three this morning to prepare himself for the trip. He wondered worriedly if it was possible that they'd been here all night?_

J. resigned himself to leaving these questions unanswered, for, though a hum of conversation filled the room, his immediate neighbors seemed to have been exhausted into stubborn silence.

J. lost track of time during the long wait, but once he happened to be facing the door as someone entered and he saw that sunset had come and gone. The abbreviated sleep of the previous night and the morning's long journey weighed on him dreadfully and, by the time he'd finally maneuvered himself to the front of the line, he was nearly dead on his feet. He had to shout to be heard over the din, but to all appearances, he'd been understood. The clerk, consulting a number of thick books in turn, carefully drew J. a map. He handed it to him and, as J. was jostled away from the desk by his impatient comrades, the clerk called after him, "Ministry Office for Familial Affairs, take care to follow the map!"

J. worked his way to the door where the rancorous mob spat him out with such force that he fell to his knees in the snow. The door slammed shut behind him. J. picked himself up and sat at a low bench beside the entrance, feeling the cold air start to revive him. He glanced down at the now crumpled paper in his hand. The map was painstakingly drawn and embellished with all manner of landmarks to guide him along the circuitous route to the Ministry. J. began to feel more himself and, indeed, more enthusiastic about his immediate prospects. It occurred to him that perhaps the Guardsman was not so close within the inner circle as he imagined given that his suggestion was apparently not at all the office best suited for J.'s case. J. smiled wryly to himself and stood up. Consulting the map at every turn, he went on his way.

The Ministry Office for Familial Affairs was a plain building in the same utilitarian style as the Information Office, though it was far larger. The main door opened directly onto a waiting room, which barely contained another mass of petitioners—this one even bigger than the last. At the far end of the room was a desk behind which stretched a long corridor of offices. An official sat at the desk, as if guarding the offices from the throng. And again uncounted hours had crawled slowly by when J. finally had his audience. His voice cracking, J. detailed his plight once more.

" _I'm sorry to say, but you have been misdirected," and with that, he began drawing up a new map. "I'm afraid your case is not properly covered under our charter at all—the office you seek is the Bureau of Marital Law."_

J. was beside himself with consternation, "How can this be? I have arrived here on the guidance of the Information Office itself."

The official looked up from his work and, fixing J. with a knowing look, he said "I have heard it implied that that particular office may not be amongst the most reliable—but it's of no concern to you, though, as I can assure you that it's the Bureau of Marital Law that will be of the greatest assistance in your case."

J. could see no advantage to be gained in arguing with the overburdened clerk and mutely took the new map when it was ready.

Conditions at the Bureau of Martial Law were similar to the two offices he'd already visited. When his turn came up, he was directed to the Subcommittee on Interpersonal Affairs. Nights and days went by as J. tracked down all the fruitless paths that were laid out, in turn, before him. The Subcommittee on Interpersonal Affairs sent him on to the Missing Persons Identification Branch, where he was advised to visit the Department of Spousal Relations and thus onwards through so many departments, bureaus, committees and branches that J. found he could no longer remember them all. It was on the way to the Counsellorship of the Adjunct Deputy for the Reunification of Separated Persons that J. finally reached his limit. He sat down in a doorway, wearied as much by frustration as by the sleepless nights. There were a few townsmen braving the cold to make their way between departments, wads of maps clutched in their hands.

He was ashamed to find himself considering the abandonment of his petition. As he reflected bitterly on the sad turn of events since his arrival, the Guardsman's suggestion from so long ago came back to him: the Department of Lost Items and Their Retrieval. He rummaged through the wadded sheaf of maps he'd collected, looking for mention of this office. In truth, he held out little hope of finding any such reference, such was the sheer size of the administration complex, and so J. was startled by his good fortune when he saw it depicted as a landmark on the very last, most recent map. After a lengthy consultation, he was astonished to discover that he was sitting on the Department's very doorstep. He jumped up and let himself in.

The waiting room was empty. A young attendant sat behind a desk laboring over a neat pile of documents. J. cleared his throat. The clerk looked up attentively. After only a brief description of J's plight, he nodded and stood up. J. followed him through the tall double doors behind the desk.

Behind the doorway, the building stretched away in a vast warehouse. Barred enclosures on either side of a narrow corridor ran the length of the warehouse. Many hundreds of misplaced persons waited morosely in the enclosures for someone to claim them, men on the right of the corridor and women on the left. As J. stepped through the doorway and they could see him clearly, they ran to the bars, reaching their arms through, imploring J., begging, entreating him to claim them and take them home. J. went along the corridor staying just out of arm's reach, searching for that familiar face among the hundreds now turned towards him, calling to him so urgently. Innumerable faces, all so lovely, so sad, so deserving of reclamation. Tears ran freely down his gaunt cheeks as he realized he could no longer pick her out from the hundreds of unhappy, desperate faces turned towards him. He'd made his way to this terrible pit but knew now he would not be able to save even one sad soul from it.

" _Perhaps you just need more time?" J. turned towards the voice. The clerk was looking expectantly at him and holding open the barred door while the men inside shuffled to make room._

# Part 2
## Chapter 1

Rich Jon

Jon downshifted and burned rubber all the way up the block to catch the yellow light. He got off the gas, pounced on the clutch, and let it out again. The tires barked and the car lurched as his speed cut in half. Alone in the car, he laughed out loud. The car was exploding with the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth. With the top down, Jon was a one man parade: a million dollars in the car alone; slung low, jet-black and gleaming like a pulsar in the late morning sun, announced fore and aft by 110 decibels of Doppler Effect. Hard on the gas now, he closed on his destination at 130 mph. He stood on the clutch and brake. Skidding in a graceful arc, he swung the car into the parking lot. Tires still screaming, he narrowly missed a half a dozen parked cars as he spun slowly across the asphalt, finally coming to rest across the white lines framing his spot. The owners of the adjacent spots had long since learned to park in visitor's. Jon killed the engine and got out. He palmed the keys in his left hand and ran the fingertips of his right down the hot hood, feeling the angry ticking of the engine.

"Neat," he murmured.

He entered the building. He took the steps three at a time and stormed the halls, scattering employees left and right in his wake. Reaching his outer office, he stopped at his assistant's desk.

"Let the department heads know I'm here. The meeting is on."

He entered the adjacent conference room. Five minutes later, the last of them had entered and taken his place. Jon stood with his back to the conference table, his arms folded, and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows to the parking lot below.

"Are all the reports ready?" All assembled murmured their assent.

"Excellent, gentlemen, then let's begin. Just give me the conclusions—if I need backstory, I'll ask for it. Good? Let's start with medical."

To Jon's right, a young man sat up and straightened his papers before speaking. "Allergies are up across the board, way up. Mean severity is also rising. Autism rates are increasing at an accelerated pace beyond the confidence intervals of our models. Incidence of deafness and blindness, along with rates of medically significant impairment of visual and auditory function, are higher than in any year on record. Medically, there is nothing unusual in the cases, excepting of course the sheer magnitude of occurrence, which would suggest their root cause. That said, probability distributions for all of these outcomes are different across demographic groups. In all cases, occurrence in Caucasians outstrips all other subpopulations. Within Caucasians, those from families with annual incomes in excess of $200,000 show another significant increase. Rates in males exceed those seen in females by a wide margin in all sub-populations. Note that there are several interesting exceptions to the high risk profiles seen within white populations beyond the low income group. These include high school drop outs, criminal and prison populations, first generation immigrants, those with existing handicaps, the mentally ill, the homeless, and Maxies. Even controlling for income as a factor, all of these groups do not show the same high rates of these outcomes as the remainder of their Caucasian fellows do. While it is too early to draw conclusions, the data on risk distribution seems to suggest a strong positive correlation of risk with moderate or high socio-economic status."

Jon considered these findings momentarily, and then turned away from the window to face the group.

"Legal?"

"Legislation regulating human interaction is continuing its upward trend with no end in sight. Anti-smoking legislation has become nearly universal. Harassment and anti-discrimination laws are increasing in scope and number. The issuance of restraining orders is at an all-time high. Local waste, noise, and pet ordinances are advancing both in number and stringency. Book-banning, school prayer, and drunk-driving measures are similarly all on the rise. Of note anecdotally is a bill pending in the Massachusetts to regulate the proper use of greetings and titles."

Jon nodded, "Sociology?"

"My people are seeing an on-going deterioration in conversational and interpersonal skills which, based on preliminary analysis, seems demographically similar to the distribution of negative outcomes reported earlier by the medical department. We believe human dialog is being gradually replaced by degenerate discourse composed of a kind of exchange of monologues. For the last year, we've been running an experiment designed to assess subject comprehension of other points of view exposed to them through simple conversation—you can think of it as a sort of conversational IQ. Scores have fallen steadily throughout the year. It's as though conversation is starting to devolve into a forum for people to hear little else but their own voices.

"In a similar vein are recent changes to how online search engines work—rather than reporting results conceptually closest to user input, new search algorithms aim to report results most palatable to the specific user issuing the query. Instead of providing the most relevant information, a wealth of knowledge about the user making the request provides a basis for retrieving information the user most wants to see. What this, in turn, implies is a sea change in how knowledge is accessed and understood by people. People will find themselves enveloped in a kind of cocoon of self where no matter how cleverly they search, they'll just keep finding themselves."

"Anything else?"

"Yes. With the advent of the Internet, specifically social networking, boundaries between work, social and personal lives are eroding and seem likely to vanish entirely. All of these are transforming into on-demand phenomena. With the growing globalization of professional and social interaction, there is evidence that, by common, though certainly implicit, agreement the extended downtime of an eight hour sleep is becoming untenable for highly-connected individuals. We see those people as forming a set of early adopters of a trend that continues to put downward pressure on the length of the effective day. Simulations suggest that this could culminate in a working day as brief as—"

"Forty-five minutes?"

"Yes, exactly: thirty active, fifteen sleeping."

Jon sat down at the conference table. "Gentlemen, I imagine these results come as no surprise to anyone here. To the best of my knowledge, however, we have no means at our disposal with which to reverse or halt these processes—although, in truth, I am not yet convinced that such a reversal is desirable, even if it proved to be practical. For the time being, we will take no action. Thank you."

As the room emptied, Jon returned to his private office. He leaned over his desk to speak into the intercom.

"Get me an intern."

He opened the wall safe behind his desk. He retrieved a small white box and closed the safe. Inside the box was the nail. He studied it a moment, holding the thin sheet of blue letters to the light. He'd just closed the box again when the intern entered the room.

"Sir?"

Jon handed him the package. "Take this to the labs. I want a complete work-up on this object. I need to know what it is, how it was made, and who could have made it. Tell them to get me the results as soon as they are available. This is very important—be certain you don't lose this."

The intern pocketed the box and left the office.

## Chapter 2

Watson returned to his desk to take the call. "Dr. Watson here."

"Hello, doctor, this is Joey Miller. I'm a reporter with The Times."

"Mr. Miller. What can I do for you?"

"Sorry to intrude on your afternoon—I'm sure you're a busy man. I've recently come across rumors concerning the work being done at the Institute—some pretty outlandish stuff, really. I thought you'd appreciate the opportunity to comment before anything comes to light."

"Rumors, Mr. Miller?"

"Yes, about experiments being undertaken at the Institute."

"I've got a few minutes. If you'd like, we could talk right now."

"I would, thank you. I understand that some of these experiments involve unusual surgical procedures."

"Unusual? Yes, I think that would be a fair characterization."

"Specifically, I understand that these procedures produce irreversible sensory deprivation in the subjects."

"Yes?"

"Yes, what? Are you corroborating these reports, Dr. Watson?"

"Mr. Miller, we here at the Institute have no need to shy away from publicity. I think you'll find we can be open about our work—perhaps surprisingly open. Please ask your questions."

"Alright. I've been told that the subjects of these experiments are human."

"One is, yes. That is correct."

"One?"

"Yes."

"Are there plans to involve others?"

"More than likely, no, not directly in any event, as it stands now."

"'More than likely, no,' Dr. Watson?"

"Yes, more than likely."

Joey paused a moment. "What's this patient's name?"

"Max."

"Can I ask how Max is doing?"

"Certainly you can, yes. Max is recovering."

"Is he conscious?"

"That's a challenging question—there's no way for us to determine that with any certainty."

"I see."

"He's like an island to us. It's a debatable point, but we've taken EEG measurements before, during, and after the procedure that show great commonality. Given that he was conscious for the first two readings, we can be relatively confident in inferring at least some form of consciousness from the third."

"Hold on now—did you say 'during'? Do you mean to say he was conscious during the surgery?"

"He was, but don't be alarmed. It's not at all unusual for patients to remain conscious during surgical procedures on the brain. In fact, it can be critically important that they do. As I'm sure you can well imagine, this sort of work is extremely delicate—it's only by keeping the patient alert and aware that the surgeon can assess his progress. There is no cause for concern on humanitarian grounds—the patient's discomfort was meticulously managed during the procedure and certainly he experiences none now."

"So you expect him to stabilize at some point and then live on in that state for what? Years?"

"I'd imagine so," Watson agreed. "Medically speaking there's nothing wrong with him, excepting, of course, his paralysis, that would negatively affect his prognosis. He should expect longevity on par with, for example, a coma patient—barring complications, of course."

"Dr. Watson, I think I am beginning to grasp the basic facts of what's been done here but I can't for the life of me understand what would possess you people to do such a thing?"

"Mr. Miller, that's the limit of our candor. Our motives are not up for public scrutiny. Suffice it to say that our work here is expected to have major impacts in a variety of fields."

"Can you tell me what's in store for Max over the next few days?"

"Yes, I can do that much for you. In the short term, our greatest concern is ensuring that post-operative healing progresses satisfactorily. Every hour, I or one of my colleagues checks in on him and, of course, he is attended around the clock by rotating shifts of nurses and stenographers."

"'Stenographers?'"

"Yes, of course, stenographers—I thought you understood? The experiment involves severance of all sensory and motor functions excepting those involved in speech."

"Max speaks? And so you've got to have stenographers there at all times because you never know when he'll wake up and start talking?"

"No, we need them present at all times because, to the best of our knowledge, Max no longer sleeps."

"Never?"

"Our EEG readings present a fairly uniform profile throughout the day, and we observe that he speaks almost continually—from these we infer that he does not sleep."

"And you keep transcripts of the things he says?"

"We do, yes."

"Can I see those transcripts?"

"No, that I cannot do for you, I'm afraid. They must remain strictly confidential."

"I suppose I'm not surprised—I can only imagine what he might be saying about all of this now. Surely you realize, Dr. Watson, that there must be legal grounds for action against the Institute or you personally stemming from all this?"

"And surely you realize that an organization such as ours does not hastily plunge itself into any new endeavor, let alone one as sensitive as this. I have been assured that such legal grounds do not exist. The contract is legal and binding—in fact, it is iron-clad. The short of it, Mr. Miller, is that Max fully understood the agreement he was entering into. He was neither coerced nor taken advantage of in any way."

"But isn't this tantamount to his contracting out his own suicide?"

"His suicide? No, I should say not."

"At a guess, that determination won't be either of ours to make."

"You may be right there. Forgive me, Mr. Miller, but I've given you all the time I can spare today."

"Alright, I think I've got enough for now."

"Good day, Mr. Miller," Watson said.

Joey hung up.

Six hours later, the evening edition was on the street. Following some debate, Joey had the story front page under the headline "One Man is an Island."

## Chapter 3

@teenjohnny

Through the intercom in a tinny, portable radio voice, "Yes, John, come on in."

A buzzer sounds and the lock releases. Johnny goes in. He is a teenager, making in-roads on adulthood with the barest wisp of a blond mustache. He is wearing a long green hospital gown, blue jeans and dark sunglasses. His shaved head is wrapped in gauze bandages.

"Please, sit down. Make yourself comfortable." The doctor indicates the big beige sectional opposite the easy chair he occupies. His smiles brightly over a placid, even demeanor. He shows no surprise at Johnny's appearance.

"Hi, John, I'm Dr. Osgood." He reaches out his hand. After a moment's hesitation, Johnny extends his in return and they shake. Johnny's face screws up in a pantomime of disapproval.

"What is it, John?"

"It's Johnny."

"I'm sorry. Johnny. Forgive me, I always use a person's given name first, out of courtesy. I hope you understand."

"Yes and that's very reasonable of you, Dr. Osgood."

"Please, let's not stand on ceremony—call me James."

"Jim, then?"

"James, please."

"You bet."

"Now that we've introduced ourselves, what seems to be the problem?"

"Problem, Dr. James?"

"Yes, Johnny, I understand that you've been going through a bit of a rough patch in recent months?"

"No, not at all, don't worry about me. I'm fine, really—never better."

"Problems at school? With family? Friends?"

"The reason I'm here should be apparent enough."

"Sure, Johnny, as you like." The doctor pauses a moment. "What about your appearance—that costume I mean?"

"Do you like it?"

"Why are you wearing it?"

"Why, Dr. James, this outfit speaks volumes."

"Perhaps you could summarize it for me?"

"It says for me what I would rather not have to repeat. 'I am spring, I am happiness, I am youth, frivolity and unbridled enthusiasm. I am hope springing eternal. I am Max.'"

"So then it's Max you follow?"

"Did they make another one and no one told me?"

"Would you say you admire him?"

"For sure, Dr. James, when I grow up, I want to be just like Max."

Dr. Osgood sighs irritably. "Alright, Johnny, alright. I think you've made your point. You're smart, let's say even more so than I. But that doesn't imply you can't use these sessions to make things better for yourself."

"Maybe."

"Let's turn that intelligence loose on the problems at hand—for example, your relationship with your parents. They're definitely concerned. The clothes, the lack of interest in school, the drugs—"

"That reminds me. I've got a ground rule for these get-togethers."

"I'm listening."

"No drugs, or at least no drugs without my consent."

"Listen, John—"

"Johnny."

"—you've got nothing to worry about there, regarding drugs, I mean. I have no intention of forcing anything on you and, in any event, I couldn't even if I wanted to. You see, although I'm a doctor, my Ph.D. is in psychology, not medicine." He leans in with his palms up and his arms outstretched. "I couldn't prescribe you an aspirin."

Johnny stares blankly. "So you, personally, can't prescribe for your patients but maybe you're affiliated with a psychiatrist or a clinic that will issue prescriptions at your request?"

Angrily, "That's a matter for the psychologist alone. It's a question of how he—or she—sets out to run his or her practice."

"But, Dr. James, you are, after all, in the service industry. As a client, the details of the service you provide would seem like something I should know about."

The doctor laughs and leans back in his chair. "Yes, Johnny, but, you see you are not my client, your parents are. You are my patient."

"Is that how we're going to establish a foundation of trust between us?"

Dr. Osgood's smile fades, "And you win again, Johnny. It seems you're ahead of me at every turn."

"Don't feel too badly, Dr. James, you're nearly broken in."

The doctor isn't listening. He's sorting through techniques to turn the tide, something to reassert the practitioner's control. He settles on the shock question. The pause has grown uncomfortably long when he asks loudly, "So do you often masturbate, Johnny?"

Without a second's pause, "Absolutely, I'm masturbating now."

## Chapter 4

The Times broke the story in the evening. By the following morning, Max's name was plastered across every front page and all over the Internet. He dominated editorials in pieces filled with vehemence and indignation. That second night, several organizations were entitling their continuing coverage "Day Two". Through the first week, more papers, TV shows and web sites followed suit: "Day Three", "Day Four", "Day Five." On the sixth day, they suddenly found themselves with nothing left to count up or down to. All had assumed some form of legal intervention on Max's behalf, but, by that sixth day, the last legal avenue had been exhausted.

The Institute's contract had proven unassailable. Even before Joey's interview with Watson, the city's Office of the Attorney General had been provided with a copy of the contract and was already preparing its case. The story's publication increased the urgency of their preparations and two days later—Day Three—they appeared in court. The prosecutors had little hope of success given the strength of their case on a purely legal basis but they went through the motions, regardless, on the chance that the judge would be so moved as to take unprecedented action on Max's behalf. Legally, though, there was nothing the judge could do. His hands were tied and, after a lengthy summation in which he praised the Attorney General's position and condemned both Max's doctors and the Institute, he summarily threw the case out. The Attorney General filed an appeal in a higher court, which was also quickly, if loquaciously, dismissed.

No further legal action would be undertaken.

Max had survived just four days in the courts.

## Chapter 5

John Classic

John stabbed at the burning embers in the ashtray with the dying cigarette but he failed to extinguish them. He discarded the butt and put down the last third of his gin and tonic in one swallow.

"What's the damage?"

"I couldn't tell you, Mr. Anomie."

"I'm asking what I owe you."

"Forget it, Mr. Anomie, your money's no good here."

"Thanks. I'll remember you for that."

"No thanks necessary."

"Alright. I'd better be on my way then."

"Very well, have a good day, Mr. Anomie."

"I'll do my level best."

John pushed the glass toward the bartender. He stood up and went out through the heavy wooden door. The weather was perfect. Under darkly overcast skies, there was no blinding light to force his eyes down to slits. In the calm, there was no wind to whip his thin hair around his face. The temperature was so perfectly tuned to him, he could not feel the air against his skin. He evened his gait and made his strides quick and smooth to create the illusion that he was completely still; that it was only the view of the world that was sliding by him of its own accord.

As he passed the mouth of an alleyway, the orator caught his arm and brought him to an abrupt halt.

"What?" John asked, distractedly. As he recognized him, his eyes widened and he took a step back. John saw no knife in the orator's hands now but, regardless, he fled some distance up the block. He was stopped by the orator's tortured voice calling out to him.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

John stood his ground but turned back to face him.

"You've got to forgive me, you've just got to. I have to hear it from your lips. I know I've got no right to ask anything from you but I've got to know you understand."

John looked into his helpless, unhappy face. His face twitching, John took a hesitant step back towards him.

"I don't know what comes over me. It's like I vanish for a while. I'm not right in the head anymore. You can't imagine."

John crossed some of the distance between them. He could hardly stand the empathy rising within him.

"I know," he said.

"I used to be like anyone else, like a normal person. Just a normal person. But it's all bad omens and frightening foreshadowing for me now. Everything's threatening—like my ruin is lurking, waiting for me around every corner. Life walks all over me. I can't take it. I'm know I'm weak; I know it."

John stood close to him. His arms rose falteringly to embrace the orator. "Don't feel badly. I don't. Nothing came of it."

