The inside of this shipping container is dirty and dim, and I’m afforded no comfort as I wiggle from one ass cheek to the other.
“Take the pill or don’t,” Rocket tells me. “It’s really up to you.”
His yes-men carried me from a van to the pier. Past the warehouse, toward the docks, and onto a carrier boat. They loaded me inside the shipping container and untied me before leaving. I never received the beating I was anticipating. Instead, Rocket hurls abuses from the container’s lone opening, refusing to shut the doors because he’s enjoying the power dynamic.
“Why not just kill me?”
Rocket laughs. Shakes his head like I’m a little kid and I just said the darndest thing. “If I kill you, you’re worth nothing to us.”
The air inside the container is thick and polluted with the garbage that was once stored within it. I try to regulate my breathing. Minimize how often I degrade my lungs with what the atmosphere contains. Try to focus my mind on something else, but it keeps returning to Enzo—his pained cry into the phone I heard right before Rocket found me. He needs help. I might be his only chance.
“I’m guessing you’ll be loaned out to the highest bidder in Qatar. Maybe Monaco. They usually have their purple pricks throbbing for our products.”
I ask Rocket what happens once I’m purchased.
“Questions and questions from the fool that mistook information for answers.” He licks his lips while flashing his gold grill. Wears his trench coat unbuttoned with nothing underneath it. The night sky and its stars cascade light upon the pier and other boats on the dock. The naked parts of Rocket’s milky torso glimmer. Protruding ribs. Starvation abs. A graffiti alley worth of tattoos—cartoonish lettering arcing over his belly button, a tiger’s head between his pecs, a smattering of regretful ink in between. “I’m sure your future masters will give you a good butcher’s hook, if you know what I mean. Figure out how they want to use you for six months. But they’ll keep you in working order before returning you. Our property is our property, after all.”
Members of the Subterraneans carry boxes and trash bags and chairs and the broken-down parts of the cage. Dollies tilt with filing cabinets. They now appear empty, no longer containing the records of everyone who’s ever been under Rocket’s spell. Ever been recorded and fed pills and rebooted and controlled. They load it all onto the same boat holding me prisoner. A man wearing a bomber jacket carries one of those crates with the hay protruding through its slits. He sets it on board.
“We’re going to leave you in here,” Rocket tells me. “Take you out in the middle of the bay. You’ll stay there for however many days it takes until you do it to yourself.” He’s referring to the Lobotomy Pill—the fourth and final one. The mahogany jewelry box, the same one that Rocket showed me the night of my testimony, rests inside the container with me, waiting for the moment I give in, swallow, and begin the process of rebooting. “Maybe it will only be two days. Maybe two weeks. It all depends on how long you can go in the heat and darkness without food or drink. But you will crack—that I promise.” He tells me I’m not getting out of here until the ship’s captain checks on me and finds me in a comatose state, ready for them to reboot me as they desire. “Any parting words from our disgraced son?”
I fortify my voice and hide its terror. “Have I been rebooted before?”
He tilts his head and thinks about it. “I suppose part of your torture is never knowing the truth.”
The doors close.
* * *
A small light mounted on the inside corner of the container turns on. I move to the front and look out through the slits. Rocket stands on the platform, the bottom of his trench coat flapping with the ocean winds. Gives orders to a couple of men who soon come aboard the ship. He remains on the platform, managing more cargo.
This goes on and on. More men here and there. Rocket giving instructions. Could it be after midnight now? Two in the morning? And as my head grows foggier, my legs also lose their strength. Quadriceps loosen. Turn to jelly. I collapse against the doors, still peering out. I pound against the container. Scream. Plea. Nobody even turns my way. This is the prerequisite to acceptance. When you fight against a system so overpowering, all that stands between you and the next stage of grief is time. I survey the inside of this container and pick the corner where I’ll soon retreat to weep. Maybe that’s the same one I’ll use when I give in and open the pillbox left here with me and take the last dose. Or maybe I won’t. Maybe I can starve and kill myself before they remake me. But everyone’s mind breaks eventually, and who am I kidding? I’ll be in that corner, pill ingested, turning into a vegetable. Because I’m no different than most people. Certainly not any better. And most people would look to survive somehow.
