“Stop here,” Jane says.

“What’s here?”

“Just stop.”

Jack pulls the Valiant over and leaves the engine running. There’s nothing here, just three boarded-up two-stories in a row with lawns growing wild like peewee jungles, then a three-story brick cube with fading paint across the top reading western hotel. A dying oak across the street defines an empty lot.

Jane pulls her .38—no, she reaches into her bag and whips out a .357 Magnum—no, she draws a Colt .45 Single Action Army revolver, pulled from the dead hand of Lieutenant William Van Wyck Reily at the Battle of the Little Bighorn by the Arapaho who cut him down, jams it in Jack’s face, and cocks the hammer back.

“What the fuck?”

Jesse in back lowers the camera. “Hey, Jane,” ze says.

“I got one question, Jack.”

“Hey, Jane, it’s all good,” Jack says. “Just put the gun down. Little help, Jesse?”

“Jesse, you pick that camera back up and get this on film.”

Which ze does.

“Jane, really—” Jack says.

“Shut up, Jack,” she says, taking his chin and sliding the barrel of the Colt into his mouth. “I just need to know one thing, a simple yes or no. Carefully.”

“Hohay,” Jack says around the steel. “Hohay.”

“Whose story is it?”

“Wha?”

“What?” Jane says back, smiling.

“Wha?” Jack says again, eyes wide.

“Wrong answer, motherfucker,” Jane says, shaking her head, and pow, the top of Jack’s head disintegrates out the window and there’s blood and bone and brains all over. Sticky black red pouring out of the cave in his skull, so Jane reaches past him, pulls the handle that opens the door, and kicks him into the street. Good thing the window was open.

“You get that?” she asks Jesse as she slides over to the driver’s seat. She looks around for a napkin to wipe up the blood.

“Fuck, Jane,” ze says. “That’s fucked up.”

“You got it, right?”

“Yeah, but, Jesus . . . What now?”

Jane closes the door and holsters her Colt. The smell of cordite and blood is making her frisky. “Whyn’t you hop in the front seat, lover,” she says.

As they pull away, headed back out of the dry, dying nowhere they’ll remember forever as Jack’s Last Stand, Jane wonders if maybe there’s a special heaven for the wholly pure, a place for people who never relented, never gave an inch, those who held to their standard of truth no matter what the cost, no matter what the truth. There orta be, she thinks, because in the end the only thing that mattered was whether you had a code.

Let’s start over, he said, tapping nails on the table. Go out West and make a clean breast of things.

A clean break, she said, turning back to the counter.

Whatever.

The pads of her fingers on Formica. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. The smell of engine grease, a slickness like rippling eels. What could she say? Her hair frizzed with static and she zapped everything she touched.

Jesse II looked out past the rim of hir bowl at the rain and kicked hir feet. Dad scribbled blue circles across pink lines on yellow paper. Mom opened a cupboard and closed it.

What’s out West? she said. In the other room Jesse I changed the channel, and they heard the TV say the police shot the woman four times.

Jesse II watched the red edge of hir bowl slip out of focus against the gray truck parked across the street slick with rain, what out West, what wasn’t here, four times, the smell of grease, Jesse II watched the gray truck parked across the street slip out of focus against the red edge of hir bowl, the memory of teeth cracked porcelain, the taste of blood tongue, thick tongue, the taste of pig tongue. Jesse II watched the slip fog gaotack wall fuck nit. flt 7 sptik. jmmy jmny jmimy jmny. sk’k. Everybody hands up, hands flat on flat surfaces, fingers flat, all their pink and white fingers flat but for Jesse I in the other room whose paint-sticky, sweaty red digits twitched balled in fists bunched in the wool of hir sweater. And the rain fell, spattering against the windows and the cars and the street like old fat. Jesse II watched the rain slip the scene

should be dramatic, humming with portentous buzz. It smells like engine grease and old coffee. Everything is muted from the colors to. Stand the colors to. Can you mute a woman’s backing her way out of life’s assorted? Mute a man’s sense of hope at the edge of risk, a gamble he’s not sure he’s got the balls to make, and the knowledge that she’s lost faith? Can you mute her loss of faith? Or is it only momentary, just doldrums, seasonal affective whatever, and don’t we have to just get through, for the kids or whatever, for life, just deal with it? Keep moving forward?

