We watch the moving trucks back up to the data center and disorganized workers scurry in and out of the building like maggots suddenly discovered on the underside of a rock. In and out of the short, three-story building, they come and go—carrying computers and chairs and cubicle dividers. A man in a black suit stands by the front entrance but he doesn’t look like any of the guys that grabbed me the other day. Those guys are likely with Rocket in another city—maybe even another country by now—or were arrested on the pier. This guy is new. Probably had his memory wiped like all of the other imbeciles under Rocket’s spell.
“They’re removing every bit out of that place,” I tell my dad.
“Wouldn’t you be quick to remove any trace of it?”
Even in November, the sun beats down on Gilroy in the midafternoon so mercilessly that the front seat of Fuji’s van becomes stuffed with carbon dioxide. It doesn’t have power locks or windows, and I have to crank the lever counterclockwise a few rotations to get some fresh air.
“How long has it been since you slept?”
“Two days. Three if you don’t count catnaps.”
“You need to sleep when this is all over.”
Sleep is for those in contentment with themselves. For people who are okay with the thought of waking up and resuming a life spent as the person they were when they fell asleep in the first place. Sleep is a bounty for the redeemed. One I’ll never collect.
“There’s a lot of movers,” he says. “Maybe fifteen or sixteen trucks?”
“At least. How do you think we get inside?”
“What patterns do you see? Where are the openings to attack?”
“This isn’t chess, and this isn’t time for a good ole father-son lesson.”
“You’re not getting in there by just walking through the front door and saying, ‘Hey, I used to work here.’ Use your mind. Can you tell how many movers are flowing in and out of the building?”
“I don’t know—twenty? Thirty? Maybe more. It’s hard to tell.”
“Exactly. And why is it hard to tell?”
“I’ve never seen any of them before, and they’re going in and out too fast.”
“Right—and do you think it’s any easier for that suit to tell them apart? Or how about the movers—do you think they know each other all that well? They’re not even wearing any uniforms.”
“I see where this is headed.”
“Obvious, right?”
I hatch the first iteration of the plan. Propose that we sneak around the front of the truck parked on the far end of the lot. When two or three other movers drop something off inside it, we’ll walk into the building behind them.
“Good. But you still haven’t accounted for the suit managing the move.”
“Chances are he’s not looking for me because they think I’m dead.”
“Then let’s get to it.”
“Before we do this, why are you suddenly helping me?”
“Not now.” He looks to the van’s side-view mirror and opens the door. “We’re wasting time. We have to go.”
We start to loop back around the far side of the building through fields of dirt and weeds and gopher holes. There are no trees to cover our approach, so we move fast but not so much so that we catch the attention of anyone off in the distance. Soon the building separates us from the moving trucks and workers, blocking their line of sight. We creep around to the front of a truck and crouch down, leaning against its wide chrome grill, the oval Ford logo at its center. I start to talk, but my father holds his index finger to his lips. Instead, we wait until we hear the patter of footsteps walking up the metal ramp leading from the asphalt into the back of the truck. The vehicle rumbles as the movers set something heavy within the cargo area.
My body, as beaten up as it is, manufactures enough fear for adrenaline to course through my system. Fear of failure. Fear that this won’t work, and I lose Glitch. Fear that we’re caught, just like the last time I was here. But fear and rage are close cousins, and I use it all as a force against this facility and this dream of Rocket’s because he too is to blame, and maybe this will be my act of vengeance.
“Now,” I whisper.
We peel around the side of the truck and find the backs of three movers walking down the ramp, headed toward the building where the suit leans against a wall, swiping at his phone. The mover with a blond ponytail hears my footsteps and looks over his shoulder—surprised at first, but then flicks his head in my direction, the age-old male-to-male nod. We’re inside the lobby and follow them into the elevator.
“You just get here?” a short, pudgy man says as the elevator door closes.
“Yeah, I got the start time wrong.”
They all laugh, and the pudgy man’s belly jiggles out from underneath a T-shirt. “Happens to the best of us.”
The elevator dings and the doors part and there, standing before us, is the third floor, half the workstations still intact. The movers start breaking down the nearest cubicle—power drills torquing screws. We head down the corridor, across the shadows demarking several more workstations until I find the last one on the row. I sit down at the computer and power it on. Wait for the login portal to flash.
“They must have blocked your credentials,” my dad says.
“Definitely.” I enter credentials belonging to someone else. “But they didn’t block Mahmoud’s.”
“Enzo’s last deed,” he says.
“How’d you know?”
“Focus on what you’re doing.”
The next screen loads, and there awaits a backlog of assigned and categorized videos and audio recordings from inside people’s homes and cars. I ignore all of it and use the search function. Narrow the search results to Monterey County only. Hit enter.
“Shit.” The search returns 4,871 results. Seventy-three pages of spy-cam footage to sort through.
“Filter it further,” my dad says.
I go with “Monterey County video feeds with connections to smart speaker systems.” I hit enter, and it returns 372 results.
