Enemies lurk and pursue with hearts overflowing with volcanic malice, their faces blank because they are no one, and they are everyone all at once. Your gardener. Your FedEx deliveryman. The first person you see donning a beige or navy or brown trench coat. Anyone looking to cut the line and receive their Lobotomy Pills faster by capturing me—the Judas Iscariot of the Liberty Subterraneans. And right now my only guard against the threats beyond is nothing more than a slab of wood, a couple inches thick, sanded and finished.
Fuji’s front door. Its deadbolt locked.
That’s all that separates me from my problems. So I wait. Bide my time here at Fuji’s salon and ensure we’re safe. I hide the delivery truck several blocks away. Take apart my phone and her phone, making sure they weren’t bugged by anyone in the Subterraneans. Fuji even uses Instacart and orders a pair of burner phones to be extra careful. I check every device in the house. Look for a Raspberry Pi in the several computers and smart TVs she has hoarded with all the other junk in the rooms down the hall. I find nothing and feel somewhat secure that we’re off their grid. But every now and again, that door rattles—maybe a gust of wind off the ocean, maybe the pipes in the house giving it a shake—and when it does, I’m sure the end is here. Quoth the Raven, blah blah.
I’ve been holed up for three days and three nights with Fuji. Each sunrise, she awakes within her nook, a spring of happiness as she remembers Glitch and I are her guests. But come noon, her energy wanes. Soon she’s back asleep. My heart aches because I know what this means for her, and worse, I know she knows.
On top of it all, sleep continues to evade me. At least not for any period greater than twenty or thirty minutes. Not because of amphetamines. I can’t even fault a particular memory for insomnia. In fact, memories are becoming a problem growing smaller by the day. The effects of the first three Lobotomy Pills have set in. Probably 70 percent of my life’s memories should all be gone. I did the Post-it exercise out of habit this morning. Moving into my apartment. Age: twenty-four. My license tells me I’m thirty-two.
But that’s not one of my problems.
Right now, police are digging hard into Emily and Veronica’s deaths. They already know they were my neighbors. They’ve connected the killer to me because of the Coast News and the fake story. Maybe they think I’m the killer. Maybe they just need to gather some piece of evidence to warrant an arrest. Worse, the person that killed Emily and Veronica—the serial killer I provoked—has gone from threatening letters to phone calls to murdering people I know. The escalation suggests it’s going to get closer. And closer. Until he finally has me.
But the police and the killer only represent one-half of the problem.
The Subterraneans are the other half.
Caris undoubtedly has alerted Rocket about what I did, which means I’m no special little bird. I’m a pariah to the whole operation. Even Enzo has gone cold on me. I texted him on the burner phone each day, giving more and more info as to why we needed to talk, stopping just short of mentioning that I had his file. Information that shows just what Rocket and the Subterraneans have done to him. How they’ve used him. And why Enzo isn’t really the person that he or I thought.
I decide to text him one more time:
“Hungry?” Fuji asks. She keeps her eyes closed when she speaks.
“I’m fine. Can I get you anything?”
“No, thank you. Where’s Glitch?”
Glitch’s ears perk up. He looks at her, then back at me, asking permission to go over and say hello to her in the nook. “Go ahead, boy.” He hops up on his hind legs. Places his chin on the corner of her pillow, and she giggles upon the first sensation of his sandpaper tongue on her cheek.
“How are you feeling?”
“Hanging in.”
“Know what you’re going to do?”
I run my hand through my hair. Greasy and thinner than I remember. But what do I remember anyway? Two days from now, I was supposed to take the final Lobotomy Pill. No idea what happens now. This feels like a cross-country road trip finally coming to an end, only for the car to break down two blocks from your home.
I tell Fuji that I’m out of options. She stacks her pillows up behind her back and sits up.
“Doing right by yourself is always an option.”
“I think I stopped doing right a long time ago.”
My phone vibrates because Enzo is calling—which makes me paranoid. One of Rocket’s goons spoofing the number? I walk down the hall, out of earshot. Hold my trembling finger over the icon to answer the call. It vibrates again. Answer it or don’t? Vibrates more. If I don’t, I may never hear from Enzo again. The phone buzzes one more time. I press down on the icon.
“Three a.m.,” I hear Enzo say, his voice bringing a needed degree of relief. “The parking garage behind the indie movie theater downtown.”
I spend the rest of the night caring for Fuji, making her some chicken soup, tilting the bowl to her lips. She doesn’t take much. I wipe the corners of her mouth and she thanks me with a smile. But the process of eating just makes her more tired and around nine, she’s asleep again.
