ISOLATION POINT, CALIFORNIA

__________

GAGE PUSHED THE door of his cabin open with his booted foot, as he always did, peering inside, right and left, without going in, to make sure no one was hiding there waiting for him. He looked around, saw only his single bunk, neatly made up, with the solar-powered lamp on a small stand beside it, glowing faintly in the overcast, late afternoon gloom. Faces did stare back at him: the old magazine photos of smiling people, mostly girls, on the wall over his bunk. The wooden chair stood just where he’d left it, pulled back slightly from the metal table with its two coffee cups, long bereft of coffee, and his collection of pens, stacks of spiral notebooks, the radio. Above the table were the shelves of random books, many of them blackened at the edges, foraged from a burned library in Sweetbite. The ax leaned on the stack of firewood beside the river-stone fireplace, opposite the old woodstove, with its two pots.

It was tedious, having to stop and look around in the cabin and the out-house, before going in, day after day. But as he went inside, he told himself that the first time he neglected to do it, someone would be there to brain him with his own ax.

He closed and barred the door behind him, saw that the fire was out, but went immediately to the desk and stood there, looking out the window. It was nailed shut and curtained—a risk having a window at all—but he could see the light was dimming, the clouds shrugging together for rain. The charge on the lamp was low, so he plugged it into the socket that connected to the solar-collection panel on the roof, and the lamp’s charge meter bobbed to near full. He dialed up the light, and looked at the radio but decided not to try it. He was usually depressed for a while after listening to the radio and didn’t want to ruin his hopeful mood.

He leaned his shotgun against the wall, within reach, put the binoculars on a stack of notebooks, and sat down at the table. He adjusted the shim under the short table leg to minimize the wobbling, picked up a pen, and wrote his newest journal entry. His fingers were stiff with the chill but he wanted to tell his journal what had happened more than he wanted to stoke up the fire.

NOVEMBER IST, 2023

I saw her again this afternoon, about forty-five minutes ago. She was standing on what was left of the old marina, coming out from all those burned-out buildings along San Andreas Spit, across the river’s mouth from me. She was standing right where the river meets the tidal push from the ocean. That always seemed suggestive to me, the river flowing into the ocean; the ocean pushing back, the two kind of mingling. “Here’s some silt” and “Here’s some salt back at you.” Silt and salt, never noticed how close the words were before now.

I looked at her in the binoculars, and when she saw I was doing that, she spread her arms and smiled as if to say, “Check me out!” Not that I could see much of her under all those clothes. It’s pretty brisk out now, Northern coast this time of year, wind off the sea, and she was wearing a big bulky green ski jacket, and a watch cap, and jeans and boots. She had a 30.06 bolt-action deer rifle leaned against a rock. She never went far from it. She’s got long wavy chestnut hair, and her face, what I could make out, seemed kind of pleasant. She’s not tall. Taking into account the silhouette of her legs, she seems slim. Not that there’s anyone obese left, not on this continent, anyway. She seemed energetic, confident. I wonder if she found a new supply drop somewhere? If she found it first, she could be doing well. Another reason to make contact.

But who knows what she’s up to? She could be talking to men at a safe distance all over the county. Getting them to leave her gifts or something. But that’d be risky. They’ll kill her eventually. Unless someone finds a cure for the AggFac soon. Not very goddamn likely.

Anyway it felt good talking to her. Shouting back and forth, really. I got pretty hoarse, since of course she was several hundred feet from me. Said she was from San Francisco. Got out just in time. Told her I was from Sacramento. She laughed when I told her this little peninsula of mine is called “Isolation Point.” Had to swear and cross my heart it was always called that. She said she used to be a high school English teacher. Told her, “Hey that’s amazing, I used to be a high school student!” She laughed. I can just barely hear her laugh across the river.

She asked what did I used to do. Said I managed some restaurants. Wanted to be a journalist, write about America. Big story came, no one to tell it to. She said I could still write. I said for who? She said for people—you leave the writing in places and other people find it. “I’d read it!” she said. I said okay. Thinking that writing for one person at a time wasn’t what I had in mind, but you scale down your dreams now. Way down.

I was running out of breath and my voice was going with all the yelling back and forth so I asked her name. Told her mine. Our ages too, me 43, she 34. I tried to think of some way to ask her to come closer, maybe at the fence. To ask her without scaring her. But I couldn’t think of any way and then she waved and picked up her rifle and walked off.