Rocket now stands with his eyes closed and ear pods wedged into the sides of his head as he listens to music. He flutters his hands across his chest. Up into the air. Side to side. He’s a maestro conducting his orchestra of deviance. With each slash through the air, the orchestra plays the shrieking high notes and supportive bass tones—the grunt work from warehouse to shipping vessels continues.
Am I part of this orchestra? Were my misdeeds a nocturnal sonata? I think this through, and the worst revelation washes over me. I’m not part of Rocket’s orchestra. I never was part of it. I’m a piece he maneuvers for a different game. The most disposable piece available. Just a pawn. Move over here, little bird. Sacrifice yourself on this square, little bird. Dead now, little bird? Worry not, plenty more from where you were found.
The boat rumbles as its engine starts. It must be time. My sentence in solitary confinement begins. Here I thought—here I mistook—all this time that the waning moments of my life as I knew it would be brought upon by my choice alone. My reboot is an outcome part and parcel with the solution against my past. And the waning moments are here nonetheless, but the outcome is out of my hands, away from my desires.
Then I see it.
Just as I’m about to give in and let my eyelids collapse and welcome the terrors found within my dreams, the nighttime energy outside my new prison transforms.
Bright, blue, red. Swirling.
Knifing through the container’s slits, twirling in strobes. Lights that normally alarm when you glide through a stop sign. When you jaywalk across a street. But at this moment, the familiar lights only grant hope. Because tonight—as I watch Caris and the men scramble across the pier, take cover behind a barrel or an open door or back inside the warehouse, as I see Rocket sprint across the platform and jump onto the boat, after I hear the garbled voices of those now in charge of the situation boom out of a police megaphone—I know a friend came through.
That Cal read the letter.
That Clark Kent put on his cape.
The police swarm the pier as the boat motors away from the dock. I watch with detached excitement as the men in blue chase after Caris and everyone else, their flashlights and guns drawn. There are at least a dozen cops. I try to find Affleck and Damon among them but cannot. But my excitement is momentary. My salvation is fleeting. And as I stare out at the shrinking pier separated by a long trail of rippling white water, at the cops living out their greatest police drama fantasies—tackling and seizing each Subterranean after the next—I understand what’s happening to me right now. The boat carries me out away from the pier, farther and farther from the cops, farther and farther removed from my rescue.
And as it does, it too carries Rocket out into the bay, under the cover of night, closer and closer toward his escape.
* * *
The boat has been racing along the coastline for ten minutes or so. I know because the hazy lights from town run parallel to the boat, never fading. Despite the choppiness of the ride, I keep my eyeball pressed against the slits in the container’s door. Spy out at my panicking captors. Rocket yells at the three men on board. Demanding the boat go faster. Cursing them for not doing a good enough job on reconnaissance. Rocket picks up the boat’s radio control and begins barking.
“Three cars. We head north tonight.” He paces far enough away from the radio that the coiled wire attached to the speaker strains. “Stay focused—no more missteps. We should be at Marina Beach in twenty minutes.”
The voice on the other end replies, but it’s too muffled for me to make it out from afar. But I can tell Rocket knows what was said and that it was bad news. “Meet us there in five minutes then.” He slams the radio down and walks back out of view. I hear panic replace anger as the primary tone within his voice. He’s ordering the men around again, but this time it’s existential.
“We have to go faster. Dump all this shit!”
Something splashes off the side of the boat, loud enough to rise above the engine straining against its limitations. Then another splash. And another. Two men carry the filing cabinet. They push it into the bay. The cage goes next.
“Those too,” Rocket says, voice breaking with defeat.
The grunts carry the crates to the side of the boat, one by one. As they hurl them over, strings of hay fly out of the slots, leaving whatever’s inside less protected. The crates cannonball into the bay along with everything else.
Leaving only me.
I think about begging for mercy. Asking forgiveness. Thinking of a way to communicate my value and how I can still help Rocket’s cause. But I already know the decision has been made.
“Toss him,” Rocket says.
The two men jostle the container from side to side, metal shrieking against the boat’s deck, and I fall back on my ass and slide against a wall, the pillbox tumbling toward me. Methodically, the men move me and the container to the gunwale.
