The Ghosting, Old Jim called it, how he lost his daughter, and only him the one losing her, and he figured he would never know the why and that’s why she’d done it that way. So she would never have to talk to him again. When the thought made his heart constrict and Old Jim’s breath came rough and uneven, like he might die, he tried to remember he didn’t deserve it. Unless he did.
Eleanor Cassandra Kavanaugh, the first name from her mother, French for “shining light,” the surname a construct for Old Jim’s cover. Little Light when she was younger. The way at age eight she had held the spatula out like a flyswatter to turn over a pancake shaped like a butterfly. The frown into smile as she ignored his advice at twelve playing miniature golf and made a hole in one. That time she tried to run off with a pig at the petting zoo and had been trotted along the fence line, the porker protesting the tight leash, until they’d caught up. Where had she been going?
Eleanor Kavanaugh held weight, but by her teen years she’d gone by “Cass” or “Kavanaugh,” as if it made her seem more serious, and Cass had stuck over time. Cass as college undergrad who took poetry classes and published poems, but had graduated with a degree in animal science. But turned aimless, left jobs abruptly, took other ones, started over. It became a tougher life for her over time than he’d wished for her, but he was proud of her.
Most of the time during her childhood, Old Jim was a spook, far from home, reliant on his wife’s updates. He’d met Genevieve in the service, which is why they’d never married, just played pretend. Old Jim’s boss, Jack, had this intense idea of family to go with allegiances within Central that made it work, for a while.
What it meant to tread foreign soil on some pulse-pounding secret mission, receiving communiqués from home that seemed benign, senseless, benign again. Checking for enemy surveillance along a dusty roadside … while reading about 4-H clubs and prizewinning chickens. Central had him hooked by then, or he just liked the adventure of the job and used that as an excuse.
Then, that period of domesticity when, despite bouncing around between home and overseas, he took Cass to soccer matches and for a time he was driving this chatty teenager to regionals and exploring the mysteries of small talk with the parents on the sidelines, commiserating when they lost and celebrating when they won. Then he’d been called overseas for a longer stretch, and for a handful of years Cass had lived with a great-aunt.
By the time Cass left him for good, Gen had been gone eighteen years, the time they’d had together so short. Everyone was so grown up, Cass closing in on thirty and Old Jim used to a haggardness in her eyes as each new opportunity crumbled to dust, and he couldn’t parent her into something better at that point. She had her poetry. She wasn’t out on the street. She just had a life that hadn’t hit its stride, but he thought she knew he had her back.
The day she left Old Jim remembered as being in November, dead leaves on the lawn of his upstate New York house that Central had bought him as a prop. He’d been stateside for some time, Central using him to trap domestic terrorists. A few meetings in public places. Arrests months later, after he’d been forgotten, not a loose end but a thing that hadn’t worked out, a person they’d barely known.
A burnt hint of winter in the distant smoke from a premature fireplace. But maybe that was his mood remembering it. Perhaps it had been late summer and the generator had just died, but he couldn’t recognize the glimmering hope of that.
No, it was a day you don’t forget. In November. The dead leaves on the lawn he left all winter until the snow covered them. She had ghosted him but was still around. Traces over time. Bills that arrived, forwarded—by her. All her mail came to him for a year, then nothing.
In its sparse, impersonal quality, the mail almost broke him, even though he opened each new envelope as if the advertising within would, miraculous, reveal a message. As if he were still receiving her over the transom, if only he could read the signs. Was light. Was matter. Washed up in the sea wrack of some distant shore.
No hospital had held her. No hotel had booked her. No airline had received her. But, then, she was her father’s daughter. He’d not let slip the specifics of missions but had entertained her, perhaps too much, with a beer in him, in the art of espionage.
Had she asked him for specifics? He couldn’t remember.
At first, he had just a spy’s intuition that something was wrong, because her usual letters never arrived, and they’d settled into a good, solid routine with that. But, two weeks after their last lunch, he opened the car’s glove compartment … and found her note. Not even in an envelope, just scrawled on a lined piece of eight by eleven notebook paper, ripped from a spiral binding.
“Don’t follow me. Don’t try to find me. Don’t contact me. Sincerely, Cass.”
