I sit jailed at my desk while the other reporters move about the office. They take the long route to the printer on the other side of my cubicle, zigzagging a path that avoids me at all costs.
Because I’ve become the pariah of the Coast News.
I get an email from Cynthia asking me to see her immediately.
Two days have passed since the Laura Poole debacle. Two days since Terry told me—through a series of creative uses of the f-word, how screwed I was for fabricating the story. I elected to remain silent after each attack and accusation. This fueled Terry’s belief that I did make false connections about my experience with the man in the street and the Coast Killer and pissed him off more. The one-person PR team at the Coast News canceled all my interviews with other outlets. Terry has since ghosted me. No check-ins at my desk. No emails. My team meetings have been removed from my calendar. Normally, reducing my interactions with Terry would be cause for a bottle of champagne or a Cuban cigar, or however it is people with healthy amounts of serotonin celebrate.
But it’s not.
Until I get those Lobotomy Pills and a fresh start in some other town, in some other state, I need a job. The Coast News pays for my apartment. Food for Glitch. Visits to Dr. Pill. The last week and a half has been spent sitting atop the workplace throne, one where people in the office who had previously never so much as said hello to me were suddenly asking if they could buy me coffee because my friendship was a shortcut toward increased social capital. But just as quickly as I was made the golden boy at the Coast News—the prom king of the leper colony—I was deemed too toxic to engage.
Cynthia’s door is slightly ajar. Closed enough to tell everyone that she’s too busy to be available, yet open enough to keep that precious “my door is always open to you” promise. I give the courtesy middle knuckle double-knock before entering. She’s seated at her desk, pounding away on her laptop. Without breaking her concentration, Cynthia holds up her index finger and signals for me to wait. I take a seat on the other side of the desk, which is riddled with trinkets—half-marathon trophies, stress balls, framed photos of non-photos like “Keep Calm and Carry On.” I look for the “Hang in There” cat poster, but she has resisted that one.
Cynthia swivels her chair to face me. She crosses her arms. Her ruby hair is pulled back into a tight knot, choking the life out her personality. “Terry wanted me to talk to you,” she says.
“He can’t talk to me himself?”
“Terry has to run a paper. I’m sure you understand he’s a busy person.”
“Very busy.”
“I’ll be brief because I’m busy as well.”
“Very, very busy.”
“Save me the sarcasm.” Cynthia grabs a top folder off a Jenga stack of papers and other folders and slides it across the table, narrowly missing a troll doll. “I’ll be honest and say I disagree with Terry’s decision on this one.”
Inside the folder is a form unmistakably created by human resources. Terry has signed and dated the bottom. There is a section for me to do the same. I scan the form’s content and find my fate. I’m being suspended without pay, pending an investigation into the credibility of my Coast Killer story. The endgame is clear—they’re going to fire me. But firing a reporter that they were pimping out to national media just a few days ago is not a great look. They need an investigation to show due process. Cover their asses from a wrongful termination suit.
“I would have fired you,” Cynthia says in her 1960s sci-fi robot voice. “You’ve disgraced yourself and this paper.”
I grab a pen out of a coffee mug and sign the form. Slide it back to her.
“You should consider yourself lucky,” she tells me.
“Very, very, very lucky.”
“Someone from our end will be in touch about the investigation.”
I storm out without being melodramatic. No door slams. No stomping feet. But no “goodbye” or “have a nice day” either. I make my way down the hall, passing the Seymour Hersh and George Polk meeting rooms, the esteemed journalists who led careers without scandal. Without disgrace.
Cal is hanging around my desk as I approach. From the look on his face, my suspension and inevitable termination were hardly being kept a secret prior to Cynthia dropping the hammer on me.
“You know?”
“People are talking. Guessing Cynthia wants people to know.”
“Her misery is a virus.”