I take Glitch out to Fuji’s backyard, the wooden fence guarding the view from any onlookers. I throw a tennis ball for him, again and again, the ball becoming a mix of fuzz and saliva. His tongue hangs over the side of his mouth. He drops the ball at my feet before shuffling backward—never too much for him. “Okay, boy.” I rub the top of his head and pull him in close. His snout finds a home under my armpit. “I need you to stay here and watch over the old lady. Can you do that?” I kiss him between his eyes. He presses his face into mine as I do. I leave him with Fuji and head downtown.
* * *
I make sure to beat Enzo to the parking garage. I scope out the area, starting from farther away and making my way to the meeting spot. Make sure this isn’t an ambush. Enzo pulls up in a 1980s Chrysler LeBaron. He’s alone. I try small talk at first, feeling him out, but it’s clear he’s prickly. He doesn’t want anything to do with me. Tells me that Caris and Rocket have made it known I’ve been blacklisted. An enemy of the state. Any Subterranean that sees me is to report my whereabouts. If they’re particularly daring, there is a reward for physically bringing me back to the warehouse: immediate access to the Lobotomy Pills, as predicted.
“How can I trust you won’t bring me to them?” I ask.
“I guess you don’t really have a choice but to trust me, do you?”
“After I show you this”—I hold up his folder—“you’ll realize it’s me you should trust.”
Enzo scans through the file. I read his face while he takes a violent mental trip. One that sends his mind running up the peaks of sensemaking, into the valleys of second-guessing and denials and blaming himself and rage and blaming everyone but himself and back to rage, until the journey ends within the sunken canyons by the names of sorrow and disbelief.
“This can’t be real,” he says. He cradles the folder on his forearm and keeps his eyes locked on the documentation. Of course, I read it over the first opportunity I had. And it’s worse than anything I read about Phillip. They have held Enzo—with his easy-come, easy-go personality—in a continuum of cycles for six years. Easy-kept, as it turns out.
They did fulfill one promise to him. They moved him from his home in Detroit to the West Coast. His files don’t say anything about his life back in Michigan. And unlike Phillip’s folder, the original reason for Enzo getting mixed up with Rocket—the shameful memory or memories he likely put on a recorded tape many years ago—is left undocumented. Because as the cycles carried on, Rocket or Caris or whoever was managing Enzo’s trapped existence repeatedly changed the details of his life when rebooting him. Instilling an understanding of himself, his greatest sins, and a deep need for the Lobotomy Pills that were worse and worse each time. Ensuring Enzo would have no choice but to judge himself as a piece of shit in need of what they were selling. His file listed “Arsonist” three years ago as his worst secret. A year later, it read “War Crimes.” The ambiguity was more haunting than anything else. And if the details they were devising weren’t enough, his name became fodder for manipulation. He was Roger in Detroit. Then Jeffrey after the third cycle. He’s only been Enzo for under a year and a half.
“Is it?” he asks.
“Is it what?”
“Is it real?”
“You’re asking the wrong fucking guy about what’s real.”
“So, what are we going to do?”
“There is no we, Enzo.” We each come to the same reminder about his name. “Sorry. I don’t know what to call you now. But I have to go.”
“Why?”
“Because, idiot—you just told me Rocket has basically put a bounty on my head. Caris probably checked and saw that I took your file. For all I know, someone followed you here to get to me.”
“But what about me?” he asks.
“What about you?”
“You’re just going to leave me?”
I want to pull his lungs out through his nostrils for acting like I still owe him something. And for a millisecond, I move toward him, vengeance as seductive as ever. But his eyes are now watering, and for some reason, that classifies him as wounded enough. “Just be grateful I risked as much as I did so you could know the truth. I don’t give a shit what you do now. Don’t forget, you’re the asshole that brought me to Rocket in the first place.” I walk past him and leave him standing idle in the garage, where the lonely night is only made lonelier with the loss of a friend. “So fuck you.”
* * *
At sunrise, Fuji turns on her side, reaches for her glasses. Rubs sleep goo out of the corners of her eyes.
“Sleep at all?” she asks.
“A little here, even less there.”
“When was the last time you really slept?”
“A few weeks ago, I guess.”
“Do you remember what you dreamed about?”
“No, why?”
“Just curious.”
Fuji asks me to turn on the TV so she can watch the morning news. She loves the local weatherman on channel four because of his lisp. She giggles each time he says “thh-unny.” I start to laugh with her. Afterward, she gets out of bed and fights with her walker, arms trembling as she pulls herself out of the nook and heads down the hall. I listen to the sound of water refilling the toilet’s reservoir as Fuji returns to her bed, book in hand.
“How’s the memory today?”
“It’s foggy, but I still have some memories from recent years.” And I don’t know if I want that. Maybe I still want to go all the way. If I die tomorrow—by a killer’s hand or in a car crash—I’d prefer to die content that I never fucked up anyone else’s life. Never hurt anyone I loved or someone who loved me.