Her name’s Brenda.

I was hiking back to the cabin going, “Brennnn-da! Brennnn-da!” over and over like an idiot. Like I’m twelve. Not surprising after two years alone here, I guess. It was good just to see someone who isn’t trying to kill me.

Wish the dog would come back. Someone probably ate him, though. I need to check the fence again. Going to do it now. It might rain. Might get dark before I’m back. Might be someone there. I’ve got the shotgun. Not that I can afford to use the shells. The sight of the gun keeps people back, though, if they stay beyond The Nineteen. Going now. Should stay here … Too antsy …

Gage put the pen down and picked up his shotgun. “That’s right,” he said aloud. “Put down the pen, pick up the gun.” He had to talk aloud, fairly often, just to hear a human voice. Brenda’s was the first he’d heard, except for the warning noise, for three months. “That’s how it is,” he said, hearing the hoarseness in his voice from all that shouting. Bad time to get laryngitis. Bad time to get anything—he’d almost died of pneumonia that once. No pharmacies anymore. You ran into a doctor, he’d try to kill you. He’d be sorry afterwards but that didn’t do you any good.

Gage unbarred the door, and went out, closing the door carefully behind him. There was still some light. He walked out to the edge of the trees to take a quick look out at the Pacific, beyond the edge of the cliff, fifty yards away. It was steely under the clouds. He was looking for boats and hoping he wouldn’t see one. Nothing out there, except maybe that slick black oblong, appearing and disappearing—a whale. At least the animals were doing better now.

He’d chosen this little finger of land, with its single intact cabin, partly because there was no easy way to land a boat. Mostly the sea was too rough around it. You could maybe come in from the sea up into the mouth of the river, clamber onto the big slippery wet crab-twitchy rocks that edged the river bank, if you could secure your boat so it didn’t float away, but the current was strong there and no one had tried it that he knew of. His cabin was pretty well hidden in the trees, after all, and it didn’t look like much was here. And of course, they were as scared of him as he was of them. But then, that’s what his father had told him about rattlesnakes.

He turned and tramped through the pine trees toward the fence, a quarter mile back, noticing, for the first time in a year or more, the smell of the pine needles mingling with the living scent of the sea. Funny how you see a girl, you start to wake up and notice things around you again. To care about how things smell and look and feel.

The wind off the sea keened between the trees and made the hackles rise on the back of his neck. He buttoned the collar of his thick, blue REI snowline jacket with his left hand, the other keeping the Remington twelve-gauge tucked up under his right armpit, pressed against him, the breach-block cupped in his palm. He was good at getting the Remington popped fast to his shoulder for firing. So far nobody had noticed what a lame shot he was. The two guys he’d killed since coming to the area—killed four months apart—had both got it at close to point-blank range. That was the AggFac for you. If people sniped at you, it was out of desperation, not because of the AggFac.

He felt the wind tugging at his streaked beard, his long sandy hair. “I must be getting pretty shaggy,” he said to a red squirrel, looking beadily down from a low branch. “But the only thing I’ve got left to cut it with is a knife and it’s so dull … I’m down to my last cake of soap. Half a cake really …” For two years, cognizant that no one on the continent was making soap anymore, he’d only washed when he could no longer bear his own smell.

The squirrel clicked its claws up the tree, looking for a place to curl up out of the wind, and Gage continued, five minutes later cutting the old deer path he took to the fence. Another ten minutes and he was there: a twenty-five foot hurricane fence with antipersonnel wire across the top in a Y-frame. The fence and the place at the river where he got the fish and the crabs were two of the main reasons he’d chosen this spot. There was no gate in the fence—they’d used a chopper landing pad of cracked asphalt, near the edge of the cliff on the south side of the cape. There’d been some kind of military satellite monitoring station, here, once, and the fence, he figured, had been put up to keep people away from it. It kept bears and wolves out too. The post building had crumbled into the sea after a bad storm—you could see the satellite dish sticking up out of the water at low tide, all rusty; the cabin was all that was left. There was forage, if you knew where to look; there was river water to filter; there was a way he knew to get around the fence, underneath its southern end, when he was willing to try his luck checking the crossroads at Sweetbite Point for supply drops. But he hadn’t been out to the crossroads in seven months. Previous time, someone had almost gotten him. So he stayed out here as long as he could. It was a great spot to survive in, if you wanted to survive. He’d almost stopped wanting to.