Cal offers to take me out. Coffee. Lunch. Beers. Whatever I want, he’s game. We agree on a time for drinks. He offers to give my car back even though the insurance money from his wrecked vehicle hasn’t arrived yet. I tell him to keep it for a few more days. Eventually, I leave the building with my hoodie pulled over my head. The walk home feels slow and pained with failure. Life is a ledger. Your good deeds and shameful sins. Any positives I’ve registered are too small and transactional. My failures and wrongdoings are too large and impactful. At a certain point, the ledger ceases to measure your deeds and reveals a complete picture. What you are—good or bad. The final sum.
And I’m in the red.
So it’s back to the main objective. The thing that makes the ledger insignificant. I take my phone out and call Enzo.
“I was starting to think our relationship was one-way,” he says. “Glad to know you will occasionally call me.”
Enzo’s voice delivers a surprising dose of stability amidst the current turbulence. He’s the lone person I trust who knows about the other side of me. The side willing to break into people’s homes and pledge allegiance to a weird ass seven-foot vampire with dreads. If Cal is my best daytime friend, Enzo fulfills the nighttime duties.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
I tell him about the paper. Laura Poole. About the suspension and the chance of losing my job. He asks how he can help make things better.
“Help me get going on these missions faster. I want to move on with a new life. I need the Lobotomy Pills.”
The rest of the walk home lingers on the nexus of a likely doomed life and the promise of something fresh. Somewhere different and far from Monterey. A town whose beaches seduce you into thinking that everything will be easy and okay. But the small-town repetitiveness that produces small-minded individuals drags you down those beaches, past the peaceful pieces of kelp sitting idle on the moist and soft sand, and into the warring ocean. Farther and farther into the horizon you go until the water turns blacker and deeper than you can imagine, and before you can fully grasp how far from home and safety you’ve ventured, you have to confront exactly what you are, exactly what you’ve become, and exactly what you will always be, over and over and over, day after day after day, until finally, when you reconcile the past, give in to what you know about yourself, you drown. So, in the end, it’s not hard to throw this all away—whatever good memories I might have—if I’m still left with the constant pain from the time on the farm and its days and nights that changed me forever and hang over my head.
Like a noose.
* * *
Back at my apartment, I find my mailbox throwing up envelopes and promotional cards. I empty it and walk past Emily and Veronica—the twins in mid-argument, their eyebrows pinching together while they bicker. Glitch rushes toward me as I open my front door, zigzagging around and through my legs, whining for attention. I give it to him. He licks my hands and face. I massage his ears before sorting through junk mail until I come across a purple envelope. No stamp. No return address. Instead, in thick black Sharpie, the question is presented to me in jagged, smeared handwriting: WHAT’S YOUR SECRET?
I pull out the envelope’s contents. And there in my hand lies three glossy black-and-white photographs. Of me. Of Enzo. Entering and leaving the warehouse the night of my testimony. The warehouse where Rocket conducts his affairs. The affairs nobody outside the Subterraneans is to know about. I flip the photographs over. More handwritten antagonizations: YOU TOLD YOUR STORY ABOUT ME. SHOULD I TELL A STORY ABOUT YOU?
There is something about this that feels different. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m looking at another person’s handwriting—jagged and disturbed—or maybe it’s because this is a direct threat, but this doesn’t feel like the night I came across the man at the dealership—the same guy who chased me on the freeway. I stare at the photos. Look back over the handwriting. I realize something else is different, something that’s missing. The hum. I don’t hear it.
A fist hammers my door and my spine lifts out of my back. Glitch starts barking. The fist hammers more. I put my eye to the peephole.
The cops.
I slide the photos underneath the stack of junk mail and out of view. Open the door to Officers Affleck and Damon. They cock their heads to the side. Jaws flexing as they chomp bubble gum. Aviator glasses reflect my image back at me. The local police academy must specialize in producing cliché and homogenized cops. Before I can greet them, they hold up the Coast News with my cover story facing me.
“Seems like you had a lot more to tell us than you let on,” Affleck says.
“A lot more,” Damon says.