Dad’s name is Jack. Mom is Jane. They’re the J Crew. Smile. They go to Olive Garden on Sunday evenings and make it back in time for The Walking Dead. They have a tangible socioeconomic reality evoked by a combination of telling details and artfully crafted omissions. Dad drives a Prius.

If we go to California, Jesse II asked, do I have to go to school?

Yes, Dad said.

Can I go to one of those Muslim schools?

What?

Where they teach the Bible.

Muslims don’t read the Bible. They read the Koran.

Yeah the Koran.

No, you can’t go to Muslim school.

Can I watch TV then?

Mom opens the cupboard and turns on the screen. Dad pushes a button on the wall, the window flickers, static gray, resolving into to a D—— D—— cartoon. Mom slides her eyes from their sockets cutting loose the projecting beam, firing TV at the walls, the ceiling, TV piercing the table. The focus. The cereal bowl. Light on skin on light. Mom and Dad waltz the kitchen, singing “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” don’t you wish y’d go on forever, and Jesse I prances in, shooting hir Colt into the ceiling, hotfooting a flippetyflop jumparoo. What are you gonna do about it, that’s what I’d like to know.

Deeper into the mystery, I saw then why Jack liked to have things very clearly organized. If they were really going out West, it would start an almost uncontrollable avalanche of signification. Speed of space. skintification. Spk’hhh. Can you imagine potato-chip bags slick inside with the grease of salty fingers, mustard packets, an inch of stale Cherry Coke at the bottom of a lukewarm, crumpling wax-paper cup? Can you feel Mom itching her scalp, her eyes weary with the same broken road, the same humming engine, the same stabbing whine, the same glance at Jack to make sure he’s awake, make sure he’s awake, make sure he’s awake. We touch too much maybe

you should try a new shampoo let’s

start

oh, what a beautiful

Mom buys a pack of Winston Lights on the sly and smokes one out behind the hotel. Purple slabs of granite heave at the horizon, a wall of rock in which somewhere stands the gate the candy-apple-red semis keep rolling through, somewhere the way through, the western path. Dad changes channels upstairs while Jesse II looks out the window and writes in hir Dinosaur Journal. Jesse I—who knows? The sense of danger and novelty has faded into scummy unconcern, the apathy of open space. Clouds point this way and that, no clear omen. Dad changes channels from a pouty, half-naked nymphet singing for cheeseburgers to one of those extra sports channels, where Portuguese and Senegalese men chase one another with sticks down a field, a ball, three balls, points, somebody fouls. Is it some kind of field hockey? Dad finds himself wondering if they have electricity in Portugal, or cable TV, what they do in Portugal for fun. How do you be Portuguese? How do you have fun?

Dad finds himself half wishing Jesse I would find a meth head to run off with. He wouldn’t even have to be clean as long as he had a car. Ze was too much these days: hir pubescent indeterminacy, hir sex-tainted tantrums, hir hot-pink claws. Maybe they could sell hir for gas money.

Dad, Jesse II said.

Yeah.

Is it true our civilization doesn’t deserve to survive?

You got me, kiddo. Ask Mom.

She said ask you.

Well, shoot. Why you ask?

Warren wants to know.

Warren who?

Warren Buffet.

Warren Buffet the millionaire?

No, not Warren Buffet millionaire. Warren Buffet dilophosaurus.

Oh. Is that one of the little ones?

He has a double-crested head.

Is he the one that spits poison?

You believe everything you see on TV?

Fine. No. Our civilization doesn’t deserve to survive. Is Warren happy now?

Oh, Dad, dinosaurs aren’t happy or sad. Their brains are too small for emotion. You of all people should know that. Reptile cortex: kill and fuck. That’s all there is.

Jesus, where’d you hear that language?

