It’s a few hours later, and the first night of missions is underway. Enzo knew the passcode to the front door and let us in the stranger’s house. I later learned that someone in the Liberty Subterraneans installs security systems. Inside the home, we each have our roles to play, and my job is to watch our target as he sleeps. Breathing tubes aid his respiratory system. Enzo is downstairs. He has the more formidable job—a two-step process. The first step requires him to install technology in the resident’s home. Technology they will never see or come to know. He fixes small spy cams about the house. Peels off adhesives and fastens them to the underside of couches. Behind bookcases. Picture frames. And where he can, he installs Raspberry Pi devices—a small and crude version of a computer. The Raspberry Pi runs Linux, a bare-bones operating system that allows a remote user, say a hacker, to control the device to which it’s attached. It could be your smart TV. Your home security cameras. Laptops. The second step of Enzo’s job requires him to take what is pertinent for identity theft—searching through the man’s drawers, cabinets, and mail—maybe cracking open a safe if necessary. I hear the ruffling of paper downstairs, and I know Enzo is still searching. Sweat and chills run down my fingertips and soak my leather gloves. My mind prays to a nameless god—asking her or him or they or it to make sure this man doesn’t wake anytime soon. Never sees me as the intruder that I am. The criminal I have become. I know this is wrong, and I know this isn’t who I want to be, but I also know that in order to feel complete again, I need the fresh start that Rocket promises. As long as these people don’t get hurt, I tell myself. Maybe it’s not so bad. This goes on for thirty or forty minutes before I hear the signal. Enzo clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth twice. That means he’s found what we needed. The night’s mission is complete.
* * *
It’s Tuesday, daytime, and the name of the game is “Avoid Terry at All Costs.” I sit at my desk, slouching so the top of my laptop covers my eyes and face from anyone trying to read my panic. My “Oh shit, what have I promised” demeanor. I occasionally spot Terry walking the halls and going from one meeting to the next. I take an extra-long lunch break. When I get back, Cal is standing by my desk.
“Any ideas?” he asks nervously.
Cal knows what kind of a journalist I am. My strengths and weaknesses. He knows that most, if not all, of my successful stories were developed in a slow boil. How I would catch a rumor about something nefarious in the county. Hold the rumor from the police for the time being while I tried to collect more bits of information around town. At the dive bars in Seaside. The illegal card games in Marina. Talk to the local cab drivers who work the oddest hours—their back seats are often the street’s version of a confessional, a driver instead of a priest, a passenger instead of a penitent. Only when I had enough information about what was going on would I seek any comments from the police. They deny it otherwise. But all that takes time. More than what I have been allotted now.
“None.”
We hold our anxious stares. Protect the shared conspiracy through our silence. Terry doesn’t seek me out. Today I am safe.
Night falls, and my nocturnal work begins again. I brace for more disappointment in myself. Think of the farm and everything that happened there. Use it to prevent myself from pulling the rip cord on these missions. A means to an end, I tell myself.
Enzo picks me up and we’re soon at 501 Ocean Ave. in Monterey. A little brown Spanish adobe one-story. We’re inside before our ski masks cover our chins. Same assignments as last time. I hover in the doorway and watch the only resident of the household. A small old lady sleeping on her side. She faces the opposite wall, her hands huddled to her chest in a praying pose. A nearby nightstand balances an array of picture frames—trips around the world with a husband no longer here. I fight the urge to slink down against the wall and close my heavy eyes. I snagged a couple of catnaps in the early evening—neither more than ten minutes. After the second nap, I chugged a cup of coffee with three NoDoz caffeine pills crushed and stirred into the mug, followed by a couple of Adderall—my fourth and fifth of the day. It’s all wearing off now. I hear Enzo’s click-clack from down the hall.
Another night in the books. Another person’s life taken without them noticing. What am I becoming?
* * *
It’s Wednesday and my game of Terry-Roulette continues. We’re well into the afternoon, and there’s no sign of him or Cynthia or their tormenting expectations for the story I promised. Like a fool, I lower my guard. Walk the building to stretch my legs. I fixate on the lines marking the linoleum floor when I see his shoes. It’s Terry’s unmistakable red-and-black Air Jordans that scream, “I might be your boss, but I’m still a cool person, and can’t we be friends during happy hour?” His left cheek bulges out with his last few bites of whatever he just ate.