“This will take forever,” he says.
“No—I can search items the recognition software categorized.”
“Hurry.”
I rise out of the seat and see the suit has arrived on the floor. He’s talking with the same three movers from the elevator. The pudgy man points down in our direction and I plunk down below the cover of the cubicle.
“Fuck.”
“We should go.”
“No, this is our only shot.” I get back to the search bar. Punch in the only lead I have and search “infinity.”
I stand up, and the man in the suit moves in our direction, the pudgy man following behind. The soles of their shoes beat to an executioner’s song.
Clack, clack, clack.
“He’s coming.”
“No shit.” I look back at the search results. Still, far too many.
Clack, clack, clack.
“Try something else.”
Clack. Clack.
I try “infinity on fire” and hit enter.
“Fuck—nothing.”
Clack.
Clack.
Clack.
“Hurry!”
I peer back over the edge of the cubicle wall and into the darkened, narrow walkway penetrated by the man in the suit, closing the distance between us rapidly.
Clack.
“Anything else—now!”
The cursor slides back into the search bar. I type “figure eight ornament” and hit enter. And there, organized into five independent feeds are five separate infinity symbols fully aflame, all streaming from the same address.
Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack.
I move the cursor over the square. Right-click and select “source data.”
“What’s the address?”
“Help me remember this,” I tell my dad. “182 Fati Way.”
“182 Fati Way.”
CLACK, CLACK, CLACK.
I look over the cubicle again, and he’s two workstations down, stripping the darkness with the beams of his flashlight.
“Now!”
I unplug the computer and ditch the workstation, sprinting out into the corridor, entirely enveloped in their handheld search beams.
“Stop right there!” the suit says, but we are not stopping because we are not stopping here in this building ever again—because before he can get into a full sprint, we are already racing in the other direction and to the south end staircase, never looking back, only hearing the clacking of his shoes but by the time the door to the stairwell clicks shut, we are hopping over railing after railing, frog jumping down the banister—the shortcut between floors—and he screams for us to stop once more but the desperation leaking out of his soul is as evident as our near escape because the exit is right in front of us, and off we go, the sun ripping through the door’s opening and the outside world and its breeze pouring into the stairwell, killing the dry stench of every misdeed committed within the building. And the last time I hear the suit scream for us to stop, we are already off into the fields behind the data center, headed back toward the van, and all that is left to chase us are moving trucks bogged down by the immense weight of an entire building’s worth of spy equipment.
“We did it!” I scream as soon as I turn onto the freeway—blurring the faded asphalt and yellow lane markers. “We fucking did it!”
My father shakes me by the shoulder. “Yes, you did it.”
The afternoon sun knifes through the windshield as I pull into a gas station and head inside for a bag of chips. The man behind the register gives me a weird look as we enter—the inside is perfumed with the stinging chemicals of bathroom mop detergent. I ask my dad what he wants to eat while bypassing the front-facing stand with Chapstick and condom-sized Tylenol wrappers and condom-sized wrappers of condoms.
“I’m not hungry.”
The drink selection is overwhelming and I can’t think straight. Too many choices. Too many cans and plastic bottles and beers and Gatorades and Red Bulls and sodas and forever it goes.
“Sir, are you okay?” the cashier asks from behind the counter.
“Huh?”
“Do you need any help?”
“Who are you?”
“I work here.”
I look around the insides of the crowded space—the candy bar aisle facing the energy bar aisle, leaving only a shoulder-length distance in between. “What does that guy want?” I ask my dad.
“Oh no. Your memory.”
“What?”
“It’s happening. There are only a few more hours to go for Glitch.”
Glitch.
And with that, the static builds up in my head. Waves of fierce electricity crackling like downed powerlines in a tsunami. I blink, and the man behind the counter asks me if I’m alright again. I fall to a knee, stand back up, and brace myself against the fogged glass containing gallons of milk and cream. “Yeah—why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because you’ve been standing there for at least twenty minutes.”
“What is he talking about, Dad?”
“Sir—who are you talking to?”
The needle of denial plunges into my heart and my soul aches to weep but my brain is too disconnected now to register the sadness it protected me from these last fifteen or sixteen hours—since that knock on my door, since he walked right back into my life. My memories vaporize within my cranium like a water bottle left out underneath the sun and here I am with the realization that isn’t felt in my mind because that is the part of me that betrays. Instead, it is my gut that recognizes that the hand that held the needle in the first place was my own. Recognizes that which I created. Nausea starts as a small tear in the abdomen, but as the realization of what is occurring in the external world becomes evident, that tear grows and rips along the large intestines, rupturing everything between the gut and throat until I can no longer heal it temporarily with denial. I stare back at the cashier, trying to remember what I’m supposed to do and where I need to go, with one simple detail from my memory coming back as so many more fade away.
“Nobody. I guess I forgot.”
That he died years ago at the farm.
The Next Chapter Begins in 3, 2, 1 . . .