Sincerely crushed him. Her handwriting, hurriedly scrawled, even if the time delay had broken the chain of evidence, and so he entered his first loop: That someone was running an op on him. Some Central faction, an agent he’d caught with a hand in the till back in the day, or one of the domestic terrorists he’d set up, but, no, they lacked the subtlety. There would’ve been a ransom note, some other sting in the tail. The note felt real. It felt real because it hurt him so badly.
Don’t follow me. Don’t try to find me. And that was him, too, in a way, cashing in his R&R with Central and slipping their gauntlet, flush with cash and driving a different car. Catch me if you can, but for a long time they didn’t bother.
A forwarded letter from a friend of Cass’s, early on, he pored over for clues but found nothing. Juxtaposed with unearthing a box of memorabilia that included baby photos and elementary-school essays, crayon and watercolor images she’d made for classes. Green parrots she’d never seen flying across a blue sky, as if predicting an idyllic moment from Old Jim’s secret missions. Such a happy child, with such a huge smile. Everything he felt in that moment, looking through the box, was a cliché, even though it cut so deeply.
What did that mean about details of lives, real or made-up? That Central could’ve made this up, too, if he didn’t remember her drawing it? A casualty of his career, these thoughts. Because he’d been so many people, for Central. Out in the field, then as a fixer or enforcer.
Her apartment at the edge of a city forty miles from the house … barren, gutted, and after Old Jim’s first visit, that December, slipping the landlord a twenty, rented out again, so anything forensic receded into the past. Returning the night of his visit, Old Jim had run a black light across the floor, the walls, the lone futon left in a corner.
What had he expected? Blood spatter?
After he was done and sitting in his pickup truck, in the grips of some dark emotion between grief and rage, he hated himself for turning her disappearance into another special op. Sneaking into buildings after dark with night vision goggles. To trudge the world looking for traces of someone who didn’t want to be found—who had decided to become a ghost. What next? Would he construct theories from torn matchbook covers, like a bad noir movie?
The details that became a description for other people as he widened his search. Long brown hair, hazel eyes with dark liner, small upturned nose. Freckles, with a slight flush to her cheeks. The mouth that tightened into determination when she clenched her jaw. Just under five ten and a swimmer’s body. Bitten nails with chipped red nail polish.
As weeks became months and the feeling he’d had when she’d missed two regular calls, usually after group therapy, became a constant weight in his heart, his stomach, like a cancer spreading … he couldn’t take it anymore. No relief from the sadness, the confusion, the sudden disconnection, shocked by the force of these emotions, how they sustained themselves.
He slid past the date on the calendar that he thought of as marking the end of Central’s tolerance. He slid into drink, like a natural, like a pro. It was easy enough—it had been the escape that got him through many a mission, in moderation, doled out as a reward or to screw his courage to the sticking place. Just upped the volume on it, to stop hearing her voice. Because her voice came to him at odd times, from different times, so the cooing of Shining Light became the castigation of a teenage rebellion into activism and the arts. And the shame of it: Gen receded even further the longer Cass had ghosted him, as if the two were connected and, both undead in their separate ways, cast loose from memory, reeled back in.
Inadequate, fuzzy, shimmering moments came back to him—his sense of his own daughter. Memories he had to work at, reinforced by old photographs. Here she was right before the petting zoo pony stepped on her foot. There she was staring at the camera in costume for some high school event.
He ate too much, to keep up the drinking, or he ate nothing, to punish himself, until he felt weak, fuzzy. He left the house and spent a month in a crap motel sleeping most of the time and roaming dive bars in strip malls late at night. Got used to the smell of piss from dirty bathrooms, the curling grin of vomit. He wanted to pick fights—with fellow drunks, with rangy men in backward-turned baseball caps playing pool. He couldn’t say what held him back.
Instead, Old Jim had conversations with himself at the end of the bar. Except, it wasn’t Old Jim he spoke to—he spoke to Cass, reliving the last conversation they’d had, that last Monday. He’d been driving through her area after visiting a hardware store, so it had been by chance, except maybe she’d meant it that way. For the last time.