“T-minus five days until I fire you and Cal,” he says with a grin. I head back to my desk and carry the countdown.
T-minus five days.
It’s nighttime, and Enzo and I are at 2364 Spotsylvania Drive. It’s Seaside, the poorer part of the peninsula. A town with more concrete than grass, more strip malls than cute coastal ma and pa stores. The residential neighborhood sits on a sloping hill with beaches at its base. If you walk to the top of Seaside at night and look across the black water and over to the more affluent parts of the coastline, the Pacific Ocean stops feeling like a blessing and more like a moat keeping you from their precious California castles.
Enzo and I stand in the shadows—which are not hard to find since the streetlights in this neighborhood aren’t working. I survey the house, tonight’s target. Bars on the windows. Metal screen door with cracked white paint. When we walk around the side of the house, a motion light goes off.
“Relax,” Enzo says. “It’s going to be fine.”
The back door to the house has the touch pad above the doorknob and Enzo enters the four-digit code. We’re inside. It’s a small family room. A frumpy sofa and two patio chairs pointed toward the television. Our breathing slows. The exhales plume out of our masks and become little visible clouds methodically dissipating in front of our faces, the first signs that autumn is beginning its slow transformation into winter. Enzo and I nod at each other—tacitly acknowledging our core responsibilities. He starts to look for the necessary documents. Social Security cards. Passports. Bank statements. Car registrations. Anything that allows the Subterraneans to lift the identity off the target and give it to one of our own. Someone who fulfilled enough missions to be rewarded with Rocket’s promised rebirth. I suppose that will be me one day. A new name. A new life.
Is that what I want?
I find the bedroom and nudge the door open. There rests a queen mattress on the floor. A wrinkled couple of spoons—the man in a white T-shirt with his arm around the woman, the blanket held to her lips. We’re stealing from people who own very little for us to steal. Instead, what we take is the one thing they probably believed could never be removed—their sense of self. This realization turns me into total garbage. I go numb and just do my job. After twenty minutes, Enzo taps me on the shoulder. He holds up a black notebook and shrugs, not with indifference but uncertainty. He shows me a page featuring handwritten passwords for about twenty or thirty websites.
On the walk home, I ask Enzo how many more of these we have left.
“I honestly don’t know,” he says with exhaustion. “We show them what we’ve got at the end of the week. They’ll let us know after that.”
It’s almost over, I tell myself.
* * *
It’s Thursday now and I spend much of the day working the phones at my desk, fishing for story ideas. I talk to a couple of sources within the police department.
“A bar fight last week led to an arrest,” one source tells me. He’s a desk clerk within the department named Kevin. He feeds me a story here and there. It took some work to develop him as a reliable source. This is how it tends to go as a reporter. You have to invest in building relationships with as many people around town as possible. Buying them a coffee here. Lunch there. Showing interest in them outside of their job. In this case, Kevin is actually interesting. A weekend warrior type that eventually showed me how to surf. But Kevin doesn’t have much for me now. “We found out that one of the guys had a warrant for auto theft. That juicy enough for you?”
No.
Earlier in the morning, Cal told me what’s at stake if I can’t cobble a story together.
“I have enough savings to make it through a month, maybe two if I get on unemployment,” he said. “But after that, I figure I’d have to move somewhere with more opportunities. No way the Monterey Herald hires someone who couldn’t hack it here.”
Cal always had a clear plan for his career. Put in enough time at the Coast News to land a promotion or two. Parlay that into an editor job at a daily paper—nothing too huge. Probably another mid-major regional. The Herald would suffice. Then, go for broke. Something like the Los Angeles Times or The Washington Post. If he’s lucky, he figures he could have a recurring guest spot on network news. But all this goes up in smoke if his résumé shows he couldn’t even make it at the Coast News. I barely care about losing my own job. I’m trying to do this for him.
T-minus four days.
By the time I get home, my head is fully congested with my problems. So much going on at once that I’ve nearly forgotten about the man with the gun. I think about him standing in front of me that night, and my stomach acid churns hotter. I drop my warm forehead into my warmer palms. Earthquakes erupt within my belly and move north, tremoring into my cranium. My ears start to buzz and thump like electronica. Pressure mounts at the side of my head. I open my eyes to make sure this is real.
