Birth begins in darkness.
Atop a midnight battlefield, you wait, a pale know-nothing soul that never asked to be here, looking through a horizon so drenched in that black, bruising vacuum all you can do is wait for your platoon to find you, speak knowledge into that barren mind, teach to you what the coordinates of this conflict even mean. At first, time—the nebulous variable bound by molecules outside our ability to calculate—feels slow, like nothing happens, and even when it does, it still feels insignificant. But the relationship between time and conflict is that of two lovers returning to the hollows of their bodies, twisting and turning into their lustful embrace. With each struggle you encounter on this battlefield, conflict fires off an explosion, and time accelerates to meet its calling, and in both their wake, the sky lights up with the flames and echoes of explosions, and for the first time, you can see yourself. Others along for the fight. You grow together, you and these people, across the battlefield, each explosion a demarcation of what was simultaneously gained and lost, periods beginning and ending.
But it all begins in darkness.
And it begins anew for me.
I lay in fetus pose, opening my eyes to the room—TV screens burning static signals—when the first significant explosion occurs in my memory. Then two more. Another. Neural nukes and synaptic warheads, mushroom clouds blooming, surging in expanse, but once they dissipate fully, something is found inside each of their destructive craters.
A memory.
I’m four, swimming with floaties as my grandfather, silver-blond hair and bifocals like Lou Holtz, splashes water at the other side of the pool, encouraging my journey.
Another massive eruption inside my head.
I’m six, and my first-grade teacher holds flash cards the size of Pop-Tarts, each one with vowel and consonant combinations. The students mouth the “ou’s” and “ain’s,” and this moment sticks out because this is when I realize I can read.
The explosions become rapid and unending, mounting a deposit of memories.
Fistfight at fifteen.
My driver’s test at sixteen.
Large memory landscapes, sentimental and mundane, delude the brain. The exhilaration of summer vacations in elementary school and the suicidal dread that back-to-school TV ads brought on. The simultaneous defiance and fear that procrastination delivered throughout my life—college exams, work deadlines, cleaning the kitchen on Sunday nights.
“My toy will resume the game now.”
Here come the more recent recollections. Interviews with television stations and hours at the data facility and detoxing at Fuji’s.
“And it will obey the rules-s-s-s.”
The things I forgot from the original cocktail of meds. Memories lost before the first Lobotomy Pill. My mom and brother. Their voices. The way they eat—noodles always slipping out from their mouths. That they each live in Florida now. How they’ve invited me for the holidays the last three years.
“Follow the screens. They will show the way.”
Dad, Dad, and more Dad. The late nights. The chess matches. Walks into the early morning hours with the dog. Always night and always Dad, and this was always about him because here comes the montage of memories about the farm. Every. Single. Detail. Days and evenings and nightmares with eyes open, and will he go peacefully? And why won’t he go peacefully? And what can I do to end this? But all of it comes back—not just the farm—and the presence of who I am and what I’m doing here swells inside my head like a helium balloon ready to pop.
“Is this what it came here to find?”
The rows of TVs broadcasting speckled static begin to shut off until everything is powered down but for the one monitor at the center of them all, which now plays a live feed from another room. And within it, laying atop a bed cluttered with redheaded Victorian dolls—remaining so still I wonder if I’m too late and he’s already gone—is Glitch.
“The dog dies if my new toy does not play.”
I find the sticky note still in my clutches, the adhesive binding between my index and middle finger. I look it over one last time. Confirm the reason I’m not a drooling zombie devoid of who they are and what they’ve done and why they still exist. I read the last instruction I wrote to myself.
Step Five: Take the other pill if necessary.
The Emergency Pill. The one now undoing what the previous four Lobotomy Pills wrought. The one that was only necessary if I failed to save Glitch before I went full vegetable. Save that sweet boy and still let my mind turn to jelly. But I wasn’t even close. And as my consciousness continues to recalibrate from foggy as fuck to semilucid, I think about a different angle regarding the pill’s necessity. Maybe I ended up taking it to save something else in addition to my dog. Maybe, in the end, I took it to save me too?