The fence looked perfectly upright, unbreached, so far as he could see from here, no more rusted than last time. Of course, a determined man could get over it—or around it, if you didn’t mind clambering over a sheer drop—but it was rare for anyone to come out onto the cape. There weren’t many left to come.

He walked along the fence a ways south, wondering what’d brought him here. He had a sort of instinct, especially sharp post-AggFac, that kept him alive—and usually it had its reasons for things.

There it was. The sound of a dog barking. He hoped it was Gassie.

“Hey Gassie!” he shouted, beginning to trot along the fence. “Yo, dog!” Be a great day, meeting a woman … sort of … and getting his dog back too. “Gassie!”

Then it occurred to him to wonder who the dog was barking at. Maybe a raccoon. Maybe not.

He bit off another shout, annoyed with himself for getting carried away. Shouting. Letting people know where he was.

He circled a lichen-yellowed boulder that hulked up to his own height, and came upon Gassie and the stranger—who was just a few steps beyond The Nineteen. Gassie was this side of the fence, the man on the other side, staring, mouth agape, at the hole the dog had dug under the fence to get in …

Despite the dangerous presence of the stranger, Gage shook his head in admiration at the dog’s handiwork. It was the same spot he’d gotten out at—some critter, raccoon or skunk, had dug a hole under the fence where the ground was soft, and the dog had widened it and gotten out and wandered off, more than a month ago. Gage had waited a week, then decided he had to fill the hole in. Here he was, Gassie, his ribs sticking out, limping a little, but scarcely the worse for wear—a brown-speckled tongue-drooping mix of pit bull, with his wedge-shaped head, and some other breed Gage had never been sure of.

The stranger—a gawky, emaciated man in the tatters of an Army uniform, who’d let his hair fall into accidental dreadlocks—goggled stupidly at the hole, then jerked his head up as Gage approached the dog.

Gage reckoned the stranger, carrying an altered ax handle, at twentyone paces away, with the fence between them. Not at The Nineteen yet. Everyone alive on this continent was good at judging distances instantly. Nineteen paces, for most people, was the AggFac warning distance. It was possible to remain this side of psychotic—like this side of the fence—beyond nineteen paces from another human being. Nineteen paces or less, you’d go for them, with everything you had, to kill them; and they’d go at you just the same. Which was why most people in North America had died over the past few years. A couple of phrases from one of the first—and last—newspaper articles came into his mind: The very wiring of the brain altered from within …That portion of the brain so different victims become another species ….

“You’re outside the margin, dude,” Gage said. “You can still back up.”

He knew he should probably kill the guy whether he backed up or not, on general principle. For one thing, the guy was probably planning to kill and eat his dog. For another, now that the son of a bitch knew there was someone camped on the other side of the fence, he’d come over to forage and kill—or rather, to kill and forage.

But you clung to what dignity you could. Gage did, anyway. Killing people when you didn’t absolutely have to lacked dignity, in Gage’s view.

“Don’t come no closer,” the man said. He hefted the ax-handle warningly. It was missing its ax blade but he’d found a stiff blade from a kitchen knife somewhere and he’d pushed it into a crack at one end of the handle and wrapped it in place with black electric tape.

“You were a soldier,” Gage observed. “Where’s your weapon?”

“I got it, real close,” the man said. After thinking laboriously a moment, he said, “My partner’s got it trained on your ass right now.”

Gage laughed. “No one’s got a partner. I saw some people try it, before I came here—watched from a roof for two days. They tried partnering by staying twenty feet away from each other. But eventually they would fuck that up, get too close—and you know what happened. Every time. You haven’t got a partner—or a gun.”

The man shrugged. He wasn’t going to waste his breath on any more lies. He looked at the dog, licking his lips. Finally he said, “You knock that dog in the head, push it where I can get it, I’ll go away for good.”

“That dog’s worth ten like you,” Gage said. He made up his mind. It’d be pretty ironic if the AggFac had worn off, finally, and he and Brenda were staying out of reach for no reason. Of course, there was no reason to think it ever wore off. But everyone, as far as he knew, hoped it would, eventually. They didn’t know what caused it, exactly—there were lots of theories—so maybe it’d wear off as mysteriously as it came. For no good reason, the brain would revert to normal.

Yeah right. But for Brenda’s sake he stepped closer to the stranger, within The Nineteen, to see if the AggFac was still there in him.

