I REJOINED MY CHILDREN aboard the freighter Markyta as the ship moved sluggishly toward the relative safety of Germany’s shores through the endless expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. It seemed like we were the only ship left on these waters; I spent hours on the deck looking for the shadow or lights of another vessel but observed only the flashes of rolling waves and, once, I thought, a whale’s fluke. After the excitement of the escape, the first eight days of the journey passed slowly. My children mostly kept to themselves in their rooms, emerging only to check on the state of my body in the shipping crate and to collect their meals from the kitchen. Roman had been indulging in his world of conspiracies on Reddit, connecting with others who had experienced the disappearance of a loved one at the hands of the American Reclamation. At night my son stared out of the small circular window of his cabin. He had ceased to sleep almost completely. He visited my crate three or four times a day and whispered to my casket. Apologized for failing to protect me. For allowing the Americans to have me. For letting me die away from home. Never again would he allow strangers to desecrate my remains, he swore.

My daughter spent her days obsessively calling her coworkers, attempting to glean more information about VITA’s black ops, searching for the reasons that had led to the bizarre theft of my body. But her colleagues were well versed in the company’s NDAs, revealing nothing in their small talk. I had expected that Steven & Mark would reach out to her, as Greta suggested they would, but the silence between the visionaries and their scientist continued while Tereza considered her options—whistleblowing, lawsuits. But in her journal, she also recorded her inevitable curiosity. What had VITA discovered after snatching her mother? I didn’t blame her, as I wondered the same thing. Why did they consider me to be the key to the future of humanity? Did it have something to do with my spirit form, my inability to leave this world?

The recovery of my body didn’t change my state of being. Part of me had hoped that the process of the afterlife would finally embrace me, carry me off to some Eden or at least a primordial pool of nothingness where I’d cease to care about mortals altogether. Perhaps this would happen when my body was in the ground. But I couldn’t see why a patch of dirt would make a difference.

On the ninth day of our return trip to Europe, I found Tereza and Roman attempting to be social in the common room as they watched newsreels from around the world on their devices. Russia continued its hostilities in the Balkans, its imperialist aims reinvigorated by its alliance with America’s like-minded Reclamation president, who had overturned all of his predecessor’s policies against Russian aggression. Protesters had been shot dead by the NYPD as they attempted to storm the Brooklyn branch of the Reclamation Bureau. The body of Vladimir Lenin, tended by a team of elite scientists keeping his embalmed corpse preserved, had been struck with a mysterious and unprecedented fungus that swallowed every part of his skin, turning the revolutionary papa into the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Russian state media, which, since the invasion of Ukraine, had become more and more adept at fanciful explanations, suggested the tsar’s family had in fact escaped the Bolshevik Revolution and hidden out in an underground super-palace built in Siberia and that the tsar’s grandchildren had conspired with NATO to dispatch this alien fungus as an insult to the father of the revolution.

The most interesting news, however, came from a small country at the heart of Europe. The eyes of my children widened as our village of Hluboká appeared on the screen. The incident had occurred in the picturesque village of Kozinec, not far from Hluboká, shortly after we’d embarked from the Gulf of Mexico. In the middle of the night, the villagers had awoken to smoke and flames curling from a barn at the edge of the village. The structure had been fully engulfed before the firemen could arrive. Though the barn had been believed empty at the time of the fire, in fact the marshal found two burned corpses on the premises. The bodies were identified as a teenage couple from the village who had used the barn for their secret midnight tryst. An incident that would usually have warranted a half-hearted investigation suddenly turned into a possible murder case when signs of arson were found at the scene. Crude Xeroxed fliers scattered around the barn claimed that mujahideen were responsible for the fire, having come to slaughter the dogs of Bohemia.

Unsurprisingly, the truth behind the fire turned out to be quite different. Within days, the police located the source of the flyers and the owner of the vehicle that had been parked just outside the village during the time the fire was set. When the police arrested him, he hastily confessed to his part in the crime and provided the name of the principal conspirator: Lubor Zoufal, the face of the Ancestor Party and Roman’s former friend. Frustrated by the slow progress of the country’s reclamation, Zoufal had recruited a couple of his men to set the fire, hoping to unleash a disinformation campaign to “prove” the existence of a terror cell operating on Czech soil. It was a story certain to boost his party’s standing if it convinced skeptics that the dangers of an Islamic invasion were both tangible and inevitable. The nation was in need of its own holy warriors who would carry the Ancestor Party to an assured electoral victory and a majority in the parliament.