At a busy diner pretending to be a café, in a booth with cracked plastic covers, with the comforting burnt-grease smell and the line cooks grumbling, tetchy and sharp in the open kitchen. They both drank hot chocolate.
Old Jim had told her about his physical, that he’d “passed it with flying colors,” a term that now seemed meaningless. By which he meant he didn’t care, but he also didn’t know what “flying colors” meant, as he dissected each moment later. UFOs? Flags? Less or more? Some old way that made sense back in the day.
“That’s great, Dad,” she said, and she never called him Dad, did she? Or did she? Her face was open to him—and the smile, it seemed genuine in the moment, but what lay behind it? Something else had had to exist behind it.
But he’d been caught in the reverie of relief of getting through another physical, which she couldn’t know had meant a trip to Central, along with a full psych eval, too. A process he dreaded. Then, thinking about the things he could not share with Cass for security reasons, and did that mean he’d never been able to share enough, been too on guard, to ever really be her father?
He just hadn’t seen it coming—the way they’d laughed and joked with each other for a few years now. How they’d been in such easy contact for most of her middle to late twenties. They’d had one bad argument, yes, a couple of years before the ghosting, but he couldn’t even remember most of it. Something emotional, but her shouting at him and him shutting down as a result.
“Don’t talk to me that way,” he’d said, because of her shouting.
“Something isn’t right,” she’d said, “and I don’t know how to fix it.”
But they had fixed it. They had fixed it to the point they had been fine later that day. He recalled a nice dinner at a steak house, where she could get a robust salad.
What if he could have focused on what was moving through her, absorbed the hurt, asked a question? Was that it? This strong impulse? If only. If only he could travel back in time and fix it.
But he couldn’t.
The familiar sick and hopeless feeling washed over him again, and he kicked his feet against the side of the bar so the men playing pool took note and the bartender’s caterpillar eyebrow rose, as Old Jim put up his hand in the universal gesture for “Sorry sorry sorry” for “Peace, peace, peace will never find me, but I’ll settle down now.” Looking down at himself, at his body, like his own ghost, wondering at the overreaction, get it together, pull yourself together.
Remembered now why he didn’t want to fight anyone. Because his training might kick in and he’d be helpless next to the compulsion of that, and he didn’t want to kill anyone because he was grief-stricken. Break the pool stick in half, jam it in a biker’s eye, take the other half and smash it across the back of the next attacker. Reach across the bar and pull the bartender toward him into a headbutt, or worse. Now he was back there, now he was overseas again and with a mandate to do whatever, whenever, without asking.
He had kept the forwarded letter from Cass’s friend, but knew better than to pull it out of his wallet and read it again. Usually, that triggered his need to write to Cass, and he’d done enough of that, with no way to get the letters to her.
Feared all of those letters would turn into the plea he wrote, so short, out-of-his-mind drunk in one of these bars, the one he balled up and threw away, a weird déjà vu in the action he couldn’t ever explain. Asking for a sign, an explanation, anything.
He’d passed the physical with flying colors. She’d said she was glad and had touched his hand. No, his wrist. She’d reached across the booth, sitting opposite him, and touched his wrist, glad that he was okay. A daughter who loved her father.
He remembered then that she’d said she appreciated him. “I really do.” And that had landed odd at the time, this idea of appreciation, but now it screamed out at him as her receding across the table from him until there was nothing of her left, no way to explain, just this constant absence, re-absenting itself.
What had she thought would happen? That he’d go on with his life, assume she was safe? What was anyone supposed to do with that?
The next time Old Jim came to his senses, he was in a dark bar in the Midwest and didn’t know how he’d gotten there. Oh, right, he’d been kicked out of the hotel for being “aggressive” and “disturbing others.” That made him cackle but when he tried to stop, he couldn’t turn the faucet off. His savings almost gone, and every time he made a withdrawal, the assumption that Central might’ve closed the account. Or, perversely, did Jack like to think Old Jim was still undercover?
Thoughts that recycled: His daughter had been recruited by Central. She hadn’t left him but couldn’t tell him, for the usual reasons. She would contact him when she could, if she ever could. She loved her father. She loathed him. Despised him. She’d called him “Dad” in the diner. Had she ever called him that before, with such informality? He didn’t think so.