He felt it immediately. The clutching up feeling, the hot geysering from the back of his skull, the heat spreading to his face, his arms. The tightening of his hands, his jaws, the background humming; the tight focus on His Enemy. And the change in the way things look—going almost colorless. Not black and white, but sickly sepia and gray, with shadows all deep and inky.

Since Gage had come within The Nineteen, the stranger was seized by the AggFac too, and his face went beet red, the veins at his temples popping up. As if propelled from behind he came rushing at Gage, stopped only by the fence, hammering at the chain links with his ax handle, making that Eeeeee sound in the back of his throat they all made—the sound Gage might’ve been making himself, he could never tell somehow. Hammering the ax handle to splinters as Gage shoved the barrel of the shotgun through a fence link and pulled the trigger at point blank range …

The stranger fell away, gasping and dying. The AggFac ebbed. Color seeped back into the world.

Gage heard the dog barking, and saw it start for the hole in the fence. Wanting to get at the stranger’s body.

“No, Gassie,” Gage said, feeling tired and empty and half-dead himself. He grabbed the dog by its short tail, pulled it back before it was quite through the hole. It snarled at him but let him do it. He blocked up the hole with rocks, then started toward the end of the fence, where it projected over the cliff. He’d have to go down by the rocks, about fifty feet south of the fence’s end, thread the path, climb the other cliff, to get the body, drag it to the sea. A lot of work.

But he didn’t want to leave the bloody corpse there for Brenda to find. He wanted her to come to the fence …

So he trudged off toward the cliffs.

NOVEMBER 2ND, 2023

My face hurts from scraping at it with that knife. Used up a lot of soap in place of shaving cream. Hope the contusions go down before she sees me up close. Not too close, of course.

Will she come? She’d be foolish to come. She doesn’t know me. She can see the fence from across the river but she doesn’t know if it’ll keep her safe from me. I might have a gate for all she knows. She’s never been out to the point.

She says she’s coming. We agreed on high noon. She’s got a longer-range weapon than me. She doesn’t seem stupid. She’ll be smart about it. She’ll get close enough to take stock of the situation, with that gun right up against her shoulder, but not so close I could rush her.

I think she does understand that outside the AggFac I’m not some thug, some rapist. But she may decide not to take the chance. Or someone may kill her before she gets here. I think it’s almost noon …

“HI! CAN YOU see me okay?” Gage called, spreading his hands so she could see he didn’t have the shotgun. She was still about a hundred feet off, on the other side of the fence, assessing the situation from cover, like he’d figured she would, the rifle propped on the top of a big tree stump and pointed right at him.

Dangerous, not to bring the shotgun. But it was meaningful. They both knew that. Not carrying your gun was like, in the old days, bringing a bouquet of flowers.

Still, this could be a set up. She could be after his goods. She could want his cabin, maybe. She could shoot him, and Gassie, if she had the ammo. Shoot him from safety where she was. Nothing to stop her. A couple of rounds, one’d get through that fence. Down he’d go …

He kept his arms spread. Standing in the open, a little clearing with just rock-strewn dirt on the ground, so she could see he didn’t have the shotgun anywhere near—like, hidden behind a rock close to him. His gun could be somewhere in the brush, of course. But at least it wasn’t in easy reach.

Slowly, she got out from behind the stump and walked toward him. She glanced right and left now and then. Looked at the dog, sitting there wagging its tail, beside him. She smiled.

“Hi Brenda,” he said, when she got to about twenty-one paces, and stopped. Slowly, she lowered the gun, holding it cradled in her arms.

Then she sat down, her legs crossed, deciding to trust him that much. He sat down too, on his side of the fence. The dog put his head on Gage’s lap.

“I’m embarrassed to tell you his name,” Gage said, patting the dog. “It’s Gassie.”

“Gassie!” She laughed. “After Lassie, right?” She had all of her teeth, which was unusual in itself. Her face had lots of roundness to it, but she wasn’t pie-faced. Her eyes were dark brown, he saw, and the shape of them suggested she had some American Indian blood. She’d put her hair up, in a simple kind of way, and she seemed clean.

“What now?” he asked, as mildly, as casually, as much without pressure as he could.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just needed to see someone up close as I could, and you seemed nice.” She shrugged. “As much as anyone can be, with the—you know.”