But Zoufal’s soldiers had failed to cover their faces when they used the county’s library to print the flyers; they had failed to check whether surveillance cameras were present in the vicinity of the barn; and on the evening of the fire, they had even boasted drunkenly at the village pub about the brave act of patriotism they were about to commit. Zoufal’s apostles poured gasoline around the barn’s perimeter and lit a match, apparently too drunk to notice the screams of the teenagers inside as they fled the scene.

By the time a tactical unit arrived at Zoufal’s home to arrest him, he’d received a warning about his impending capture. He’d created a Facebook post showing the photos of the barn fire and the teenage corpses, accompanied by a long, rambling screed blaming the attack on a secret Islamic terror cell avenging the Hluboká five, who’d died during the Summer of Madness. He insisted that the government wouldn’t allow the truth of these crimes to reach the public, that assassins were on their way to take his life.

When the tactical unit entered his apartment in Prague, Zoufal raised his CZ P-01 handgun and aimed at the officers. He was killed immediately. In the aftermath, the government publicized the entirety of its investigation of the fire to counter the spread of Zoufal’s Facebook post, which had gone viral and inspired the passions of many followers. Supporters of the Ancestors descended upon Hluboká to find the fictional terrorists and punish them for their alleged crimes. Dozens of policemen entered the village to protect it, turning my peaceful home into a pressure cooker filled with drunken armed men.

Roman and Tereza watched as journalists interviewed Hluboká’s residents. Reporters arrived at Babi’s door—there was Babi, on TV!—and asked whether she had witnessed any possible terrorist activity in the village, whether she believed Zoufal had been framed by the government.

“Is this a joke?” Babi inquired, smiling widely without her teeth. “I’ve known Zoufal since he was a tot. Little asshole, that one, stole ice pops from the store and blamed it on his friends. Always a liar.”

“Some people think otherwise,” the reporter said as the nation watched.

“‘Some people think otherwise,’” Babi repeated. “I see. Well, you can tell those people that I did it. I drove to Kozinec, I set that barn fire. You know what else? I killed Kennedy. When the aliens crashed in Roswell, I got rid of their bodies with my own hands. I blew up Chernobyl because I felt like it. I killed Archduke Ferdinand—didn’t like his face. I’m the leader of the shadow council of pedophilic wizards, and we’re coming for you. Tell that to ‘some people.’ Tell them Babi did it all, tell them I’m the villain, the beginning and end of the conspiracy. I’ve been alive for one hundred and nine years, and I’ve seen knowledge become as attainable as a breath of air—all of human progress is now stashed in the hocus-pocus invisible waves surrounding us, all the knowledge of our ancestors available at the twitch of a finger. Yet I’ve never seen people more rabid about their right to remain stupid, to shun knowledge, to live life by the same superstitions invented back when our forefathers shat in the dirt and prayed to gods made of sock puppets. Anyway, that’s my jar of fat for the market. Gotta get back to my stories.”

As the reporters abandoned Babi’s house to seek more favorable responses from neighbors, Roman translated Babi’s words for Tereza. He seemed distracted, troubled; clearly the loss of his former leader and friend was a personal blow. Roman still cared about the movement that had once given him purpose. I wished he would be sadder for the endangered residents of Hluboká, for the children who’d died, instead of feeling such sorrow for the man responsible.

Tereza left Roman alone with the laptop to give him time to process these bizarre events. Perhaps she hoped he’d conclude that the failures and embarrassments of the Ancestor movement were no longer his to claim. Like me, Tereza wanted to believe that an aspiring fascist could be cured, reformed.

But after he received the news of Zoufal’s demise, Roman refused to leave his room. Tereza brought him a plate of food and a glass of wine after the captain’s dinners, but he left the food untouched. She sat next to her brother’s door for hours at a time, listening for signs of life. Occasionally, she heard the clink of glassware, the opening of a bottle, the clicking of laptop keys. She pleaded with Roman through the door but received no reply. She gave up after a couple of days and returned to her routine. During a midnight trip to the kitchen, she finally spotted Roman haunting the hallways with Sergei. The men ignored her, going about their business in the dark.