Glitch remains on the center screen. This is where I’m supposed to go. What the game is telling me to do next. But this game is conceived by the architect of this property. A mind that has carefully designed my doom. There is a meticulousness to all of this plotting. Getting me here on his vast property. Venturing down those steps into the gut of his bunker. He’s always one step ahead. The cracked concrete floor grates against my elbows and forearms as I stand.
“Good.”
I slap my cheeks and try to rid my head of the yet still-present pollutants from the gas.
“Here is the full map. Try and follow.”
On the top row, a monitor activates its surveillance feed—an empty room containing nothing other than a chain hanging from the ceiling, ominous and taunting.
I stumble and the fire from the infinity symbol comes dangerously close to my face, the momentary heat signature on my cheek a sign that everything here and now is real. A door on the far side of the room slides open, grinding against the doorframe in throaty growls. Looking through the doorway, I recognize the same chain hanging from the room’s ceiling as the one I just saw on the monitor. This is the starting point.
Another screen on the top row lights up and shows me a different room. A mounted sink and faucet lets out an aggressive stream of water that overflows onto the floor.
“Is the game getting clearer?” the killer asks.
A third screen one row down activates and broadcasts another room. Three waist-high gnomes—ceramic statues—block a door like they are imperial guards.
It keeps going.
A TV set on the bottom row now sends me the images of a fourth room. Several plates of food left on the ground. They form a trail toward an empty cage.
Another live monitor. As I comprehend what it broadcasts, I wipe away at my eye sockets, hoping it’s not real. Just once, will the laws governing what is real—and conversely, what is not—rule in my favor? I take a step in its direction. But my vision does not lie to me at this moment. Within the surveillance footage—promising I am not alone here—lay not one but two people, alive or dead or alive but hoping to die soon so it can be over. Naked and torn flesh—skin hanging off one of their thighs like bedsheets from a clothing hanger. Motionless. One person spoons the other with a limp arm draped over an emaciated waist.
“Paying attention?”
All six screens stare back at me with Satan’s cruelty playing out on them. They remain scattered across the three rows, only depowered monitors left in between.
At once, the depowered monitors find electric vitality. Thirty or forty surveillance feeds from around the compound—the backyard, the front of the mansion, the pool, every corner, and many other rooms. Some are duplicate feeds, others broadcasting the same room or landscape from another angle.
“Try not to forget.”
The original six screens start moving over the vast map of monitors, bouncing to a different location—new coordinates for me to follow. A feed from the front gates replaces Glitch, his feed moving to a monitor in the upper right corner. It speeds up—the exchanges of what was once on the screen and what is now shown become maddeningly fast and my eyes want to roll back into my skull and I want to roll back to several months ago, several years ago, when nothing felt this complicated, and the images don’t stop and the original six rooms keep fluttering around at a rate so rapid it could induce a seizure until everything, at last, stops. And there on the second row of screens—one after the other—are the six rooms displayed in the original order. The chain. The sink. Gnomes. Plates of food. The couple. Glitch.
“My new toy gets five seconds.”
Five seconds?
“Five seconds to remember.”
Fuck.
“Five seconds to commit to the journey.”
I summon my concentration. Try to cut through the brain fog.
“Five.”
I beg myself to find a way. Ask myself what happens if I fail.
“Four.”
Think-think-think.
I recite the rooms to myself in simplified terms. The chain, then the cage, then the faucet? No. The faucet is before the cage, right? Fuck. The gnomes then Glitch. No. Fuck me.
“Three.”
The screens start to transform again, cutting to static, like magnets grazing against them, causing waves of distorted pictures and sounds.
Like a glitch.
Like a glitch?
I’m in full panic mode but I can’t ignore the familiar sensations returning to me. At the base of my skull, down my spine. Pins to fingertips. The monitors are not the ones glitching. And I know this from what I see and feel but mostly, above all the other indicators, because of the sound. For it returns, starting soft—always, always soft at first—increasing in volume, eventually overwhelming me.
The hum.
“Two.”