“My little maggot,” Rocket hisses.
They push one end of the container over the edge, and everything tilts. I stumble toward the descending inner wall. Slam into it.
“Turns out you get to die.”
They finish the job. Tip me and the container over the side of the boat.
And into the bay.
* * *
Water rushes through the cracks of every corner and gap—my impending death—the bay roaring into the metal container, battering it from the inside and out. Its walls groan and start to contract inward toward me, bending and shrieking. The water level reaches my knees. I’m sinking.
Fast.
My ears pop. I splash my way toward the doors. Grab hold of the inside handle. Push and pull as more water gushes inside. The lever on the outside of the door, the one that locks me inside, moves up and out of its locked position by a few centimeters each time I slam my shoulder into the door.
The water level reaches my neck.
My fingers and hands and arms are things I no longer feel because I no longer feel anything at all thanks to my pumping adrenaline. But the streams of water burst through every crack and sliver this container has to offer—shooting inside like a firefighter’s hose at full velocity.
And I’m the fire soon extinguished.
It’s above my head now and my body starts to float. Only a thin layer of breathable air is left in here. There is no other way out of this container other than the lever trapping me inside. I submerge myself and fight and fight against the door. The little metal latch lifts incrementally before falling back into its locked position. I swim back up above water level, only inches from the container’s ceiling. Purse my lips out like a funnel.
Take a deep breath in. Don’t let it out.
Think about what you’ve done to get yourself in this position.
I plunge back underwater and to the door. I kick it. Throttle it with my hands as violently as my strength allows. But the forces pushing back at me are too much.
They’ve won.
There’s nowhere to go. Nothing else to do.
But accept my fate.
Accept that this is where my story ends. The series finale—no countdown ticker to the next episode because there is no more plot shock to tease, no more episodes to be aired.
And maybe this is the most fitting end.
Maybe this is what I deserve.
For all the people I’ve hurt.
Fuji.
Emily. Veronica.
Enzo.
My body will soak from saltwater and decay until bits and pieces of my corpse flake off and float away—food for the fish soon to be captured and killed and put on ice back at the warehouse. But my actions led to this point. Fuji and the twins are mere victims. Collateral damage.
So I deserve to be here.
I deserve the pressure and pain melting my lungs. I deserve the slow death and forced contemplation in the final moments and all the questions you inevitably ask yourself. Who will miss me? What comes next after death?
Was I ever a good person?
I let go of the inside door handle and let my body float. The pillbox passes my face. Bubbles leak out of my mouth—maybe the last exhale of my life—as I watch the box drift away from me. I give in to the moment. And in forfeiting my soul, I expect to feel closure. Peace. Like everything I was worried about or hated about myself would become small and insignificant. Like I could forgive myself for the past—what I remember of it.
But I can’t.
No peace arrives.
And as my sinking, oversized coffin shrieks against the swelling ocean pressure, my ears popping even more from the unending descent to the bottom of the bay floor, I think of him.
Glitch.
I can feel his snout against my chest, the same as the first night I rescued him. Hear the clacking of his paws against the hardwood floor. Sense his happiness whenever I tell him, “Who’s a good boy? You’re such a good boy.”
For the first time, the container rotates. The pull of water inside intensifies. The pillbox clanks off the ceiling and pinballs to a wall, then back in my direction. The door pushes in and out a few inches at a time, the aquatic inertia toying with the metal lever on the outside.
I flutter my legs and move back to the door, peering out at the lever as water rushes underneath it, momentarily lifting it up and out of its locked position, its upward motion pointing toward the surface. The same direction I better be heading very fucking soon.
I decide to fight once again. If not for me, for Glitch.
I thud my kneecap into the door. With each knee, the lever elevates a fraction of an inch. The descent and water rushing underneath the lever prevent it from falling back into the latch. I can do this.
Kick.
Shoulder.
Knee.
The lever cranes up higher and higher. And with the insides of my neck bursting with pain, my lungs squeezing with looming death, it happens.
The lever rises above the latch.