"That's so good to hear. You don't know how it eases my mind hearing that from you," the orator choked on his words and his eyes filled with tears. He swallowed hard before continuing, "But it doesn't change who I am. I know that much—I know it doesn't matter. I'm so ashamed—I can't control myself. I do things, bad things. I'm like a crazy man. I'm a fucking animal." Tears cut wet stripes down his filthy cheeks.

John shuddered and he, too, cried. "I know. I know." He put his arms around the orator and they wept together. John kissed the orator's dirty forehead as he held him and, in a voice nearly silent with emotion, he whispered to him, "It's alright now. I forgive you. I forgive you."

The orator broke away from him. He staggered back, his hands clasped over his eyes. He dropped his hands and stared wildly in all directions. He screamed, "I'm blind. You bastard. You god-damned bastard. I'm totally blind."

John was frozen to the spot. "No, I didn't mean—"

The orator charged clumsily towards the sound of his voice. "You bastard."

John jumped to one side and he flew by him and crashed into a row of garbage cans. He fell into the gutter, with trash raining down all around him.

John turned away and ran up the street.

Far behind him, the orator disentangled himself from the toppled garbage cans and stood up. He brushed himself off and mopped his face with a clean, white handkerchief, all the while shaking with quiet, repressed laughter.

## Chapter 6

Billy Gordon was lucky to find the last free spot in the parking lot. He pulled his rusting white Corolla in and sat there idling, looking the building over and watching the clouds of smoke drift away in his rearview mirror. He shut the engine down and pocketed the keys. Grabbing a worn canvas bag from the passenger's seat, he got out. He stretched and slung the bag over his shoulder. He didn't bother to lock the car.

The main entrance was nearly hidden behind a crowd of reporters milling around listlessly and talking shop. They looked like they'd been waiting a long while. Billy didn't like his chances in that mob. He took a walk around the building, as much for the exercise as anything else. He gave the crowd a wide berth and went around to the east side of the building. A smaller group stood waiting by a secondary entrance. He made his way around them and turned the corner to the rear of the building. This side was deserted and, at first glance, there was nothing here to draw anyone's attention. The entirety of the north side was one long, unbroken, featureless wall with two tall dumpsters standing close by the middle.

Billy picked up his pace to get to the other side of the building. As he approached the dumpsters, a man appeared between them. He turned away from Billy to the west. Billy stopped. He noted the man's short, graying hair and his rumpled brown suit before he disappeared around the far corner of the building. Billy assumed he was another reporter—perhaps departing after searching the dumpsters. He went to the dumpsters to have a look for himself.

Hidden between the dumpsters, he found a steel door in the wall. He was surprised to discover that it had been left slightly ajar. He retrieved a roll of duct tape from his bag and taped the deadbolt open. He put the roll back and then carefully arranged the contents of the bag to prevent them from making noise.

He opened the door a narrow crack and peered into the hallway inside. It was empty. He went in and shut the door behind him. He crept down the hall to a stairwell. The stairs, he knew, would probably be seldom used, as a building of this size would certainly have an elevator. Moving from floor to floor should be comparatively safe. Billy decided that the top floor along the windowless rear face of the building would be as sensible a place to start as any. He made his way up. In his sneakers, he was all but silent. He rested a moment at the top floor, quite winded, his heart pounding in his ears. He peered through the window in the stairwell door. The corridor was deserted. Billy counted five doors evenly spaced along one wall. These doors, like the one behind which he crouched, had small, safety glass windows set at eye level. Of those, just one showed light in the room within.

He left the stairway, tip-toed to the door and peered through the window. Max lay motionless and silent in his bed, alone in the room. Billy went in. He struggled to keep his hands from shaking as he took dozens of photographs of that wasted form. He paused just a moment, looking down at him before tucking the camera away in his bag.

Billy quickly left the building the same way he'd come, taking care to remove the duct tape from the door as he went out.

No more than fifteen minutes had elapsed since his arrival.

He sat in his car, the engine idling. How was it possible? Those hoards of reporters had been on site for days without meeting with the slightest success while Billy had made good the instant he arrived. Why was Max unattended? Who was the man in the brown suit and why had he been so negligent with the door? He put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. As he drove away, he resolved to leave well enough alone—he couldn't very well go back in and ask.

He drove home, doing twenty over the limit the whole way, trailing puffs of blue smoke behind him.

He had calls to make.

#

Far from the Institute, glittering red circles of light flickered across the glass doors of the mahogany bookcases as a thin bluish finger tapped on a leather-bound book, sending clouds of dust upwards to dissolve into wisps of smoke.

#

Being a freelance photographer, Billy's work belonged to no one but himself. The photos of Max represented the greatest success of his thus far hand-to-mouth career and he had every intention of exploiting them for every penny he could get. He contacted each news organization separately, exhaustively working through newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet in turn. He was turned away by no one. Negotiating each sale on a non-exclusive basis was time-consuming but Billy was satisfied by the returns.

He kept the details of how he'd gotten the photos to himself.

## Chapter 7

Billowing dust clouds settled once more over the desk, the rectangle of light, the hand and the book. The ivory hand was still, inanimate; five finger tips, five nails pressed for eternity to the old leather. At the bay window, the man in the gray suit faced away and looked to the scenes portrayed beyond. A cigarette had been lit some time ago and lay abandoned in a gleaming ashtray. Its ember glowed weakly and reflected dim yellow ghosts in the deep crystal cuts surrounding it. It had burned through half its length, but the ash had not yet fallen. The wind lashed the window with rain as the man, watching closely, spoke.

"Now?"

"The stenographer."

"Yes."

In the stillness, the fall could be heard. At the bottom of the ashtray, the ash had crumbled, and above, the ember burned brightly.

## Chapter 8

No-Pardon Jonny

Jonny cut a straight line down the busy sidewalk, shouldering aside those few inattentive enough to leave themselves in his path. People went out of their way to let him pass, careful to avoid eye contact. Jonny read respect in their deferential postures. He felt a surge of pleasure at every fearful glance he saw around him through his dark black sunglasses.

His army-issue field jacket sparkled with medals: a sniper's award, paratrooper's wings, three marksmanship medals for rifles, handguns and grenades, and two unit crests, gold with the words "victory or death" in red across the bottom. The rest of his clothes were of unfaded black: muscle shirt, spit-polished tanker boots with buckles gleaming and battle dress SWAT trousers. The wind rushing by him barely bent the oval shoe-brush of hair standing two inches high on the top of his head.

He turned west from Broadway onto 41st Street. Jonny went into a small dingy shop with barred windows and a red neon pawnbroker's sign hanging over the door.

Jonny looked past the dusty display of TVs, stereos, laptops and guitars and watched the fat man behind the register talk on the phone. The owner squinted and looked Jonny over. He hung up the phone.

"What can I do for you today, Jonny?"

"I need a piece."

"Alright then. Why don't you just close that door and turn the sign. Pull the shade, too, while you're at it."

He did as the owner said and then started toward the counter.

"No, no, hold up just a minute, son." Jonny stopped. The fat man shifted on his stool and called over his shoulder.

"Jorge, you want to come on out and give this fellow the once-over for me?"

A broad, imposing Puerto Rican in blue polyester slacks, a blue pinstripe shirt and a black tie appeared from the back room behind the fat man. As he approached, Jonny could see the butt of his sidearm peeking out of the back of his waist band. Jorge's thin mustache curled as he said, "Empty you pocket."

Jonny took out a wallet, a hunting knife, a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a key ring and some change and put them down on the counter. Jorge pawed through the pile and reached for the wallet. Before he could take it off the counter, Jonny slammed his hand back down.

"No."

The guard tensed. He looked first at Jonny and then back to the fat man.

"Relax now, Jorge's just doing his job. How would it be if there happened to be a badge hiding in there?"

"OK." Jonny lifted his hand and watched the guard as he went through the wallet.

"Put you hands over you head."

Jorge put the wallet back on the counter. Jonny let himself be frisked.

"Pull up you shirt."

Jorge looked front and back and then nodded to the fat man.

"Sorry for the trouble, son. In our line, we can't be too careful, you understand."

"OK."

"I think we can get down to business now."

Jonny nodded as he pocketed his belongings.

"Why don't we head on into my office?" The fat man waved him through the doorway. The back room was small and dimly lit by a single, naked bulb. A battered oak desk stood close to the far wall surrounded by tattered office chairs on broken casters. Tall, steel-gray filing cabinets stood on either side of the desk. A second door to the left of the desk was closed. The fat man leaned hard on the desk as he walked around it to the chair behind.

"Sit down."

Jonny pulled up a chair. Jorge stood behind him in the doorway, watching.

"You got yourself a permit, son?"

"Come again?"

"That's a joke, loosen up now, I'm sure I can take your word for it—you look just right as rain to me. Don't he look right as rain to you, Jorge?"

"You bet."

"You looking for anything in particular or you just window shopping?"

"No, I don't have a specific model in mind."

"What do you want from it?"

"It's got to have knock-down power and it can't jam."

"Semi-auto?"

"Yes. I need a good silencer too."

"Would a forty five do?"

"Six or seven shot clip won't cut it."

"Can we cross revolvers off the list then?"

"Yes, too slow reloading."

The fat man sat back and looked Jonny over skeptically. "Just how much you planning on spending, son?"

"Let's talk money later. It's not going to be a problem."

"Fair enough... let me think a moment." He leaned back further in his chair and stared at the ceiling, silently ticking off possibilities on his fingers. The front rollers on the chair banged to the floor. "Let's try a CZ-75—can you fetch that for us, Jorge?"

The guard left through the second door and Jonny could hear him going down stairs. Jonny started to light a cigarette.

"You mind?"

"Not at all, you go right ahead."

Jonny relaxed in his seat and blew smoke rings across the room. A few minutes later, the guard returned. He put the gun and silencer gently down on the desk.

"I think you're going to like this one—Czech military issue, nine millimeter, semi-automatic with a fifteen shot clip that swaps quick and easy."

"The silencer looks a little short."

"Modified—trust me, it's like sweet nothings whispered in your ear."

"Looks good."

"I'll throw in a cleaning kit and holster to sweeten the deal."

"Shoulder holster?"

"That's right."

"Good." Jonny considered the gun a moment. "How much?"

"For the gun and silencer?"

"And eleven clips and a couple hundred rounds, if you've got it."

"We got it, don't you worry none." He paused a moment, "What the hell kind of party you got planned for yourself anyway?"

Jonny stiffened. "How much?"

"We can chew on that in a bit. I hear it's not going to be a problem." He smiled. "You're going to want to try it out for yourself first, ain't you?"

"Where? Here?"

"Yes, downstairs."

"OK."

The three of them went down to the basement, the owner struggling with the stairs. Bars ran down the length of the room, dividing it evenly into storage space and a narrow firing range. The fat man handed him a clip.

"Seven shots, that going to be enough for you?"

Jonny nodded. "I'll know by then."

"Use the silencer, would you, son? I don't want to wake the neighbors."

Jonny screwed the silencer in. He popped the clip in and pulled it out a few times. The locking mechanism operated easily, smoothly and the same way every time. He tilted the gun in his hand—even with the silencer's weight, it didn't feel unbalanced. It ran from his hand like an extension of his arm. Even before the first shot, he knew this was the one.

"You're all set."

Jonny looked up and found a small human silhouette taped up on the wall, forty feet away. Three times he brought the gun up, aimed and lowered the gun to his side again, feeling the weight transfer to different muscles in his arm. He brought it up again and, bending a little at the knees, he fired. The recoil jerked his hands over his head. On the successive shots, he adjusted for it. It was manageable. The silencer was perfection; the only noise from each shot was a low, quiet whistle, a sound he felt more than he heard.

The clip was empty. He stood turning the gun over in his hand. He went up to the target. The head had been chewed right out of the paper by a perfect shot group.

The fat man whistled behind him and asked quietly, "Well, well, well, what you need a gun like that for anyhow, son?"

"Hunting." Jonny turned around and walked back toward them. "So how much?"

"For the whole lot?"

Jonny nodded.

"Let's call it three grand."

Jonny smiled.

"Done."

## Chapter 9

In that white, windowless room, Max was no longer alone. The nurse studied with some concern the devices to which Max had been reduced. In any normal patient, the sedatives Dr. Hull had administered would have been metabolized by now, but the nurse kept the paradoxes involved in this case at the forefront of his mind. The only indication he could rely on would be Max starting to talk again.

He'd just started this shift. He suspected it would be a long one.

Across the bed from him, the stenographer sat waiting at his machine, stretching and flexing his fingers nervously from time to time as if in anticipation. The nurse hadn't seen him before. The stenographer had a fair bit of weight on his smallish frame. His thinning brown hair was shot with gray and combed from side to side over a wide bald spot. The nurse took him for fifty at least. A greasy sheen glowed on his face but did nothing to hide the myriad little red blood vessels crossing over the bridge of his nose from one cheek to the other. But the strongest impression the stenographer made on the nurse was the overpowering sense of discomfort he seemed to exude. He could feel it radiating from the stenographer even when his attention was focused on the monitors. Looking into his darting, nervous eyes, pale blue irises set in yellowing corneas, the nurse could feel his own stomach tightening up.

The nurse did not know, because they had not spoken, that the stenographer's name was Morrie Allison and that his painful awkwardness was due, at least in part, to how unaccustomed he'd become to work of any kind. This was the first full-time job he'd held in nearly a year and a half. He had wasted those eighteen months, and to a greater or lesser extent the bulk of his adult life nearly destitute, peddling the poems and stories that made up his life's work. Morrie wore a lack of self-assurance like a scent—it was the by-product of the isolation of his craft and the net effect of the years of unremitting failure he'd suffered pursuing it.

His mother used to say about being in a choir, "if you can't sing well, sing loudly"—that summed up Morrie's career in writing also. He produced reams of work. Every so often, once the sting of previous rejection had receded far enough into the past, he'd gather up his work and send it off again to agents and publishers. He cast a wide net, but New Vector was the publisher he hoped for most. Their authors—so many of his favorites had been published there; in his most optimistic moments, he thought himself fit to take his place among them. In the end, though, all it had gotten him was an impressive stack of rejections. He'd kept them all. From time to time he'd pore over them, reading between the lines, trying to divine how he might secure their acceptance.

Stenography was his mother's idea. She'd known of his aspirations for a career in writing but urged him to find a fallback he could count on to pay the bills. "In the meantime," she'd said, with a small smile. She'd been a stenographer herself and was quick to point out that "as long as people keep being horrible to one another, stenographers will always have work."

She thought he'd pick it up fairly quickly. She'd been right about that much—it did come easily to him. She'd lasted until just before he'd gotten his certification before the cancer took her. They were barely speaking by then. There wasn't any great falling out; they'd just gradually come to realize that they had nothing left to say to one another.

This was Morrie's second shift in less than twenty-four hours and he was tired. He was glad Max was quiet. On every other shift, Max had been talking when Morrie relieved his predecessor mid-phrase and had continued non-stop through the end of his shift when Morrie was, himself, relieved. The words came out of Max's mouth and went right through Morrie's fingers into the stenotype machine in a relentless stream. The work was pure, mindless drudgery, but Morrie had no complaint; the money came in steadily and in greater amounts than he'd ever seen before. Equally, the job wasn't as harrowing as it might have been; though Max rarely paused in his monologues, much of the time he ranted pure hebephrenic nonsense. Morrie found he could record that without much effort.

In the previous positions he'd held, Morrie's greatest challenge had been interaction with his co-workers. Working for the Institute was perfect for him in that way also, as, even now after many weeks on the job, he found he knew only two people by name: Max and Dr. Watson. Watson seemed to find Morrie's performance acceptable and, much to Morrie's relief, he made no attempt to get to know him better. Watson gave him his schedule and received the transcripts at the end of his shifts, but otherwise took no interest in him. The bulk of what interaction he'd had with him had been in the training Watson provided at the beginning of his first shift—and that had been a five minute affair at most. His instructions had been quite limited: don't be late, don't omit a single word out of Max's mouth and never, under any circumstances, was he to allow any of Max's transcripts to leave the building. Watson stressed this last point. He made sure Morrie understood that the Institute would move heaven and earth to ensure swift and terrible punishment for anyone who ran afoul of this directive.

Socializing had never been Morrie's strong suit. After a shy childhood spent hidden away in his room, he'd reached a solitary adulthood, if anything, even less capable around people than he'd been as a boy. Save for the few awkward, fumbling encounters blind chance had seen fit to send his way, Morrie was a virgin, but all worries in that area, and really all hopes as well, had been driven out of him over the lonely years. He'd acquired that hollow lack of empathy that characterizes all people who have lived alone too long.

Silently, Morrie speculated about the motivation for this unscheduled shift so close on the heels of his last one. It seemed unlikely that a colleague had quit, but someone could have been fired. Perhaps someone had transgressed. Perhaps they were that very night awaiting the swift and the terrible. More likely they were under-staffed due to illness or some other, more mundane, cause. Certainly no explanation had been forth-coming from Watson. Considering the sudden notoriety of the young man in the bed, Morrie was not at all surprised by the caution with which they managed every aspect of his care. Morrie was tempted to ask the nurse if he knew what had happened to the stenographer that was originally scheduled for this shift, but decided not to. At a guess, the nurse would be no better informed than he was, and, in any event, Morrie did not want to open the door to an on-going dialog with him.

Max was murmuring. Morrie leaned in close to hear him and his fingers started up on the machine. He recorded a mish mash word salad with a few more coherent phrases interspersed from time to time. Morrie's mind wandered as he worked. All things considered, other than how it had begun, it was a night very like all the others.

Morrie estimated he'd transcribed fifty pages worth of this nonsense when Max's monologue changed—Max started telling stories. These were nothing new to Morrie. Max spent a good deal of time seemingly reliving his past. He covered the same few dozen stories repeatedly: childhood conflicts, arguments with his parents, a party that turned sour for him, a gruesome assault on a train. Over Max's many retellings, Morrie felt he had developed a fairly complete view of the incidents described though on first hearing he'd been hard-pressed to make heads or tails of them. It was like hearing one half of a conversation—like listening to someone talk on the phone where you know neither the person on the other end nor the topic being discussed. Max spoke only his part of the dialog aloud, while the narrative and any other dialog remained purely internal. Morrie was never sure how true to his past Max was being. Over his shifts, he'd heard the same stories told by Max so many times, distinguished only by wording, some small details and the quality of emotion—in short, the basic difference between these retellings lay in the picture they portrayed of Max. It seemed to Morrie that Max was recreating in his mind important events from his past so that he might relive them and improve his performance in them for the practice.

Sometimes the stories Max told seemed pure fantasy. It was as if Max was in some academic forum being questioned for his opinions on any number of weighty topics. His answers to these imagined questions were phrased elaborately and delivered with pauses and inflections here and there as only an actor would use them. In these interviews, Max held forth on topics ranging from politics, history, and current and entirely imagined events through to science, sociology, philosophy and literature. In the privacy of his mind, Max was transformed into a knowledgeable man whose thoughts on these many subjects were respected and sought after. Certainly the bulk of these pronouncements were embarrassingly self-serving or naive, but the odd exceptions were startling—as brilliant as Max was pretending to be.

Max carried on with his one-sided dialogs for a few hours before abruptly changing focus. It was as if someone had changed stations on a radio.

You will say nature, certainly, and be right

But she cuts off our heads on her enormous knees

I would travel through her landscape making obscene gestures at life abounding

I find her laughing, aged and beautiful, but the joke's surely on me

And yet I too have spilled seed for that cosmic delinquent

You will say love and I'll spit some truth:

Love is death's acrobat

Love is a demon raping my intent

A whore of death and debauchery, two friendly girls ravishing all the virgins

In my house flooded over with purgatory, what's hell to me?

And so I will say nature now and paint for you a nature full of bull's eyes

And I will call to men:

When will you bury death in the mud of earth dying?

Max had short breaks between phrases that Morrie took to be the divisions between the lines of a poem. It was in these pauses that Morrie grew to appreciate the words funneling down to the machine through his fingers. The next thought came so easily to him. It drew him in the moment it crossed his mind, and though Morrie spent the remainder of his shift making motions of silent deliberation, he had already been committed to it from its inception. Max, still speaking jack hammer fast on the bed, had been the subject of idle speculation for Morrie all the long weeks of his tenure, but there was more than curiosity in Morrie's eyes now as he watched him.

On his previous shifts, Morrie had made a habit of washing up before handing in his transcripts to Dr. Watson. Typically, this stop had him in the doctor's office a few minutes after the end of his shift. This night was no exception, although it had been an entirely different purpose which had delayed him.

## Chapter 10

@teenjohnny

"You've got this pretty well sewn up, haven't you, Johnny?" He pauses a moment. "Tell me about Max."

"What do you need to know?"

"Why is he important to you?"

"Why isn't he important to you?"

"Would you say you have many friends, Johnny?"

"You're my friend, aren't you, Dr. James?"

He sighs, "I'm your therapist. Can we get back on topic?"

"Let's do it."

"If you'd like to hear my opinion, I don't understand what you see in him. What is there to admire in a man who's turned his back on the human race, on the whole world—a man who's divorced himself from all of us for the rest of his life?"

Johnny laughs, "So in your view it's just a kind of pathological avoidance mechanism, what he's done?"

"Yes, in a sense," Dr. Osgood agrees.

Johnny rolls his eyes.

Osgood considers him for a moment. "How about you tell me where I've gone wrong then. What do you think, Johnny?"

"There are only two ways to look at him: Max as a man and Max in terms of his place in history."

"You've thought about this quite a lot, haven't you?"

"Obviously... Think about the body. It's a lazy thing—the more you prop it up on crutches, the more it falls apart. It's hardly surprising all the new diseases are immunological: food allergies, cancers, leukemias, AIDS. What else did the body have left to let go? No Band-Aids for the immune system.

"Think about America. A couple centuries back, it's a backward country in the middle of nowhere. Half the people lived on farms—maybe more. Now everyone's in the city working white collar gigs. There's no tie to the world—the immediate, physical world around us, I mean. Who has any sense of place? People bounce from city to city. The environment was everything to us for our whole history, but it's meaningless now. You pick a place to live based on where the jobs are, the cost of living, the migratory habits of pretty girls. Our whole lives are in our heads.

"Who's ever hot or cold? No one. Who's ever hungry or thirsty? No one. Who's ever tired?