Meanwhile, the situation in Hluboká became ever more dangerous. Encouraged by the martyrdom of their leader, Ancestors arrived to search the village for imaginary mujahideen, and their numbers grew into the hundreds as their social media accounts called for more reinforcements, declaring the path to Hluboká a pilgrimage, a crucial act of resistance against the enemy. The prime minister responded by sending armed forces to support the efforts of the police. During these days, the Ancestors usurped the nation’s discourse. Zoufal’s plan had worked after all. As Markyta continued its course to Europe, the only thing my children could do was stay pinned to the news and hope that at the end of this standoff between nativists and reason, they would have a home to return to.

Twelve days into the journey back to Bremerhaven, Tereza awoke in her room to the sound of Roman’s door creaking open. Barefoot, she followed him through the hallway, into the kitchen. Somehow, he had gotten hold of a key to the pantry. He opened the crew stash and retrieved a few bottles of rum. He turned to face Tereza but made no acknowledgment of his sister, just walked past her toward the passenger cabins. His face was covered in red blotches, the bloated skin and sagging eyes rendering him almost unrecognizable. I felt like I’d traveled back in time, to the days my son fought imaginary enemies in and out of pubs as a hobby, when his blighted appearance reflected the infection inside his mind.

“After all this time,” Tereza called out, “I can’t believe you’ll let this break you.”

“Have you ever believed in something outside of yourself?” Roman said, turning around with a scoff.

“I’ve spent a few afternoons trying to alter the course of human destiny,” Tereza said.

“Yes. Your telomerets, whatever. Your belief system. Imagine I took it all away over the course of one day.”

“Roman. You’ve stayed away from these people for years. There’s a reason for that.”

“And all those years I’ve felt empty. What have I done with my time, Terezo? I barely got through university, I underwhelmed my girlfriends, I failed our mother, I grew up to realize that I’m not extraordinary, not even close to it. I felt expendable. Insufferable. But the Ancestors bound me to tribe and purpose. My own people, my land. Protecting it from the forces that want to change it. And I know you don’t think those forces exist, but you’re wrong. Look at what the Russians did to Ukraine. The world has always been divided between invader and the invaded. I couldn’t handle the violence they asked from me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe. After we bury our mother, I’m going to retake my place in the movement, to honor Lubor’s memory. I’ll live for the preservation of the Czech people, something greater than me. I should’ve never left them. If I hadn’t, maybe he’d still be alive.”

“But don’t you see—this cause is still about you. You’re not really interested in helping the downtrodden, otherwise you’d head to the refugee camps in Yemen or California. You want to feel like a paladin, protecting whatever it is you consider pure. There’s no war to fight, so you try to start one, because believing you’re a soldier is easier than accepting that real life is mundane and ordinary and mad, a series of chores. So unlike the stories. The world is filled with people like you, young men claiming they struggle to feel purpose. But there is so much real work to be done, so many people who actually need your help. Ladling out soup in a shelter isn’t nearly as sexy as starting a race war, though.”

Clutching the bottles, Roman walked back to his room without another word. He seemed unreachable. Muted. All these years, it would seem, he had remained an Ancestor, unwilling to engage in the movement’s crimes yet still dedicated to its ideology. How many sleeper agents like him did the nativists have around the world? People who passed as normal, ordinary hard workers, who appeared to their neighbors to be kind and down-to-earth but in their heads stayed loyal to this warped cause. Should the nativists wrest control from the government, these sleeper agents would be ready to activate, to help support this new world of Reclamation, where you are only as good as your loyalty to your tribe, your adherence to tradition, and your rejection of anything outside so-called patriotism. Perversely, a Reclamationist would call such a life “freedom.”

TWO DAYS BEFORE we were set to reach Europe, Tereza again spotted the VITA drone hovering above Markyta, flying low, perhaps on purpose, to ensure she’d see it. Had there ever been a time when VITA didn’t know her whereabouts? Had they followed her into the swamp? Surely Benjamin’s skilled eyes would’ve noticed the shine of a drone in the night skies.