The truth of it was: No way to get out of the raw, bloody scream deep in his throat that he didn’t fully understand. The not knowing. The not knowing and no way to tell her … anything. He knew it was a circle, a loop, a crashing into the ground from forty thousand feet, but …
But he tried. Stupid, maybe, to try the places he knew she’d haunted before but to which she would never return, but that was all he had left. Coffee shops, bohemian bookstores, counterculture performance spaces, laundromats, libraries. He wrote and rewrote a new letter. He left copies of the new letter everywhere. As if his daughter had been lost somehow, to everyone. Kidnapped. In trouble.
If you see this woman, call …
If you see this woman, call …
If you see this woman, call …
If you see this woman, call …
If you see this woman, call …
If you see this woman, call …
If you see this woman, call …
Old Jim started doing it seven times and then another seven times, convinced that six was bad luck, five not enough, and eight too many. Seven a day, seven the next day, until he ran out of places. The photo he had to use was grainy, and he didn’t know if her hair was still long and brown.
There came strange callers in the night who hung up when he answered, and did he dream them, or did Central test him, or want him back? Or his daughter? Or some third party, like another intelligence service? But he saw signs of Cass in everything, no matter that it wearied him. From the walk of some stranger hunched over in the rain to a singer’s voice on the radio to an electronic pulse through a receiver that might mean nothing.
Her poetry came to him during odd moments of sobriety.
“The upward lilting song / of small birds in the air. / A sweet question in the dark, / mysterious trajectory, / the strafing of a whispered love.”
There came the moment Old Jim vomited in the hot sun on hotter pavement, maybe six or seven months after Cass was gone. He’d tried everything. Found nothing. Burnt up, lit up, sitting down heavy against a fire hydrant, feeling the hardness of it against his back, and letting it dig into him like a punishment. Ankle hurt, so he’d been limping before he fell. Could’ve caught fire in that heat—in what city?—didn’t care. Didn’t care.
Still didn’t care, when a woman in a white dress shirt, black blazer, and black dress slacks loomed over him, bounced a quarter off his forehead. He just stared at it where it had landed, on his thigh right above the end of his ragged cutoff jeans.
Except when he picked up the coin and felt it between his thumb and forefinger, the face etched there was not the familiar one. Or, rather, the less familiar one. Central’s special quarter, their coin as calling card. The core of their far-flung and invisible land, to have the arrogance to presume their own currency.
He looked up at the face of a model, but hardened despite the youth of her. A jaw from hell, or that promised hell. It was not his daughter.
She didn’t identify herself. Why would she? But he knew who she was. She was Jack’s daughter. An emissary by which Jack sent a message.
“Shouldn’t you be in high school? Not here scraping trash off the street?”
She gave him a cold, appraising look, like a heron about to spear a frog.
“Shouldn’t you be somewhere other than puking your guts up, homeless?”
Central didn’t care that he was a wreck, he believed. More that he’d made himself a target. By being careless, so he might have made himself visible to foreign agents. Or maybe Central was just, finally, angry he’d abandoned his post.
“Where’s my daughter?” he asked.
“‘Where’s my daughter, where’s my daughter?’” Jack’s daughter mocked. “She’s not there in the gutter with you, is she?”
The way she talked to him was a slap in the face, cold water poured over his head.
“Do you know who I am?”
“I know you’re my father’s friend,” Jack’s daughter said, and Old Jim had to wonder how much of Jack peered out at him now. “And I know where you’ll be in a year if you don’t pull out of this tailspin.”
“And where is that?” Old Jim asked, although he knew the answer.
“Dead.”
“Are you here to kill me?” He knew the answer was no, but some part of him wouldn’t have minded too much.
She smiled, but it was cold, so cold. “No, but I could do that—for you, for them. If need be.”
“So young to be so hard.”
“So old to be so soft,” she replied.
“What do you want?”
“Nothing for now. We just want you to go home.”
“Home?”
“No, not the house. Your real home.”
The Forgotten Coast.
Except it wasn’t.
He’d never been there.