The countdown becomes insignificant as my eyes roll back under the soft cover of their lids, twitching in their sockets, the crush of the glitch in full effect. And at once, like a life flashing before my eyes, I see myself in my apartment, weeks ago, when the first glitch occurred. Reliving the fear and agony and uncertainty about why it was happening and what it meant, and how those feelings never diminished as the severity and frequency of glitches increased, only to find out that all that time, it was simply about him. And as the hum deafens and my world remains in a blackout, I no longer feel fear. Desperation. The longing for the truth as to why this is happening. Because I already know. This is happening because he’s here again.
“Dad?” I mumble.
Crack my eyelids and look about the room while the glitch’s disorienting side effects fight me. I look everywhere. The area in front of the monitors. The staircase.
“One,” the killer informs.
The temporary glitch runs its course. All the screens—the ones I needed to memorize—are now blank.
The speakers hiss once more. “Game on.”
But before I can cry out for my dad again, something else gnaws at my state of being—a memory from the immediate past, a short time ago before I entered this structure. I hold my watch up at eye level and take in the digital timer counting down—hundredths of seconds ticking away faster than the brain can comprehend, never to be turned back the other direction, only forward, forward, forward in life. Time: the resource for which there is no renewable source.
He laughs through the speakers.
And as the digital numbers collapse into each succeeding figure, I remember that which the killer does not.
The plan.
Less than five minutes to go. This is the countdown.
He laughs some more.
But I laugh back. Because I remember, and remembrance is a form of control finally granting me its power.
And what about your superpower, son?
“Where are you? Help me!”
If you never forget what I taught you, you can never forget at all, Amir.
“Please, I can’t do this alone.”
I am with you now.
“I don’t know what to do. I don’t remember where to go.”
I already did it for you.
“Did what?”
Amir—check the time. We need to move. Trust me.
My watch reads four minutes and thirty-three seconds and counting.
Just go!
I head into the room with the chain hanging from the ceiling. The door behind me shuts, cutting off my retreat up the winding staircase but that’s okay because this is the game, and it only involves forward movements. Can’t retreat into the previous room. No turning back. This room is rectangular. Four doors in total. But only three to choose from. One on the left, one on the right, and one directly in front of me. The one on the left opens to a room with a toy chest, its top popped open like a mouth at the dentist’s office. Little dolls with red hair and blue overalls spill out of the chest.
“Are those the dolls?” I ask myself.
The door on the right has a mounted aluminum sign in the shape of an arrow. EXIT.
I memorized them for you, Amir. You know the order.
I know there was a room with dolls. “Is it this one?” I take a couple of steps toward the toy box, my breath held tightly like a dark secret trying to escape. An iron blockade drops from the top of the doorframe and nearly takes the tip of my nose with it. The floor shakes and cracks on the impact.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” I hear through the speakers. “Strike one. Two more, and the dog dies before any spoken goodbyes.”
Let me guide you, Amir.
“I don’t remember. There wasn’t enough time.”
Do you remember what I taught you about the loci method?
“The rooms are already a map. I can’t map a map to a map.”
No, he tells me, voice calm like he’s once again explaining math to a fifth grader. Let the rooms serve as the map. We’ll do it in reverse.
“You have the trigger memory—is that how this works?”
I have them all. But that means you have them too. Ready?
I nod.
The Mercedes SL 500.
Before I hear my father finish the last syllable, the memory portal drops me off at the Mercedes dealership in 1990s San Jose, California.
It’s late at night and it’s just him and me and he leans over with hands held behind his back and I am eleven and I am content to be here because we own the night. My father is humble and my father is proud and my father steps away from the sticker taped to the Mercedes and I know from the face he makes that he thinks he’ll never afford it. But later that night, I collect the last several months’ worth of allowance, walk out to the living room, where I find him sitting on our crappy couch with a cigarette in hand, and present him with all I can—$132 in total. “For you,” I say, holding the crumpled bills and rolled quarters in my outstretched palms. “I want you to get that car.” His voice cracks as he tells me how he feels.