He nodded, deciding he needed to be as completely honest with her as possible. “I tried it, yesterday, when a stranger came up to the fence. I deliberately stepped closer, just to see. I always hope it might go away some time.”

“I’ve never heard of it going away.”

“No. Reports on the radio say it never has for anyone. Kids don’t outgrow it, old people don’t get over it. It hit me the same as always.”

She nodded, not having to ask what’d happened.

“I don’t feel too bad,” he added. “Guy was trying to eat my dog.”

She nodded again. That she understood too, both sides. “You fish?”

“Sure.” They talked a long time about practical things like that. He told her about his water filter, the crabs, the fish, the wild plants he knew—she knew them too—and about the forays to the food drops.

“They’ll drop food to us sometimes, the foreign people,” she said, “but they seem to have just … given up on curing it. Unless—you said you had a radio? You heard anything?”

He shook his head. “Nothing new. One guy—hard to get the signal, I think it was from the Virgin Islands, I had to move the radio around—he said the Japanese thought it was some kind of nanotech-creation that got out of hand, like an artificial virus, supposed to alter your brain wiring in a good way, does it in a bad way instead, jumps from person to person. Then there’s the biowarfare theory, the mutated virus theory … ”

“The one I liked was about the schizophrenia virus. Back in the twentieth century some people thought a lot of mental illness is caused by a virus that gets in the brain. They think this is a mutation of the schizophrenia virus. They thought schizophrenia was something you could get from cat-shit, once.”

“I always knew there was some reason I didn’t like cats.”

She laughed.

“Whatever it is,” he went on, venting, “you’d think someone would make some damn progress by now. No vaccines, nothing. It is like they’re just waiting for us to die. Won’t let anybody come to their perfect little countries. That blockade in Panama, shoot down our planes …”

“Can you blame them?” she asked.

He knew what she meant. The world had watched, as the “Aggression Factor” rolled over a hemisphere; as millions of people had killed one another: people in North America and Mexico, all the way to the geo-quarantine at the Panama Canal; the world had watched as millions of longtime neighbors had killed one another; watched as an unthinkable number of husbands had killed their wives, and wives their husbands; as unspeakable quantities of children were murdered by parents, by siblings, by friends; as others murdered their parents. As women throttled babies freshly plucked from the womb—and then wept in utter bafflement. He remembered a boy walking through the ruins of Sacramento, weeping, “Why did I kill my mom? Why did I kill my mom?” And then the boy had come within nineteen steps and … without meaning to, Gage had put him out of his misery.

“Nah. I don’t blame them. I just …” He didn’t have to say it. She smiled sadly and they understood one another.

“Nice not to have to shout.”

“Yeah. I … have some dried fish for you, if you need it. I’ll leave it at the fence. I thought maybe I’d loan you my solar radio, too, if you wanted. The dog dug a hole under the fence a ways down. I could push it under there … leave it for you to get later. You can see me walking a good quarter mile off from there.”

“That’s so sweet. You look like you carved your face up a bit …”

“Best I could do with what I had.”

“You’re still a nice looking guy.”

Probably not when the AggFac hits, he thought. But he said only, “Thanks.”

“I’ll borrow the radio, I promise to bring it back …”

NOVEMBER 6, 2023

I’ve seen her every day but yesterday—I was really worried yesterday when she didn’t come but she had to duck a guy who had gotten wind of her. He was stalking her. She finally managed to lure him up to a hill she knew real well and she shot him from cover. Smart, cool-headed girl. I’m crazy about her. Of course, I can’t get within nineteen steps of her but… I’m still crazy about her.

She told me about a girl who’d lived down the street from her, they talked from rooftops, sometimes. The girl would trade a look at her naked body to guys who’d come around, look at her naked up on a second floor balcony. She had a gun up there in case they started up. They’d leave her food and stuff and they’d look at her naked and masturbate. It worked for awhile but of course some predator got wind of it, some guy who was always more or less AggFac, even before it came along, and he busted in and jumped her. Killed her, of course, the AggFac won’t be denied, but I figure her body was still warm afterwards. Lot of bodies get raped now.

Why did Brenda tell me this story? Maybe suggesting we trusted each other enough to get naked, if only from a distance? I’m too embarrassed to masturbate even if she’s doing it too. That desperate I’m not.

I wrote her some poetry I’m going to leave for her. She might blow me off for good after she reads it, if she’s got any taste …

“FEELS LIKE IT might snow,” Brenda said, hugging herself against the morning mist, the occasional gusts of cold wind.