And for the first time, it happens.
The room flashes static with wavy lines of black-and-white crunch. My view of the living room—the closed blinds, a bookcase overflowing with stacks of novels, manila folders, and magazines—is gone, like a cut satellite feed, a lost cable connection. Like a glitch.
I’m glitching.
The wavy lines of electricity overtake my vision. My lungs fill with air I’m too afraid to exhale. I hold it in and wait for the glitch to fade. Count to ten. Count to ten again. Lose count and wait. And wait more.
Eventually, the glitch’s distortion, like an AM radio station too far out of range, fades. I exhale. The sun is now setting. Time has passed, the extent of which I have no idea. Concern levels are redlining. Options start running through my head. Call 911. Get to an emergency room. Forgo duties with Enzo and never see Rocket again.
The meds, the drugs—no more.
The forced insomnia must end.
This is a wake-up call, and my brain is on the other end of the phone.
I think of all this before I think of the other side of the coin. What glitching might signal.
Progress.
I head to my bookcase, my equilibrium misfiring, and I walk like a newborn doe. I open the one book that matters most, my Kierkegaard drug haven. Every prescription bottle is empty. I try to recall when I ran out. “I can’t remember,” I mumble.
I smile.
Progress confirmed.
* * *
My apartment is completely dark. I’ve waited hours for the next glitch. For the next sign that my memory is actually dying. That all of the self-poisoning, all the sleep deprivation is finally paying off. But the glitching has not returned.
My door rumbles from somebody’s knuckles. I open it, and there stands Enzo. It’s Thursday, and this is our last night of missions for the week.
“Good evening, good morning, and good night,” he says.
“One second.” I head to the chess set. Move the white bishop to E2.
“Have you beaten yourself yet?” Enzo jokes.
“All I do is beat myself.”
Enzo insists on driving to the target location tonight. We pull into a neighborhood and park underneath the cover of a tree. Enzo kills the engine.
“Do you want to take the lead this time?” Enzo asks.
I’ve grown tired of watching the poor souls we’re stripping of their privacy. If I’m going to drown in a pool of felonies, I might as well do it in the deep end.
We walk toward the target house in Pacific Grove, an artsy but also richer part of the peninsula. Rather than Audis and BMWs, you’re more likely to find Volvos—the automotive loophole that accommodates pretension and luxury, the thing you can park in the faculty lot that signals you have tenure but haven’t joined the bourgeoisie.
We arrive at the address, 867 Arkwright Street, and both Enzo and I exchange looks.
“Do we have this right?” I ask.
Enzo holds his phone over a piece of paper listing all of the addresses for the week. “This is the one.”
But this doesn’t look like an average house. It looks like an abandoned storefront. Two faded words above the door and front window, only the second one legible: Salon.
Enzo shrugs and stuffs the piece of paper inside his trench coat. We put our masks and gloves on. Start to case the residence. I walk around the side of the house into the backyard. Dry weeds sprout out between the long cracks in the patio’s concrete. All the windows are closed shut, the latch locked. I find Enzo back at the front door, his eyes bugging out behind his ski mask. He motions at the doorknob and twists it. Unlocked. We walk inside and Enzo closes the door behind us. A four-foot fish tank dimly lights the room. A school of little red neon tetras do laps within the tank. They circle a despondent creature—one betta fish floating peacefully, blowing bubbles to the top of the tank, its royal-blue lion’s mane undulating as the water moves through it. The rest of the room serves as the dusty remnants of the salon. Directly in front of us are the haircut stations. A long mirror fastened against the entire length of the wall. Opposite the mirror, four swivel chairs wait for clients of yesteryear. Citrus-colored drying bowls hover above each chair.