As she watched the drone, she dictated a journal entry to her hWisper. She guessed it was only a matter of time before Steven & Mark came to collect her. Supposedly, Tereza belonged to them. The very people who’d stolen her mother’s body while she was still alive, in a way, and had kept that from her. Tereza had always made excuses for VITA’s moral trespasses, as the work was too important to be impeded by the world’s arguments over ethics, but it was impossible for her to set aside her personal vendetta. They had fucked with her family. In her journal she recorded the options she had to sever herself from the company. She could go public with it all and face the consequences of being a whistleblower. She could threaten them privately, get herself out of her contract. She would never be able to work in the field again, but this seemed a better option than staying with the company that had stolen her mother’s body from her deathbed and shipped it off to the Florida wildlands for unknown but surely perverse reasons.

What could they do to her if she never returned? If she decided to simply walk into a bank, empty her account, and ride this pile of cash back into Hluboká? She could remodel the family house any way Babi wanted or leave it the same. She could invest in the village businesses. She could live in the community happily until VITA lawyers arrived at her door with an invitation to court, then hire lawyers of her own and hold the case up for years or countersue for the theft of my body. Perhaps she would lose in the end, perhaps VITA would take everything she had, but until that day came, she could live free, get to know her grandmother, abandon her pursuit of the God pill. A different kind of life. Would she be able to resist her seemingly immutable drive to change the world all by herself? Exhausted from this journey, she was willing to try.

My daughter spent her afternoon on the deck, immersed in the soothing hum of the surrounding ocean. But soon the skies turned black, and the crew members and refugees whispered of a dangerous storm approaching. The VITA drone continued to follow the freighter at the same distance, and Tereza did her best to ignore it. She followed the ongoing standoff in Hluboká on her hWisper, distressed over the footage of a growing Ancestor presence, people carrying guns and building a tent city just outside the perimeter established by the police. I worried about Babi, though I knew that she had survived far worse.

Then the hostilities ceased overnight. Against all expectations, the leaders of the Ancestor Party released a video calling for their supporters to abandon Hluboká. They conceded that the government’s version of the story had been verified as somewhat true, that Lubor Zoufal had been consumed by his anxiety disorder and opiate addiction and had brought shame to the movement by committing acts of violence. It seemed that the party had to weigh a decision between returning to its roots—violence, chaos, confrontation—and advancing its new vision of a more peaceful takeover of Czech society. They chose the slower path, fascism with a human face. Though I was relieved that the village of my youth wouldn’t become famous for bloodshed, I worried greatly about the fascists learning new tricks. They were blending in. Finding ways of normalizing their agenda. What if, someday, we lost sight of them?

When she heard the news, Tereza attempted to visit her brother again, but his door was locked. Behind it, Roman wept as he scrolled through photos of himself and Lubor embracing each other at the Ancestor rallies with surprisingly touching intimacy.

Tereza returned to the deck to see the first drops of rain fall. The VITA drone had vanished from its usual position off the stern. Tereza walked around the perimeter to look for it. The captain waved at her from the window of the command center looming above the ship. The drone seemed to be gone, but then the faint echo of an engine cut through the susurrus of ocean and rain. Tereza sought out the source. In the blackened sky, a small dot came into focus and grew larger as it approached. Tereza ran to the railing and squinted at the object. It was a helicopter branded with the VITA logo. Three VITA drones followed in its wake. The ship’s emergency siren let out a long whine. She sprinted up the stairs to the command center.

The captain burst through the doorway, giving off the scent of tequila. He grabbed Tereza by the shoulder, too roughly for my liking. “You brought them to my ship?” he said, his usual confidence betrayed by his trembling voice.

“Don’t let them land,” Tereza said.

“You’re aware that a helicopter moves much faster than a freighter? And what happens if I succeed and they crash into the ocean? That wouldn’t end well for me. Besides, the Frontex Coast Guard is on the radar. We’re cooked either way—our only luck is that it’s Europeans, not Americans.”

“How much weight are you smuggling?”

“Excuse me?” the captain said.