“Mercedes SL 500 is the room with the pouring faucet,” I tell myself, walking through the door, splashing in the puddle-turned-flood while the faucet continues its assault on the room. Again, there are four doors in total, but only three from which to choose. One in front and two on the sides. The doorway on the right leads to a room with a Matchbox car racetrack, its tiny automobiles zipping along the curving raceway with repetition. Through the door on the left, facing me with devious grins and rosy cheeks and pointy hats, are three ceramic statues. Gnomes. Sawdust and burnt wood permeate the air traced to the third room, the one directly in front of me. A circular buzzing saw fastened to a mechanical device raises itself like an ax murderer before descending onto pieces of wood pushed forward on a conveyor belt. A graveyard of little planks mounting on the floor.
Burger King.
The memory portal drops me off in freshman year of high school, and I’m lying on the sofa, staring at an episode of The Price Is Right while my classmates daydream through fourth period. All the while, I swallow snot and cough up bits of my throat, dying of cold and dying of heat and dying from the commitment I made to the god I still believe in because while fever warps my day, I hang on to my fast—no water, no food—for this is Ramadan. My father comes home, finds me, immediately knows something is wrong, and soon is taking my temperature and asking if I’ve taken my fluids. “I can’t,” I tell him. “That would be breaking my fast. I won’t do it.” My father’s smile curls underneath that black mustache. “Not if you’re sick,” he says. “You’re allowed to if you become ill.” He runs out to Burger King. Brings food to me. After finishing the meal, I’m back on the sofa, still waiting for the fever to break. He brushes my hair off my forehead and says the words to me. The words convey how he feels.
Burger King equals the gnomes.
I walk around the three statues, stationary and demonic, and into the next room. There are only two doors to choose from on this journey to Glitch. I look into one and see plates of food, scraps of chicken wings broken in half, and an empty cage a few feet away. The opposite wall offers an open passage. Too dark to discern what’s inside.
Don’t worry, my father says.
But worry is all I can do because I’m flying blind from room to room, listening to the voice in my head direct the air underneath these aimless wings. I check my watch.
Three minutes, twenty-eight seconds, and counting.
Saturday school.
The memory portal drops me into my father’s blue Ford Thunderbird he painted himself, dried streaks forever embossed along the front chassis. The interior is as worn as any of our cars; the gearshift broke off weeks back, and in its place is an Allen wrench fastened to the nub. We remain parked on the curb outside of my high school. My father is stern and my father is focused and my father wearily speaks while looking straight ahead. “Is this who you want to be?” I hold my response because hidden within these kinds of questions are the rhythms of paternal speeches. “Well, I’ll answer for you. This isn’t you.” His grip tightens on the wheel. “I’ve sacrificed a lot to see you succeed. Your success isn’t optional. Class isn’t optional.” We sit there stewing—he in his disappointment in his son and me in my sudden disappointment in me. At last, my father looks over and I turn to meet his gaze because now I’m contrite and now I’m willing to accept however this lecture ends but instead all I find is my father’s face softening and his eyes transformed by sympathy. “Look—every kid is stupid sometimes.” We laugh. “This is a not great moment. But I need you to remember something. You are meant for so much more if only you allow yourself to see it and want it. Come here.” He holds his arm out like a cape, and I fall into its enclosure. Before I leave and serve out my punishment, he tells me how he feels.
“Saturday school,” I say back to myself—the clear image of the room once previewed on the monitor roars back in my mind. “It was chicken bones.” I enter and my shoe catches the lip of split concrete, bumping into the first plate, knocking the greasy scraps to the side. I stumble but rebalance myself.
Two minutes, twenty-five seconds left.
Hurry, hurry, hurry, I tell myself as I stand. I survey the room, looking for the options that my father’s loci map will make clear, but all that is here, to my left, to the right, straight in front, is a thick, unforgiving wall.
Fuck.
I scramble around the perimeter, banging on the walls, searching for a pull mechanism, a button, anything that opens the maze so I can move one step closer to Glitch and to his survival.
Two minutes, eleven seconds.
The light reflects off the stainless steel cage, its door still open. “This?” I walk into it and shut the door. The lock clicks in place.