Enzo moves down the hall. I stay put and analyze the room. It’s what used to be the salon’s waiting area. A leather sofa and a couple of plain accent chairs. An end table with a stack of magazines and envelopes. I start by sorting through the envelopes like baseball cards, looking for the logos of credit cards or banking companies. Every envelope appears to be junk mail, all addressed to a person by the name of Fuji Nakamura. I take one step toward the back of the house when I hear it. It’s faint at first. Louder as I focus on it. Pained breathing from old lungs. A tired throat gurgles. Lost in the awkwardness of fish tanks and hair bowls is a dark crevice in the corner of the room forming a space just big enough for a twin bed. And there on the mattress, beneath four or five blankets, her face turned toward me, brown eyes wide open and glistening from the aquarium’s light, is an old woman.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I whisper instinctively. I hold my hands out in a manner that somehow signifies surrender. She lifts her head off her pillow, never blinking, never looking away. The past prunes her face. Her thinning hair is comically dyed black, patches of pink scalp breaking through the frizzy strands atop her head.
“Who you going to hurt?” she teases with a Japanese accent. She starts to giggle like a child. The giggle morphs into a cough. She reaches for a plastic breathing mask, tubes connected to an oxygen tank. She inhales, takes a few seconds, and rests her head back down on her pillow. “You’re desperate tonight?”
Maybe.
This is the point in the evening when I’m supposed to signal back to Enzo that it’s time to run. To get the fuck out of here. I catch a glimpse of myself in the long mirror. Dressed like a burglar. Caught like a criminal.
“Very desperate,” I mutter.
“Take what you want,” she says with annoyance. “Let me go back to sleep already.”
“I don’t want anything. I’m sorry.” I start to head for the front door.
“No,” she stops me. “You’re desperate. But I’m not. What you need?”
“Are you going to call the cops?”
“For what? No crime here tonight. Just a donation. Me to you. A donation is a crime now?” she giggles again. “What do you want? Money? My purse is right here.” She points to her frumpy bag on the floor. “You want jewelry? That’s the other room.”
“I don’t want any of that.”
“Then what?”
“I’m supposed to get information.”
“You come into this house for information? Life is never boring.” She laughs. “What kind of information you need?”
“Do you have a passport?”
“You want to travel?”
“A bank statement?”
“No bank.”
“Birth certificate?”
“Oh, I see,” she says. “You want my life.”
“I’m afraid so.” I cringe as the words leave my mouth.
“My life is almost gone,” she says. “But we can share what’s left. Go look under the fish tank.”
I do as I’m told. Underneath the tank is a small filing cabinet with one drawer. I open it and find greeting cards, Post-it notes with written reminders in Japanese and English, and spare car keys. Beneath all of that is the gold mine. Immigrant visa. Marriage license. Social Security card. Death certificate.
“You can only have my life. Leave my husband’s alone.”
I nod. Take her visa and Social Security card and leave behind the documents belonging to her husband, including his death certificate. “Thank you.”
“Yes, yes. Thank me by leaving.”
I want to get out of here before she changes her mind. Or before I change mine. Before I give her back the documents and call the cops on myself. I walk through a narrow hallway with two rooms on the right side. Both are nothing more than a hoarder’s closet space. Junk from wall to wall, stacking on top of itself. It would have been impossible for anyone to place a Raspberry Pi or spy cams in the middle of all that anyway. I find Enzo on the back patio, mask off, staring at the stars.
“Weird, lonely place, huh?”
“Yeah, but we’re done,” I tell him.
“You find something in all that junk?”
“More than I wanted.”
On the way home, Enzo thanks me for great work this week. Tells me that I should be proud. That these are essential steps on my journey. I stay quiet but for a few grunts to let him know I’m listening. Eventually, he pulls up to my apartment building.
“We’ll show Rocket what we retrieved tomorrow night. I hope he will be happy.”
It better be worth it, I think.
I collapse on my couch and gaze at the inside of my apartment. Think about the Japanese woman and what we’ve taken from her. From all of them.
Then I think about the glitching. Wonder what the fuck it’s about. How long it will last. I ask myself when the next glitch will occur, hoping that I never recover from it.
* * *
It’s Friday, the end of the workweek—for both of my jobs. I’m out of every medication that makes up my cocktail and have zero refills left. This means that my narcotics warring against my own memory—and, by extension, the remembrance of the farm and my greatest sin—are depleted and in need of reinforcements. This also means I’m due for a doctor’s visit. But this isn’t any doctor. This is Dr. Pill. Love Vicodin? Need a hefty supply of muscle relaxers? How about some Quaaludes? Dr. Pill is your man.