I don’t know.

Well, don’t let your mother catch you saying “kill and fuck,” or you’ll learn real quick about reptile cortexes.

Cortices.

Whatever. Go read your book.

I never thought time was something you could feel. What happened? On the screen is a show about sex workers peeing on a black couple, “externalizing white desire with a golden, ammoniac splash,” says the voice. Look of horror. Mom’s Winston burns with a crackle, a single star orange in the dusk now Prussian blue.

A line of tanks thunders along the highway, west to east, deer carcasses slung to hang against the turrets, slack, furred loins, the fall kills. The lead tank commander stands jutting from the cupola wearing a gas mask, antlers mounted on his Kevlar, the staff of Moses in his hands.

Wait, he said. I forgot to show you this. He handed me a pewter pig. My first feeling was confusion—wasn’t it supposed to be a slice of pig, a crackling slab of pork, our feast, the first kill of the fall? But it was a small pewter figure of a pig, a small figure of a big pig. I looked at it by the light of the fire, examining the fine work, the delicate bristles, the tiny jutting snout and eyes little more than pricks, and confusion gave way to admiration, amazement, some slight joy.

Nice, I said.

You like it? he asked.

I do, I said. You can see little splotches of mud on its legs, the work is so fine. His little cloven hooves. And the tiny, curly tail.

Snouts snuffling in the gullets of corpses.

I know, he said. I thought you’d like it. I didn’t mean to interrupt.

No, it’s fine. It’s nice. Where’d you get it?

He made a sheepish face and looked away into the woods. Was this the detail you’re waiting for? Woods, trees, pine branches hanging. Campfire. A twenty-five-dollar bottle of whiskey and a six-pack. Eat the dead.

I stole it from Jack, he said.

Are you serious?

Eat the dead.

Yeah. I went into his office earlier this week to ask him some fucking thing about payroll and he wasn’t there, so I waited to see if he’d come back and I was looking at that shelf of figures he has, you know what I mean, that shelf with all his little fucking knickknacks. And I felt out of the pit of my stomach rising a dark and petty spirit inexorable as the ocean, a plum-colored perversity, and I saw the pig and took it. I wanted to take them all, take all his little figurines and break them into bite-size pieces and eat them, then shit them all over his carpet. I didn’t have time, though, so I just took the one.

He say anything?

He say anything I make him. Integral to the trajectory, asymptote to the curve, the road at the edge of consciousness spinning pixelated silver discs under black rubber engines screaming the edge of day across space—stab yourself into the plains, lash yourself to the coffin, tie yourself down and ride—headlight, toothpick, enamel. As follows: milkshake unction, sun like a bloodied eye, the clouds in the sky drift silver across the windshield, drift charcoal grit across the velvet-black sky, firelight reflecting intimations. The secrets of fire in the dark—wild pig roasting on a spit—lost it, whatever it was, the Cro-Magnon man. Gone like yesterday’s Greyhound. Coming up on Undercover Boss, after these messages from our sponsor, will Jack and Jane stop global warming?

I’m pretty sure he knows it’s missing, but I think he’s too scared of us all to say anything until he knows who did it. It’s like if he admits we can steal stuff from him, then he’s vulnerable, you know? But he started locking his door.

The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Dad scribbled blue circles across pink lines on yellow paper. Jesse II watched the slip fog gaotack wall fuck nit. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Cereal bowl. Fine. Happy? Jesus. Jesus. Cortices. Mom opens a cupboard, closes it. Dad scribbles blue ellipses across pink lines on yellow paper. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Tanks rolling east. Mommie? God’s grace. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Dad scribbled blue circles across pink lines on yellow paper. Jesse II watched the slip fog gaotack wall fuck nit. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Dad’s name is Jack. Mom is Jane. Dad drives a Tesla. Jesse II asked. Dad, Jesse II said. Ask Mom. Mom opens a cupboard, closes it. God’s grace. Don’t you wish y’d go on forever? sang Jesse II. Don’t you wish y’d go on forever? sang Dad. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Ask Mom. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Ask Mom.