“And nobody is buying that you spoke to an anonymous source in our department,” Affleck adds.
“Any reason you didn’t come to us with this information when we originally asked?”
It’s been a little over a week since the story originally ran, but evidently, that isn’t enough time for these two gumshoes to figure out that the story is bogus or that I’ve been suspended. “Officers, I’m a reporter. Those kinds of articles are to be expected.”
Affleck holds his hand up to me. The nonverbal version of shut up. “Are you aware that withholding this kind of information can be interpreted as obstruction of justice?”
“This wasn’t a crime-stopping article about a local burglar,” Damon says. “You’re screwing around with someone extremely dangerous. I know you’re probably loving all the attention you’re getting, but fifteen minutes of fame isn’t going to catch this guy. But working with law enforcement might. So before you print another one of these stories, you better think hard about what lines you’re crossing.”
I feign a look of contrition.
They throw in a couple more veiled threats about withholding evidence before they march off. Their radios echo within the courtyard as I close the door. My adrenal glands are kicking into sixth gear. Cold fear swirling at the base of my skull. I’m bookended by doom. A killer on my right. Prison time on my left.
* * *
My phone rumbles atop my coffee table. It’s a text from Enzo. It lists an address along with a simple message: Be there in ninety minutes. I battle against the fear that Affleck and Damon just instilled in me—that heading straight to my criminal life right now is a mistake, and I’ll get caught. So I play it smart. I survey the outside of my apartment complex and walk around the block. Make sure the cops are long gone and eventually head out.
My phone’s navigation takes me north to Gilroy. It’s best known for boiling during the summer months and hosting the Gilroy Garlic Festival—because at some point in the time, the world decided that needed to be a thing. There is a small downtown area with ma and pa storefronts. “Quaint,” people say when visiting. The downtown area and vast ocean of strip malls are all that Gilroy has to offer other than the orchards and farms. But as I drive down a two-way road that winds for miles, with only one or two houses pushed far off into the distance, I find a rectangular office building, three or four floors high. Slick black exterior. Few windows and the ones I can spot are too tinted to see inside. The structure is dense. It feels fortified. Impenetrable.
The parking lot is empty but for a pickup truck and the camping trailer attached to its hitch. Standing outside the egg-shaped trailer is Enzo. I crack a window for Glitch and get out.
Enzo flexes his newest article of clothing—a navy trench coat. “What do you think?” He tells me they gave it to him after I took my testimony. My success in this group is his success. Enzo tells me that navy trench coats are reserved for sponsors deemed successful over time. The brown trench coats, like the one Caris wears, are for those who manage all of the sponsors. But I’m not after a closetful of coats. I want something else.
Enzo motions to the trailer. “He’s waiting for you.” He opens the door for me. Inside I find Rocket, a creature too big for his surroundings, standing by the rear window. The trailer is narrow and cramped, probably like all camping trailers. Benches along one side lead to a café-style table. A stainless steel sink, electric stove, and a couple of cabinets on the other side.
“Rough day, my little bird?”
“You could say that.” I hold back on telling Rocket that the day was made even more complicated by the mail I received from a psycho killer. I try to forget about that for now.
“Just one more reminder that the normal world is not right for you. But that will not be the case for the next version of you.” He fidgets within his golden trench coat. Looks out the window. “Do you know what goes on inside this building?”
“No idea.”
“That’s why it’s perfect.” Rocket sits down at the café table. “Please, sit.”
I do as I’m told. Take a seat on the padded bench. We sit side by side.
“Inside that spectacular structure, found at any given time, are numerous recorders. Part-time transcribers.”
He looks at me as if I’m supposed to know what he’s talking about. I don’t.
“In a sense,” he says, “they are transcribing the beautiful people of this planet. Their thoughts. Their behaviors—even desires or fears. Someone is always watching and listening. And there are many more who want to know what they see and hear.”
“I don’t understand.”