“Kind of cold. I could go back, get you a blanket, toss it over.” They were sitting in their usual spot, fence between them.

“Oh, it’d probably get stuck on the wire,” she said.

“I could send Gassie over again to keep you warm.”

“Last time he came over he humped my leg.”

“He did? I didn’t see that.” He was only momentarily tempted to say, I don’t blame him. Even now he could be slicker than that.

“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” she said. She chewed her lip for a moment, then went on, “Look—you ever hear about someone being cured of, like, a phobia, before the AggFac, by getting used to whatever they were scared of, little by little? Scared of flying, they made you go to airports, sit in a plane, but then get off the plane before it flies, look at pictures taken out a plane window, till you’re ready to fly … all that kind of thing. You know?”

“Yeah, I forget what they call that. But … you don’t think the AggFac would work that way. It’s not a phobia.”

“No it isn’t. But it’s a kind of compulsive aversion for people … when they get physically close. Right? What if a person could sort of inure themselves to the presence of another person within nineteen steps—by slow degrees? Make the brain accustomed to the other person … the wiring of the brain itself acclimated to them.”

“How? It’s so powerful that even if your eyes are shut and you can’t see the person, soon as you know they’re close, the AggFac hits and you kill them. Whatever you do, the murder reflex comes out. I mean—I could probably find a way to restrain myself, somehow, for awhile, so I couldn’t get loose too easily. So you could get close—but then, let’s face it, you’d kill me. I mean, mothers killed children they loved all their lives … ”

“Sure. But … suppose we both restrain ourselves somewhat. With rope, whatever, the weapons off somewhere, we keep the fence between us at first … but we’re basically within reach. I don’t think I could even bite you through those links. But we could have some contact …”

The idea made him breathless. His blood raced as he thought about it. But then he shook his head. “Even if we didn’t hurt one another—we’d hate one another, within The Nineteen. There’d be no pleasure in it—just rage.”

“Our brains would feel that way—at first. But our bodies! Our bodies would … I think they’d respond. It’d be a kind of … counter force in the brain. Maybe enough, after awhile, to … Oh, Gage I can’t take this distance from people much longer. I’m … I’ve got skin hunger. It’s bad. I have to try something.”

“Hey. Me too. And I really, really like you. I’d have liked you before all this stuff, I swear it. But—even if we couldn’t hurt each other, how would the encounter ever end? We’d be smashing at each other through the fence!”

“That’s the risk. There has to be some risk. There always was some risk. But Gage—I want to try. I think that … if I’m starting to hurt myself against the fence, I’ll finally manage to back off and the AggFac’ll go away. Then we can try again. We can inure. We can accustom. We can … acclimate. Maybe you’ll stop seeing me as … the other. Maybe I’ll be, like, an extension of you, after awhile, so the AggFac won’t come any more, at least when it’s me.”

“You mean … you want to get naked, on either side of the fence …”

“Yeah. Well, I’ll keep my coat on, and some boots. Won’t look too elegant but … I’m burning to touch you. I want to love you. I want you to love me …”

She was crying now. Finally he said yes.

NOVEMBER 11, 2023

The weather cleared up some, and, partly naked, we tried it. We each had our guns put way out of reach but where the other could see it. She had some rope, left some for me—she’d pushed it through the mesh, inch by inch, while she was waiting for me. We took turns, measuring it out carefully. The rope went from a tree behind me to the fence, just enough so I could press against it, but restraining me so I couldn’t start to climb over it easily. My arms were tied to my sides. That was tricky. Had to work with our teeth, use a fork in a tree to pull a knot taut, stuff like that. Laughing a lot back and forth as we worked out how to do it, all alone, each on their side of the fence. Of course we knew it was still possible to get out of the rope but it would take time and the other could get away or get their gun … We thought maybe we’d be too frenzied with kill lust or the other kind to do really work out how to attack the other person with all that stuff in the way. The AggFac isn’t about thinking or planning, god knows.

I used up the last of my soap, getting ready for this. She had cleaned herself up too …

We came close, the fence between us, the rope restraining us. The AggFac hit and there was no remembering how we’d said we’d loved each other, there was no remembering how we wanted to trust …

• • •

HE TRIED TO snap at her nose through the mesh, envisioned tearing it off in his teeth, but couldn’t reach her. She tried to bite into his chin, couldn’t reach it.