Slap. Fit cairn. Antlers mount the TV. The kitchen reeks of engine grease—under Jack’s fingernails the stain of a thousand blown gaskets—in the corner, wrapped in a towel in a red plastic recycling bin, the heart of some great machine lies bleeding. Mom opens a cupboard, closes it. Dad scribbles blue ellipses across pink lines on yellow paper. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Ask Mom.

Tanks rolling east.

She’s out there smoking a Winston Light, the ember an orange star in a field of Prussian blue, the stars getting blurry, thinking what it means to go out West. Her dad left when she was only young, the four of them, she was nine and he left, out West, two days before Christmas, the Christmas morning Mommie didn’t get out of bed.

Mommie?

Go away.

Mommie, it’s Christmas.

Go away, go all of you.

Can we open our presents?

Do whatever you want.

Jane put on the TV and played Mommie, telling the little ones which gifts they could open and in what order. This is the psychologically telling memory, the pivot of her later life, the organizing principle, consciousness reduced to biography. We are memory or we are nothing.

Dad was a brother in the church, the First Church of Hope of Jesus Christ, and they quit going to the church after Dad left, but Jane kept asking if she could go, nagging and cajoling, until Mom finally called one of her friends from church and had the woman take her. Jane looked for her father among the brothers, the other men in ties and short-sleeved shirts, the patriarchs of the folding chairs. She asked them if they knew where her dad was. They were all kind but distant, wary of the desperate girl looking for the hole in her life. It lasted until spring; one weekend she had a stomachache, and the next week Mom forgot to call, and then some Sunday morning in May she found herself watching cartoons, realizing she didn’t go to church anymore.

In her first picture album—in a box somewhere—she had a picture of Dad and the brothers all standing in their short-sleeved shirts grinning into the camera, and every time it opened a void in her chest as big as the whole known world. Some mornings her only hope was that she hadn’t seen everything yet, and maybe someday the pain might take a new shape.

She walked down the street of this one-DQ town on the edge of the plains, on the edge of the mountains, because she’d seen as they drove through looking for a hotel a First Church of Hope off a side street, and she knew even then she’d sneak away. The streets off the main drag quiet and dim, homes lit with electric fire, snapping her fingers and mumbling Cole Porter. The parking lot of the church was empty but for one car, a yellow Hyundai hatchback. The church itself was a big gray A-frame, smooth as a monolith, windowless prefab. The front door was locked, so she went around the side, where a door had been left propped open with a smooth lump of iron. She put the iron in her pocket and went into the darkened chapel.

Small yellow lights illuminated the unadorned crucifix on the stage at the front of the chapel. She felt a shock of apprehension, realizing how long it had been since she’d been in a church, how far she’d gone from God and how much she missed him. The cross, so simple and good, so bright in the darkness, seemed to be the very shape of her life, a road forking, paths chosen, suffering borne for others’ sake. Her eyes grew accustomed to the dimness and began to see the lines of folding chairs and the posters hung on the walls.

Would it be different out West, she wondered. Would Jack be different? Would her hands no longer feel tied to the same stations, the same knuckles sliding on stainless steel? Would the meaning of suffering for Jesse I and Jesse II, the ungrateful little suffer them, would that meaning return to hold her up like it had before? She didn’t think so, yet here was hope. Some hope. Some hope for something. Some hope for anything.

I came out onto the stage and saw her there. I hadn’t expected her, but at the same time I wasn’t surprised. We have a sense of things sometimes. She had short brown hair and a sad, complicated face. She wore earrings, but no makeup, blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a puffy black jacket. She was still young but hard put by life. She carried her purse in her hand, maroon pleather with cream trim and fake-gold snaps. I didn’t say anything, not wanting to startle her, so I stood in the shadows until both of us were used to the darkness.

Yes, I thought, there’s the hope and resignation, there’s pain and—for a moment—the transcendence of earthly torment. There’s comfort in the sense of an ordered cosmos and dignity in the meaning of our lives. There she is struggling with doubt, thinking her life all the deeper for it, then affirming her faith and feeling it rush into her veins, sudden strength, yes, this life, yes, this world, yes, by God.