"Social environments are the world 2.0. Wouldn't you think we'd get wickedly good at interpersonal skills? Like, through practice, integration of individuals into groups would get infinitely more effective? But obviously, that hasn't happened—people can't even agree on where they can smoke without calling in a cop—or a lawyer.

"Look around you. Laws and rights and contracts and litigation—but there are no sets of people greater than the sum of their parts. Ten thousand years ago, survival was a function of how well you worked with your immediate group, but who cares about that now? Your existence is made possible by the efforts of people far, far away. You'll never, ever meet them—your appreciation is not required. Your respect is not needed. Your money will do nicely though. Ontogeny beats phylogeny like an unloved step child.

"Here's a magic trick." Johnny holds his left hand up, fingers spread wide apart. He points to each finger in turn. "Smart guy, smart guy, smart guy, smart guy, smart guy." He pulls his fingers together into a fist. "Ta-da! Bunch of idiots. Plural pronouns are a rubber stamp—three hundred million people piled up all over one another but not one community."

Johnny finds his audience satisfactorily attentive. Dr. Osgood continues writing and nodding and doesn't look up from his pad.

"So where does Max fit in? He's the collapse of human evolution in the flesh. He beat us to the punch. He's like a pioneer, or an explorer—or an intronaut.

"Here's the question: has human development been driven to an event horizon? Is it our decline you're watching on TV every day? Maybe we should move over and let the chimps have a shot? Or are we on the verge of a punctuated evolution that will transform us in a new phylogeny?

"People think of Max's operation as the end of the line for him. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. The operation is only the first step in the pursuit of the answer to the question. Really it's just the posing of that question.

"So to answer you: Max is important to me in a historical context because he'll provide the answer; he'll light the way to the future. But as a man, he understood the question when no one else around him did and had the balls to ante up to answer it. He bet the world."

Johnny waits for the pen to be stilled, and when Dr. Osgood looks up, Johnny is watching him intently, waiting to measure his reaction.

"Well, Johnny. I should say it's all out in the open now. I'd say we've got a much bigger problem before us than I would have guessed."

## Chapter 11

Morrie felt like he was stealing a million dollars the hard way: ten dollars at a time. When the idea had first come to him, he knew immediately there was no way he'd be able to deny himself. And once he'd taken that first ten dollars, there was no turning back. He could see no sense in stopping after just a few, small thefts—if he was already a thief, he may just as well be a successful one. Though this all seemed unimpeachably reasonable to him, the towering risk of it robbed him of what little nerve he had. He turned these points over in his mind obsessively. It was too easy, he cautioned himself. He read the news. He knew how prominent Max had become in the public eye. And he knew how thorough the Institute had been in preventing any exposure. Was it even conceivable that they had somehow overlooked him and the rest of the stenographers? They were, after all, seemingly the most obvious avenue for a breach of security.

And now that it had come to pass, where was the swift and where was the terrible? Did they think warnings and veiled threats would be enough? Morrie couldn't bring himself to believe this. They must surely have taken measures against this possibility. But, if so, where was their response? If they'd known what he'd done, surely they would have acted against him by now. The conclusion this suggested, really the only one that seemed rational to Morrie, was that they did not know. They could not know.

But Morrie found reason was cold comfort against the storm that was his fear.

Having taken that first ten dollars, Morrie was trapped. His fear cut the legs out from under him, robbing him of the perspective he needed to see his position in these designs for what it really was. He was so immersed in his isolation, his scheming and his secrecy that he never saw that it was the illusion of choice that he operated under. It seemed his own free will had led him every step of the way, yet the circuitous path to this precise outcome had been laid out for him from the very start.

All the while, Morrie lived with his fear. He stood vigil with it through the night. He did the cruel math of the alarm clock and laid down with it and prayed for sleep. He served it coffee for breakfast, drove it to work, and fed it drinks all night. He cajoled it. All would be well.

In the privacy of his dingy, paper-strewn apartment, he gave it free reign. He let it chain smoke and pace the long hours away. He let it eat and vomit and then eat again. He got it drunk and let it pull his hair out by the roots. He let it gnaw his nails until they bled freely. He ran it into the ground at home in the hopes of suppressing it at work. It seemed inevitable that it would surface there one day. To his credit, though, it never did. Dutifully, it hid itself away through the days, waiting impatiently in his trembling hands, his blood-shot eyes, and the pallor of his veined, sweating face.

## Chapter 12

John Classic

John lay in his bed, yawning occasionally as he watched the slow-motion antics of the animate and the lifeless through his bedroom window. He was barely awake and took no notice as he slowed, mind and body, as a wave of kinetic energy washed out of him pushing him to absolute zero. The picture in his eyes of life beyond the window was a frozen point in time not because the world was stilled but because he was. In the silence of his mind, he had no reaction to the indecipherable messages that he suddenly found caroming in his thoughts. He was puzzled but not concerned; he sought meaning in them and tried to intuit their origin as his body relaxed limp in the bed. The messages bounced around in his mind. They were an incoherent mess, increasing in number and volume. He was at his leisure as he worked to decode them while birds and clouds made targets of themselves for his eyes.

It was his body. His body was demanding his attention with a flood of data describing the unexamined consequences of a terrible process; it was pressure, tremendous bottom-of-the-ocean pressure. Bone, muscle, skin and organ wailed torture in sad dialects of pain as they were pressed into collapsing density. John's breathing came labored and shallow and then stopped altogether. He struggled to hold onto his last breath only to have it crushed out of him. Peristalsis came to a halt under the sky-rocketing atmospheres. His vision warped nightmarishly as the third dimension was squeezed right out of him. He forced his eyes away from the window and looked down to where his body should be. He could discern only the slightest suggestion of it beneath the covers. In a panicked explosion of strength, he threw the covers aside with his left arm, hearing the perverse noises his bones made breaking. He saw at once the arm that uncovered his body and the body itself. He watched in terror as his anatomy pressed down further, barely the thickness of a bottle cap. With an effort that ground the bones of his right arm to dust, he knocked the phone from the nightstand onto the mattress to within six inches of his mouth. Twisted upon itself like the sleeve of a discarded shirt, his useless right arm fell to the bed.

He could not believe his good luck; there was someone already on the line.

"Help, please, send help." In a hoarse, two-dimensional whisper, he told the caller his name and address. He knew there was someone on the line but he could understand nothing of the response to his plea. He made out a distortion of a dial tone through his now nearly useless ears as the call ended.

He had little doubt that he would die long before help arrived. He felt his heart twitch helplessly in his chest and then finally stop. He felt his lungs collapse altogether as his flesh imploded to a thickness barely sufficient to keep him in this universe.

An incomprehensible noise wormed its way into John's mind. In his flattened eyes, John witnessed the entrance of an inhuman rendition of a man, inverted, far wider than tall, painted all over with migraine fireworks.

"I just keep bailing you out, now don't I?"

Speech was entirely beyond him. John gave a fearful exclamation in a thin, reedy wheeze slipped out through his slit of a throat.

"What's all this fuss now? You look troubled—you needn't be. I'm here to help, ain't I now? Why it's you that called me, after all.

"Leave it to me—I'll fix you up proper. Good as new in no time. But it wouldn't set right with me if I didn't warn you: son, sometimes the cure's going to be a mite worse than the disease. It's the bane of every doctor's existence. Your condition, it's just a little unusual, ain't it? I reckon it won't surprise you a bit to hear that the treatment's not quite out of the physician's desk reference either. But we've got no time to waste. Best get to it—I bet that sounds good to you right about now, don't it, boy?"

John cried out a flat, airless scream as the doctor took out a pair of scissors from his bag and snapped them in the air.

"Just like one of dear old Gran's quilting bees, God rest her soul."

He ran the scissors up and down John's length several times, cutting him to ribbons, then cut width-wise to make rectangles out of him. The scissors made a sound like a zipper as he ran them through.

"You stop that whining, you hear?"

He stacked and rearranged the squares like he was dealing out cards. As he lined them up again, they came together and fused of their own accord. When John was reassembled once more, the Doctor winked cheerfully.

"You feeling lucky today?"

He took out a beaker, a large syringe, a flash drive and a lighter from his bag, and set them on the nightstand. He melted the drive in the beaker over the lighter, whistling as waited, and then filled the syringe with the steaming tar.

"Hair of the dog."

He slid the needle sideways into Johnny's form with a careful, practiced hand.

"You'll be up and around before you know it."

John saw the doctor's grin a yard wide, monstrous and unforgettable. The doctor emptied the syringe into him.

John felt as though he were rocketing upwards like an air bubble released from the depths of the ocean floor. He felt the void rushing in to fill him out, pushing its way through the stacked atoms of his body to make him whole. His heart started pumping again like thunder in his ears. Euphoria was all pins and needles in him as he drew a breath.

"No charge, son, this one's on me."

## Chapter 13

Morrie and his replacement said nothing to one another as they switched places at the stenotype machine. One pair of hands was replaced by another as the flow of words continued unabated. Morrie gathered his things and left the room, heading up the hall to the men's bathroom. He went into a stall and latched the door behind him. His belt hit the floor with a resounding echo as he undid his pants and sat down. After a minute or two, he flushed the toilet. Using the noise for cover, he went through the stack of transcripts on his lap and removed the sections he'd ear-marked earlier. There were word salad portions before and after each of these. He reviewed the transitions over the missing sections quickly to make sure they weren't too abrupt. What he was taking was just a small fraction of the total he'd transcribed that shift. He didn't think the remainder would be noticeably smaller than normal. He counted himself fortunate that the Institute didn't use numbered steno paper—missing pages would have been obvious if they had. He imagined he could have taken photographs of each section if he'd had to but the fact that the pages were unnumbered had the added benefit that the Institute would never have a copy of the missing pages.

He flushed the toilet again, stuffed the sections he'd removed into his underwear, pulled up his pants and left the bathroom.

The door to Watson's office was open. Morrie dropped the papers on the desk. Watson nodded absently but did not look up from the journal he was reading.

Morrie wasted no time in leaving the office, and then the building itself.

Standing at his office window, Dr. Watson watched impassively as the old black Diplomat came to life and limped out of the parking lot. Without moving from the window, he turned the desk phone to face him, picked up the receiver and dialed. He waited a few seconds, spoke two words and hung up.

#

The door opened. The stenographer who'd replaced Morrie was working too frantically to look away but the nurse turned to see the man enter.

"You're going to have to step outside for a minute," the man said.

"Make it quick, please; I need to keep an eye on him."

Without turning away from the machine, the stenographer asked, "Me too? I'm not supposed to miss a word."

"Yes, both of you, please. Dr. Watson's orders. I'll let you know when I'm done. It won't be long."

They went out to the hall to wait.

The man closed the door behind them and pulled the shade over the small window. He took a key from his breast pocket and turned it in a lock on the underside of the stenotype machine. A plate opened behind the lock. The man removed one thumb drive from the recess and replaced it with another he retrieved from his breast pocket. He closed and locked the plate and then flipped the machine back on its feet again. He stood up and opened the door.

"You can come in. I'm finished now, thanks."

## Chapter 14

@teenjohnny

His thoughts start within him. Johnny forces his eyes open. He is groggy. His eyesight is distorted and unfocused. He waits for his surroundings to resolve themselves into something recognizable. He picks out animate areas from his view and suspects that these may be people. He can identify no one despite careful inspection. The faces are incomprehensible—like the electronically disguised faces of police informants on TV. He hears what can only be their voices, but they are meaningless to him. He convinces himself that it's not some foreign language they're speaking but, still, he can make out none of it. He tries to sit up, only to fall back immediately, dimly aware of something impeding his progress. He wonders if he is tied down or restrained somehow?

He tries again to sit up again and is again restrained. He lets himself fall back on the bed. The sounds of what he knows are his breathing and heartbeat are utter nonsense, loud in his ears. He sees motion once more. A garbled shape swells, coarsely pixelated, as it approaches. Nearly filling his view, the shape shouts gibberish out at him. It is calmed then and retreats, growing smaller and quieter as it recedes. Johnny can make no sense of any of this. He opts to lay low and let things take their course. He feels lucidity returning to him but is surprised to find no improvement in his senses.

He can't place the people that the masses of color around him seem to represent, but he notes they are all a featureless green from head to foot. Doctors, he suspects. He wonders if this is a hospital. Johnny looks around for Osgood, but can see no indication of the doctor's presence. He picks out what he imagines to be a window in the wall opposite him and realizes that it's not in the same position as it would be in his bedroom. His hands, palm down on the mattress, tell him that this is not his bed. He wonders again where he is.

He runs through the recent past in his mind, but can find no explanation for his situation. He suspects he'll have to ask, but he doubts anything good will come of it. He sees no wisdom in speaking and still less in listening. Eventually, sheer boredom outlasts him. He prepares to take his chances.

"Where am I?" he asks, his voice more unnerving nonsense in his ears.

He waits for a response and it is with profound ambivalence that he sees one of the abstract green fields stir. His heart pounds as the pink and green shape rushes in on him. More senseless noise booms in his ears. Two bands extend to him left and right like a fat green horizon. He feels something being lifted from his head.

Instantly, his senses are restored.

He stares up at his rescuer. He is a young man in a green hospital gown. His head is wrapped in bandages. In his hands he holds the device he'd removed from Johnny's head. It's a bulky helmet—like a beauty shop hair dryer, but jury-rigged with tape and loose wires sticking out here and there. The front is covered over with switches, lights, buttons and dials. The man reaches behind the bed and uncouples the thick cables connected to the helmet, and sets it down on the floor.

"Had enough?"

"Where am I?"

"You're with us. You're OK."

Johnny looks around the room. There are many other beds like his, each equipped with a similar helmet. All are occupied. The people lying in them are moaning and muttering, low and soft. Some of the helmets are painted with angry animal faces like World War II fighter jets, the wide jaws clamping down on human heads. Dozens of other people are scattered through the immense room, lying and sitting on the floor in lethargic poses. All have shaved and bandaged heads and wear green hospital gowns. Occasionally plates of drugs pass between them. The stagnant air is filled with smoke. He has no inkling where he is or how he got here.

"Too much?"

"I guess so." Johnny watches the man as he busies himself with the contents of a paper plate. He turns to face Johnny, waving a syringe in his hand.

"What do you say?"

"OK."

He ties off Johnny's arm and pumps up a vein. Johnny feels the needle go in and does not flinch. The tie snaps back and falls to the ground.

## Chapter 15

The overcoat fluttered and unfolded as it sailed through the air. Clearing the chair by a good six inches, it landed in a heap on the floor. Morrie locked the door behind him. He cleared some space on the table—the dining room table where he ate and worked; where he smoked and drank coffee in the morning, where he smoked and drank gin at night; the dining room table, covered over with clutter: typewriter, bottles filled with cigarette butts and rancid beer, overflowing ashtrays, and stacks of newspapers, folders and dictionaries. Melted candle wax was spattered here and there from evenings without a light. Morrie pulled a fist-full of crumpled stenograph pages through his fly and smoothed them out in the small space he'd cleared on the table. He divided the pages into three poems. After a brief search for blank paper, he typed copies, word for word, of each poem with his own hands, on his own typewriter, on his own paper.

His hands shook a little as he dumped one ashtray into the other. He tore the stenograph sheets into tiny pieces and filled the empty ashtray with them. Retreating far from the smoke detector in the kitchen, he sat on the toilet with the shower running beside him, and burned them. When they were gone, he dumped the ashes in the toilet and flushed them down.

He returned to the table, found his letter paper and spent nearly two hours faking rough drafts for the three poems; changing words here and there and adding or deleting the odd line. Then he went over these with red pen, replacing the alterations with the words just as he had heard them. The longest poem went two thousand words or so—for that one Morrie invented a third version, still further removed from the first.

He put a pot of coffee on and, while he waited, he crossed to the opposite side of the small kitchen, lifted a corner of the linoleum floor and pulled out a loose floorboard. Beneath was a small space in which he'd put two stacks of paper. He removed them and held them tightly under one arm as he got himself a cup of coffee. He sat down again at the table and separated the papers into two neat piles: typed copies and hand-written drafts. To these he added the pages he'd finished earlier.

He drank his coffee and tried to relax.

He'd diligently performed this same sequence in the same manner every working day; it was an offering to his fear, which had come to dominate his thoughts almost autocratically. It promised him some meager relief in return for his unfailing vigilance. But this day he would diverge from the ritual. Morrie, dragging his fear behind him like a bitter, reluctant twin, would be moving on to the next step in his plan.

He rolled a fresh sheet into the typewriter and typed: "Out of the Question, A Collection of Poems by Morris Allison."

In all, he'd amassed fifty-six poems. Together, they ran to more than two hundred pages—of sufficient size to warrant publication as a volume on their own. Though he was tempted to gather still more, perhaps enough for a second book, the prospect of continuing on much longer as he had been filled him with dread. As things stood, even if he stopped with what he had right now, his fear would only grow stronger in the coming weeks as his goals came closer to fruition. He knew he had no remaining reserves within him from which to draw to fuel the effort of harvesting another volume. He wondered sometimes if he had enough stamina remaining to see him through to the end of what he'd already started. He'd begged all the leniency that was to be had from his fear and now, at least on this one point, reason and fear were agreed: it was time to be done with it. His fear demanded he simply burn the manuscript. It warned him that all the risk he'd embraced thus far was nothing compared to that which lay ahead. It seemed this was his last chance to extricate himself before the die was truly cast. But it was that same ambition that had set him on this course to begin with that stayed his hand. He'd carry on.

There were still some details to work out. Morrie considered dividing the poems into two smaller manuscripts and then fleshing each out with poems of his own. Perhaps that way he could make a second volume from what he'd already accumulated. He thumbed through a folder of his work. He selected some poems and laid them next to the pages he'd transcribed. He looked at them together and paced the floor. Finally, he had to admit that there really was nothing he could offer that didn't seem wanting or out of place by comparison. "Out of the Question" would remain as it was.

He stuffed the pages into a manila envelope and covered it with stamps. He thought of his stack of rejections as he addressed it to New Vector.

It was nearly over.

The sealed envelope lay in the uncluttered space on the table. Morrie could not bring himself to pick it up. In truth, he could hardly stand to look at it.

Morrie got the gin and tonic bottles down from the kitchen cupboards. He rinsed out a mug that he found lying in the sink. He went to the living room and turned on the TV. He sat down on the couch. The mug still had a brown ring inside. He poured himself a warm gin and tonic and watched TV.

The TV was still on hours later when the last of the gin was gone and the stations were all off the air. Morrie was drunk. He stood up, went to the table and stared at it.

He got his coat, his keys, and, last of all, he picked up the envelope.

He made his way down to the street. A row of garbage cans stood to the left of the entrance. His fear surged at the sight of them. It seemed there would be no end of last chances for him. Morrie, reeling, went past them and on to the mailbox at the corner. With numb, jerky movements, he sealed his fate.

Back in his apartment, Morrie gave his fear a few loose ends to chew on. Now that he was done his harvest, should he quit his job? He was under no delusion that "Out of the Question" would make him wealthy; he just wanted put the Institute behind him. If he did leave, what would he provide as an explanation? He decided the last question easily enough—he would tell Dr. Watson that, morally, he could not condone what had been done to Max and, because of that, he found he could no longer permit himself to be involved in any way.

He sat at the table to write this down in a letter of resignation. His fear demanded that he quit immediately, but Morrie struggled with this. Staying on seemed better. Ideally, he would stay on indefinitely—or at least until he was fired. He decided he would let his work grow increasingly careless and error-prone, and thus force Dr. Watson to let him go. He tore the letter of resignation to pieces and threw it away. Morrie decided that he would wait until he heard back from the publisher. If they were encouraging, he would begin to gradually invite his dismissal. This would give him the opportunity to keep a watchful eye on Watson both before and, hopefully, after publication of the book. If Dr. Watson did happen to find him out, Morrie might intuit it from his manner—perhaps that would buy him enough time to remedy the situation. In any event, quitting, especially close to the publication date, seemed to invite suspicion.

His fear was not pacified, but with Max's sudden prominence, the consequences were too dire for Morrie to allow anything other than reason to influence his decisions.

Morrie lay in his bed, drunk and exhausted, but he did not sleep.

He reflected worriedly on how great the inert boy had become. Ever since he'd started on this path, Morrie filled odd hours scouring the media for mention of him, and was astonished as he saw the explosion of interest in Max—this fueled only by what Watson had said in the interview and the photographs Billy Gordon had taken. Despite the absence of any further information on Max, he continued his domination of the public discourse. If anything, with each passing week, he became even more firmly entrenched before the public eye.

Religious groups had demonstrated in opposition to what had been done to Max. Evangelists filled Sunday morning hours with their contempt for the crime the secular world had perpetrated upon him. Even the Pope weighed in. Kids mimicked Max in appearance and aped what they imagined were his views and outlook. Max found his way on to TV in comedies, dramas and talk shows, popped up in stand-up routines and on web sites, and insinuated himself into every news medium. Morrie reviewed all these with great interest, although he cared nothing for the stories themselves; it was simply their range and especially their quantity that he studied with alarm. From the moment he'd plunged himself into this, he'd had no fonder hope than to one day awake to discover Max's image fading from the screen, his name fading from the front page, fading from the airwaves, fading from the public consciousness.

No one wished for an end to Max's turn in the spotlight more fervently than Morrie.

## Chapter 16

John Classic

He stood by the bedroom window, a cigarette shaking, nearly falling, in his hand. He tried to collect himself. He was face to face with it, a difficult remembrance. He struggled to put it out of his thoughts. Pictures flickered into motion, his mind's eye was captive, helplessly attentive. It grew from the smallest, barest, scant half-thought to a monstrous imagery, his skull barely enough to contain it, spread out before him in a perverse montage.

The bedroom, unclean, a topology of corruption in kicked over trash cans and heaps of dirty laundry... the windows shut tight... venetian blinds, down but slanted open, cutting the street light to ribbons... her on the bed, naked ... her thin, white, muscular body striped with bars of light, her beautiful body decorating itself with bands of shadow... her young, strong, able and willing... a wicked flood of red hair, cast all around her and over the pillows and mattress like an embarrassment of riches... the green eyes that coaxed and coerced him, drawing out crowds of faceless women forever unknown to him... burning as it ran through him like white-hot voltage...

Tempting, goading, calling out a secret she saw twisting in him just below the surface... her, controlled, assured, reaching to him across a fantastic expanse of proximity... beckoning him to join her in a scene he would not place himself...