“Heroin, coke, whatever you have on board. How much?”

“Enough,” the captain said.

Below, on the deck, the presence of the helicopter in combination with the storm had unleashed chaos, a wild interruption to the serene days of the journey so far. A mixture of crew members and American refugees scurried out of the ship’s innards. Some prayed and some shielded themselves as if the helicopter might shoot. Crew members shouted into their radios: “Get the rafts!” “Hide!” “Is it the Coast Guard?” “Are they here to kill us?”

The captain pushed past Tereza and leaped down the stairs to the deck, issuing commands to his men with every step. Some listened, others ignored him.

Where was Roman in this chaos? Not in his room. I couldn’t find him anywhere.

A trio of refugees from Florida dropped an inflatable raft into the water and threw ropes over the side of the ship. But a crew member yelled for them to stop—their raft would not be able to withstand the storm. The helicopter hovered right above the empty platform on the stern, where there was enough room for a landing.

Tereza ran back to the civilian cabins, dodging people carrying boxes of food and water from the pantry. She rapped on her brother’s door. It creaked open. He was gone, though all his possessions were still in the room.

After checking the kitchen, Tereza returned to the deck. Precious minutes passed. The helicopter still hovered above the platform, unsteady in the wind, as the rain intensified. Along the ship’s starboard side, the lifeboat that had carried her and Roman to shore had vanished, along with the ropes that usually held it.

Tereza leaned over the railing. The lifeboat bobbed where the freighter met the surface of the ocean. On one of the rope ladders hanging over the side, a familiar crew member wearing a large green backpack climbed down to the lifeboat. It was the man Tereza had often seen with her brother in recent days, Sergei. Next to him climbed another man. Was it…

Roman.

The man with the backpack jumped onto the lifeboat and crawled through the hatch. Roman followed. He looked up briefly at his sister, nodded a goodbye, hesitated for a moment, then shut the hatch door behind him. Through the hatch window, Tereza could see the silver handles of my casket resting in the lifeboat, ropes still tied around them. She looked at the stacked containers forming the ship’s valley. The bottom container, which had held my casket, was wide open, its doors creaking back and forth in the wind. Roman and Sergei must’ve retrieved my body from the container in the midst of the chaos and lowered it into the boat.

“Fuck!” Tereza screamed.

She sprinted along the deck and spotted the captain standing underneath the hovering helicopter. He waved his arms, shouting “No!” as the helicopter descended and ascended again, like a bee deciding whether to unleash its sting. Thunder roared briefly in unison with the chopper’s rotor.

Tereza slapped the captain’s back. “He stole my mother!” she said.

“Why would he do that?” the captain said.

“He’s with Sergei. They took the lifeboat.”

“Was he carrying a green backpack?”

Tereza nodded.

“Coke,” the captain said. “Cartel package. I suppose those idiots got the idea of stealing the lifeboat from me at the same time. Kruzifix! They’ll never reach land with it.”

“He wouldn’t leave me here.”

The captain said nothing, and I knew that even Tereza didn’t believe her own words.

“How do I get to him?” she said.

“The Coast Guard will rescue them. It’s every smuggler for himself now.”

I wanted to stay with my daughter, to know she remained safe, but the pull of my son in danger and my body left to the elements was stronger. I left Tereza behind as she helplessly watched the VITA helicopter above her head. My spirit rushed in the direction of the lifeboat. What was Roman doing in the midst of a raging ocean? There was no land he could reach before the Coast Guard nabbed him.

The thunder roared again as I found myself inside the lifeboat. The cartel man, Sergei, sat at the helm, holding his backpack strap with his right hand as he steered with his left. Roman sat next to my casket, gripping the ropes along the walls. The casket swayed and slid, banging his knees and shinbones. He endeavored to keep it steady so as not to further destabilize the boat as it rocked in the sea. Rain poured down like a salvo of arrows on an ancient battlefield, striking the windows so hard, I expected they’d crack. The waves battered the sides of the boat. A sound of tearing and breaking came from somewhere above. The rain was so thick the freighter was no longer visible; we could see nothing but water hitting glass. Though it couldn’t be far behind us, Markyta had vanished.