Hello, I said, in my gentlest timbre.

She turned but did not startle. Hello?

Hi. I waved my hand.

Oh, hi. I’m sorry, I didn’t realize anyone—I just—I was—I just wanted to come in for a minute.

That’s fine, I said, the Lord’s house is always open. I’m glad you came. I bowed my head a moment, then stepped down off the stage. She looked at her feet, then at me, then back at her feet. Tears welled in her eyes. Are you troubled, sister?

She choked up, waving her hand at me. I took it and pulled her gently near, putting my arm around her.

It’s all right, sister. God’s grace.

Eat the dead.

Then she was weeping on my shoulder, sobbing out all her pain and worry in jagged moans. God’s grace, I muttered, God’s grace. She wept and then she was better. She pulled away and wiped her face, apologizing, explaining how she’d been so worried lately, telling me the whole sordid story: Jack losing his job, Jesse I discovering boys and getting into trouble, Jesse II wouldn’t talk at school anymore, the job she’d left so they could go out West where Jack’s brother lived and worked for a construction company and could get him a job there, lower-level management, and it would pay all right and be a new chance, a new chapter, a new life, start over, except everything she ever knew told her it would be the same.

I took her chin in my hand and kissed her. She seemed surprised at first, then yielded, her lips sweet and slick as rippling eels. I could taste her despair and the Winston she’d smoked, her tongue, I breathed her breath, her blood pumping against mine. Then I let her go and she looked at me, her eyes red rimmed and confused.

There’s something I want to show you, I said, and I took her to the side of the altar, where I opened a fire door. Beyond the door was a set of stairs that led down, down deep, at the bottom of which reflected the yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel below. There’s some people I want you to meet, I said, and they want to meet you.

Down there? she asked, trusting but timid.

Yes, I said. Just go down and follow the tunnel. I’ll be along in a minute.

Okay, she said, giving a brave smile. I patted her on the shoulder and then pointed down the stairs. She looked down, then up at me, then back down. I nodded and she nodded back and took the first step, then the second. When she was about halfway down the stairs, she looked up at me and I waved to her, then slammed and locked the door. Poor thing—the lights go off when the door closes—how would she ever find her way in the dark? Of course, the tunnel only goes one place.

I stepped to the crucifix on the altar where hung our tortured God and looked out over the chapel’s lines of folding chairs. I turned the lights off. I could hear the angels singing, ever so softly, “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top.” I bowed my head a moment, turned, and left. The stage was dark and the chapel silent.

That stag washed dark and this cheap hell skyless.

Treat stuck wounds down with his ASAP poultice.

Tak stug wam dak enten chapeau silas.

The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. Dad scribbled blue circles across pink lines on yellow paper. Jesse II watched the slip fog gaotack wall fuck nit. Jesse II watched the rain slip. Dad’s name is Jack. Mom is Jane. Dad drives a Prius. Mom opens a cupboard, closes it. The yellow-lit ceiling of the tunnel. People talking. Tanks rolling. Mommie? God’s grace. I can feel the day getting older, sang Jesse II, pulling a mock baritone. Don’t you wish y’d go on forever? sang Dad. The fall kills. Fire crackles. Pig tongue. Whatever.

I can feel the day getting older, sang Jesse II, pulling a mock baritone.

Don’t you wish y’d go on forever? sang Dad.

Jesse I came in with hir lovely soprano—Don’t you wish y’d go on forever?

Jesse II kicked the back of hir seat.

Up here high in the mountains the road curved over space over space. Read it again. Jesse I looked out over the shoulder where the granite fell away, the vast spectacle of sky and rock. What happened? Let’s start over.

Slip divide the sky.

One time we went hunting in these very woods, my dad and my uncle and me. Slack, furred loins lying along the bed of the truck, lightless black eyes I’d

like to believe there’s some principle at work here, some demon playing games. I think I’m suffering from dysentery. I think maybe I’m an algorithm.