Green eyes staring up at him, cold, measuring from the pillow, head cocked to one side, suggesting, insinuating, inviting, calling him out... green eyes drill holes straight through to his stomach...

Him refusing, rejecting, false arguments bellowing silently in his head ... driven to distraction, an ignition of menace and indignation...

Her stoking, feeding, tending his anger with a knowing smile, a small, sarcastic laugh ... her mocking him, shining an unwelcome light flushing him out of denial... him pouring out louder and more vicious... blood rising like an elevator going up... and her pointing, pointing and laughing...

Humiliation, anger, humiliation and anger once more ... temperatures rocket, heady, in the small room...

Her spreading her legs wide, mocking him...

Him cursing and slapping her as he did it...

Him rolling off of her, wet and limp... exhausted, expired...

Her, a question, quiet but intently...

Him, quiet as well... looking away... her reaching for the clothes on the floor... her handing it to him... silence...

He padded softly right through revulsion...

Easier now, and quicker, nurse-maiding his fury... pushing past the pit in his stomach, the nauseous spasms of remorse...

Her, tied now at three points to the bed, one arm free ... him, pausing again to smoke another trembling cigarette... him, abandoning the cigarette, still burning, in a black plastic ashtray... a belt rising and falling fast in the smoky ladder of light...

Him, reaching for the cigarette, coughing as he inhales and trembling...

Her, in ragged whisper... hoarse, unused to language...

Razor blades, straight pins... her silent, breathing deeply... unsteady hand cutting shallow ... run in red lines over her breasts and thighs like a map... pushing a needle through her straight into that part of him that rioted suffering... her head back, her neck tense and sinewy, her lips parted slightly, her free hand moving quick, her body tensing...

Him afraid, but turning her loose... her rolling over on all fours... him behind her... blood dotting the sheets...

Her feeling herself with bloody fingers...

Her rolling onto her back and sliding down between his legs... emptying him onto her breasts... her mixing in the blood... him, strings cut, falling onto her... holding her, crying... her crying too, and kissing him...

Truth or dare, film spinning, flickering, and slowing, the free end making a slapping noise that settles down to a silence shot with conscience...

Her sleeping in the ribbons of light, her bruised and bleeding, her breathing rising and falling and moving the light...

Furious husbands with hard-ons chasing unfaithful wives ... surgeons with hard-ons and knives in their hands ... gruesome morticians fighting hard-ons in rooms filled with death... a picture in stained glass: broad-shouldered, grim-faced, pot-bellied, fists brutal and calloused, eyes dim, glazed, close together, suspicious and threatening, shotgun nestled intimately under one heavy arm... work boots and a wedding ring... a face of pride and conviction, a face of honor and authority, a face of heritage and gravitas and horror unrestrained...

John shook violently, alone now, at the window. He braced himself on the sill with cigarette smoke bringing tears to his eyes...

## Chapter 17

No-Pardon Jonny

Jonny tucked the bag under one arm as he opened the door. He went in and pulled the door shut behind him. He tried the handle to make sure it was locked. He laid the bag gently on the dining room table and went to the windows to close the shades. After a quick search through the kitchen cupboards, he found some newspapers and rags and brought them back to the table. He spread out the newspaper, pulled up a chair and unpacked the contents of the bag carefully, piece by piece.

The ammo and clips stretched out in a long line along the far edge of the newspaper, with the gun and cleaning kit set out before them. Examining the gun from every angle, he took his time deciphering its construction, and then, with no fumbling, he broke it down. Assembled, the gun felt like a solid block of steel, yet it came apart smoothly. No piece required unexpected force to separate it from the whole—neither did any come free too readily. He marveled in mute appreciation at the precision of the gun's design and manufacture. He worked slowly, committing to memory each part, its purpose and the order of its precedence in disassembly and reassembly. When the gun had finally yielded all its component parts in neat piles on the newspaper, he relaxed a moment and leaned back in the chair. He closed his eyes and turned the weapon's structure over in his mind until he was certain he understood it completely. The design had a seamless unity to it. He knew this was the key to a more perfect intimacy in its usage; once he saw the purpose of each part and its inescapable necessity in the whole, he would expose all the mysteries the gun contained.

He worked his way out from the bolt grouping. With brushes, solvent and rags, he scrubbed the carbon, dust and dirty oil from each part in turn until all were spotless and gleaming like new. Then, with fresh rags, he dried them and gave each a generous coat of lubricant. The gun went back together easily, like it, itself, had decided it was time.

He slipped the gun into the holster and put it back in the bag.

The clips had a similarly admirable composition. One at a time, he took them apart and cleaned, oiled and rebuilt them. As they went from the long row before him over to little stacks on his right, Jonny was keenly aware how satisfying the work was to him; there was something incongruously both calming and exciting in the uncluttered order of each operation, the surety of each task at hand and the pattern that led unambiguously from one to the next with never a confused, misplaced or inefficient movement in between. Having developed a comprehension of the structure, Jonny felt it was the gun itself dictating how he should proceed.

He directed his attention to the ammunition next and laboriously inspected each round in turn for defects. There was little likelihood he would find any, but, above all else, he wanted nothing left to chance. The one thing he could not stand to do was allow himself to be undermined by his own careless oversight. One ill-timed jam could well prove critical; he had to be sure the gun would fire and chamber the next round at every single pull of the trigger; he had to be sure spent clips would be ejected and replaced in the few seconds he could spare.

He loaded the eleven clips.

He took off his field jacket, laid it on the opposite side of the table and went into the bedroom. When he returned, he brought with him a small sewing kit, a measuring tape and an old pair of black jeans. After measuring the size of the clips precisely, he cut the denim into eleven rectangles and sewed them into the lining of the jacket. He checked his work exhaustively, fitting each pocket with a clip and testing for both tightness of fit and accessibility. He must not have to try more than once to retrieve them, nor could he tolerate them slipping out unexpectedly. When he'd sewn the last pocket into the jacket, he loaded all eleven clips into them. He got the holster back out of the bag, fit it snugly to his shoulder, and then put on the jacket. He practiced reaching for and extracting each clip in turn. He jumped, rolled and turned somersaults on the carpet. He was more than satisfied—neither the gun nor the clips had come loose and there were no rattles to give him away. He looked himself over in the full-length mirror in the bedroom. He was pleased. The jacket seemed bulky, but no more so than if he was wearing a heavy sweater beneath it.

Jonny smiled at his reflection and left the apartment.

The old, black Nova was parked just half a block away. There was an understated brutality to its wide, solid lines. The car always looked better at night, when artificial lighting hid the rot bubbling up under the dented quarter panels and fenders. Under the moonless night sky, the car's dilapidated appearance gave away none of its secrets.

Jonny took a small tool box and a flashlight out of the trunk. He twisted the knob wide open on the bottle of nitrous oxide hiding below the carpeting and closed the trunk again. He popped the hood open and set the tool box on the fender. Wiping away the grime on the top of the radiator with a dirty rag, he read the word he'd painted there long ago: "sleeper".

As a matter of pure habit, he checked all the fluids on the big block 454 engine first, though he knew he'd find all was well. He flipped open the lever on the secondary safety on the nitrous and he closed the hood. He went from wheel to wheel checking the tire pressure and let five pounds of pressure escape from the fat, second-hand slicks in the rear. This gave away some top end for quicker take-off but that was a trade he was willing to make. He smeared a handful of mud on the plates. He opened the driver's side door and, under the dash, he connected the couplings on the cable to the header cut-outs. He moved the handle back and forth a few times. He settled into the driver's seat and shut the door. The last safety on the nitrous was mounted on the dash. He checked to make sure it was shut tightly. He wanted it ready when he needed it, but even a small leak would destroy the engine in a matter of minutes. He put his tools on the floor on the passenger side and sat with his hands on the wheel.

He replayed in his mind everything he'd done until he convinced himself that he'd forgotten nothing. If he failed, it would have to be for reasons beyond his control, because he was ready.

He was ready.

Despite the night's cold, damp air, the car started up immediately at the barest twist of the key.

He slipped the shifter into first and pulled away from the curb.

## Chapter 18

Before the leather chair, the hand hovered six inches above the old book and supported a column of air reaching miles into space. The ring glittered from fingers still under the lamp; the red stone caught the light and shattered it in all directions. Beneath, the outline of the hand was traced in dust on the book. Within those hazy borders, three letters were exposed, in gold leaf and gleaming with muted luster: "Law."

Still facing the window, the man in the gray suit broke the silence.

"Now?"

"We wait."

Thin, watery light seeped through the windows to frame right angles on the gray fabric of his jacket as the man raised himself slightly on his toes and then brought himself slowly back down again.

## Chapter 19

Rich Jon

"I'll see him now."

The Director of Legal Affairs came in walking slowly, his head down. He was carrying his briefcase behind his back with both hands on the handle.

"We need to talk, sir."

"Bad news?"

He nodded, "It is, yes."

"Then let's talk."

The director shut the door.

"Take a seat. What've you got?"

He pulled up a chair, opened the briefcase and retrieved a massive sheaf of documents. He dropped the pile on the desk. "Our contacts in the Justice Department have only this past hour provided this to us," he said, tapping the top of the pile with his index finger.

"What is it?"

"These are charges that will be brought against you before a Grand Jury tomorrow."

"All of this?" he asked, eyeing the stack.

"Yes, and more."

"All of these will be filed against me, personally?"

"What you see here is just the tip of the iceberg."

Jon sighed and bounced a rubber handball on the desk. "What have I done this time?"

"This is serious, sir."

Jon caught the ball and held it still, squeezing it in his hand. "Go ahead."

"You'll need a little background to understand what we're up against. These charges are without precedent in US law—no previous criminal action has been brought forward on grounds like these. We'll need time to determine how best to fight this. Our contacts tell us that there's no likelihood of killing this off at the Grand Jury—there's too much pressure. If that's correct, we're looking at a trial."

"What are the charges?"

The director leaned forward to consult a summary sheet on the top of the pile of documents. "They include over fourteen thousand counts of murder, eighty-four thousand counts of rape, just under four hundred thousand of robbery, three quarters of a million aggravated assault charges, over two million counts of burglary, six million or so of larceny-theft, and similarly large numbers of theft auto and drug trafficking offenses. Smoking, waste disposal, noise and D.U.I. violations are also listed, but we're focusing on the big ticket items for now."

"Plea-bargain down to jaywalking?"

"Not likely, sir."

Jon turned the summary sheet around to review it himself. "It would seem I've been a busy boy."

"They have no intention of trying to prove that you physically committed these crimes, sir—were it that simple, we could dispense with this in a day or two. They will attempt to show that, while it was not you personally holding the smoking gun, so to speak, in each case it was nonetheless you, and you alone, who was ultimately responsible. Given that it will be difficult to secure a sympathetic jury, we're preparing for a battle in court."

Jon rolled the ball slowly between his hands and stared at the sheet. "Do what you can. At a minimum, buy me as much time as possible."

"Understood, sir."

The director gathered his papers.

"Leave me the summary, please," Jon said.

"Absolutely."

The director left the office.

The intercom buzzed the instant the door closed again.

"The lab report you requested is ready, sir."

"I'll see that now, please."

His assistant came in, dropped the report on the desk. He pulled the door closed behind him as he left.

Jon looked down at the two documents: the summary of forthcoming charges and the lab report. He sighed and then leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. He picked up the report. He paged through to the conclusions.

"Excepting the inscriptions, there is nothing unusual about the finger nail per se. The inscriptions, however, are notable beyond the semantics of the words themselves. They are composed entirely of unadulterated nucleic acids, all derived from a single human host. Models suggest that the total amount of nucleic acid present in the inscriptions is equivalent to that typically present in the human body in sum. There appear to be only two possible origins of the acids in the inscriptions. One is collection from a subject—but that would leave that subject entirely without DNA and presumably non-viable. The second possibility is replication using samples taken from a particular host. In either case, there are no methods known to us that would yield quantities of nucleic acids this large or with this level of purity."

Jon picked up the phone. "Finance, please." He paused. "Yes, this is Jon. I want you to liquidate everything. Yes, everything. The Foundation, my assets and holdings, all the subsidiaries, everything. Immediately. I want everything that isn't liquid up on the block by close of business today. I'll notify personnel. Yes, I'm sure. I'll be down to supervise later."

## Chapter 20

Morrie damned the post office for the on-going torture of his employment with the Institute. His fear ran away with him, irresponsibly pushing him from thought to panicked thought, driving him from preoccupation to paranoia. He was glad to be done smuggling transcripts but what relief that afforded was both shallow and short-lived. Morrie never once admitted the remotest possibility that "Out of the Question" would be rejected; his fear refocused its attention on the impending publication, whiling away the days clamoring for attention and calling the alarm at the most commonplace of events. It saw Dr. Watson's car approaching at every intersection, saw Watson lurking in crowds, heard Watson's step in his hallway and anticipated Watson's firm knock at the door. When confronted at work by the man himself, Morrie's fear read menace and suspicion hiding in his eyes, and could just hear the accusing words forming in his throat. His fear whirled and climbed and built itself into a towering construction Morrie's fragile reason struggled to contain.

Sometimes a shaky, unexpected reprieve would come upon him; it felt as though the floor had given way beneath him, bringing his fear tumbling down of its own weight. In those moments, as the dust settled in the rubble of his mind, Morrie found himself inexplicably giddy. In those tiny windows of time, there was not one fraction of his being that could be made to care a bit how it all turned out. Inevitably, though, his fear would begin to reconstruct itself anew.

Early one morning, Morrie was awakened from a few hours of fitful sleep by the ringing of the telephone. Disorientation offered him no respite from the shock of it, which nearly paralyzed him. Morrie opened his eyes and found his fear already raging, pinning him to the mattress. The phone kept ringing. There were only two possibilities he could think of: the Institute or the police. Either way, he was sure he was found out and soon to be condemned.

"Hello?"

"Is this Morris Allison?"

He considered hanging up the phone.

"Yes."

"Great. I'm glad to catch you in. This is Dan McCall calling from New Vector Publishing."

Morrie listened intently but seldom spoke. As the conversation neared an end, Morrie was beaming.

Morrie hung up. He sat on the edge of his bed, his fear mollified but not convinced. McCall was excited about the book. They wanted Morrie to come down to their offices as soon as possible. They had an opportunity to fit "Out of the Question" into their short-term publishing schedule but, to do so, there were many things that had to be resolved. There was the contract to work through, final editing and proofing to complete, and promotion and distribution plans to develop.

They were very interested in meeting him.

Morrie ate and dressed quickly and went into town to meet the editors.

That night, Morrie had a few drinks before he left for work. He arrived a little late and looking a little haggard.

(The thin hand, dropping incrementally toward the book, collected a lion's share of the light.)

Daily, Morrie's emotions crossed a yawning chasm, from dread in anticipation of the face-to-face meetings with the doctor at the end of his shifts to the irrepressible exhilaration he felt at his new-found prominence away from the Institute.

Morrie let his performance deteriorate through the weeks. He made mistakes. Sometimes he showed up late, sometimes a little drunk, and sometimes he made it in not at all.

A week before publication, Dr. Watson broke his customary silence as Morrie handed in his transcripts.

"Mr. Allison, I need a word with you. Please close the door."

Morrie, his fear burning in his stomach, turned back. "Yes, Dr. Watson?"

"It's come to my attention that the quality of your work hasn't been up to standard in recent weeks. We were quite content with your efforts earlier in your tenure but, recently... Mr. Allison, we need you to pull yourself together. We've all got personal lives to contend with, but we can't allow them to interfere with the performance of our duties. Certainly I don't and I expect nothing less from you. This is a scientific project, Mr. Allison. Shoddy workmanship jeopardizes everything we're working towards. Have I made myself clear?"

"Very much so, Dr. Watson. I'll try to improve."

"You see that you do. That'll be all."

(Red gem throwing red light lightning around the room as the thin hand fell further through the rectangle of light.)

On the eve of the publication, New Vector arranged a party in Morrie's honor. Morrie was astonished to find so many well-known authors in attendance. He gave witty and engaging his best effort, but he suspected he was leaving people cold after just a few minutes of conversation. But it was a great night for him nonetheless.

Later in the evening, after dinner was finished and more drinks had been served, Morrie sat quietly at the table, happy and flush with satisfaction, and listened to the hum of all the excited conversations around him.

A man entered the hall and left a folder with McCall. McCall reviewed its contents briefly and smiled. He stood up and tapped his wine glass with a knife to get everyone's attention. He started to read aloud. Morrie strained to hear him, as party-goers continued their impassioned discussions unabated all around him. He could make out only a few of the opening words but Morrie could tell he was reading from a review of the book—a very favorable review.

Morrie called to McCall to pass him the review. He'd only read the first few lines before he was interrupted and pulled into conversation, but what he read there, in conjunction with the dinner, liquor, fellowship, and respect extended him by all these people, filled him with euphoria, made it all seem worthwhile, made his fear seem a fading memory from a remote, unpleasant past.

Not twenty-four hours later, Morrie was again detained by Dr. Watson. Tired, unshaven, reeking of alcohol, his fear reveled in the pronouncements it had so long anticipated.

"Mr. Allison, we feel we've been more than patient with you, but your work has fallen below our most lenient standards and despite ample fore-warning about the potential consequences, it has not recovered to acceptable levels of quality. We're going to have to let you go."

"I understand. I'll get my things."

(Red gem flashing wildly, the hand that came down on the book was a fist. Shock waves resounded through the rising clouds of dust. The man at the window nodded.)

## Chapter 21

@teenjohnny

Johnny pushes his way through a crowd of sluggish Maxies, fighting his way into the hall from that huge room with its beds and their muttering occupants. The hallway is filled with people on their way in. No one is saying anything but still the noise in the hallway crowds out all thought in his mind. He can't feel the ground under him. He'd have fallen if there was room enough for it. His passage down to the street is a tedious ordeal—he's tired; so tired the world flashes by him in a series of stills; so tired he can feel the bottom dropping out from under him every time he closes his eyes. There's a cab idling, still on duty, thirty feet up the street. Johnny stands at the curb, his legs threatening to give way at any moment, and waves to the cab. There's a man sitting behind the wheel, his face hidden in shadow, but the car does not move to meet him. Johnny takes the first few halting steps to close the gap himself and then staggers the rest of the way to the car. Johnny crosses the last few feet in a free fall and catches the drip rail on the roof to keep himself upright. He mumbles his destination with head hung low and his eyes fixing on the asphalt at his feet. The driver says nothing but watches him closely as he deposits himself in the cab. Johnny notices, for the first time, that there's another passenger inside: a rough-looking man, perhaps thirty, unshaved and reeking of liquor, wearing worn blue jeans and a black t-shirt with the word "relax" printed in large letters across the chest.

"Hope you don't mind sharing the cab. I'm going your way."

Johnny shakes his head. Johnny struggles with the seatbelt but finally gives up trying to work the buckle. Instead, he reaches for the leather strap secured above the door pillar. He's hanging onto it with both hands as the car pulls away.

"Do I look like a happy man to you, friend?"

"Sure," Johnny mumbles, his head swaying with the motion of the car.

"You should congratulate me—this here's the smile of a free man. Tonight's the night. Free at last. First day back to the sporting life. Left the wife. Fucking bitch. The only thing I'm sorry about is I never done it sooner. Christ, you should've heard her, you'd have died laughing. Ten years of her shit. I dated her in high school, all the while just itching to get into her pants. She's always like 'No, not now, we should wait, we should wait.' You know the deal."

Johnny's looking out the window, watching the street fly by, and bounces a little in his seat. He keeps an eye on the man with his peripheral vision.

"It takes a month or two, but I wear her down. Like she didn't want it, lying bitch that she is. So I end up doing her in a parking lot—right in the back seat of my dad's car. After that, I get it good and steady. Paradise. One night we're out and she's non-stop bringing me down. She don't want to talk, don't want to eat, don't want to drink, don't want to fuck. Finally I get as much of that as I can stand and I ask her 'What's the problem, sweetheart?' and she starts crying and I'm like 'What the fuck now?' She starts in on me 'Do I love her, do I care?' Oh shit—I bet you know where that was going, don't you buddy: the bitch went and got herself knocked up. So I tell her that that ain't my problem. She didn't like that much. Boo hoo hoo. Turns out she's already told her folks and they end up telling my folks and before I know it, I've got half the fucking neighborhood asking me when I'm going to do the right thing. Make an honest woman of her. Jesus, like it wasn't too late for that already. But I'm just a kid myself—what do I know? So I go along with it. Before you know it, we're man and wife. And that, my friend, was the end of the good old days, if you can believe it, and the start of ten years of hell with the bitch. I never even liked her to begin with—I just wanted to get it wet, you know what I'm saying?" He leans over and nudges Johnny's shoulder.

Johnny's queasy. He's swinging from the strap and holding on with two hands. The car looks to be making very good time, at least.

"Fast forward ten years—God, don't I wish I could have. Not more than twenty-four hours ago, I dump her ass. Jesus, I wish you'd have been there. It slays me just thinking about it. One minute she's screaming and throwing shit at me, the next she's telling me about how we can make it just like it used to be. Make it just like it used to be? Make it just like it used to be? Why the fuck do I want to make it just like it used to be? I start heading for the door. Christ, you should've heard her then, buddy. It made me sick to my stomach—honest to God, sick. She's begging me, fucking begging me to stay, 'Boo hoo hoo, what about the kids? What about my sick mother? What about the God-damned mortgage?' Like any of that is going to stop me. More of the same—that's what I want. Kicking my ass for her frozen twat and the little bastards she shit out. You should see them. Never have kids, pal, trust me on that one. Little fucking monsters. And my mother—there's another winner. My old man must've fucking left her to me in his will, because he's no sooner dead and buried than she just moves in. No asking first, mind you—I just come home from work one day and she's all set up in the spare room. Nobody told me a thing—just their little secret. And never a word from her after that—I'm not kidding, six years she's holed up in that room, I heard her say maybe two dozen words the whole time—six fucking years. Just sits in her room, playing solitaire, morning, noon and night. Give you the creeps just to look at her."

Johnny pulls back from the man, pushing himself further into the corner of the seat, but the stranger pays no heed to this. He shifts over to the middle of the bench seat. Johnny is becoming increasingly aware of the lurching and halting of the cab, which throws his body around the seat like a ragdoll. Sometimes he bumps right into his companion. The stranger is seemingly unaffected by the pitching of the taxi and sits, unperturbed, perched at the edge of the seat. Johnny begins to realize just how fast they are traveling. Uneasiness tears away the cobwebs.