I rip at the bars, jostle them with whatever strength I have left, but they won’t give. But before I can do anything else, the floor rumbles. Soon, I’m lowered further into the pit of this compound, out of the room with chicken scraps, and descending toward the next stop. I fall to my knees as the cage drops and smacks the ground. And as I look out into the room, onto the stillness in which they lay, and recognize the new details of their torture, I now know that they were already dead.
“Does it enjoy the Death Professor’s work?” He laughs over the speakers.
The woman, held in the soft spoon of the male, the last act of love, lies closer to me. And there, tied to the end of her ponytail, is what I need—the key. I stick my arm through the cage’s opening, straining my face against the bars, and squirm until my fingertips graze it.
One minute, thirty-seven seconds.
Try, try, try, and I strain more until the bars press into my brow ridge. My shoulder wiggles its way through the small opening a centimeter more. I grab hold of the key. But at full extension, only able to pinch the key between my index finger and thumb, I can’t untangle it from the woman’s hair.
He continues to laugh at me from his perch beyond the speakers.
And I know why. This wasn’t a trap designed to keep me caged. It was a trap designed for degradation. I think of Glitch and only Glitch—that sweet boy with the beautiful and honest expressions of joy—and keep him in mind as I do the only thing I can. The only thing the killer wants. I pull as hard as possible, the hair ripping out of the woman’s head, skin peeling off with it—so easy it tears away like a Velcro patch, the body too decomposed to resist. I hold what I need, the dead woman’s scalp dangling from it. I gag—acidic, sour, hot, and metallic. Pinch my throat closed and choke it down.
One minute, twelve seconds.
I unlock the cage door, and the next stop on the journey begins. The walls shake before two narrow cavities, each the size of an open kitchen window. No doors this time. Just these crawl spaces. I stick my head into one, but all I can see from a restricted view into the next room are mannequins lying flat against the ground, posed like a homicide sidewalk sketch. The other opening offers an equally limited view, only the corner of a quilted blanket hanging over the lip of a bed.
“What now?” I ask my dad, and I ask myself because my dad is dead but still, in an admittedly weird fucking way, with me now.
Amir, this is the last memory.
“There’s nothing to go on. Can barely see anything to clue us in.”
This one will hurt. Please know that it hurts me too.
“It’s a fifty-fifty guess. Or can I crawl through and, if I’m wrong, crawl back?”
Forty-nine seconds.
No—not enough time left.
I meant it, Amir. Please know that. Every single time. I meant it.
“Are you going somewhere?”
I have no choice. This is the last of what I protected for you.
“Please don’t go. Don’t leave me.”
I’m never gone forever.
My chest heaves. My mouth runs dry. What do you say to the father encased only in your brain? And before I can answer, I beg more. He speaks the final trigger.
The voicemail.
The memory portal moves me into a moment lived out years and years ago, and as it does, I already know where this is going because the wrenching pain in my gut confirms it, confirms that I am standing on the student quad lawn, the university center point with crisscrossing lines of grass and walkways and my college peers zigging and zagging to and from dorms and classes and off-campus apartments and libraries—walks of shame and walks of naïveté—all of them living out a more stable college experience than me as I push ahead with a little more than one month until graduation. I start walking back toward my car, having just finished class, not even six hours removed from driving back to Monterey from the farm where my dad dies slowly and his sickness blends with rage, and where I straddle the world that once was and the world I’ll soon endure. Another student—probably an athlete since they all wear the same Nike tracksuits the school provides them—collides into me and now my patience is eroded and my own rage is rising and I look into his eyes—those eyes fronting a soul oblivious to the pain and wickedness I feel digging through the center of my chest hour after hour—and I close my fist, ready to swat reality into this pissant. He holds his hands out in front of him. Takes off his headphones. “Sorry, man.” And on he goes, stirring more into the college broth. But as my adrenaline refuses to back down, jugular punching through my neck, my phone vibrates in my bag. I take it out and flip it open. It’s a message alert from my father. From the call that I let go to voicemail. I hold the phone to my ear as I speed walk to my car, wanting to get the fuck off this campus and to a quiet place. His voice, his accent—those R’s rolling—begins calmly. “Hi. I guess you’re driving or already in class. Look, I feel very badly about how little we talk now. I go in and out—I think you understand. But I want to tell you something while I still have a clear head. What you’re doing, going back and forth and not putting off graduation, being here with me as much as you have—and you know you don’t have to if you can’t—but the fact you do, means a lot to me. And it says a lot about you, Amir.” I press the phone harder against my ear and listen to him say those words. The same words he’s spoken at the end of the previous memories. The words that were my treasure at the end of childhood, the only bounty I ever sought. “Just know that no matter what happens, I’m so proud. So, so proud of you.”