Mom down in the pitch-black tunnel beneath the church makes her way on her hands and knees toward the crack of light under the door, which finally opens. Blinded, she turns away and so doesn’t at first see the hands lifting her and carrying her into the room. She looks up at faces shadowed in white velour hoods. The room murmurs, a sibilant hiss in the round, led by one wearing a bronze reliquary bearing two teeth of St. Catherine of Alexandria, one reading the Psalter of Snakes and Bones. They strap Mom down to the broken wheel, murmuring all the time, Mom shaking her head, febrile tongues, all beyond our control. They stretch her arms in their puffy sleeves, one monk holds the stake against one palm, another readies the hammer. The iron drops and through the flesh the stake grates through the tiny bones in her hand. Mom screams. The men pound the stake into the rim of the broken wheel, nailing her to it, while another man lashes her down, rope taut around the puffy sleeve. They’re at work on her other arm at the same time, tying it down, driving the stake in. Jane’s face white with pain, her screams fade into whimpers. Men grab her blue-jeaned calves and tie them together above the ankles to the bottom of the wheel, then one takes an especially long rusted stake and jabs the point into the sock over her ankle and another brings down the mallet head with a thud and drives iron through bone.

After they get her staked down, they lash the wheel back together where it’s broken and roll it up to the altar, rotating it so she hangs head down. She’s passed out from the pain or she’s awake again or both. Her legs straight up and her black puffy arms spread wide, she mimics the symbol of peace. With the susurrant murmuring still steady, the one in Prussian-blue velour comes up and lifts the ax back over his shoulder, his feet planted apart, his shoulder set, and brings it down swinging in where her jaw breaks clean against her pale neck, cleaving through with a wet crack.

A younger one in white takes her head up by the hair off the stage, and the stump of her neck bleeds out onto the floor, an orange ember on a field of Prussian blue, teeth on porcelain, all the monks’ hands lie flat, all their fingers flat, except Jesse I’s balled sticky in hir mother’s hair as ze holds up the head to the worshipful ones and begins to sing in hir lovely soprano.

And still the rain fell, the monks all singing now, the red rim of the cereal bowl against the gray truck, pig roasting over the fire, the symbol of the pig roasting on the symbol of roasting, and I pour another two fingers of whiskey into the brushed-steel thermos-lid cup.

Can you imagine what it must have been like to see all this first? The first time anywhere?

Except the Indians.

But there was a first Indian, too, remember that.

Except the Neanderthals.

There was a first Neanderthal.

Except the first monkeyman.

But don’t you think, I said, he would have shown amazement at an existence—are the levels right here? One two three. Gtao. Spack. One two three four. Can you hear me? I don’t know if you can hear me. But I’m saying, an existence he hadn’t imagined? Whole new species? New mountains? Simple amazement at pure novelty.

Like new technologies? Isinglass curtains? Sidelights? A little wonder?

No, I said, that’s not what I mean.

Why not? he asked.

He’s always like this.

I looked through the bars of the gate, peered out upon the squalor in which my ape-man captor lived. He looked at me with dully lidded eyes. You think you’ve got it all figured out.

You’re just as much a prisoner here as I am.

I knew you’d say that, he said, scratching his armpit. He pulled a banana off the table and sniffed it.

Well, what are you gonna do about it, that’s what I’d like to know.

I don’t have to do anything, he said. I’m happy out here. You happy in there?

Of course I’m not happy in here.

Well, then who has to do anything? He peeled the banana with his feet and took a bite. Not me. I’m happy.

Let’s start over, Jack said, tapping nails on the table. Go out West and make a clean breast of things.

Four shots. Hands up. Pig tongue. The Jesses zapped everything they touched.

Mom was the only one who knew where the gate was, the only one who knew the way through, the only one who knew how to find the parallel the candy-apple-red semis rolled down, the line of red against the gray field. They’d never make it through the mountains without her, so Dad gunned it and jerked the wheel left and then right and the car shot off the shoulder, careening through the air into even now, before