"There I am, with two bitches, a mob of demented brats, the house mortgaged way out to my grandkids and a job to bust my ass at for the privilege of keeping it all. So what do I say? I'll tell you what I say. I say 'No thanks, fuck you very much.' Go find yourself another sucker. No more charity cases for this guy. She's bawling like a baby, but I don't give a shit. I go into the bedroom to change out of my work clothes and... " The man convulses with laughter. "... that stupid bitch follows me in and starts groping at me. 'You know I can't go on without you, I need you, no man can do it like you can,' and I'm laughing right out loud now—to her face, even. 'No man can do it like I can.' That's a good one. But I figure, it's no skin off my ass, so I go ahead and throw one into her. Hell, she's dry as a bone but still she's screeching like a cat in heat. I bust myself a nice nut and take a shower and after I'm making to get my shit and get the hell out of there. She breaks out again, worse than before, believe me—crying and screaming and grabbing on to me. So I give her a couple of good ones to get her off me—right in the fucking mouth. But that don't even slow her down and then the kids are all out and the old lady too and they're all over me, bawling and begging. I look down and there's my dear old Mom wrapped around my legs and she goes, and Christ, this the first thing out of her mouth in years, 'You can't do this.' 'The hell I can't,' I tell her. I shake them off me and take my fucking money out of the wife's purse and get the fuck out of Dodge. A little dust up with the wife again at the door, but after that, I'm free and clear. I get about halfway up the block and turn around. I'm just standing there—I had to get one last look to remember it by."

The cab is racing through the streets, fish-tailing at every turn, the tires screaming, blowing through red lights and stop signs, scattering the few pedestrians that are out. Johnny is flung around in the car, swinging from the strap like a puppet. The careening turns and full-bore acceleration and sudden breaking send him hurtling around the back seat, into the door, the partition in front of him, back into his seat and into the stranger beside him. Blood runs freely from Johnny's nose. One eye is nearly swollen shut. His companion, still seemingly unaffected, continues, "And there they are, the whole crew, out on the lawn, and the wife out front of them all, on her knees in the mud, with her bathrobe wide fucking open, stark naked, mind you. And everybody's wailing. Up and down the block, everybody's out having a look-see. I had to laugh. I wish I'd had a camera. I should have burned the whole fucking place down."

The car is flying down Broadway, flat out, the throttle wide open. Johnny throws open the door and falls out. He tumbles down the street. Cars swerve to avoid his rolling body. Johnny crashes into a huge pile of garbage bags on the sidewalk.

## Chapter 22

The following weeks saw "Out of the Question" become the top-selling book of poetry in the nation; a modest achievement, but a thrilling one for a man who'd only known abject failure previously. Morrie was happier now than he could recall ever having been. That his success was not truly his own did not trouble him. He had convinced himself long before that this was just compensation for the misery and inequity the rest of his life had been. He told himself that what he'd done could hardly be called theft given the purported victim was entirely incapable of missing what had been taken. Alone in his bedroom, in his weaker moments, he comforted himself, "I cannot be expected to live my whole life in anonymous poverty. It is not reasonable to expect me to forego this opportunity."

Morrie was in a local bookstore, signing books for crowds of beautiful young intellectuals, when he was served the summons. He stared after the departing process server and then looked back down to the papers sitting before him on the table. Morrie couldn't believe it had finally come to pass.

He called McCall from a phone in the bookstore.

"Hello, Dan?"

"Is this Morrie?"

"Yes—"

McCall interrupted, "I imagine you just got your summons?"

"I did."

"We got ours earlier today. I'm a little surprised there hasn't been an injunction."

"What do you mean?"

"Look, Morrie, let's not bullshit each other, alright? After we were served, I made a few phone calls. I know where you used to work."

"I swear to God, Dan, I haven't done anything."

"Well, you certainly didn't write the book, I'll give you that. Come on, Morrie. You used to work for them. Suddenly you come up with a manuscript that's miles apart from your previous work. I can't be the first person to wonder why the author, in person, seems so different from the voice in that book. And now they're suing for the rights to the book. It's not too hard to fill in the blanks."

"Slow down—you've got to believe me. We've got to fight this thing. We need to stand together."

"No, Morrie, I don't think we're going to be doing that."

"If we're not going to work together to fight this, then I'm going to need an advance to finance my own defense. The publicity this will generate has got to end up driving sales. Under the circumstances, I think an additional advance would be a reasonable expectation."

"That's not going to happen. We're consulting legal counsel and you should certainly do so as well, but you're on your own now, Morrie. Good luck. "

"Dan, calm down, will you, please?"

But McCall had hung up.

Fear came roaring back from exile; seemingly only stronger for the brief respite.

Morrie apologized and ended the book signing early. He returned home.

A quick call to the bank confirmed that his account had been frozen. He'd gone from a small but satisfying nest egg to flat broke in an afternoon. After dozens more phone calls, he discovered that the only recourse for his defense was legal aid.

Some days later, he sat waiting in a dingy office to meet his attorney. The improbably young man entered and shook Morrie's hand as he took his seat.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Allison, sorry to keep you waiting. As it turns out, I've been digging into your case this morning—and things don't look at all promising for you, I'm sorry to say. Can I call you 'Morris', Mr. Allison?"

#

McCall hung up on Morrie and immediately called Steve Ronson. Ronson was the editor-in-chief for New Vector. He'd just received a summons himself and had reached the same conclusions about Morrie that Dan had. They quickly agreed that the lawsuit was best left to the lawyers. The more pressing matter for them was deciding what to do with book in the meantime. They deliberated but finally agreed on how they would proceed. They set out on this course with great trepidation, convinced that both they, personally, as well as their company, would suffer powerful retribution as a result with little hope of seeing any tangible benefit from it.

Ultimately, however, they were wrong twice over.

Ronson called the printer.

"I want you to pull all our other orders. Start printing nothing but 'Out of the Question.' As many as possible—around the clock. Bill us as they are printed."

"Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"I am."

"Do you need any changes for this run? Say, for example, to the cover—or the copyright page, perhaps?"

Ronson whistled softly. "I guess bad news travels fast—no, for now, Morris Allison is the author."

As Ronson placed his order, McCall was hard at work on his laptop, producing a freely copyable electronic version of the book. When he was done, he'd post a torrent of the file online on a few sites.

Later, Ronson worked the phones calling a few trusted news and publishing people regarding the true author of "Out of the Question." He wanted to spread the word but needed to remain anonymous.

What they'd decided was that the public should read those words and that they should know who it was that had spoken them—to this end, they were willing to risk both their careers and their company. When news of the lawsuit broke and the rumors started, there would be copies ready by the thousands. When the injunction came to shut down the print editions, the torrent would be out there—and no court could stop that. They moved quickly. They anticipated the injunction at any moment. Their legal team cautioned that their laptops and servers could well be seized along the way; they might not have much time to get the electronic version out either.

#

What they did not know, and what they could not have known, was that the injunction looming over them would never arrive—all their urgency and secrecy came to nothing. Once the thin hand had cast the words out, it would not have them returned.

The fingers of the hand, having completed their enchantments, rested once more and covered again that golden word. The man in the gray suit stood vigilant, waiting, watching the images in the world beyond the lead window panes as they slowly resolved into perfection.

"The transcripts?"

"Notarized daily."

## Chapter 23

John Classic

John turned on the TV to fill the silence he could no longer abide. He lay back on the sofa and found faces in the stucco ceiling through the cloud of smoke above him. The TV filled the room with presence, in words and pictures. John felt a little less alone. He was grateful for how it crowded out his thoughts. He turned to face the screen.

"... and who should we say is responsible for this crime against humanity? Who is it that deserves our rancor—to whom should we direct our outrage? That's a question we can ask and it's one to which we are, quite frankly, entitled an answer. Who is responsible for this crime? It's a simple question, perhaps even deceptively so, because it would appear to have an equally simple answer: it's the doctors and the Institute who are responsible. They performed the operation—without them, there would be no crime. On that point, I am forced to agree—and I'd hasten to add to their account the mockery they have made of our legal system, commendable efforts by the Attorney General's office notwithstanding.

"So there it is. The Institute and its staff are responsible. It seems cut and dried—but is it really that simple? Had the Institute forced Max to submit to that horrible procedure, it certainly would have been—simpler by far, both for us as witnesses of this tragedy as it would have been for our legal system. Were it so simple, we would all have enjoyed a bitter modicum of satisfaction in seeing those men brought to justice. But the difficult truth is that it's not nearly so simple in fact. As has recently come to light, that poor, unhappy, misguided young man needed no coercion to recruit him to this awful purpose. If we cannot infer from that fact that he, however incomprehensible it may be to us, somehow desired what those doctors had in store for him, we can at least infer that he did not object to it. This muddies the waters of our search for justice in profound ways. And so we must ask again, who is responsible? Blame must be assigned to the doctors and the Institute—certainly that much remains clear—but justice would not be served if we allowed them to bear the burden of guilt alone."

John lost the thread in a new cigarette and quiet introspection.

"Max is himself as much a party to this crime as anyone. Because of this, we find we must cast a much wider net indeed to find all those who were liable through their complicity. In an era where murder, rape, assault, heinous inhuman acts of every stripe are portrayed as deriving in some manner from society at large, I find myself reluctant to point the finger that way once more, but, in this sad case, it can't be denied that Max came from somewhere. We are his origins—he came from us, from you and from me, from our ranks. He is as much a product of this society as any of us. He was born in our nation, nurtured in our communities, educated in our schools, and raised to adulthood just as any other child of our great nation. His willful pursuit of the procedure that ripped away his humanity, severed him from us and left him the barest shadow of a man only serves to illustrate the disease growing, unchecked, in our society. So we can and we must mourn for Max—and we will. But at the same time, we must mourn also for the diminishment of our humanity, we must mourn also for ourselves and, in so doing, we must commit ourselves to a path of redemption. It's only by doing so that we can ensure Max's loss will not have been in vain."

The TV creaked. John was on his guard now and stared at it. He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa as the TV dropped to the floor and crept slowly towards him. John backed away from it to the far end of the sofa. The picture shuddered and blinked with every movement forward as the box, trailing cables behind it, slid closer. The righteous, accusing face filled the screen.

The TV crawled across the floor.

"And so we must ask again who is responsible?"

The TV crawled across the floor.

"We must not rest until we know who is responsible."

The TV crawled across the floor.

"We will not rest until we know who is responsible."

The TV moved up onto the sofa. John backed away from it as far as he could. His eyes, whites showing wide around the irises, stared, unblinking, as the TV climbed onto his stomach. He couldn't breathe for the weight of it.

"Who is responsible?"

## Chapter 24

Just a few days later, "Out of the Question" had grown from the most popular book of poetry to become the best-selling book of any genre. At the same time, Max was undergoing his legal resurrection. His second turn through the courts would prove even briefer than his first.

Morrie sat rigidly on a hard wooden chair, hiding himself behind stacks of made-up evidence. He assured his fear that all was well, but his fear howled back in disbelief, surging within him like an impending heart attack.

The grim young men representing the Institute introduced the copyrighted and notarized transcripts of Max's monologues. They showed where the transcripts included, verbatim, every word in "Out of the Question." It wasn't long after that they rested their case.

Shrunken, lost in the worn cloth of his old brown suit, Morrie stared wildly at the judge. His greasy cheeks quivered under the withering scorn of all these witnesses to his undoing. His shaking hands clutched wads of paper covered in red and black ink. The pages shivered in his grasp. Words eluded him. His face was transfigured. Inside him, the fight was over. Whatever Morrie had been previous to this point was forever consigned to the past.

He was no longer present when his lawyer interrupted the proceedings, "Your honor, I would like to take a moment to confer with my client about the advisability of a change of plea."

"That would seem prudent. Proceed but let's make it quick."

The lawyers for the Institute were already starting to gather their things as Morrie and his lawyer conferred. Morrie nodded his head stiffly after their brief discussion. His lawyer stood up.

"Your honor, my client would like to submit a new plea on all counts brought against him in these proceedings."

"So, Mr. Allison, how do you plead to the charges against you?" The judge addressed his question directly to Morrie.

"Nolo contendre, your honor."

#

Days later, Morrie found himself again in his rumpled brown suit, sitting bolt upright in his seat. An angry mob filled the gallery behind him and waited impatiently for his deliverance to ruin.

"We have accepted your revised plea. Before we proceed, do you have anything to say for yourself, Mr. Allison?"

Morrie stared around the room at the unpleasant faces turned toward him and then looked back at the judge. Fear tightened his throat, just as if he were sad. "Is that it then? There's no more? I'm guilty—that's what we've arrived at?" Morrie looked around again, expectantly. "I could have saved us all a lot of trouble. I've been guilty my whole life—not of stealing, no, I don't care what happens here, I'm not going to apologize for that. My entire existence has come down to one pull of a slot machine—what I'm guilty of is losing. Reading and working, no family, no friends, decades of solitude and work—all down the pisser. A waste of time. Every thought and insight I've ever had—trees falling in a forest with no one wanting to hear them. 'So what if a piece of wood discovers it's a violin.' What a stupid question! So what if a piece of wood discovers it's a piece of shit."

"If you're done then, Mr. Allison?" the judge asked.

Morrie stared at him.

"Before we hand down our judgment, we will take this opportunity to explain some of the rationale supporting it, without which it seems likely to be misinterpreted.

"It would be the height of understatement to say we find this case distasteful. Neither party seems worthy of a judgment in their favor. The sad truth of this case is that the real victim in this matter is beyond our compensation.

"We should make clear that neither the plaintiff's unseemly actions nor the author's unfortunate circumstances do not diminish, even minutely, the dishonorable and disreputable nature of Mr. Allison's behavior.

"But this is a court of law and under the law we have no choice but to find for the plaintiff. By virtue of the contract the author entered into with the plaintiff, we award all revenues that have arisen or shall arise from the sale of the book in question to the plaintiff.

"We take no pleasure in this judgment, but the crux of the matter is the contract, which has previously been found binding in another action.

"From this date forward, any publication in any form of the book in question will show Max Ichstab as the author. A reasonable attempt will be made to collect and destroy all previously released copies of this book and replace them with copies showing the corrected author. In addition, we hereby sentence Mr. Allison to a term of imprisonment not to exceed five years. We order that he make full account and restitution to the plaintiff of all profits he has illegally obtained from the sale of the book, and further impose punitive damages in the sum of five hundred thousand dollars.

"We note in conclusion that this sentence is the harshest allowable under the law. We trust all involved understand the motivation for it."

Steve Ronson motioned to the Institute's lead counsel from his seat in the gallery and whispered in his ear, "Where does that leave the action against New Vector?"

"You'll be happy to know that, on the advice of our client, we'll be dropping all charges."

Ronson nodded, "Thanks." He turned back to talk to McCall who was seated next to him.

"They really gave it to him. He's finished," McCall said.

"That's not too surprising. What do we do now—it seems pretty obvious they want us to keep publishing it."

"I suppose you're right there—why else would they have dropped the case against us?"

"Maybe we should tell them go find someone else to make their money for them. I'd rather not make a whore of myself for their benefit. There would be no shortage of others who would leap at the chance."

"You're right about that."

"Let's think about it."

Later, as Ronson entered made his way to his office, a radio on his secretary's desk was broadcasting a news report that made him pause. He listened intently until the report was over and then went into his office. He picked up the phone to call McCall.

"Did you hear?"

"Hear what?"

"The Institute just held a press conference. They're saying that since public interest in the book was so great and since the book was already on the market, the Institute has decided not to pursue an injunction against its publication. They want us to continue to sell it."

"That's what we thought they wanted."

"It is, yes. But the thing is, they don't want the money. They're giving all their proceeds to charity."

They paused a moment.

"So what do we do? They're basically giving it away."

"Under the circumstances, I don't think we have a choice," Ronson said, "We keep publishing."

## Chapter 25

John Classic

John yawned, stretching as he leaned against the bedroom doorway. Rubbing his eyes, he stumbled over something on the floor but righted himself before he fell. He entered the kitchen. He put a pot of coffee on to brew and opened a fresh pack of cigarettes. He lit one, and as he inhaled deeply, he saw the first of them: hairy domes pushing up through the carpet, not far from where he stood. They were rising right at the border, where the carpet in the hall met the linoleum floor of the kitchen. He leaned out through the doorway and looked down the hall. There were more of them appearing on either side of the path he'd walked. Swallowing his disgust, he leapt over them and started back towards the bedroom. He heard the faintest strains of music and hesitated mid-stride. The tune was so compelling—was it voices? Instruments? He had no way of knowing; the notes were so low he felt more than heard them. Muffled, soft, deep, rumbling the floor beneath him, still unidentifiable yet so hauntingly familiar, the music swelled around him.

He looked down. Domes surrounded him, spreading out radially from his feet and sprouting up in every footprint he'd left behind him. The bedroom was teeming with them. He looked back over his shoulder. The hallway behind him was nearly choked as well, but, with care, he was able to step between them and return to the living room. He stood there, preoccupied and bewildered. The floor of this room, at least, was free of the infestation.

The pictures on the walls buzzed and rattled in their frames. The volume of the melody was growing with each passing second.

"Is it humming?" he asked aloud.

The carpet was jammed. The clear area John occupied narrowed by the minute as they popped up all around.

Directly before him, one lurched suddenly upward, higher than all the others and exposed forehead, ears and eyebrows.

"I should have known—it's heads. It's human heads," he muttered to himself, but he could hardly hear the sound of his own voice over the din. He fixed his eyes on that rising head and watched it sprout fully to the base of its neck. The eyelids snapped back. It spat angrily and ground its teeth. It rolled its wide-open eyes and stared up at John.

"Why?" it shouted in a low, booming voice that cut through the cacophony roaring in the room.

John exclaimed in surprise as he felt warm scalps lifting him from the carpet. All around him, faces came into view and stared balefully at him. Moaning, whispering, and the chattering sound of gnashing teeth made a counterpoint to the bedlam of the song. John clamped his hands over his ears to shut it out.

He shuddered in revulsion as he was raised, little by little, on the heads growing beneath him.

There was violent growth under him. His foot slipped from the crowns of the heads and wedged in the space between them. Heads all around pivoted with desperate speed to snap and tear at his ankles. Blood dripped down his heels as he was forced to run wildly over the wall-to-wall heads. His mangled feet and ankles were bleeding freely when he reached the bedroom closet. He looked back and saw his passing marked by bloody mouths and hair. He kept his precarious footing on the writhing heads while he rummaged through the closet. He found a baseball bat and work boots at the bottom of the closet, ignoring as best he could the vengeful mouths tearing at his hands. Avoiding disaster by the slimmest of margins, he leapt across the room and through the open bathroom door. He landed flat on his stomach. The tile floor of the bathroom was miraculously free of them. He rested there for a few minutes, struggling to catch his breath. Tears of frustration filled his eyes.

He shut the door with the end of the bat to try and get a moment's peace. Sitting on the edge of the tub, he pulled on the steel-toed boots over his abused, still-bleeding feet. He stood up and took a deep breath to steady his nerves. There was no putting it off. He opened the door again. Every head whipped around to face him—ugly, malignant expressions and still that awful song shook the walls. Facing that wave of hatred, John almost faltered; he almost shut the door again in terror. He gathered his resolve and considered the heads with care. Clearly, they could not advance on him—they screamed in frustration because of it. John felt a modicum of confidence welling up in him. He held his toe out to the shrieking heads nearest the bathroom door. One among them clamped his hideous mouth on it immediately but John couldn't feel it at all through the boot.

He smiled. "I've got you now."

With a force that surprised him, John kicked the repellent thing up out of the floor and sent it flying into the wall. John lifted the bat to his shoulder, his face aglow with excitement. He swung it in a low arc, smashing the heads in the doorway. The faces were broken and bloodied; they were rocked, but they remained stubbornly anchored in their spots. The heads shook with impotent fury. They shouted. They glared disapprovingly at John.

John took a practice swing as though he were waiting in the on-deck circle and then raised the bat once more. This time, he knocked the row of them determinedly right out of the floor. They spewed blood and broken teeth as they spun through the air.

The rest came far more easily to him.

Sweat beading his face, he methodically loosed every single one of them with short, brutal strokes of the bat. His expression had softened to one of pensive concentration as he clubbed the last of them from the carpet.

He laid the wet bat on the sofa and got a towel from the bathroom to mop the blood and sweat from his skin. Breathing heavily from his exertions, he took a moment to survey the mass of crushed and shattered heads scattered haphazardly all around the floor and piled up in unsightly heaps in the corners of the room.

He was pleased to discover the song had finally stopped and found himself, for seemingly the first time, filled with satisfaction to have silence in his home.

The carpet was awash in blood. His steps splashed nasty, tepid drops up to his calves as he went around the apartment gathering heads by the dozen and pitching them summarily into the bedroom closet. Room by room, he cleared the apartment. When he was done, it was all he could do to force closed the closet door against the awful mass of them.

He rested again on his bed, exhausted, and lit a cigarette. He inhaled deeply and sent a fountain of smoke billowing up to the ceiling. He'd finished that cigarette, had another and was working his way through a third when, still flush with his triumph over the heads, he began humming, low and absently. It was the same melody that had so recently thundered in his ears. He was nearly euphoric. He felt heat rising in waves from his body into the rank atmosphere of the room. His low humming tingled on his skin. He arched his back with pleasure.

The closet door exploded in a shower of wood and splinters. John bolted out of the bed.

He looked over in time to see the first of the returning heads. Six feet off the ground and hovering, lighter than air, they bobbed into view. There were bodies on them now—fat, pink, infantile bodies dangling below the thick necks of those battered, out-sized heads. Those still with functional throats took up the chant once more but the screams and wet gurgles of the rest made a hash of the melody. The less broken among them drifted down level with John's waist to form a little solar system of heads around him. Sniveling pathetically and with tears running freely down their bruised and bloodied cheeks, they sang for him.

"Ring around the rosie."

John whirled to meet the accusing glare of a ruined head, staring up at him.

"Why?" it demanded.

John's eyes dimmed.

"A pocket full of posies."

John was overwhelmed by sorrow. He wept along with the beaten heads. John crossed the red meat expanse of the carpet to the window and opened it. Wracked with remorse, he gestured to the children.

"Hush. Hush. Hush. Hush."

In single file, that sad host of angels filed past the sill and plummeted to the unforgiving asphalt far below, and sent their sharp, piercing cries to fill John's ears.