A killer wave came from the west, so tall it concealed the skies. Sergei had the chance to steer us away from it, to minimize its impact. Instead, he directed us right into it, plunged the boat into the wave with the full force of the Old Testament. The vessel flipped backward, and Roman lost track of gravity, of which way was up and which way was down. If it had been unburdened, the lifeboat would likely have returned to level and carried its passengers safely for a while longer. But when the boat stood upright on its stern, my casket went into an uncontrolled free fall and smashed the hatch open, knocking it off its hinges, then slid into the ocean as the boat capsized and water began to fill the interior. Roman fell out of the boat, clutching the casket’s finely crafted handles.

As my son fell into the water, I fought to be unleashed from my afterlife prison so I could somehow help. He was here because of me, dragged down into the storming ocean by my corpse encased in an overpriced cist. It couldn’t be. I couldn’t stand for this to be the end when he had interrupted his life and faced the dangers of the ocean and America to bring me home. This couldn’t be my legacy, the cold merciless rage of the ocean denying my son safe passage. I imagined the American president as a sorcerer standing atop the White House chanting spells, his staff aimed toward Europe, punishing those who had landed illegally on his beloved shore.

Roman continued to grip the casket as it descended through the twisting underwater currents. The water seemed black, as if tainted with petroleum. How cold was the ocean? Roman’s eyes were open wide, his skin blue. I noticed he wasn’t really holding on to the casket’s handle—rather, his hand was stuck. He sank with me, yanking at the casket and kicking his legs, whether to save himself or to carry me upward, I wasn’t sure. But the only place for me now was the bottom of the sea. Roman glanced up as another crooked wire of lightning lashed the sky. The blue and silver flash revealed just how far he was beneath the surface. Too far. Manically he thrashed his stuck hand, attempting to break his own wrist, his fingers, anything to separate himself from me and come up for air. He closed his eyes. Was he about to faint from the cold?

We sank toward the bottom. Water entered my casket through the unsealed cracks. The cover flailed and began to tear off—I couldn’t blame the casket maker, Mr. Lavička, as he had done brilliant work for the dead his entire life, but his eyesight was going and rheumatism plagued his hands, and he had no heirs to take over the business. Besides, this was far from what the casket had been designed for. It was hardly Mr. Lavička’s fault if the hinges secured by his shaking fingers couldn’t stand up to the pressure. My wooden vessel came apart, and I was exposed to the world once again. My lungs filled, preventing my body from floating back to the surface, and the underwater currents stirred by the storm bore me out of the casket and rolled me across the ocean floor, causing my arms and legs to flail and my dress to swirl as if I were performing the strange mating dance of the newts.

FRIGHTENED BY MY new surroundings, I lost track of Roman. I assumed he’d at least freed himself from my casket’s weight, headed up to the surface. I followed my remains in their feverish dance, unable to turn away. What was this human fascination with one’s final resting place? I had to know where my flesh would end up. Though it was impossible, I imagined the ocean carrying me for thousands of kilometers, right into the darkest depths of the Atlantic, depths that held secrets humans would never discover. I ceased to follow the flow of time, much like when I disappeared into the memories of my younger days. I stayed for hours or for centuries. I traveled a thousand kilometers or a thousand centimeters. Time bows its head to eternity, recognizing that it is no longer needed or wanted.

The undersea feeders, shrimp and crabs, would come to gnaw softly, methodically on the leftovers of my flesh. Before my body could fill up with methane and float once again, my skeleton would be stripped bare, and the torn pieces of my dress would float in different directions. I saw no indignity here, only a reclamation by nature, the only reclamation that made any sense. My bones, bare and disconnected, would scatter, as the magnetic power still trying to keep them together slowly gave way. Perhaps the bones would make it to different parts of the world, back to the shores of Portugal and the beaches of Egypt, though I knew it was far more likely they would become a permanent installation on the ocean floor. But I liked to imagine they’d be found someday, many thousands of years in the future, after the ocean dried out and became a canyon lush with new flora and fauna. Animals that didn’t yet exist would roam these parts and dig my bones out of the dirt, and to them these remnants would mean nothing at all, anthropologically or otherwise; they would not know the bones were merely the leftovers of yet another species that had concluded its short reign under the sun, having reached its peak by introducing robot cashiers into its hypermarkets.