Rocket sucks his bottom lip. Shakes his head. “That’s all the squawking this big bird can do for now. However, someone else will tell you more—provided you’re ready to take the next leap of faith.”
And this is the point in the conversation when I can see where we’re headed.
Nefarious oddities, like Rocket and Caris and the Subterraneans and the Lobotomy Pills and the myriad of missions—all different for one person to the next—often take the form of an avalanche. At first, you confuse the ambiguity of what you’re seeing with something you can control. As if you can dictate your own fate and evade the oddities if need be. But when the avalanche first begins, the ownership of control becomes clear—and it is not with you. What you mistook as chaos is instead quite concentrated. And if you’re trekking up the mountain when the avalanche starts, there is no time to stop and wonder about little else than the amassing weight of snow and debris headed for you. No reason to contemplate another avalanche on the other side of the mountain. In this case, with Rocket and everything I’ve experienced, I should have known better. I never saw a progression. A build toward something bigger than the missions I was already given. And now as I am here with Rocket and look upon this building, its presence insinuating a new level of operations, the oddity envelops me. Traps me in its crushing embrace. Suffocates me with an utter lack of options and the complete realization that I was never in control. Rather, I was controlled from the moment the avalanche first began, the first time I set foot in that warehouse.
Because that is the deal.
And I accepted it before I ever embarked on a single mission with Enzo. Before I ever put on a trench coat. So I push forward without asking Rocket the obvious questions about the building and what goes on inside of it. Because if I’m ever to get my end of the deal—a new life unburdened by the past—I have no choice but to agree to take that leap.
Rocket places his hand on my shoulder. “I understand you are in need of employment.”
I nod.
“How fortunate.” He motions to the building. “Employment awaits.”
He reaches for a duffel bag resting on a counter. Pulls out the same jewelry-sized box from the warehouse the other night. He taps it with his cocaine fingernail. “Are you in or out?”
I flip through a series of memories from my life. Halloween parties in elementary school—the excitement over seeing every other kid’s costume and wondering what they’d say about my nylon Ninja Turtle outfit. BMX bike rides through creeks in junior high—breaking my wrist while doing it and getting the cast signed a hundred times over at school. First love in high school—the extreme pain when it ended over a late-night phone call. The thrill of my first story in the college paper—pointing out my byline to my roommates as if I’d just become famous. It goes on. The good and the bad. Fender benders. One-night romances. Drinking too much. Living too little. All of the memories that I might look back upon on my deathbed. The flash of a lifetime in front of my eyes. But that also includes that in which I don’t want to remember. The thing that carries more weight than anything else. Renders everything that came before and after a moot point.
I whisper it through a rush of eagerness, lips never moving. “Yes.”
Rocket smiles at me in a way that I instantly recognize as different. Like this isn’t about another trench coat or precursor for him to call me a little bird one more time. This feels like the moment has arrived. All the trips to the deep, deep waters. All the journeys into the late, late night. Every stimulant swallowed. Every lie told.
He holds up the box. The brass hinges creak as he opens it. The four emerald pills greet me, their perfectly etched brains decorating their sides. “You’re ready for your first dose,” he says.
I reach down. Gently grab the first Lobotomy Pill with my thumb and index finger. Hold it in front of my eyes and the future comes into view like an open road.
Take a deep breath in. Let it out.
What you dream of has come to hunt you out.
“You bought the ticket,” Rocket whispers. “Now take the ride.”
We spend every year of our lives learning a little bit more about who we are and what makes us human. New fears. Old desires. Discovering why we are the way we are, one psychoanalysis at a time. Some get comfortable with what they learn. Others bury it deep down.
But tonight, God is a bomb.
Would you wash it all away with a push of a button? With a swallow of a pill? Forget everything about yourself and find out what you become? Are you brave enough, desperate enough to see if you’d like yourself afterward? Or to discover if you have any control over the outcome at all?
I swallow the pill.
I detonate the past.
The New You Begins in 3, 2, 1 . . .