## Chapter 26

Within a year of Morrie's trial, charities had netted hundreds of millions of dollars. "Out of the Question" stood alone at the top of best seller lists through the months.

Max threaded a path through all cultures, catalyzing movements, spurring debate, provoking anger and alienation. Max's words were joined by the words of so many others in papers, magazines, poetry, plays, TV shows, movies, speeches, web sites, chat rooms—like the echoing, resonating feedback of Max's thought projected into all those minds.

Religious leaders were particularly preoccupied by Max. Their diatribes sounded shrilly from TVs and car radios on sleepy Sunday mornings. Max was a secular insult to the loving, personal God. Max was a heart-breaking victim of that tool of the anti-Christ, science. Max was the anti-Christ himself as was plain to see from the actions he inspired. Max was the mouthpiece for the Lord Himself as the heavenly Father reached down to reclaim the ravaged soul of His most prodigal son with the touch of His benevolent hand.

It seemed almost inevitable that extremist Christian groups would take matters into their own hands as the tenor of their rhetoric passed from affront into outrage. Dozens were killed when explosives bound for Max's room detonated early as church members tried to force their way through the crowds of reporters surrounding the Institute. Max was unharmed.

Certainly "Out of the Question" sold well across demographic groups, but in no group was it in greater demand than it was in white youth. Within weeks of its republication, young white men and women were seen in green hospital gowns, their heads shaved and bandaged as an homage to Max's image in Billy Gordon's photographs. In these early days there was no common ground between these disparate Maxies beyond a certain discontented nihilism, which they would surely have had in common even before Max's emergence. Through Max's words and his image, though, they were unified—transformed from a mob into a movement. It began with punks and skinheads in the urban centers, already socially outcast and economically disenfranchised; they made his image their own. Heavy metal kids, emos, goths and others quickly followed.

Soon there were Maxie clubs, Maxie shops and whole Maxie communities. The neighborhoods of the urban poor were over-run.

The first outbreaks of violence were triggered by friction with other communities. Maxie fought non-Maxie in mixed neighborhoods, on subways and buses, and filled the streets with tumult out front of clubs late into the night. Near riots broke out in larger cities.

Maxie drug use was endemic. They consumed vast quantities of heroin, cocaine, methedrine, amphetamine, marijuana and psychedelics. They fashioned sensory deprivation equipment from foam rubber sheets, rags, buckets, cast off electronics and other refuse; their use, in conjunction with drugs, became a daily practice for many.

Maxies lived in tenements, abandoned buildings, grow-op houses, in parks, in cars and under bridges. Mobs of homeless Maxies stormed lower income housing developments only to be forced out by squads of police. Evictions were typically bloody affairs.

Maxies ripped themselves from the fabric of society. If they'd been in school, they dropped out. Those with jobs quit them. They severed ties with their families and non-Maxie friends. They found and exploited loopholes in social security, disability, unemployment and welfare faster than administrators could close them. They hacked ATMs, credit and debit cards and online payment systems mercilessly.

The ascendance of Maxies as an economic force was a function of their drug consumption. In the formative days of the movement, they favored the traditional lines of supply. Organized crime groups made fortunes initially but their prices outstripped limited Maxie incomes, and so the Maxies established their own drug import paths. They began supplying themselves. The response was predictable. Gun battles between law enforcement, organized crime and Maxies became so common that they rarely made the news.

Maxie drug importers sold their products at cost to fellow Maxies. This, in turn, further swelled Maxie numbers as more and more addicts entered the fold. Organized crime cartels lost huge fractions of their income in a matter of weeks.

The Maxie movement had become America's number one crime problem.

Police promotions were there for the taking, and careers were made as Maxies were jailed by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands—they were jailed until there was no more room for them, and still the sentences kept coming. Studies warned of probable prison insurrections as the Maxie majority in the ever-expanding prison population grew.

There was great interest in breaking the movement, but the sheer magnitude of membership as well as its completely decentralized structure made effective strategies hard to define. Without leaders or other obvious targets of importance to focus on, policing efforts were directed at Maxie rank and file, but had no substantive effect—Maxies were being added more quickly than they could be imprisoned.

The year of the Maxies coincided with a presidential election. A radical independent dark horse ran away with the election with a platform dominated by extreme measures to control the Maxie problem. His promises included initiatives of uncertain feasibility, such as doubling sentences for Maxie crime, and dubious legality, including plans to create mandatory Maxie re-education camps in the South-West. But he managed to make good on all of them and more.

But just as the anti-Maxie sentiment reached its most vitriolic apex, the Maxie tide unexpectedly began to ebb.

Two main factors led to the decline. The first was the shockingly poor state of Maxie health. AIDS, hepatitis and tuberculosis decimated their ranks and sent huge numbers of afflicted Maxies back into the mainstream in desperate fights for survival. The second factor was a set of clandestine operations undertaken to curtail foreign drug production. The original intent of these missions was to destroy drug crops before they could be harvested, but by the time the planes were in the air, plans had changed. Rather than defoliants, the planes dusted the crops with poisons deadly in humans, given sufficient consumption, but inert in the plants themselves. A few months after these missions, Maxie corpses began filling morgues to overflowing.

By the eve of the opening of the first Maxie re-education facility, the most visible portion of the Maxie movement had all but collapsed. Survivors were reintegrated into society over time. Organized crime recaptured their markets. Crime rates dropped.

Just two years after the publication of "Out of the Question", nowhere, not in the slums, not in the subways, not in the unemployment lines or college campuses or rooming houses or homeless shelters, nowhere could be found the green gowns or the shaved and bandaged heads, that had so recently seemed so ubiquitous and threatening.

Through it all, Max lay still in a windowless room, apart and alone, muttering and shrieking, sometimes for a few, sometimes for many, sometimes for no one at all.

#

Thin hands enchanted the face of Max from the smoke in the square of light by casting out all that was not Max. Dust devils and wisps of smoke raced with time, and under the thin, conjuring fingers, gold letters came to light once more. The man in the gray suit stood mute before the bay windows, witness to the sympathetic magic twisting beyond.

## Chapter 27

Rich Jon

"It's done now? Finalized? You've verified this? Excellent. What's the amount?" Jon wrote the figure down on the check. "Good, thank you. Yes, I'm aware that we could have done better, but this is no time to quibble." Jon hung up and finished filling out the check. He tore it out of the book and laid it on the clean, uncluttered blotter. He put the check book back in the desk drawer.

He was only a few minutes late when he dialed into the conference call. The directors were on the line, waiting for him.

"Gentlemen, I have an announcement to make. Effective end of today, we're out of business. Send all personnel home."

The line was overwhelmed by the muddy uproar of voices. Jon looked down at his conference phone, waiting patiently for them to quiet down.

"I'll provide four weeks of severance for every year of service. You'll find the details in your inboxes. Security has been notified and will be supervising to ensure an orderly shutdown of operations this afternoon."

He took only a few more questions and ended the call. It was an awful shock, but there was nothing to be done about it.

He buzzed his assistant.

"Have you heard?"

"I have, sir. Are we closing right away? Are you sure, sir?"

"It's already done. One other thing, please—I'd like you to stay. I'll let you know when to go. You're still on the clock, of course."

"Alright, sir."

"Don't let anyone through that door. I'm not to be disturbed."

"Not by anyone, sir? Surely the directors will need to—"

"No, not by anyone."

Jon sat back in his chair and lit a cigarette. He smoked and eyed the door, half expecting someone to force their way in.

He got up and went to the floor-to-ceiling window behind his desk. He stood there through the afternoon, his hands behind his back, watching the building empty. The cars left the lot in a steady stream and vanished into the traffic beyond. Just three cars were left at dusk: his, his assistant's and the car of the last security guard. He returned to his desk, humorlessly wiping away the dust that had gathered on his shoulders.

"That's it. You can go now. Ask security to lock the front doors when they leave and arrange to return the keys, please."

"Will you be leaving now as well?"

"Not just yet, no."

"In that case, sir, let me say thank you. And goodbye, sir."

"Goodbye."

He smoked a cigarette and stared at the check laid neatly on the blotter before him.

He wadded the check into a ball with precise movements. He rolled it around between his palms to smooth its surface and then popped it into his mouth and swallowed it.

His closed his eyes, took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

Jon went to the window again. The assistant and the security guard were crossing the lot to their cars. Jon silently willed them on their way into the darkened boulevard.

Finally, they were gone.

He reached behind him for the desk chair and lifted it high over his head.

Broken glass covered the carpet at his feet and rained down on the parking lot. The chair bounced and broke apart on the asphalt.

Cold air rushed in all around him.

His arms hard against his sides and his fists tightly clenched, Jon leapt through the yawning hole. He dipped low to the ground, just barely stopping over the glittering shards of glass before rocketing up again into the clouds.

He looked down and caught a last glimpse of the sprawling complex of buildings he would never enter again. He could just barely make them out, as they vanished below him. Turning away, he doubled his speed and pushed on.

He felt his hair torn from his scalp as he traced brilliant, gyroscopic curves, making quick work of the planet's circumference. He sped capriciously from point to point on the globe. He tore through night and day a thousand times a second and made a strobe light of the sun.

He dropped through the sound barrier over North America. At a thousand miles an hour, he held his position. Boredom and emptiness stared him down from the stars, from ridiculous years past.

He turned back to the planet. Closing his eyes, he doubled over with silent laughter. He pictured the continent below and zoomed in, focusing on every person, seeing them all at once and from every angle. He worried over the collection, choosing vicious, corrupt, greedy police, soldiers, politicians, lawyers, judges, jailors, priests, bankers. Jon erased them all with a gentle finger smoothing out pulse and brain waves. Soundlessly, he mouthed the word "time."

It was over in seconds.

Hanging there, grinning, Jon picked out the dead.

The jet stream was screaming all around him. Jon was taken by the fetching web of lights crisscrossing the darkened continent. With eyes open, he could almost see that formless limb as it extended to bewitch the lights, drawing them toward him like a bow-string, and then snapping them back again. They oscillated like a yo-yo, bouncing capriciously off the surface of the earth. For uncounted hours he chased the darkness, cheating the sun, and amused himself with this instrument of light. The music of the spheres sang from it.

At last, he wearied of it. He'd long forgotten the world. He turned away. He closed his eyes and strained to erase from his thoughts all notion of light. In his mind's eye he saw the plane of light below warp like a rubber sheet. It reached up a sharp pinnacle towards him. He opened one eye. As the razor point drowned in his pupil, he saw an infinity of light flowing up to him. The stars all around hurried to follow.

#

In complete darkness, John slept, and was idle.

## Chapter 28

No-Pardon Jonny

Jonny slipped his hand into his jacket and palmed the gun in quiet anticipation. O'Connor would never know it was him, would never see his face. Jonny would have liked it to be otherwise. He'd have liked to watch, see the recognition in his eyes as he bled out. But it made no sense. He couldn't afford to take chances—O'Connor was hardly defenseless. If he didn't get it over with quickly, he'd tempt failure and he couldn't stand the thought that he'd leave the job undone—or half done.

He'd be stealthy with the first one. He could afford a more leisurely revenge with the second.

It was late, just a couple of hours before dawn, but Jonny knew O'Connor would be out. He started tooling around the deserted streets of the Sergeant's beat in the old Nova, looking for him. It didn't take long to pick him up. As he turned down a side street, he found the Sergeant. He was making his way down the street, his back to Jonny.

Jonny got out. The car was idly softly; he could barely hear it. He followed O'Connor down the darkened street. Taking longer strides but at the same intervals, he used the Sergeant's own heavy foot-falls to mask his approach. The policeman turned down an alley. Barely twenty-five feet behind, Jonny went in after him.

Ahead, the alley stopped in a dead end. On either side the walls were windowless to the second or third stories.

Jonny felt uneasy. It was too perfectly simple.

There was a pile of garbage bags at the end of the alley. As O'Connor neared them, Jonny freed the weapon and brought the barrel up level with his broad shoulders. The Sergeant stopped walking. He looked like he was about to turn around but he just stood there. It seemed to Jonny that he was waiting for it—like he was patiently leaving the opportunity hanging open for him.

It was child's play. He shifted the gun down and to the left, just under the shoulder blade. He pulled the trigger three times.

The bullets seemed to pin O'Connor to the air. Though he shook with each hit, he remained rigidly erect until the third shot. Jonny brought the gun down in one smooth motion, just as the body fell. The silencer worked so perfectly, Jonny could hardly separate any sound that might have come from the gun from the shock of the recoil traveling up through his arms. He tucked the gun back into the holster and went to the body.

O'Connor lay face down on the concrete. There were three red holes bracketing the heart—a picture perfect shot group. There was only a little blood.

He was distracted by a faint sound he could just barely make out. He stood up, held still and listened carefully. Faint and mystical over the distance, it was the stuttering sirens of the police.

He holstered the gun and zipped up his coat. He rolled the body over with his foot. Something wasn't right in the face; it was too blank, too expressionless, even for a corpse. He could not quite convince himself that he recognized it. Certainly it was as close to the Sergeant as he could imagine. It felt good—or good enough anyway—to Jonny. There was satisfaction in it. The body, if nothing else, was undeniably dead.

The sirens were growing louder. He raced out of the alley and up the block to the waiting car. He slapped the ratcheting shifter into first, let out the clutch and hammered the gas. The tires barked but, despite the engine's brutal torque, the heavy mufflers on the dual exhaust kept the car remarkably quiet. He stayed to the side streets, betting they would be deserted at this late hour. As he slid through a wide left turn, he caught his first glimpse of the flashing lights in the rear-view mirror.

There was no turning back now, he realized. He would not take his chances with the police. Steering with his left hand, he reached with his right under the wheel. He opened the cutouts and switched on the nitrous. The engine's power surged by half again instantly. Inhaling the mix of pure, newly freed oxygen from the nitrous and a flood of fuel, and bypassing the mufflers to exhaust directly with no back pressure, the four fifty-four developed more power than the police cruiser could possibly match. Jonny had to tread lightly on the gas to keep the tires from melting as the car thundered up the empty street. He couldn't see the flashing lights now through the clouds of smoke from the hot slicks. He killed the nitrous and let the car settle down to speed. He checked again. The lights were dim and remote in the mirror. The distance the nitrous had put between them set up the policemen for his next manoeuver. The needle on the speedometer was buried in a zone without numbers. Unassisted now, the four fifty-four held it like a cruising speed.

Three blocks from the Holland Tunnel and the end of the island, he pounced on clutch and brake. He angled the car, screaming on two wheels, through a hard right turn. He held it down to seventy to let his pursuers gain back some of the ground they'd lost. His eyes glued to his mirrors, he waited for them. The second they careened onto the street behind him, he wheeled into a quick left, went a block and made another right. Moving back toward the tunnel, he gunned the motor loud, long and hard through the cut-outs, but kept the car in first—he needed noise now, not speed. He was two blocks from the mouth of the tunnel and knew he didn't have much time. The police, sure to have taken the bait by now, would take a closer side street to catch up. Jonny threw the transmission out of gear, doused the lights and killed the engine. He coasted through another left and immediately parked the car. Crouched down, peering over the front seat, he chuckled as the flashing lights disappeared into the tunnel and roared on to New Jersey.

He closed the cut-outs and started the car again. He made a leisurely drive of the trip back uptown, the muffled engine ticking with heat from the chase. He parked some fifty feet from the door. There was no need to leave the car idling—he was looking forward to taking his time inside. The street was deserted. He rolled down the window. There were no sirens. He hadn't been followed. He rolled the window up again, got out and walked to the building.

He climbed the stoop. The door was unlocked. He went in, almost painfully alert, and shut the door behind him. He stood motionless in the hall, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and listening for anyone moving in the building. He saw a thin strip of light below the office door. He pulled out the gun and crept toward the door. He moved slowly and stayed on the rug. All he could hear of his approach were his pounding heart and his breathing. He pressed an ear to the door. His target was inside, opening and closing drawers, shuffling papers and muttering. Jonny wondered why he wasn't in bed. There was an hour left until sunrise and yet here he was, already at work. Perhaps he'd never left. Jonny put the question out of his mind. It hardly mattered—the man's odd habits and how they'd delivered him into Jonny's hands would be of only academic interest in a few short minutes.

Incrementally, he turned the knob. It, too, was unlocked. When he was certain the bolt was drawn back fully, he pushed against the door, releasing the knob as he did. The door swung open. Even the hinges were silent. The man inside had his back to the door as he fished through the contents of a filing cabinet. Jonny stepped through the doorway.

"Hello, Dr. Osgood." Osgood turned. Jonny had the gun lined up on the center of his chest.

"Why hello there, Jonny, come on in. What can I do for you?"

The gun followed his every move as the doctor sat down at the desk. Jonny didn't like the doctor's calm confidence as he stared down the gun. He'd end it now. Osgood's heavy body shook with each tiny pull of Jonny's finger. Jonny carried on so long he lost count of the shots. He stopped firing but he did not lower the gun.

This time he was certain of it, the gun had made no noise.

No matter how efficient the silencer, he should surely have heard something in the enclosed space of the doctor's office. He'd felt the recoil and seen the impact on the doctor's body with each shot, yet somehow found himself doubting the gun had fired at all. The doctor lay sprawled, head down on the desktop. There was no blood pooling under his chest. There were no exit wounds in his back.

Would this be good enough?

He steadied his hand and aimed at the top of Osgood's head. Jonny took a hesitating step toward the desk. He took one hand off the grip and pushed the doctor's shoulder.

Osgood sat up.

"How are you now, son?" Osgood stood up, laughing heartily. "Hey, what the hell you got on that thing—a blank adapter?" He came around the desk and advanced on Jonny, crowding him into the opposite corner.

"Mighty nice firearm you got yourself there. Where'd you get it?" Osgood's face beamed with a wide grin. Jonny fired a few futile rounds at irregular intervals as the doctor came closer.

"You don't mind if I have a look-see, do you?" Osgood reached for the barrel. Jonny emptied the remainder of the clip into his palm. In a quick, sure motion, the doctor grabbed the gun out of Jonny's hand. He crushed it to ragged fragments in his massive fist. He laughed again as he opened his hand and the gun's warped pieces fell to the floor.

"Hell, looks to me like maybe you ought to go see about a refund."

Jonny was backed into the corner. The doctor came to a halt a few feet away and put his hands on his hips. He indicated the ruined gun with his chin.

"You ought to know better than that. That foreign garbage ain't worth the steel they stamp it from."

Jonny shivered, rising on his toes against the wall, but said nothing.

"Seems to me you're a pretty big man with a pistol in your hand, ain't you?" Osgood took a step into what little space remained between them. "Now, I can understand that—I mean, ain't we all? But you got no gun now, do you, boy?" His fat, sweating face loomed large in Jonny's eyes, hardly six inches away.

"I figure now's the time we find out what you're made of." The burly hands came in from left and right to encircle his neck. Osgood choked him with a determined power great enough to snap his neck like a pencil. Jonny's face turned reddish purple and blotchy blue. The veins in his forehead bulged. He searched the doctor's eyes for signs of compassion or reason lurking within, but he did not struggle.

"Just what kind of man are you, boy?"

Jonny relaxed. He closed his eyes.

#

Sleeping fitfully far away, John breathed easily and was unmoved by what he'd seen.

## Chapter 29

Old John

John was alone in the cab. He sat at the wheel and looked out through the glare of the sun on the pitted windshield. The boy was buried in the garbage bags. It was just an arm sticking up through the scattered trash and a foot stretching out into the sidewalk that he could see, but he knew who it was. He took a sip from a cardboard cup of coffee and eyed the ashtray ruefully. Dispatch kept calling. He turned the radio down and had another sip of coffee. He settled himself comfortably in the seat, his left forearm resting on the wheel, tapping the dashboard with his middle finger. He got a toothpick out of his shirt pocket and worked it along his bottom teeth. He glanced at the boy and shook his head slowly.

The meter was running.

#

@teenjohnny

Johnny lies in the pile of ripped trash bags. Thousands of people pass him without stopping. He lies there for hours.

He wakes up a little. Hair and plastic are pressed tightly over his face. His mouth and nose are covered.

"How can I breathe like this?"

He remembers the stranger and the cab. He remembers the rest in a rush: hurtling through the streets, leaping from the car, tumbling through the street, trash bags ahead and succumbing to silence.

He tries to stand, but he cannot; his limbs are locked. He cannot bend them to push himself up. He examines each arm in turn. Neither is really locked; they're just on backwards—they're hinged to bend in the wrong direction. His legs are just the same. He tries them out—it makes him queasy to see them bend up towards him that way. Thinking it through carefully, one awkward movement at a time, Johnny gets to his feet.

He's covered in trash and tries to clear the worst of it by dusting himself off.

"Where are my hands?"

He looks down but does not see them. He realizes they are behind him. He examines his body through a thick curtain of hair and is alarmed to find his shoulder blades, back, and heels.

He's looking out through the back of his own head.

He draws a hand up over his shoulder to the back of his head. Though hair covers it entirely, there's a face hiding there but the features are shrunken down to infantile proportions. His thoughts race but he's not afraid; he's filled with curiosity and cold, emotionless shock. He slides his hand slowly over the top of his head and his fingers play across his real face.

"I wonder who's in there?"

He's afraid now. He staggers backwards and stops. He concentrates on his movements with the determination of a child learning to walk and starts to make his way down the sidewalk like a crab in a clumsy, loping sidestep. He has to turn and look over his shoulder to see where he's going. It takes him nearly an hour to walk the half mile to the hospital. He shuffles up to the admitting desk and rests there, leaning sideways on the desktop. He struggles to catch his breath. He turns the back of his head to speak to the attendant.

"I need to see a doctor. I've had enough—enough. This has gone too far."

The attendant looks up at Johnny with irritation. "Sit down, Mr. Anomie, please. I'll call your doctor but it's going to be a while. He does have other patients to look after, you know." He pauses a second and then continues with a forced civility, "Never mind. Have a seat. I'll call him."

"I'm sorry if I..." But the attendant is already on the phone. Johnny sits down in a hard plastic chair in the waiting room, his head in his hands and his eyes shut against the cold glare of the overhead lights. He wonders how the attendant knew who he was and why he spoke to him as though there was only one doctor who could possibly see him. He sits up and looks around through the veil of hair. The attendant is gone, but, down a long hallway there are two men, undoubtedly doctors, standing close together in conversation. One is short and heavy, the other tall and thin. They're far enough away that Johnny can't hear what they're saying. He sees the shorter of the two nod emphatically, as if in agreement or understanding. He turns and walks briskly down the hall and comes straight up to Johnny.