Much likelier, the water would become the planet’s equalizer; sooner or later it was going to flood the shores of our continents. There would be no new canyons. Instead, the water would swallow more and more pieces of the human kingdom, inundating the remains of forgotten cities until they were nothing more than memories on wrinkled postcards. The towns I had once known would drown and their people would become refugees, searching for better luck elsewhere. The Florida from which I had just been rescued was bound to perish in the floods. The water would breach the seawalls and arrive at the bottom floors of Miami’s skyscrapers, and the mud and toxic filth and garbage and sewage would create a mosquito-infested evacuation zone. Everyone knew this was coming soon, yet nobody seemed to be sufficiently panicked. I used to watch these predictions on the news, thinking about the anchors, who seemed so cavalier about the devastation they described, so I too remained cavalier. Now it was no longer my problem!

I was happy I would never have to experience the burden of Tereza’s God pill. Even the decision itself—do I want to think forever, worry forever, wonder about purpose and love and taxes forever?—sounded unbearable. Witnessing places, states, countries vanish. Living out history. Remembering enough history to watch it get recycled by new generations who think the world is brand-new and theirs to break. Such things shouldn’t be put upon a person, yet I would be pressured into it. I would watch my friends or my family or the sexy people of the future I knew from TV swallow the God pill and I would feel guilt: If they stay here, I have to stay too. Immortality would become a social more. To reject it would be impolite. Foolish. Maddening, sociopathic. Our species would be split into those who accepted the gift and those too weak for it. Who wants to look weak? I would become a soldier in humanity’s march toward self-apotheosis.

Such terrifying thoughts here underneath the ocean. Watching my flesh and bones dance, I was certain I was about to lose my ability to see, to speak as this spirit watching over my family. I would enter my final resting place, which I hoped was simply a state of comforting nonexistence. A nothing. Done, finis, over—what I had been promised by the prophets of atheism.

Though it feels shameful to admit, by now I had become too fascinated by the journey of my body underneath the ocean to worry about my children and their safety. Surely my son had freed himself from the casket and been rescued by the capable crew or even the Coast Guard. There was no reason to think negatively. But did this indifference mean I was already losing my humanity? That with my body scattered, I was at last ready to pass from this desperate limbo into a true afterlife? I believed it. I knew it. The time had come to let go of the troubled mortals.

I waited for it. Finally, rest. The dark depths of the ocean provided the peace I’d been searching for since I had gone to sleep for the last time, inside a New York hotel room. I felt hypnotized and tempted. If I didn’t look for my children, I could simply assume they were saved and disappear into the nothingness I craved.

I began to lose my memory, bit by bit. I forgot all of who I’d been, day by day, as every piece of life that made up my self vanished one by one, never to return. Visions of the future left me too, along with the poetry of flesh in motion. My death would mean the end of desire. What a relief!

I took a final glance at the world around me. Everything blended in shades of gray. I knew I had lived as a truly free woman. Those who insist that their worth is determined by the land they occupy couldn’t understand. Even most of the soldiers who vow to defend freedom know little of it. The free woman turns into a spirit to outlive them, outrun them. The enforcers of rules that keep humans confined and separated are always bound to lose, in one way or another. The Reclamation was complete. America had become the true antithesis to liberty, a cautionary tale. Not a place for us, the Slavíks.

In the end, I am certain of one thing. Whatever efforts rulers and their vassals make to reclaim what wasn’t theirs to begin with, they can never catch up to us. Yes, there is a strength in those of us who belong to the tribe of endless beginnings. Every person who had to start anew too many times, climb from rubble and destruction and push against despair. We will begin again, and again, until we get it right, until the cumulative force of our determination becomes impossible to stop.

I promise. Everything is going to be fine. This is my last vision.

The glowing body of the golden carp appeared in the water. Its glittering scales turned the surrounding ocean into a chamber of stained glass in which my old friend and I were safe, contained. Of course! Inside this carriage of gleaming walls, the carp was here to guide me to the Other Side. I couldn’t think of a better companion.

The fish swam toward me and opened its mouth in greeting. “You don’t have a goddamn clue,” it said.