He wasn’t my first or second option. I found him after visiting half a dozen other general physicians. At each one, they rejected my requests for medications due to suspicion—all asking the worst kind of rhetorical questions.
“Parkinson’s is a serious diagnosis and not one I can make and treat here on the spot. You realize that, don’t you?”
“I can’t diagnose hypertension based on your blood pressure today. Are you sure you’re experiencing these symptoms?”
“Why is it you never needed Adderall until now?”
I finally found Dr. Pill after searching “nearby pill mills” on Reddit. I call his office and make an appointment for next week. Hopefully, I’ll still have a job by that point. What Dr. Pill sacrifices in ethics, he makes up for in profit. But right now, I’m able to cover the cost of the prescriptions with my health insurance.
I hang up the phone. I’m left with the word processor that taunts me with its unmarked canvas. My fingertips rest in home position atop the keyboard, paralyzed with uncertainty, never punching down on any single letter, incapable of writing word one for my glorious story Terry is expecting to hear about on Monday. I see him periodically—in the hallway or from across the office. He leaves me alone. He knows when the execution will occur.
At three o’clock on Fridays, most people are transitioning to weekend mode. Many have left the office. Others are surfing the Net to kill time. I catch Joan in the commons, an overly bright room furnished by IKEA. She sits on a stool in the corner. My instinct is to turn around before she sees me.
“Hey!” she says.
Too late.
I smile, probably like an idiot, and she motions me to the stool next to her. She asks me the standard questions most coworkers do for the sake of small talk. How was your week? How’s Terry been? Aren’t you glad today is Friday? She tells me a story about Kirk, another lawyer for the paper. About how he overspent his consulting budget and is now trying to reclassify the expenses before anyone realizes it. Little does he know that she already found out. She laughs because she genuinely finds it funny. I laugh because she laughs.
She tosses what’s left of her half-eaten Buddha bowl in the garbage. It’s from a vegan spot a half mile from the office. Joan was new to the area when she first started working here. She had asked me for food recommendations. I found out she’s a vegetarian. “Can’t go full vegan because I love pizza so much,” she said. I told her about my favorite pizza place and took her to the vegan spot her first month on the job. I tried to pay but she insisted. “For showing me around,” she said. She gets that Buddha bowl about once a week now.
“Any weekend plans?” she asks.
“Nothing eventful,” I lie. “Probably just a weekend at home.”
“Nothing wrong with that. I better wrap up my own week.”
I finish the day feeling desperate once again. I check the public crime logs. Email a guy that once did six months in county. Listen to the police scanner and hope for a miracle.
T-minus three days.
* * *
All I can think about is fish. Scaly fish. Oily fish. Smelly fish. Enzo and I have taken our seats on the cold concrete within the warehouse—the same venue as the last meeting. The same nauseating fish aroma comes from the back of the room as the catch of the day is laid out over the ice, on display for the morning’s market rush. If this meeting doesn’t provide me some confidence in what Rocket is selling, I might just abandon this plan altogether and leave the Subterraneans behind. Hope that the glitching takes care of my problem instead.
“Incredible yield,” Enzo says, looking around the room.
I ask him what he means.
“It looks like almost every pledge is back tonight.”
Caris, draped in his brown trench coat, shuts the entrance door. The room’s torches hiss as a gust of air bullies them.
“Is Rocket not here?”
Enzo holds his index finger up to his lips like a librarian.
“Attention,” Caris booms out to the room. He tries to make his voice sound deeper than it really is when he does this. “Can I see all the sponsors?”
About two dozen sponsors, including Enzo, approach Caris. They line up single file. After a few minutes, Enzo gets his chance, and he looks more nervous than I’ve seen him before, as if he’s searching for words he cannot find. Caris browbeats him as he struggles to talk. Eventually, Enzo hands Caris the documents and walks back to me.
“What happened?”
“Cannot say,” he whispers.
From the corner of the room, a small glowing sphere captures our attention. The orb burns brighter as it is carried out from behind the curtains, now toward the front of the warehouse, cradled between fingers as long and bony as every evil witch found within a fable. The orb spins light through the warehouse in quick spurts. I see flashes of Enzo’s mesmerized face—mouth open, smile starting to grow. Flashes of trench coats. Flashes of fish. The light gives away more of its owner—its master. The lanky arms, the sharp elbows. A torso towering above all. His dreadlocks bounce up and down, side to side, as the light continues to circle inside the orb.