But first, Central. Because they wanted him clean. They wanted him cleansed. They didn’t trust him, the way he’d become, even though he caustically joked with the intake team that it was good cover. That he was already undercover and they should drop him, drunk, on a dirt road near the coast and he’d take it from there. Ha ha, not received well.
There was a bird up near the high ceilings in the intake area, a dark fluttering smudge, trying to get out, and he watched it for a while as distraction, until it disappeared from view or became something else. He liked to believe it was free now.
Old Jim didn’t like to remember the next months, because he kept wishing he would die and couldn’t quarantine the feeling, test it. If a loaded gun had appeared on his bunk in isolation, he wasn’t quite sure what would’ve happened. But there never was one, so he had to just endure until clean, clear, mind as blank as the white walls of Central’s echoing corridors devoted to defending the nation against … well, whatever it decided was a threat. So white, so brightly white, the whole building, down to most of the underground levels, to be so full of black ops.
He didn’t see his handler, his boss, his friend, Jack Severance, for ages, while his body was unspooled into some other form that made his head full of nails and then full of cotton candy and then, roughly, back on his shoulders more or less the right way.
“If you feel this way again, remember that it’s natural and that it will pass.”
The infirmary offered only one pill, from a blank-faced technician who noted “it will last a year.” Old Jim had expected it would be enormous, like a wheel of cheese, but it was just a tiny white tablet, like the discard from a three-hole paper punch, and he felt nothing before or after he took it.
Then, and only then, he saw Jack through the half-tinted glass of the infirmary, staring at him. From afar. Almost suspicious. Turning away and moving out of sight when Old Jim locked in on him. How he’d seen Jack through layers of glass before, on their best their worst mission, in a church, in a different life.
At least the infirmary smelled of something. Not just bandages and iodine but some underlying rot like they brought triage into that space from foreign lands and at the end of the day they couldn’t quite mop up all the blood and other bodily fluids. Couldn’t quite get it out.
He insisted on his psych eval from the infirmary doctor, a kindly man with a twinkling eye who seemed too good to be true, and as far as he knew they had honored that request.
Because he didn’t like the odds of ever getting out of Central if he talked to a Central psychologist, in their separate department. Talk the dark cloud from his mouth, to some young go-getter rah-rah bullshit artist or buoyant “life coach” he could peer inside of in twenty seconds and pull his soul out of his head through his nose, shrieking.
Except, Jack might’ve gone a step further—given Old Jim over to some even darker soul they kept in one of the flooded basements turned over to the black arts. He imagined these experts at psychic overhaul and rebirth as being like coelacanths: ancient and sequestered in that deep water, and you had to be lowered down into their tanks like enduring some profane baptism, and the psychology of it was you were cured when you spent enough time down in the depths to become like them.
“How do you feel, Jim? If you were an orchestra, what music would you play? If you were a school of fish, what kind of fish would you be? Think of a point of light deep beneath the sea. Recognize that if you go deeper, you will be released into the burning of that incandescent light. Can you feel the warmth of your burning?”
Once you could breathe through their gills, you would be released toward the surface, gasping, to deal once more with megalodons like whomever Jack reported to.
But fuck all that, some tiny pilot light flickering inside him kept repeating. No, he couldn’t do it. He’d rather die on his feet, in hell, with his grief intact; he had nothing left. Let them try to take it away from him. A flare of rage rising from his indifference, seen by none, that he’d felt before in his love-hate relationship with his job.
He’d be flame hurtling down the corridors of Central, rendering justice to every damn fool who deserved it. Including himself.
But would he? Because, most of the time, he just felt grateful to be at Central and all alone in the world.
Routine at Central meant doing something to replace the routine that he’d lost with Cass and his prior mission. Central gave him structure in how he spent his days, but to replace the letters, the repetition he took up after long absence was the piano. The kindly psych in the infirmary had put the idea in his ear, and he’d really taken to it.
At first, Old Jim just hummed those tunes to himself and drew the keys on a piece of sketch paper from the thrice-weekly Rorschach wellness check disguised as an afternoon art class. To remind himself of the notes of his new favorite piano suite, where his fingers might go on the individual songs.