But their skin touched, through the links, and he did get a hard-on under the rope—it was roped to his belly, no way it was going to be free to go through that fence, she’d bite it off for sure. They writhed and snapped and snarled and then she managed to back away …

STILL, I SWEAR something did get through the AggFac, some other feeling—it really did get through. Just enough.

We both got bloody on the fence but we’re going to try again. We have a plan, a way to try it in the cabin.

HIS HEART WAS slamming in his chest, so loud he could hear it in the quiet of the cabin. He just lay there on his bunk listening to his heart thudding, trying the ropes, hoping the self-restraint system he’d worked up was going to hold him long enough. He could get out of the ropes, afterward, but it’d take time. The dog was tied up in the woods. He was ready for her to come. Maybe she wouldn’t show up. He’d lie here like an idiot and some son of a bitch would climb over the fence and find him here, before he got loose, and he’d be helpless. Then dead.

Big risk, trying it in the cabin this way. Risk from her too. She said she was getting some control over the AggFac, but how long would it last, in close proximity?

He knew he couldn’t bear it if he killed her. If she killed him, well, it wouldn’t matter.

The door opened and he looked up and saw her there, inside The Nineteen, almost naked. Her hands were all muffled, tied together and smothered in big thick home-made boxing gloves, and her mouth was gagged, she’d gagged it herself, to try to keep her from biting him.

The color drained from the room. The Eeeee was building up in the back of his throat; was trying to get out of her too. He could see her struggling to keep it back. But the other thing, the distance from the AggFac, that they’d worked on, built up through the fence, that was there too. He was able to look at her, like a man close to the sheet of flames in a forest fire—feeling the heat painfully but not quite so close he was burned yet.

She waited there for a moment, looking at his ropes. Then she started toward him. He tried to hold onto the memory of her touch, through the fence, the desire he felt for her, but the AggFac rose up. He writhed against the ropes.

She rushed him, her face reddening with AggFac, leaped on him, straddled him …

IT WAS FUNNY how the two feelings were there, right close, so distinct. Kill. Love. Almost intertwined. But not combined. Like, alternating. I just kept trying to drag my mind back to the love feeling. I looked in her eyes, saw her doing the same thing. Whole moments of close, intimate sanity, each one of those moments—impossible to explain how precious they were. Impossible.

THE AGGFAC WAS still there but somehow, for a few moments, they were in a kind of blessed state of betweenness. She was there, so close, her breath on his cheek, the feeling of her closeness like a hot meal after a week of hunger.

Something in him, something that went to sleep during the Aggression Factor, quivered awake and brought color back to the room … Their eyes locked … hers cleared … She stopped shaking … .

She stopped pounding at him … and slipped him into her, pumped her hips, working the gag out of her mouth, chewing the gloves off her hands so she could touch him.

There was intimacy; after so much privation, there was rapid mutual orgasm. Then he drew away from her, instinctively, as he came, and the AggFac returned, and he started thrashing against the ropes, trying to kill her, and her own Aggression broke free in response, and she started clawing at his eyes, snapping at his throat. She bit hard, she tore, his blood began to flow …

Some of his rope gave way. Enough.

He seized her by the throat and—just to get her hands from his eyes—threw her off him, to the floor. He tore loose as she scrambled to her feet, turned snarling to face him. He reached out with one hand, scooped up the chair, threw it at her—it felt light as cardboard to him in that moment. It struck her on the side of the head and she fell backwards, crying out. He still had ropes around his ankles and jerked them loose, looking for another weapon to kill her with. Stunned, confused, she crawled to the door …

She turned and stared dazedly at him. He hunkered, ready to spring at her. Panting, they stared at one another. She was within Nineteen. He wanted to kill her. But a second passed and he didn’t spring. Neither did she. The betweenness was in her eyes. But it wouldn’t last, not now.

“Run!” he managed, huskily.

But she hesitated …

And then the moment passed.

FEBRUARY 2, 2024.

I’ve met someone else. Her name is Elise. Pretty soon I’m going to tell her about the fence and the process. I’m going to try again. I have to try again.

There was that one second, when I was free, and didn’t attack. Seeing the humanness in her eyes, too, for a moment. It gave me hope. That one second could telescope out to a lifetime of forbearance …

Some day I’ll get control of it, and then I can be honest with Elise. And show her Brenda’s grave.