Rocket has taken his stage.
“I look across our cathedral and see a congregation that was once comprised of little birds, all eager to get out from the warm wing of a mother, and now only see devoted raptors of the night staring back at me.” Rocket raises the orb. The spinning beams, one after another, never-ending, penetrate my consciousness. “My creatures, my darlings—I have come to the knowledge that you have flashed your talons this week. You have snatched what was required and brought it back to our nest. And to that, what do we say?”
“God is love!” the sponsors yell.
“What else?” Rocket beckons.
“God is life!” the room gets louder with some pledges joining in.
Rocket raises the orb above his head. “And?”
“God is a bomb!” the room crescendoes.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Enzo says to me. Before I can respond, I realize what he’s insinuating. I joined the chant.
Did I just glitch?
Rocket lowers the orb and continues to let the light paint our faces. “Yes, God is a bomb. As I have told you, and as I will continue to tell you, I will help you detonate the past to liberate your future.” Rocket nods to Caris, now standing at the entrance, and suddenly Rocket’s orb turns off. But as it does, intense slivers of light shoot out from the side of the room. From brown coats holding their own orbs. “Let’s talk about the past for a moment. I know everyone here took great steps this week in ridding themselves of this enemy. And I know that it might not have felt as comfortable as you might like. But for our group to thrive, we need everyone to do their part.” Rocket’s gold teeth sparkle with each illuminating stream. He begins to twirl his hands with whimsy. His conviction draws me in. “What is the past, exactly? Can you touch it? Smell it? Does it even exist? And if you believe it does—then what does it mean for your existence now?” He folds his hands across his chest and bathes in our silence, our mercy. “But the past is no more real than your dreams. All that is real is ‘the right now.’ And the only thing that is controllable is the ‘here on out.’ The future is as real as you can envision it in the current moment. But as long as you acknowledge the past, that vision of the future becomes compromised by the gravity of your memories. That is why I am here, my not-so-little birds. To help remove the invisible hand of the past.”
Rocket holds his arms out toward us, offering himself. A tear trickles down my face and slips salty between my lips. I want that gravity removed. I want my future again.
“My beautiful birds,” he says adoringly. “My metaphysical self combusts from all the love I have for each and every one of you.”
A pair of hands begin a thunderclap, a sonic eruption that stings my ears. I look down and realize it is my hands applauding. My hands that everyone in the warehouse emulates. We all answer Rocket’s call for love.
“Thank you, my birds—but not necessary.” Rocket motions for silence. “Every time we meet, it is about love. But not every time we meet can it be about celebrations. And I know that while everyone here tonight has succeeded in what was asked of them, we have one special creature that has risen faster than expected.” Rocket scans the attendees. At first, his eyes are processing the other side of the room. But as his dagger chin swivels more in my direction, I can feel it. A slow swell building at the center of my chest. The anticipation and hopefulness. At last, his eyes meet mine. “Dash. My beautiful nocturnal being. Please come forward.”
I approach Rocket—a glowing figure of magnificence. He holds out his hands and I take them with mine. I crook my neck back so I can look into his eyes as we stand at his altar. “Caris tells me that you have gone above and beyond your calling this week. That you took point position during one of your missions. Is this true?”
“It is true,” I say.
“Beautiful boy.”
God is love.
“My sweet, sweet son.”
God is life.
“You have earned this special, special gift.” Caris walks toward us, holding something that folds over both of his arms. “This gift represents the progress you have made and the work yet ahead.” He takes the item from Caris. The room’s flashing lights unwrap my gift from the shadows. Rocket slides the beige trench coat over my arms. The warehouse begins to cheer. Louder and louder. Enzo pumps his fist into the air. The warmth within my chest starts to boil with satisfaction. With accomplishment. And for a nanosecond, the Japanese woman and the old couple pop into my head, making me second-guess the nature of this reward. But they fade back into the darkest recesses of my mind.
Because they are the past.
And the past is not real.
God is a bomb.
The Next Chapter Begins in 3, 2, 1 . . .