“My feet did not ask for rest, / though it was too cold to stand; / my back did not long for caress, / the storm led me through bitter land.”
He had tried to teach Cass piano as a teenager and she’d rebelled, but he could still remember a nice moment before her teens when she’d listened to him playing and enjoyed it, asked questions that meant it intrigued her.
But the piano helped, because he was back in a loop again, and needed the poison out. Worse, because too often there was so little emotion there, or the emotion flared up again raw, and then banked almost into ash, and wasn’t that awful? Wasn’t that the wrong kind of oblivion? While thinking, If you cut someone out of your life that way, hadn’t you become, for a time, a kind of monster? Didn’t that deserve the ash?
But perhaps his daughter had felt burning her life to the ground was magnificent viewed from afar, or somehow admirable in its hardened stance. How close was narcissism to empathy? And was it better confined to an individual or better when the impulse coursed through the veins of an organization like Central, where doing the right thing could become the wrong thing? Oh, he wished her well. He wished for her … nothing. And, yet, if she returned, he knew no matter how he tried to cut her from his mind now …
As he was let off the leash more and more, Old Jim found comfort in an old dark dim bar with a piano only a ten-minute swift walk away, and with a few others, he’d take a lunch relearning how to play. A quiet group, just four of them, and they didn’t talk much. Maybe they were his minders as well as colleagues he’d known forever, but sometimes he imagined they had gathered over a mutual love of an upright piano.
Central would never bring a piano into its hallowed halls. The sound of music there might break the crystal, the test tubes, the eardrums of those in the basement who labored so intensely on the most arcane assignments that their sensitivity to random blips on tapes rewound multiple times was akin to that of mice or rats.
“When snow flies in my face / I cast off its shroud; / when my heart speaks in its cage, / I sing bright and loud.”
Who knew what other operative in the halls of Central might hear the faint sound and become aware, for a critical instant, of the world beyond what had been hermetically sealed?
After five months, Jack parachuted, unexpected, into Old Jim’s routine of breakfast, quiet time, exercise, lunch (sometimes with piano), analysis of the Dead Town Disaster, dinner, some midnight hour down in the deep, deep archives questioning things like alligator experiments and people named only Mudder and Medic … all of that and then hey, presto, there Jack was, taking the place of his afternoon group session with a bunch of other burnouts.
Typical. Disruptor of the key element, wanting to be the most important thing in his day. In his head. This old friend. This disastrous remedy. With a big hug and a clap on the back. Just like old times.
Because Jack Severance never could contain himself—broke contain every time. The beatific sheen to Jack’s face, the ruddy gleam of a hardworking man that was likely just a skin condition. But it also emanated from the flame that Jack had nurtured within himself for such a long time: That knowledge of the sacred spheres or other incalculable wisdom had been passed down to him from those upper reaches of Central that Old Jim would never see, let alone be able to imagine, well above the tree line, requiring a guide and an oxygen mask. And yet what could possibly exist at the summit?
Maybe just Jack after all.
“Those dipshits would impose themselves without you there,” Jack said to him in the conference room, and Old Jim nodded. He felt he’d lost the thread of a conversation Jack thought Old Jim had started.
They sat at a nondescript gray Formica table, leaning back in standard black office chairs, posing a bit for the mirror at the far end that must be two-way glass with a possible audience in the dozens. They had two mugs between them filled, for some reason, with hot chocolate, both mugs displaying the optics of a Christmas cheer long faded from the calendar.
Jack had dressed like a country man, in a plaid lumberjack shirt, scuffed jeans, and work boots, which on him resembled a Halloween costume, at best. He was a smaller man than you might expect, his clothes always too big for him; his hand on the mug handle seemed tiny, despite the iron grip.
“What dipshits?” Old Jim asked, after a skipped beat. His mind had been clear for a couple of months, but often empty, and he had yet to take interest in even the simple things people tended to be interested in. Nothing in the present really made his pulse race, and he’d come from the archives, which felt more real. He’d been reading more of the Mudder’s journal and some turn of phrase had reminded him of his daughter’s poetry.