Forty-two seconds.
Pain skis down the mountain of my heart, dragging with it the avalanches of my experience. One last glance around me to make sure that he is, indeed, gone. Which he is. Nowhere to be seen. And now I no longer hear him. But the last trigger—the voicemail—reveals the memorization he saved for me, the one I can now fully picture in my mind.
“The ‘voicemail’ is Glitch.” And the picture my father planted within my mind expands beyond just Glitch. “Glitch with the dolls.” The view widens further, and there the whole bed is revealed. “Quilted blanket.”
Thank you.
Nothing left to do, so I’m belly crawling through the little tunnel and to the room with the quilted blanket—elbows and knees, knees and elbows, forearms thrusting against the surface of the tunnel, squirming and inching forward because right now there are thirty-one seconds left and right now I’m falling out of the tunnel and onto the floor of the next room, rolling a couple of times and hitting the side of the bed. I rise to see the exit on the other side of the room—another staircase heading vertically through the pit of this nightmare. But before me is something more important. Glitch. The peaceful creature remains in slumber, one ear floppy over the side of his head, and his stomach rises and falls.
God is love.
Tick—tick—tick.
I scoop him up into my arms, his snout up against my jaw like the first night I rescued him and like every time he’s hopped up on his hind legs to hug me. As I hold him now, the vents running along the base of the nearest walls start to whistle, and gas the color of emeralds—the same gas as before—pours through, ankle-high. The Death Professor laughs and laughs and says something too garbled to understand and I can see the dial on my watch, twenty-two seconds to go and right now I’m outracing the gas as it rises waist-high, as it chases me out of the room and through the open door where the spiral staircase awaits. Tick, tick, tick.
Eighteen seconds.
Seventeen seconds.
Glitch is a buoy bobbing up and down in the ocean of my grasp, step after step, rising through the bowels of the killer’s maze, green gas seeping into the staircase and ascending with me, only two or three feet behind me, and I’m still outrunning its reach, dog held high, bouncing and bouncing, he lifts his head off my shoulder, sets it back down because he knows I’ve got him and I’m not letting go, and tick, tick, tick, because there are eleven seconds left, ten, nine more seconds as the staircase twists along its spiral design, up and up, the gas now nipping at my heels, the backs of my legs, not sure how much longer I can evade it, and tick—tick—tick says the clock, eight seconds, and the gas twirls around the front of my body, Glitch’s tail hanging into the green fog, hold your breath, hold your breath—lungs scorch, but three steps to go and the staircase gives way to an open door.
God is life.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Through the open door, I run, looking for my next escape, but escape is met with the noxious gas because this is the room I was never meant to get past, the room already enveloped in the same gas that chased me here. Blind, blind, blind, I see nothing because the space is swallowed by the green cloud storm, and I make the mistake of being human and finally breathe it in because I can take it no longer, and I immediately explode with coughs, and I see a shadow, the outline of someone else across the room. I hear his laughs—the Death Professor no longer coming in over the speakers—and the shadow dodges and darts across the milky screen, and something shimmers in his hand, long and metallic and sharp. I retreat until my back bumps up against a wall, colliding against a side table, and the shadow comes back into view, closer and closer it comes, but I latch onto Glitch’s underside with my right arm, hold my watch as close to my eyes as I can and see how many seconds are left, can count them off myself because there are only five seconds remaining, but the figure steps through the patch of fog separating us, now in full view, perfectly parted hair, gas mask fixed to his face, he laughs no more as he drives the blade into my oblique, which feels like a slap, like a punch, deep and cutting, pushing me back, pressing me against the wall, and as he twists it, he laughs again.