She starts picking through her book, alternating between the back pages—an index or glossary—and around the middle. “Do you remember anything from when you were a boy?”
“No.”
“Do you remember your mom?”
“I don’t.”
“Dad?”
I search every crevice of my mind and all I find is the sound—the hum—blooming at a rising volume. “No.”
“You should eat breakfast.”
The hum breaks apart. The volume dial turned back to the left. “Maybe later.”
I fetch a glass of water. My body aches with dehydration. The lower lumbar compressing tighter with every passing minute. Stress, the ultimate assassin. Fuji clears her throat which means she’s about to ask me something—which she does.
“You were willing to do just about anything for those pills, weren’t you?”
“Ashamed to admit it.”
“Enzo is probably no different. Can you really blame him for anything?”
“Are you advocating for the guy that also stole your identity?”
“Everybody needs help. And if you put yourself in his shoes right now, you’d feel pretty helpless.”
Glitch gets up and wanders over to a salad bowl turned doggie bowl. Slurps some water. Comes back and stretches in front of me, backside up in the air while his chin strains toward the floor. There are probably ten billion morning yoga classes practicing the same move right now.
“Tell me about the first time you agreed to steal things from people’s houses. When was that?”
“I guess you could say that was the first night I met Rocket.”
“What happened that night you met him? Walk me through it.”
“It was late at night when I left. I met Enzo at a gas station, and we later went to a car dealership. That’s where I saw the man for the first time.”
“The killer?”
“I guess. But to be honest, I have no idea anymore.”
“The killer is definitely back now.”
“Clearly.”
“Why go to the dealership?”
“Enzo suggested it.”
“And afterward?”
“That’s it, really. We went to the meeting.”
Fuji continues to flip through her book, searching for something in it.
“What’s the book?”
“This is one I got after I lost Richard.” She flashes the cover my way. I see multiple authors listed, which tells me it’s probably nonfiction and academic. The title reads, The Haunted Self. There is a subtitle, but the print is too small. Fuji tells me it’s about trauma and what it does to a person’s psyche, how our subconscious sometimes goes into survival mode to protect the rest of us.
“Did it help you—after Richard?”
“Something like that.”
I decide not to pry.
“The night you first met Rocket—can you remember anything about what you did in your apartment before leaving?”
I strain for details. “I remember watching TV for a bit.”
“What else? Try closing your eyes and visualizing this time frame.”
I follow her instructions.
“Recreate the smells. The sounds inside and outside.”
I start to see the inside of my apartment. Bookcase. Sofa. Breakfast counter dividing the living room from the kitchen. “Chess,” I say. “I moved a chess piece before I left.”
“Which piece?”
“The knight.”
“Which knight?”
“My knight. White knight.”
“If you’re white, who’s black?”
The memory of the board is a glossy puddle, rippling with each small raindrop, the clouds created by the chemical storm within my brain. But between the raindrops, the ripples dissipate. And I can see the image. The chess pieces are arranged in mid-game formations. “I move the black pieces as well. I’m not playing another person.”
“Did you move a black piece that night?”
“Just the white one.”
“Where did you move it?”
“To F6.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you feeling when you move that piece?”
A warm energy orbits my chest as I think about it. “Good.”
“Are you playing yourself?”
“It’s more of a sequence. I can tell you each move that comes after that one. Every move that happened before it.”
“Like you’re rehearsing moves?”
“More like I’m replaying the same game.” The warmth spreads from my chest, swirling throughout my body. Tingles up my neck. As my pulse thumps, my knuckle hairs start to flare. Fuji asks me to recite all of the moves to the game, starting from the beginning. I blurt them out like a song so deeply burrowed in your head you hum the melody without realizing it. Dxe5. Ng4. Nf3. Nc6. On it goes. She writes the sequence down in her journal.
“Do you still feel good while thinking about these moves?”
“I do.”
“If one can feel good, one can be good.”
I open my eyes. “What are you saying?”
“The real you still exists, no matter how many pills you took. And despite what you tell yourself, the real you is a good person.”
Fuji closes the book and turns on her side. “Sometimes, being good and being good to yourself isn’t even about you alone. It’s about helping others.”
Within fifteen minutes, Fuji’s breathing tubes muffle her snores. I pour some cereal into a bowl, drench it in almond milk, and swallow my thoughts.
About that night.
About the knight.
The warmth. Fuji.
I spoon cereal down my gullet and wipe my lips with my wrist. Pull out my phone and make the call. The other end picks up.
“Enzo,” I say. “Maybe we could help each other.”
The Next Chapter Begins in 3, 2, 1 . . .