“You know, the dipshits you’ll be managing from afar,” Jack said, on message. “They’d be interested in every third-rate, crackpot haunting. They’d be rapturous over a shipwreck younger than the Titanic”—he pronounced it “Tit-tan-ick”—“and there in the back of beyond we’d be fucked if not for our raptor’s focus on what’s actually important, right?”
So Jackie hadn’t lied and the files weren’t just distraction, a test of his analytical skills, or sparing some more valuable operative the boredom of cleanup work. It had been prep for a field position. Great. The Rogue fascinated Old Jim, but something about existing in the same space, even twenty years later, froze him in place. He could sense the danger of it, even though, logically, that was the distant past.
“Right. What’s important?” Old Jim asked, because Jack expected it and if he cared about anything at all … it was not to fail another secret test, like his reaction to being in a bar, and remain at Central another three, four, six, ten tedious months. That, he didn’t think he could take. Lurking beneath his calm: blood waves and lost daughters trying to burst out of his skull, smash into his skull.
“We’ve been running something called Serum Bliss in a place you know pretty well by now from the files—the Forgotten Coast.” Flash of the piano keys, Cass’s doll flung there after the lesson. A hiccup in his heartbeat.
“And what does Serum Bliss do?”
“Turn rabbits into gold,” Jack said, holding Old Jim’s gaze in a way that told him to pay attention.
“Sounds dangerous.” He’d bit his tongue on “sounds reckless,” or “like some alchemist’s wet dream.”
“It will be.”
“You’re not going to tell me what Serum Bliss is, are you?”
“Once, Serum Bliss was an expedition that Central hijacked as an op for mind-control experiments. Now it’s a hunt. For an ‘existential threat,’ in the same place.”
“What threat?” But Old Jim knew, because he couldn’t get the Rogue out of his head.
“Certain intel suggests the capacity for widespread devastation, some new weapon.”
“How reliable is the intel.”
Jack grinned, like a gambler with a question that lit up his life. “Not very. According to most of Central.”
“Why me?”
Jack wagged his finger at Old Jim, drank some hot chocolate, changed the subject: “We’re using the cover of a bunch of stupid Ouija Hicks, who’ve been traveling to ‘haunted places’ for a couple of decades. They already call the whole coast ‘Active Site X,’ like they’ve planted a flag and claimed it or something. But little do they know, we’ve planted a flag in them.”
“What’re they called? These Ouija Hicks?”
“The Séance and Science Brigade.”
Old Jim didn’t like brigades, made him think of civil wars and unrest. But also of fools who didn’t clean their weapons.
Jack leaned forward to whisper, “You’ll use your prior cover name, ‘Old Jim,’ and most of what comes with that. Your meta cover, for certain factions here, is that you’re headed to retirement and the Hicks op just lets us keep an eye on you. From the Central side, officially, S&SB is a ‘passive inquiry.’ We just observe, extract any useful intel for R&D. Unofficially, I run a much more active operation, with Jackie mostly on-site.”
“Who else knows about it?” Besides whoever watched from behind the mirror. If anyone did.
Jack, gleeful, put a finger to his lips. “Shhh. No one. Almost. Let there be some mysteries left.”
Sure.
“Where’s my daughter?” Old Jim asked. That spike in his heart rate—that was the hope Jack knew, and would tell him.
Jack looked around the empty conference room like it was Shangri-la, said, “Man, those office parties used to get crazy around here, didn’t they, Jim. People blowing off steam. Getting up to all kinds of antics. Those were the days. Not like this antiseptic crap the Brutes have imposed so they can see the blood all the better.”
The Brutes Jack warred against when he didn’t want to answer a question were a “new breed” that held most of the power, made policy, and were always trying to impose “an ungodly order” on what was meant to be wild and free—namely Jack’s budget. Sometimes Jack also railed about a Central faction Old Jim didn’t think existed: “Phantoms, playing their own long game, slipping through the fingers the more you look for them.”
All Old Jim said now, though, was: “Sure, sure, the Brutes. Yes, those were the days.” Old Jim didn’t care to parse Jack’s use of the term. You could parse Jack until the cows came home, for miles and centuries, and never get close to the answer.