Three.
Tick, tick.
Hold onto Glitch. Don’t let go. Almost there, boy. Almost there.
Two.
Tick.
The blade retreats from my body but I know it’s only temporary and I close my eyes tight because here it comes again, plunging further into my abdomen.
One.
Mind and body separate maybe because of the gas inhaled or maybe because death is near or maybe because the end is here and I’m the only one that knows it and right now I’m content and right now I only want Glitch to be okay, and don’t be scared, boy, don’t be scared, I promised I’d come back, I promised, and why hasn’t Dad come back for me when I need him now and will I see him soon enough in the afterlife? In a plane of existence extending beyond the pain and misery we create for ourselves—yeah I think I’d like that but right now I still have to hold on. Hold on as tight as you can.
God is a bomb.
Zero.
Energy storms through the walls—energy of force and energy of sound and energy of detonation—and the energy transforms time into slow motion, snatches me and Glitch and the killer off our feet, hurling us up into the air—hold tight, hold tight—Glitch fastens his snout to the side of my head as the explosion fights gravity with us as its hostage, lighting the room aflame, sucking out the gas, opening the ceiling to the lavender sky, broken glass and shards of wood shotgun through the atmosphere as my feet fly high above my inverted body, bicycle through the air, my head smacks the ground—don’t let go, never let him go—and the rest of me finds the unforgiving floor, spine first, tailbone second, and there’s a greater thud from across the room, a muffled guttural sound, many muffled guttural sounds, choking, choking, choking, and the room is decapitated, and everything that was once whole is now in pieces—dismembered furniture, scorched bearskin rug—but I held on. I held on.
Flames flicker off to the side and at my feet and all around me. My ears ring—maybe they’re bleeding. Black embers flake off from what’s left of the ceiling.
I assess the damage to my body. All limbs are accounted for and present. The dagger remains, handle jutting out.
But I held on.
Glitch squirms. In his way, he asks for his release. With nothing left to give him, I grant his request. Arms fall to my sides. He stands and shakes on all fours, side to side like he got out of the pool, his face hovering above mine—floppy ears and floppy mouth and snot pooling on his black nose.
“Good boy,” I mumble.
The gargling and choking nearby diminishes in time. Everything diminishing in time. And the threat that was once here, dies.
The sky stares down at me through the tattered remains of the compound. The night has all but receded. A few purple streaks, a couple of stars holding on in peril. But the sun is nearing and its canvas dominates with its early morning pink. Soon tangerine. Across the valley and down the sloping dunes, the ocean sings in the far distance. The waves sizzle. The nearby birds call out to friends, chirp across trees, probably asking one another about the explosion. Glitch lies down next to me. Lets out a whine. “It’s okay, buddy. You’ll be okay.” My waist runs warm with my blood. Out it flows. Carrying oxygen and life. Glitch sends his love my way with each slow blink, but I’m not sure how much more I can send back because my body is overtaken by cold—toes first, then legs and torso. The great beyond now beckons. I close my eyes, wondering if it was the gas or the knife or maybe I’m just too exhausted to know any better. Maybe this is the long nap. At last.
Sleep.
Sirens echo in the valley afar. I don’t care. I close my eyes. But as I do, the ground beneath me quakes, opens up, swallowing me whole as I fall through, Glitch is spared as he’s left on the surface of the earth, but I descend through the black hole. I fall and flail, the cavity in which I fell becoming a smaller and smaller dot as I drop deeper and deeper, air rushing along the sides of my head, my ears, but I no longer feel fear because I can no longer control what happens, so I accept it—wait and fall and fall and wait—until my body lands gently into a soft patch of dirt, a tiny impact cloud erupts from the soil, and there is no pain, and there is no blood escaping me and I don’t see a knife protruding from my side because once again I’m intact. But as I look around, I realize the sky has changed back to night—stars sparkling—I don’t even have to turn and look and see the house behind me.
Because I already know.
Somehow. Someway.
I’m back at the farm.
The Next Chapter Begins in 3, 2, 1 . . .