"How are you doing today, Johnny?" Johnny realizes that this doctor, who is a stranger to him, is speaking directly to the back of his head.

"I need help. I don't know what's happened to me."

"Yes, Johnny, I understand. You don't have to explain. When you missed your appointment, I thought you might turn up here. Look, Johnny, I need to be frank with you. How can I help you if you don't do your part? You seem bound and determined to undermine your treatment at every opportunity. There's not much I can do to help you if you continue to refuse to cooperate. You can understand that, can't you, Johnny?"

Johnny nods emptily and the doctor continues, "I don't like to admit it, but your condition is something we can't fix. You know that. What we can do is help you to adjust to it—but you'll never accomplish even that much if you don't make an effort." He looks down at him with such a tender mix of compassion and worry that Johnny nearly forgets himself.

"My condition?"

The doctor throws up his hands in frustration. "Yes, Johnny, your condition. Look, neither of us has time for this charade. You can't hide behind a wall of denial every time the going gets a little tough. Accept it, Johnny. Really it's not that bad is it, when you stop to think about it. We've all got our crosses to bear. Yours is bad, it's true, but it could be worse, now couldn't it? You should walk a mile in my shoes—I see people worse off by far every day, believe me. You've got a healthy body and mind. You're young and have all your faculties intact. In the face of what others suffer through, you might even count yourself lucky."

Johnny nods, but doesn't meet the doctor's gaze.

"Good... really good. Johnny, I'll go ahead and reschedule your appointment. In the meantime," he takes a pad from his pocket and scribbles on it, "let me give you these—to tide you over until we meet again. Does that sound good?" He tears the sheet free and holds it out to Johnny, smiling.

"OK." Johnny takes the slip.

"Great. You can get that filled at the pharmacy down the block. Just go out the main door and turn left. You can't miss it. I hope you're feeling better soon. Start that course of medicine," he points to the prescription in Johnny's hand, "and you definitely will be. Four every four hours. Don't be alarmed if you feel groggy at first. That's to be expected."

It takes hours for Johnny to work his way from the hospital to the pharmacy and then back to his apartment. Finally he closes his door behind him, the pills swaying from his hand in a small brown bag.

He gets a glass of water and opens the bottle. The pills are huge. He takes them one at a time, forcing them down with large swallows of water.

The bottle is still in his hand when he goes to the bedroom. He sets it on the bedside table and turns on the clock radio. He stretches out on the bed, lying on his stomach. He lets his eyes wander over the moldings where the ceiling meets the walls. His vision seems hazy. He tries to clear some of the hair out of his eyes but his hand fumbles awkwardly on his face. He rolls over to examine the bottle of pills more closely.

"1000 mg. Valium. 100 tablets. Take four every four hours for anxiety."

"That's going to kill me," he realizes. He falls back on the bed.

He struggles to his knees.

There's a song on the radio. "At twelve o'clock, we climb the stair."

He can see his reflection in the mirror on the closet door. In the mirror, his torso has become a perfect cylinder, even in width from his hips to the top of his head. His clothes and limbs and face slide fluidly around the cylinder. At the moment he recognizes himself, it's the back of his head, stomach and shoulder blades in the mirror. A second later, just as he topples over onto the mattress, the small of his back and his chest are visible and his face is just rotating around, pushing his true eyes into view.

He hears an unfamiliar step in another room.

Johnny knows there's no fighting unconsciousness. Drifting away, he feels his face sinking, retreating into the back of his skull under the thick, suffocating hair. Awareness is disintegrating; his mind is breaking apart and everything is slipping, receding from him fast.

"We never knock, cause..."

The face and mind vanish like the closing of an eye.

#

John woke up groggy and listless. He lit a cigarette. He stared out the window and thought about the day ahead.

## Chapter 30

John Classic

John left his apartment. There were a half-dozen or so men milling in the lobby. He knew none of them. He made his way through them towards the door.

"Pardonnez-moi monsieur, voulez-vous informer sur votre compatriote?" One of the men stood directly in front of him, blocking his way. They looked like professors in their tweed jackets and button-down shirts.

"I'm sorry?"

The other men pulled in around the two. John was surrounded.

"Ou, mon bon monsieur, préféreriez-vous de garder le silence?" The man looked at him expectantly with a knowing smile.

"Who are you? What do you want?"

The men to the left and right of him took a step back. Someone behind cut his legs out from under him. He fell backward, driven to the ground. Lying on his back, he stared up at them, full of dread. A forest of legs made a circle around him.

"Perhaps your studies have not left you familiar with the Prisoner's Dilemma, Mr. Anomie?" This was met with chuckles and amused comments from the men around John: "No, presumably not!" and "You might be on to something there!" The man at John's feet continued crisply, "But you have, in fact, studied the French language, n'est ce pas?" He looked down at John, a syringe held in one hand, his eyebrows arched and waited for an answer.

"I have, but—"

"Indeed you have." Speaking to his colleagues in the circle around John, he said "I believe this patient is exhibiting clear indications of auditory aphasia. Opinions, gentlemen?"

The men on either side of him nodded emphatically. A voice behind John said, "Agreed—and at a guess, global aphasia would be the most likely prognosis." At this, the men nodded solemnly.

From behind him came "Hear, hear" and "Indeed—well said." A couple of them even applauded.

John craned his neck to see the men behind him.

The syringe descended through a graceful arc and buried itself in his arm.

"There, there, Mr. Anomie, don't struggle so. Calm yourself, rest assured you're in good hands."

"Yes, you are—the best, truly the very best—why you should count yourself lucky," someone added.

John offered no resistance. The men holding him down felt him go limp. They stood up to confer amongst themselves. They congratulated each other and slapped one another on the back. From time to time, they would turn to point at John and laugh.

Down on the floor, John lay still. He didn't want to give himself away but he noted, to his surprise, that despite whatever had been in that injection, he felt no loss of lucidity, nor diminishment of his will, nor impairment of his faculties. In truth, he felt no effects at all.

He bided his time and waited for an opportunity.

One of the men announced finally that it was time to leave. He got a cell phone from his breast pocket and went outside to call for transportation. Several of the others followed him. John stole careful glances around him. Only two men remained in the lobby to watch over him. Those two seemed to have lost all interest in John and were engrossed in discussion, gesturing wildly, fussing with their moustaches and gaping at one another with eyes wide open. John could follow none of it. They were huddled together on one side of him; the doors, barely six feet away, were on the other. He leapt to his feet and was out on the street before either of them had time to react. He ran by the men standing outside and crashed into the one making the call, sending him staggering backwards and exclaiming at John's impertinence. John ran past him and up the street. They were shouting indignantly behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he saw them charging after him. As they ran, they fumbled with small, glittering bottles and needles, filling them in expectation of overtaking him.

John turned down a deserted street. A pair of street lights stood on either side of a brownstone and provided the only illumination on the block.

As the mob came around the corner, they hurled their syringes at him like a volley of arrows. John felt the stabbing pain of needles lodging in his back and saw flashes of light from others as they flew past him.

John ran on towards the street lights. Miraculously still quite unaffected by the many injections, John ran smoothly and confidently. He smiled as he widened the gap between himself and the bumbling mob.

Ten feet from the street lamps and wholly within the circles of light they cast down on the sidewalk, John felt inspiration burst in his mind. With a strength born of unwavering certainty, he leapt high in the air, and, pumping his legs vigorously as if he were riding a bicycle, his descent slowed. As his pursuers hastened to join him, John's feet touched the ground for the last time. His legs churned the air. He rose, a healthy sweat pouring down his grinning face. They finally came up below him. They jumped to grab his feet, but he was well beyond their reach. He floated up at the top of the street lights, legs a blur of motion, and looked down at them. He smiled at the affronted faces they turned up to him. He laughed out loud as they bellowed their frustration and flung their useless needles up at him.

## Chapter 31

Old John

Parked up the darkened street, John sat in his cab. He'd shut it down and turned the radio off. It was so nice to have some peace from the dispatcher's endless chatter.

It was a quiet night. He could even make out a few stars in the sky.

He looked up the block to the two street lights. He saw the crowd looking up, shouting and jumping impotently. He saw John hovering there, above them all, laughing.

He watched John and thought about the wife he'd had, and the wife he had still.

He watched John and thought about them all, so many, gone now, buried in the past with no one left to remember them.

He watched John, hanging there in the sky, and he shook his head.

He looked away and glanced at the meter. It was still running but he'd be damned if he was going to turn it off.

# Part 3
## Chapter 1

Pale, dappled, overcast light was muted by the thick lead glass and dissolved into the charcoal gray of the suit. A drop of water on the windowpane transcribed a gleaming tear on a black button. The man brought himself slowly up on his toes and just as slowly back down again.

Flashes of red light shone through the dust and smoke, sparkling from a ring on one finger of the hand on the book. At the bay window, the man shifted his weight from foot to foot, as if preparing to leave. Outside, the rain continued unabated but the sun made a brightly glowing curtain of the unbroken clouds.

Now motionless, the man held his position, and did not turn to speak.

"Are we finished?"

"No."

"His part is done."

"Soon, yes."

"The experiment is concluded?"

"No."

"Then I am mistaken—concerning what?"

"The subject."

Standing at the window, his eyebrows raised a fraction and fell. The rain's peculiar, deafening silence swallowed all sound but its own. He nodded and prepared to wait.

## Chapter 2

Frigid winds stiffened his clothing as John found meager shelter from the freezing rain on a wide window ledge hundreds of feet from the ground. He moved into the deeper shadows at the edge of the sill and cleared the spiked icicles of his hair from his face with numb, white fingers. He peered through the window. The scene beyond was distorted and dimpled by the ice and rain running in streams down the ancient glass. The room beyond was dark, warm and tempting but no matter how he squinted, he could not make out much detail. He leaned against the window and cupped his hands around his eyes. A click sounded that he barely heard. The vast pane swung inward on unseen hinges. John nearly fell into the room. He waited on the angry voices he felt sure would clamor and advance on him. He clasped his hands over his ears and shut his eyes tight. For a moment, he was oblivious to his precarious position on the ledge. When at last he forced his eyes open and reexamined the room, nothing seemed amiss. From his position on the ledge, there was nothing but the incessant beating of the rain and ice behind him and the yawning suggestion of silence awaiting him in the room.

He was astonished by his good luck.

He stepped down onto the hardwood floor and shut the window behind him. The wrought iron latch caught and held fast. The storm outside was reduced to a bare reminder of its fury.

It was so good to be out of the cold.

The room enveloped him in an overpowering sense of comfort and security. The heat was pure bliss after such miserable weather. He felt himself drying quickly, yet there was no puddle swelling around his feet. Blood darkened his cheeks as the warmth of the room worked its magic. Each breath contained the scents of old wood, leather, paper and dust; they drew him in like an invitation. Tall, mahogany bookcases stood at every wall, filled with books. He strained to see but they were too distant to read their titles. At the center of the room was a rosewood desk with matching chairs about it. A brass lamp with a green glass shade stood on the desk, illuminating an ashtray and a closed book. Behind the desk, scintillating red points held fixed positions in the blackness, twinkling like faint red constellations in a static sky.

He crept across the floor, his steps creaking faintly. He reached the Persian rug in the heart of the room and exhaled a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. His movements were nearly silent as he approached the desk. He didn't dare sit in the red leather chair but rather stood behind it to examine the objects held within the yellow square of light. The lead crystal ashtray was cut in dazzling lines. In its recess lay a long ash, alone and crumbling. Dust had fallen over the whole of the desk. John wondered how long ago it had been that the cigarette burned down in the utter stillness of the room.

Finally he allowed his attention to be drawn to the book. The leather cover was well-worn and suggested both age and use. The corners of the cover had turned inward and whitened. The gilded edges of the pages were partially faded but the word stamped in gold leaf on the cover still shone as if it were newly printed: "Law."

John's turned back the cover with a red, chapped hand.

The Ecology of Filth

Kicked out into the wind—a difficult exit

Misery stretching into the night—such a difficult exit

Trauma saved and promised to silence

A skullful of unhurried convalescence

With jagged-edged wounds I scurry to the ground and under

To filth and camouflage

I smuggle myself

Legs spread to breaking, I ride a centipede whose ends I cannot see

A rustle, a sudden motion

Find a dark corner behind arms and legs and sweat

Now still, the air, crystal, hard and brittle

Gaudy cartoons blaze past windows and my eyes flicker, following

Unprecedented chance

No solace in a dry eye open or closed

Plastic seat, a makeshift altar for worldly possessions vomited from cracked, bleeding lips

Heaves with crust in his beard

A roach crawls out from under a flabby cheek

Sinking into rest like a baby

Wet pants reeking and yellow, jaundiced eyes

His neighbor, affliction surrounds him in unhealthy radiance

Every inch of skin erupts in ichor

Insect busy, two hands wipe it away in a filthy cloth

His moist heat appalls me

A baptism in the plague

(Cold water runs in my gut, wanly detached and distant)

The spitting image of my best friend

Leering propositions at a sweet Puerto Rican, laboring under the cross

Fondles his cock, a fat, loose finger

Wishes, denials, approach, retreat

He from bitter experience

She from unclever youth

Laughing, she trots away her treasure, long since in hock

A chattering of quarters brings the weakest yet and still my master

I pelt him with money

But it's an ear, it's my ear

My ear to stuff full of lies and fantasies, self-abuse

Jacked off for a nod for him to remember himself by

(Cold water sinks in my balls)

Pretty boys, once at opposite ends, strangers

Choreographed together, kissing full-throated

Hands squirm in clothing, hidden from sight

Grasping at straws of corruption and fertility

They whisper and touch

And I swear I will not acknowledge them

The stainless steel fever does not break – and who could stand one minute of this – or a second? A comic strip sequence of insights, each more edifying and unimpeachable than the last, like maggots, they gnaw at me and drag off pieces of my flesh, one after the other and another and another. A storm of sewage reigns over it all. Can't catch my breath, there's no cover in shades and shadows. The invisible man exposed and found naked has no protection from the shame, and sky-rockets to the voices under a siren moon. Dragged by the tongue, bolting from the practices of the muscle and the fear of it, dragged into the open air, a stone's throw in eternity would put me gratefully behind a locked door. Stagger, tar-lunged and frantic into the gate keeper—a fleshy punch line, a boy absent youth, rising slowly on the iron candle, a metronome closing on quiescence, waving a grin through spectral unreality, untouchable, he's dropping, he's dying on the vine. Poisoned by his own gleeful hand, he runs singing into the void.

An epileptic prayer, I sponge truth from his falsehood while he drools and sways.

He laughs and, oh, how he's happy.

As he reached to turn the page, a hand appeared from behind him, bluish white in the light, and closed the book. A second man stepped out of the shadows before him as the hand disappeared from view behind. The cover, shutting, spawned dust devils that teemed under the lamp as John looked up at the man opposite the desk. The light reached only to the bottommost button of his rich gray suit. John struggled in vain to decipher his face from the darkness.

"Come with me."

## Chapter 3

The door before him opened as another closed behind.

"Glad you could join us."

Two doctors were standing there. Confusion framed an odd expression around the question on John's lips.

"Who—"

"I am Dr. Watson." Gesturing to his partner, he said, "and this is Dr. Hull. And you are John Anomie."

"What do you want from me?" John shuffled backwards against the closed door.

"The more pertinent question is what do you want from us, isn't it, John? Please, come this way."

John stood mute, his hands flat against the door behind him.

Watson spoke sternly, "Mr. Anomie, think—why are you here? Come with us, please."

The doctors turned and started down the hall. John took an uncertain step towards them, intending to call after them—to ask them to explain themselves. John could hear in his mind his voice sounding sharp and tinny in the echoing corridor and could picture the comical spectacle he'd make issuing demands of them.

He understood without question that there was nothing left on which he could take a stand.

He followed them, his every step squeaking in the wide, white halls. Through multifaceted translucent plastic covers, the bright fluorescent lighting seemed to expose him from every angle at once.

The doctors stopped ahead of him. They turned back to face him as they waited at a gray door. John broke into a clumsy trot, as he had fallen some distance behind. Watson held the door open.

The two doctors followed John into the office. Watson, a gentle hand at John's back, directed him to a chair and went around to a seat behind the glass-topped desk. Hull went straight to a door behind the desk and left the room. John stared at Watson. The doctor took a moment to straighten the papers on his desk before speaking.

"John, let's hear you say it—why are you here today?" He folded his hands and waited for an answer.

John stared at him.

"Come on, John, out with it." Watson prompted him, "You are here, John... to see..."

"Max."

"Excellent." Watson nodded.

The door behind the desk opened and Hull returned, pushing a cart full of medical equipment before him. John started at the sight of it and stood up.

"Please sit down, John," Dr. Watson said softly.

"There's nothing to worry about here," Hull said. He pointed to each in turn as he named them, "EEG, ECG, empty syringes for blood tests, blood pressure monitor—there's nothing here that can hurt you."

John looked the cart over. "OK, if it's absolutely necessary."

"I would say that it is," Hull said.

John nodded.

They gave him a small beaker to fill with urine and showed him to a bathroom. When he returned, they took his blood and then shaved small spots on his arms, chest and neck, swabbed them and glued electrodes there.

"I wonder what you expect," Watson asked as he worked.

"What do you mean?"

"From Max—I was wondering what you expect from him."

"I don't know."

Hull glanced up from the machinery on the cart, "Don't underestimate him."

"That's good counsel," Watson said and paused a moment before continuing, "Max and John, alpha and omega. It may well be that our job, in the end, will come down to determining which is which."

Dr. Hull nodded and stood up, "There, that's it, John—we're ready. Not too uncomfortable, I hope?"

"No, I'm alright."

"Then let's get started."

John stood up and followed Watson through the door. Hull pushed the cart of instruments close behind. A loose wheel made a shuddering, spectral percussion in the long corridor, dying away as the group reached their destination. Hull unraveled long cords from the cart and plugged them into outlets beside the door. All at once, the machines came to life. John's racing heartbeat echoed in the hall. Hull turned down the volume on the ECG.

"Would you like some time to prepare yourself before you go in?"

"More time? No, I can't see how that would matter."

"Then go ahead," Watson said.

John opened the door and took a few steps through the doorway. His eyes darted left and right. He averted his gaze from the muttering occupant of the bed in the center of the room.

Why no understanding?

Oath, promise, dedication an insult to the young, the image destroyer

The saint's gone under the knife.

On the right of the bed, a nurse sat before a cart of instruments, identical to the one John trailed behind him. Hull wheeled John's cart through the door. The twin ECGs sounded two electronic pulses that met arrhythmically in John's ears.

Moon sends us out

Dashing into millionaire excess and subsequent decline

Clever master of obfuscation

On the left of the bed there were two stenographers at two desks with two stenotype machines. One of the men was idle and stared absently at his machine, while the other typed away.

' _It were better for him, that a millstone be hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.'_

The electric hum, the tapping of stenograph keys, the stuttering Morse code of the two pulse sequences just slightly out of phase—the spoken word rang out over them all. John's eyelids were heavy, half closed. He rocked back and forth where he stood.

Good sense, arbitrary strategy

Bullets flying, violence birthed in a litany of flaws

Funeral directors watch eagerly,

their noses pressed up and fogging the glass.

The doctors moved in quickly on John's left and right and caught him as he fell. They laid him down gently on the floor.

There was only one cadence of beats as the ECGs chimed in unison. The arms of the EEGs swung back and forth in perfect harmony. The stenographers were typing in tandem, word for word, stroke for stroke.

Memorials, somber remembrances of hesitant parties

Tight-rope walkers from cradle to grave

Methuselah ran to a photo finish in time

The path of glory opens before us and closes once more

Not enough time for everyone

Betrayed, empty shots in a wasted by-world kill no less than two

Deaths follow inquiry, swindle

Didn't you used to be?

John, Max, his eyes were closed, his lips moved subtly.

## Chapter 4

SETTING: the ocean floor. The stage is covered in sand. Seashells and starfish are here and there in the sand and a couple of old lobster traps are half-buried. At the wings, great sea plants tower to nearly the stage lights. A purple, green and yellow coral reef sits upstage. Behind the reef, hidden almost completely by the curtains at stage right, is a blue public bus. A sign over the bus's windshield reads "Out of Service." Hanging from wires, brilliant fish turn tight circles at varying heights around the stage. The lighting is soft and dappled. Undersea noises can be heard in the background.

(Laughter muted by wind and distance, radios, people talking, dogs barking, fires burning, crackling, popping, the swelling white noise of the ocean. After a moment or two, there is the dull thud of feet running in wet sand and then crashing sounds as JOHN charges into the surf. There's a loud splash as he dives into one wave and swims through the next. The beach noises dwindle, replaced by JOHN's heartbeat, breathing and the regular slap of his arms and legs, propelling him. He is pulling hard through the water. All at once, his heart surges frantically. He draws a short, panicked breath and his strokes stop altogether. A second or two pass filled only with the pounding of his heart. He thrashes, trying in vain first to swim back to shore, and then finally just to keep his head above water. His struggles churn the water as he sinks. Seconds before the curtain, we hear nothing but his slowing pulse and the faint bubbling of his last exhalation. AT RISE, there is a sharp gasp. JOHN, suspended, is lowered slowly to the stage. His face is full of surprise and wonder as he pantomimes treading water. He is covered, head to foot, in white pancake makeup and wears a white bathing suit. A dark brown spotlight follows his every movement, making him appear deeply tanned. He reaches the bottom and roams around the stage. He pauses with his hands on his hips at extreme stage right. @TEENJOHNNY, seeming to appear from JOHN himself, steps out from the curtains behind JOHN. @TEENJOHNNY is wearing a green hospital gown and has a bandage covering his shaved head. As he appears, JOHN cries out and doubles over in pain. The brown spotlight on him grows a shade lighter. @TEENJOHNNY turns and gives JOHN a disdainful once-over and crosses to stage left. He leans against a sea plant, his posture suggesting equal parts boredom and impatience. As JOHN recovers and attempts to compose himself, RICH JON enters from behind him in the same manner as @TEENJOHNNY had before him. JOHN falls to his knees, holding his stomach in pain, and his color becomes still lighter. RICH JON is wearing a blue long sleeve shirt, black slacks and leather loafers. Gold glitters from his cufflinks and belt buckle. He strides confidently to center stage.)