I wedge my foot into the small opening in the door. A vortex of water escaping and entering the container sends debris my way. I feel the pillbox bump into my hip. And at that moment I see what I’ve sacrificed so much to obtain, and no matter how uncertain I am of its place in my life now, leaving it behind feels like the ultimate loss. One I’m not willing to take. So I grab the box and squeeze through the opening at last. The container rushes into the vast blackness of the ocean’s unknown.
I turn my attention to the surface. Each meter I travel the need for oxygen grows more dire. More excruciating. And as my head breaches the surface and enters the nighttime atmosphere, I gasp like I’ve never gasped before. Sucking in as much air as I can take in. Gasping. Gasping.
And again.
And again.
This goes on until my insides move from a boil to a simmer. The adrenaline dissipates. Blood cells carry oxygen to the heart and brain at more normal rates. The blurry lights of the closest town sparkle off the choppy water. I’m too exhausted to swim. I’ll let the waves take me in. I turn over on my back and float. Water, too cold to fixate on, slips into my mouth. I taste it. Spit it out and remain in gratitude. For the bay. For inertia. For a little help. My eyes fix themselves on the stars, searching for the brightest one I can find.
Such a good boy.
* * *
My limp leg and extended shoe hit a clump of sand, and I know I’ve made it. I crawl up the beach, pillbox still in hand, and collapse. Roll over and lay there, collecting whatever is left of myself. Several minutes pass before I start to shiver. Which means I need to move. I gather to a knee and realize I’m not the only item the ocean has taken to shore. Illuminated by loyal moonlight and scattered among stones and shells are items from the warehouse. The bags of trash now spooling open. A single aluminum drawer from a filing cabinet. A leg from a chair. But fifteen feet from where I currently stand is something else.
A single crate.
Dripping wet and speckled with grains of sand, I move toward it. Pull the top off and remove clumps of soggy hay. There, packed inside, is a perfectly constructed mechanism the size of a mailbox, tightly coiled with wires and pipes, a blank digital counter. I pull it out by the rope harness fastened to its side and examine it further. A red trigger switch to the side of the digital counter is locked in the down position.
A bomb.
Let Rocket come back for me. I’ll detonate his past, present, and future.
I fetch a trash bag and empty it. Wring out water. Securely set the bomb inside and slowly lift it up over my shoulder. Slide the pillbox into the front pocket of my hoodie. Finally, I start walking. To the bike path on the other side of the beach and dunes. Underneath the cover of trees and darkness and away from the threatening streetlights or patrolling vehicles. Through side streets and alleys until I’m nearly to Fuji’s house. I approach the front door with caution, making sure none of her neighbors will see me in this condition. With an ominous-as-fuck trash bag over my shoulder and my clothes soaking wet and smelling like a mermaid’s armpit.
I open her front door and find her still in the nook. Breathing slowly. Slight gurgle. But still resting deeply. I set the garbage bag down and head to the backyard for my sweet dog. But the door to the yard is slightly ajar, the sliver of moonlight becomes a dagger through my gut because this doesn’t feel right. And as I step outside, look across the vacant lot made of ankle-high grass and weeds and splitting concrete, and search for my golden retriever. All I find is a haunting whistle in the breeze and an envelope laid neatly on the ground. I reach for it. Open it up, already knowing the handwriting that awaits.
And Your Little Dog, Too.
Head to Your Apartment if You Want Him Back.
I drop the note and race out the side gate. Back across neighborhoods and streets draped in darkness until I’m on my block. I approach my building, the same as before, from the backside.
But in a flash, I know this is only getting worse.
My front door is wide open. The doorknob is removed, leaving only the circular cavity where it was once attached. I close the door behind me and take stock of what remains. My furniture turned over. Shelves knocked down and the TV smashed. My books are splayed across the floor near cut-open couch cushions, the stuffing gutted and spooling out. In the kitchen, across a floor covered with broken glass, is another envelope. Another letter. This one is taped to the microwave door. I read it.
Final Stage: Your turn. Find me if you can. The dog dies in twenty-four hours if you do not. You die eventually, no matter what. But if you try to run, I’ll come back for the old lady.
My gift is in the bedroom.