RICH JON

(Standing with his hands on his hips, his fingers tapping at his belt, he looks appraisingly around the stage.)

Excellent. We're all here.

@TEENJOHNNY

(Knowingly)

Are you sure about that?

RICH JON

Well, no, I suppose not. Nonetheless, we may as well get down to business. Where do we want to start?

JOHN HERITAGE

(Physically, he is quite similar to the others but he is much older. He is wearing a navy blue suit, starched white shirt and yellow ascot. He enters as have the others. JOHN shouts and falls backward to a sitting position as the light on him fades to caramel. JOHN HERITAGE carries himself with an unapproachable dignity and pride. He walks stiffly and takes up a position half of the distance to center stage.)

Surely work's the thing. Work and family. We're mired in a despicable rut—rest assured, though, that while we languish, others are making their marks. Our heritage demands we do no less. All men are obligated, some men more so than others. Those who balk in the face of their obligations are unsurprisingly less content than those who find the courage to fulfill them.

JOHN

(Rising unsteadily to his feet)

Why?

JOHN HERITAGE

(Contemptuously)

Naïve, John, naïve and short-sighted. But not out of character. I approach my wit's end with you. At our very foundations, we are made to work—to produce and participate. We were made to build things shoulder to shoulder with our fellow man and to build lives for ourselves, thus to propagate the lineage. Idleness comes unnaturally to us and, isolated and left to our own devices, it will soon be our ruin. I think our current situation makes that point with inarguable clarity.

(JOHNNY UNDERGROUND appears from behind JOHN, who cries out again and is thrown down to his knees. The spotlight on JOHN lightens further. JOHNNY UNDERGROUND is dressed casually in boating shoes, faded blue jeans and a faded cotton work shirt opened a few buttons at the collar.)

JOHNNY UNDERGROUND

(As he crosses the stage to stand near @TEENJOHNNY)

Everyone's talking like this is the end of the world. We'll get by—we always do.

RICH JON

(Scornfully as JOHN HERITAGE throws up his hands in frustration)

"Getting by" is not at issue here. We did not come together today to discuss strategies for "getting by."

(He pauses for a moment. When he continues, the anger is gone from his voice. He speaks earnestly, almost pleadingly.)

None of us would be here if the problem at hand were so simple. We're spinning our wheels. We're just killing time—what we have to realize is time itself is a commodity like any other. Let time escape you without a fight and you'll find the bottom's dropped right out of the hourglass. No more wasting time. Not for us. We simply can't afford it. Skills, abilities, experience—they are what's wanted now. Get out, do things. Be the start of something—and soon, very soon. I can't imagine our present course will sustain us much longer.

JOHN HERITAGE

(Having nodded emphatically throughout RICH JON's appeal, he continues in the same vein. His voice, though authoritarian, also suggests a certain softness and concern.)

Agreed. In reality, what you've described is nothing less than our salvation. We can deny our birthright no longer. We stand at the beginning of the path we were made to follow. It has long since been time for us to stake our claim—to accept both the privilege it provides and the accountability it demands. We will engage our fellow men, prove ourselves, lead men toward prosperity and accomplishment and rise to our proper position of prominence and respect. Those with greater potential fail at tasks requiring less; those made to lead fail as followers. And we have failed, make no mistake—so now we must set the bar high, because it is time, gentlemen, for us to succeed.

JOHNNY UNDERGROUND

(Quietly, but with determination)

But we're none of us joiners, none of us, not really.

JOHN HERITAGE

(Minutely less certain)

In the face of the obstacles before us, I would think we should bloody well make an effort.

JOHN

(Down on all fours, he speaks in a weak voice, with his head hung low.)

It can't come down to doing just as everyone around us does, can it? Are we to simply ape the actions of other men? I need time to think.

(He struggles to his feet. @TEENJOHNNY and JOHNNY UNDERGROUND nod in agreement. JOHN HERITAGE and RICH JON stare at him, dumbfounded.)

@TEENJOHNNY

(In a whisper)

Don't pick at it, it'll get infected.

JOHN HERITAGE

(Sharply and in disbelief)

Procrastination—is that it, then? Tell me now; do you think it possible that a path that runs unerringly toward our redemption would have such an ineffectual beginning?

RICH JON

(Nodding)

Indeed.

NO-PARDON JONNY

(Rushes out from behind JOHN. NO-PARDON JONNY wears black jeans and boots and an army field jacket with various medals on the epaulets and pockets. His hair is cut in a high and tight. His face is lined with rage. As he storms up to JOHN HERITAGE, JOHN whimpers and rolls from side to side in the sand. The light on him has faded to beige.)

Why don't you give it a fucking rest? Why don't you just shut your fucking mouth, you pompous dick? I'm sick of listening to your shit.

(He lowers his shoulder and rams JOHN HERITAGE, sending him staggering backwards.)

The lot of you—all you ever do is bitch and moan and analyze and argue and debate. You don't do a god-damned thing, any of you. What a bunch of pussies. Not me, though, not me—but why take my word for it?

(He grabs RICH JON by the shoulder and draws his fist back.)

Case in point—you're next, buddy.

ALL

(Mortified and shocked by NO-PARDON JONNY's actions)

Stop!

(The outburst stays NO-PARDON JONNY's hand. A hint of uncertainty crosses his face.)

JOHNNY UNDERGROUND

(Calmly)

Look, that doesn't go here. We can't have that.

JOHN HERITAGE

(Vehemently)

What could you possibly hope to accomplish?

RICH JON

(Evenly, enunciating every word carefully)

Take your hands off me.

NO-PARDON JONNY

(He lets RICH JON go. He seems to shrink under the weight of universal disapproval.)

I'm sorry.

(All stare angrily at NO-PARDON JONNY, who turns away from them to face stage right.)

RICH JON

(Straightening his clothing)

Where were we? At this juncture, and given everything we've heard thus far, it seems painfully obvious that we're incapable—

JOHN HERITAGE

(Interrupting)

Or unwilling, more likely.

RICH JON

(Continuing coolly)

For whatever reason, we're unlikely to come to a common agreement on this.

@TEENJOHNNY

(His arms folded across his chest, one hand taps at his cheek impishly)

How's the wife?

JOHNNY UNDERGROUND

(Gravely)

We've got to get her back.

JOHN

(Earnestly and suddenly, as if he only just remembered)

Yes, that's it.

RICH JON

(Quietly)

We don't have to look far to find those responsible for her disappearance, I suspect.

JOHN HERITAGE

(Nodding)

Yes, it's we ourselves that have stolen her.

NO-PARDON JONNY

(Still with his back turned to the rest, whispering sadly)

Or gotten rid of her.

RICH JON

(Gently)

Regardless, gentlemen, I think we need to come to terms with the fact that she's gone for good.

(These words echo from the stage. JOHN weeps silently. JOHNNY UNDERGROUND and RICH JON look away. No reaction is visible from NO-PARDON JONNY. JOHN HERITAGE stares stoically straight ahead. @TEENJOHNNY shifts uncomfortably from foot to foot. A long pause follows. All at once, NO-PARDON JONNY is racked with piercing sobs.)

JOHN HERITAGE

(Firmly, but with compassion)

Be that as it may, gentlemen, the truth is the woman only served to lead us further down the cul-de-sac from which we now seek our egress.

JOHN

(In disbelief)

What?

JOHN HERITAGE

(Continuing without pause)

It pains me to say it, but it's no mistake. She gave us only the illusion of purpose and fulfillment—placeholders, if you will. We can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of such self-delusions. Her removal from us, though perhaps inelegantly realized, has brought us back to the very mouth of the dead-end, which is its only exit. We find ourselves positioned to make the last few renouncements required for our recovery. Despite the apparent failure of this assembly, we must all steel ourselves for the sacrifices to come. Without a doubt, though, our inactivity is forced to an end.

(Long seconds of contemplation follow. All is silent on stage save for the soft background of underwater sounds.)

RICH JON

(Clears his throat before speaking)

Well, that's it. There's nothing more to say.

(All nod their affirmation but JOHN, who keels in the sand.)

Then we'd better be on our way. It's time.

(JOHN watches but does not get up to follow the others as they board the bus.)

RICH JON

(Standing in the doorway of the bus)

I mean everyone, please.

(A muted rumble starts from stage right and grows quickly louder. An uncountable mass of JOHN figures come streaming out from the curtains behind JOHN to clamber up onto the bus. As they appear, JOHN is thrown into spasms of agony. He screams and writhes in the sand. When the procession finally ends and the last of them has climbed aboard the bus, JOHN collapses to the ground. The spotlight on him has faded completely to a blinding, white, fluorescent light. He lies on his back, his head cocked at an unnatural angle, facing the bus. The bus starts up and drives across the stage to disappear into the curtains at stage left. A street sign is exposed where the bus had been parked. The words on the sign are printed on either end of a double-headed arrow and indicate "déja vu" off to stage left and "jamais vu" to the right. JOHN gets to his feet. The light colors him white as a sheet, brilliant and ghostly. He seems to waver in and out of focus as the ocean currents push his weakened body gently back and forth. JOHN waves goodbye to the receding bus, which can still be heard as it drives away; a strange resonance of the diesel engine and the massive volume of water in between. JOHN's arm drops limply to his side. Alone on stage, he stares up at the sign. He hesitates, sighs and shambles off to stage right.

THE END

#

In the darkened audience, two empty eyes stared impassively as a tall figure guided a gurney and its occupant through the shadows and out of the theatre.

## Chapter 5

The stacking chair the nurse sat on had uneven legs; he rocked back and forth, one leg crossed over the other, his foot tracing circles. He was staring blankly at the collection of devices that spoke softly of Max's continuing existence. Every so often he would bite the inside of his cheek to fend off the boredom.

Across the bed, an aging man in an old blue suit sat at the stenotype machine. His hands were at the keys but he was not typing.

Max lay still, exactly where the nurse had set him after sponge bath and linen changing.

Max's lips were at rest now. There was no hint that they had ever been animate. The words had stopped; Max had fallen into silence.

The stenographer sat there for a moment or two, his hands poised over the machine, and then leaned back in his chair. He flexed his wrists and fingers and prepared to wait.

The nurse looked from Max to his instruments and back a few times. There was no change in the monitors. He sat back in his seat as well and set his foot bouncing again.

Hours passed with nothing to break the silence beyond the beeping of the ECG.

The nurse was leaning forward, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. His blood-shot eyes, hardly open at all, were pointed steadfastly at the instruments.

The stenographer had stretched out as best he could in his uncomfortable chair. His arms were folded on his chest. One hand propped up his chin. A couple of candy bar wrappers were crumpled in balls beside the stenotype machine. He hadn't bothered to throw them out.

Abruptly, the nurse sat up straight and the stenographer started in his chair and began typing. Max was speaking again.

Why no discussion?

I have seen all controversy arise from flights of fancy

I've taken hopeless considerations deep into the vacuum

I thought to split every face down the middle

like the meat cleaver of God

and you who birthed a third sex into a crucible of technology,

delivered a disabled promise approaching reality

it is tasteless; I express dissatisfaction in the worth of flesh and bone

you who offer absurd service with implacable diligence

find second hands crashing into stop signs and cut dead wood

I meet destruction in a friend called time

all in the aim...

The nurse cried aloud and jumped out of his seat just as the alarms began to sound. The stenographer rushed to gather his things and had to press himself into the wall, his papers clutched to his chest, as the doctors burst through the doorway. The nurse moved to the foot of the bed. Watson and Hull took positions on either side of Max's head.

Max was asphyxiating.

His neck was being constricted, choked off in a narrow band, as if he were being strangled with an invisible rope. His chest lurched, fighting for air, and sent ripples through Max's loose, atrophied flesh.

Hull completed a brutal tracheotomy below the narrowing ring. Max took a wet, sucking breath and exhaled in a shower of blood. Max's neck was still contracting. Watson could just make out dark markings in the strip of skin.

Watson went to the cart and filled a syringe with a massive dose of muscle relaxants. He stabbed the needle into Max's neck, just below the obstruction. He exchanged a glance with Hull as they waited for the drug to take effect.

Max's neck shrunk still further, pinched back right to the bone. His gray skin was flushing blue all over his head, ghastly under the thick white scars in his scalp.

Hull made a small incision across the strip. Blood came up in a geyser and coated his glasses.

The doctors paused and looked at one another. Max's neck had shrunk down to the thickness of a broom handle.

Behind them, the nurse looked up from the monitors.

"He's gone."

"Yes, I know. Get him prepped for an autopsy, stat."

## Chapter 6

John ran to the bathroom. He slammed the door behind him and leaned against it. He looked up and found his own face staring back at him in a mirror over the sink. A mirror in the door behind him made his reflection stretch away from him in a fun house infinity.

He dropped to his knees at the toilet and vomited. He dragged himself up to the sink, scattering toiletries onto the floor. Over the sink, the mirror was broken. There was glass everywhere. He opened a thousand cuts in his arms as he ran the faucet and bent over, turning his head sideways to drink. He forced a few mouthfuls down and then fell back to the toilet to vomit it up again. He went back and forth between them, drinking and vomiting, until his throat burned and his stomach was agony and breath came shallow and painful to him. Vomit, water and blood made a hideous mural over the broken glass still clinging to the wall. John was drenched.

Panting over the toilet, John crouched with the tip of his nose in the water and sweat beading his face. His eyes were screwed shut. Tension squeezed out red pictures behind his closed eyelids. The frenetic, dizzying fury of the hive, the nightmare of the super-organism, of bees destroying the idea of bee. The mindless, empty twisting of the double helix, the absurd equation that begets self. And a dart buried in the center of his forehead—an x-ray view of the brain from above; the senseless, seething brain, writhing, convulsing, squirming, inventing motion in motionless practices.

He stood up.

## Chapter 7

John taps his foot in the elevator. He stands against the doors, craning his neck to see the flashing numbers above. The floor vibrates under his feet. The elevator makes an electric hum as it descends. The doors open and John leaves the car. He walks quickly across the lobby.

"John Anomie," quietly. He turns back but recognizes no one behind him. Turning forward again, two policemen block his way. He stops a few feet from them. The crowd in the lobby spreads out around the perimeter to watch. A heavy hand grabs his shoulder from behind.

"Sorry, John, this is it. We've got to take you in."

John hangs his head resignedly, but casts sidelong glances from the corners of his eyes. The three policemen converge on him but do not draw their weapons. John seizes the neck of the man on his right and brings his knee up viciously in his groin. He pivots to put the man between him and the two other policemen. Pushing hard, he hurls the man into them. All three tumble to the marble floor. John runs for the glass doors and throws them open. Sergeant O'Connor and his men free their guns and shoot from their knees. The vestibule shatters in a million shards of safety glass. Bullets fly all around him. John scrambles through the broken glass and dives for cover behind the thick brick pillar supporting the overhang outside the vestibule. His ears are ringing from the gunfire but he can still hear the cries of astonishment from the people cringing along the walls of the lobby.

John gets to his feet. Other than some small cuts on his hands and knees, he's unharmed. His heart is hammering in his chest. He forces himself away from the protection of the pillar. Crouching low and using parked cars for cover, he sprints the short distance through the parking lot to the trees beyond. He's already reached the brush at the edge of the forest when he first hears the disorganized shouts of the police in the parking lot far behind him. He dives into the bushes and lies still. He listens carefully. He can't hear what they're saying from this distance, but the frustration and urgency in Sergeant O'Connor's booming voice tell him they've lost him. Their voices grow fainter as they leave the parking lot for the street. When they pass out of earshot, John gets up, dusts himself off and jogs through the forest and away.

#

Converge... seizes... shoot... shatters... shards... scrambles... dives... ringing... astonishment... cringing... unharmed... forces... away from the protection of the pillar... to the trees beyond...

He is half-way through the parking lot when he first hears the disorganized shouts of the police bursting through the ruined vestibule.

"There he is."

Running nearly doubled over and looking for cover as he goes, John rapidly loses ground to his pursuers as they charge after him. As he nears the brush at the edge of the forest, they are just twenty feet behind. The pounding steps of the police closing on him, he bolts into the ten feet of open ground separating him from the forest.

"Freeze!"

John keeps running and dives for the bushes just as they fire. The bullets catch him in mid-air and rip him to shreds. John's body falls, already dying. Sergeant O'Connor's face comes into view, laughing and wheezing six feet above him.

#

"John Anomie"... policemen block... perimeter... watch... heavy hand... from behind... "Sorry, John, this is it. We've got to take you in."

John wheels on O'Connor and shouts "No can do!"

John leaps straight up. His arms and legs churn the air like a sprinter. He does not return to the marble floor. Sweat standing out all over his body, he rises higher and looks down at the mob below. The buzzing, angry policemen fire countless rounds. They pass through him like pure imagination. John turns leisurely circles over them, drawing their impotent fire. Balanced neatly in the air, he laughs, at the police, at their ardent supporters all around; every upturned face fills him with helpless laughter.

They have no more bullets left to fire up at him. The crowd stares open-mouthed. Only Sergeant O'Connor himself looks away, shaking his head and, in a quiet voice, admonishes him.

"This'll never do. You know it can't be."

John's laughter echoes sharply in the lobby. He soars up through steel and glass and concrete, up to the welcoming clouds above.

#

A heavy hand grabs... "Sorry, John"... resignedly... seizes the neck... viscously in his groin... pivots... pushing... hurls... all three tumble to the marble floor.

John pulls the CZ-75 from his belt.

"No can do!"

The police struggle to get to their feet; the crowd around takes a step back, terror standing out on their faces. John backs towards the elevator doors.

"Closing time."

John puts the barrel in his mouth. The mob gasps. In his frenzy, John somehow manages to pull the trigger twice. Sergeant O'Connor, scrambling across the floor, reaches him just in time to catch his body as it falls.

#

All three tumble to the floor... John pulls the CZ-75... "No can do!"... struggle... step back... terror... "Closing time"...

He unloads six shots into the mass of police before him. Pivoting smoothly on one knee, he drops his neighbors, eight in all, as they run for the doors. It is a tidy, unhurried process. A single, well-placed shot in the head at a time, they fall dead one by one.

A cry breaks the silence of the lobby. Trapped under the weight of his two dead colleagues, Sergeant O'Connor looks at John. John checks the gun. There's one round left in the clip.

"This'll never do. You know it—"

The shot echoes in the lobby. Sergeant O'Connor's head slumps into the pool of blood spreading beneath it.

The numbers above the elevator doors are counting down.

Seven, six, five.

He reaches into his hidden pockets and withdraws a fresh clip with his left hand while simultaneously ejecting the spent one with his right.

Four, three.

He slaps the full clip home and draws back the bolt to chamber the first round.

Two, one.

The doors open. John fills the elevator with gunfire. Bodies fall forward and block the closing doors. John tucks his weapon into the waist of his pants. He clears the elevator of bodies. He changes clips and boards the car. Ascending through the building, he is the deliveryman of mortality, an anti-doctor making house calls. He visits each floor, killing anything that moves. He reaches the top floor. The doors part, revealing an impatient crowd tapping toes, checking watches and complaining loudly.

He is down to his last clip when he's done. He moves the corpses away from the door and rings for the lobby again.

On his way down, he smiles.

#

Policemen block... a few feet... spread out... perimeter... heavy hand... from behind... "Sorry, John, this is it. We've got to take you in."

John nods mutely. His neighbors look contemptuously at him and make disparaging comments. They despise him. John does not resist as Sergeant O'Connor's men move in on either side of him. His head is hanging; he is so exhausted they nearly drag him as they lead him away.

The sergeant speaks quietly, almost respectfully, but does not turn to look at him, "We're placing you under arrest for murder."

#

The elevator doors rattle and slide shut behind him. John stands alone in the center of the checkered marble floor of the lobby, his feet bordered by squares of opposite colors. His mind is full of omens and premonitions. He is overwhelmed with dread and is unable to move. The walls around him are groaning. He watches in horror as earth piles up at every window. They are covered completely and still the building shudders as its interment continues. A worm twists helplessly in the dirt against the glass doors.

In the air, there's cigarettes, burnt coffee, beer, sweat—smoke is pouring out of the vents. The lobby fills with it in seconds. He can't see the room around him; no walls, no doors, no windows. A bell rings behind him. The elevator doors open and dump an avalanche of paper out onto the floor. There is a muffled crack above him as the vents give way. Torrents of paper flood down from them, smothering him in an instant. He struggles and frees himself. He wades to the farthest corner of the lobby through the chest-high mounds of paper. By the vents and elevator, the piles are nearly level with the ceiling. Papers pour in and push him back into the last square of the marble floor. He's looking around frantically, pressed into the corner. To his left is a huge artificial palm in a plastic pot. It takes all his strength to move it in front of him. He crouches in the tiny space behind the plant as waves of paper creep around to push gently at his legs. They gradually bury him to the waist.

He knows it's an end to flight. There is no way out. The thought takes all the fight from him.

Lights like fireflies, like searchlights against a cloudy sky, like shooting stars, the flashes of glimmering red reflection catch his eye as they streak towards him. The smoke parts to form a narrow tunnel. John squints to see.

He is no longer alone.

He feels it first, before he sees. Outstretched from the hole, the hand reaches for him through the plastic leaves, palm up, thin fingers, the red gem on the gold ring glittering from under one finger.

The hand offers itself. The hand beckons, welcomes him, and calls him home.

He feels such an impending relief. He longs for it.

The hand is waiting, strong, firm and sure.

At last, he's ready for it. He'd take it. He'd take it gladly. But his arms are immobile. They're buried in the pages. The hand suspended amongst the leaves, patient, still and enduring. Judgment fills his mind around his writhing brain.

This pit has become his high ground; any action is a tiny suicide.

The offering hand awaits and he cannot take it.

## Chapter 8

Watson had already removed the scalp and the plate in the skull when Hull joined him in the autopsy. Watson examined his handiwork carefully, searching the tissues for abnormalities and assessing the healing of the scarred incisions.

Watson turned to face his colleague. "Let's have a look at the skin around the constricted area."

Hull nodded.

With precise incisions, Hull freed the thin strip of skin from the neck. He handed it to Watson, who took it over to the illuminated magnifier that stood at the wall behind the table. Watson turned on the light and gently spread out the pinched skin. He examined it under the glass. He said nothing as he stepped aside for Hull. Hull inspected the skin. In purple-black letters of bruising, tiny words were inscribed; tiny, suffering words.

"That I should serve no longer."

###