I flip on the bedroom light. The blankets are neatly folded underneath his head and back, propping him up in a seated position. Hands resting on his waist. His eyes are opened—bugging out wide—but they never blink. I stare into them. Into the vacuum of death. Into the space where his soul once resided. At the dead body in my bed.
At Enzo.
His disemboweled parts flung around the room. Blood everywhere. More pictures of Enzo and me, taken at the gas station just hours ago, pinned to the wall. The photos encircle the last message left here at the scene of the crime. But this message is not for me to read. This message is designed for others. For cops to find and draw the obvious conclusion.
I confess. I am the killer. Come get me, PIGLETS.
I fall to the floor.
Hang my head inside the cradle of my tremoring hands.
And finally, it happens.
It happens because all of it—not just the here and now but everything from these last several weeks. It breaks me. Completely. Fully. Right down the middle of my existence.
The Coast News.
The crimes.
The killer.
All of it coagulates into a bigger, more obvious neon arrow pointing toward the only option left—the one I wanted all along and finally have. I reach into my front pocket and pull out the pillbox. Undo the latch to find the last Lobotomy Pill sealed in its little plastic Ziploc baggie, kept dry from the ocean, waiting for me to accept it as my own.
And so I do.
I toss it into my mouth. Gather up spit. Ignore the bitter taste and finish the deed.
I swallow.
I fall back to my knees and wait. Soon, in a day or so, the pill will have finished off what remains of me. They can fire me. Arrest me. Kill me. I won’t care. Won’t know enough about the world to feel shame or hate or guilt.
Because I’ll no longer exist.
But just as the first semblance of relief warms over me, I hear it. From outside my apartment, on the other side of the door. A thudding knock. It pulls me out of my head. Back to my feet. I move out of the bedroom. The door shakes again—wicked aggravations of knuckles on wood. There is nothing keeping them—police—killer—Rocket—whoever—from opening the door themselves. No doorknob. No deadbolt. But again, they knock. Softer this time. And in the space between knocks rises another sound. The soundtrack plaguing me at so many moments these last several weeks. That familiar noise, starting soft at first—always soft at first—then louder and louder it grows.
The hum.
“Amir,” I hear the man say. The voice is somehow calming. Reassuring.
Loving.
I walk to the door. Look through the peephole.
I glitch.
Hard and fast and without the usual warning. Sparks of light in waves of kaleidoscopic transformations.
I open the door. And there, standing before me, is not anyone I expect. Not Cal. Not Joan.
It’s the man from the dealership. From the freeway.
We lock eyes. We hold our gaze for what feels like an hour. What feels like a day. What feels like a life lost and forgotten. His skin is brown like mine. His eyebrows are bushy like mine.
He opens his mouth. He begins to say something.
My skin sheds.
“Do you remember?” he asks.
The soundtrack rages on. The hum vibrating through my head. Through the night.
“Let me help you,” he says.
He moves past me. Walks to the breakfast nook and picks up the fallen black-and-white marble board. Collects all its pieces scattered about the room. Holds them with great care before arranging them on the chessboard.
Exactly as I left it.
“Watch,” the man says. He drives a white pawn diagonally until it pushes against another piece, this one black. He sets the black pawn off to the side of the board, in the graveyard with other fallen soldiers.
“Dxe5.” He smiles, and his face softens more. It invites me to him. “Do you remember?”
I clear my throat. I clear it again. I take a deep breath, and when I let it out, shredded glass runs up my windpipe and exits my mouth. My body evacuates the most painful sigh of my life. When the last ounce of air exits my body, I shudder.
Because I do remember.
“Do you, Amir?” he asks again.
“Yes,” I whisper back to him. A tear flees from my burning eye.
And as I look at my father, standing there proud and stiff, mustache hanging above his relaxing mouth, I realize what he’s just done. Dxe5. It comes back to me. My father. Me. What he just triggered is more significant than a swoon of random recollections, because buried in that move is one memory in particular—the one I thought I was finally rid of forever—but it’s all coming back, every detail, every day, every moment. And there’s no stopping it. No way for me not to relive it, bit by bit. With the hum persisting, louder than ever, my mind goes there now.
To the farm.
To The Farm in 3, 2, 1 . . .