Jack rambled on, unthwarted by Old Jim’s stoicism, and Old Jim made useful noises to nudge Jack forward. It wasn’t that he didn’t share intense memories with Jack, or a certain brotherly fondness, and Old Jim owed him a lot. So, yes, the good old days with Jack, when ops had less moral complication, because everything felt so black and white, and every day had been like holding hands running through a field of daisies.
Those days when no one saw it coming or felt even the slightest sting of doubt as Jack, as the senior operative, had led Old Jim down rivers, down roads, rutted paths. A river could as easily be a trash-strewn parking lot behind an abandoned strip mall. Not for what it contained, the landscape, but for what you did once there, and had passed a certain point. The way the headlights burnt through the mist or humidity or rain to reveal a silhouette only ever allowed for one outcome anyway.
Jack was still saying. Jack was still talking about. Jack was this. Jack was that. Jack, maybe, was a little bit unhinged, but that was Central for you. That was the old breed.
“With gas—poison gas—you know the birds fall from the sky and plants wither, and the people, Jim”—said with real anguish as he paused to take a sip of hot chocolate—“the people, they cough up their lungs and drown in their own blood. They drown in blood, Jim.”
The silvered figure roaring through the mud, the sonic boom leveling the biologists. Old Jim wondered if the Rogue had seeped into Jack’s thoughts, along with all the blood in people’s lungs. He’d always had a thirst for the uncanny, a superstitious streak. No op on the thirteenth, ever. The bad luck of the croak of a raven in a tree that made Jack look up from a scope triangulated on a target. His rule of three, which meant always having a backup plan to the backup plan.
Jack continued before Old Jim could figure out what to say: “But what if it wasn’t gas. What if. What if it wasn’t gas. What if the birds stayed in the sky and the people went about their business … but they were … changed, so they were different? And some day, when you wanted them to, when you needed them to, they would, at the snap of my fingers, at the utterance of a single word or phrase, help defeat an enemy. Receive a signal. Sequester and not feel pain on the battlefield. Do even a small, mundane task in the middle of their normal routines without remembering they’d done it. Like, even, introduce something dangerous, even monstrous, but necessary, but in between playing hopscotch and not recall. What if in a sense the necessary world of violence in which we live, that violence became so contained it was invisible to the naked eye?”
“You know the Tyrant’s still out there,” Old Jim said, because he didn’t like what Jack had said to him. “Somewhere in the marshes.” He wanted to talk about the generator, but figured Jack would deflect, unless this was Jack’s way of talking about the generator … and he’d rather Jack not know everything he was thinking about. Central’s determination: “mass psychosis event caused by errors in hypnosis programming.”
“The what?” Jack said, looking at him like he was nuts.
“The alligator. The locals call her the Tyrant. She eats abandoned hunting dogs and can’t be caught. Local legend. Part of the Cavalry.”
“I’m not following,” Jack said.
“The alligator experiment.” Even as he uttered the words, Old Jim felt exposed, like Jack hadn’t expected he’d go off in that direction.
Jack looked at him with practiced puzzlement.
“The Dead Town Disaster,” Old Jim said, because he was sick of playing games.
Some hostile impulse to blurt crossed Jack’s face and Old Jim could’ve sworn he’d wanted to say: “Don’t call it that!” But instead Jack laughed. “Always the runts, huh, Jim? You want the sawed-off shotguns instead of the sniper’s rifle, the stuff no one else wants. Or needs.”
Jack changed the subject to something blithe and cheery that Old Jim didn’t remember later because he’d had an image of the Rogue riding the Tyrant enter his head, trying to reconcile the strangeness of that, the ridiculousness.
Because Old Jim was already all-in on the Dead Town Disaster, he couldn’t help himself. The Rogue wasn’t Central, but the generator was, and maybe so was the alligator experiment, and to Old Jim it felt like Jack had taken a risk in giving him access for a reason. Something there beyond an “existential threat” that Jack didn’t want to articulate but still trusted Old Jim to track, like a faithful hound that he might give up to the Tyrant after.
“So, you’ll take the job?” Jack asked at some point, as if he’d interviewed Old Jim for assistant manager at a hardware store.
The longer they spoke in that conference room, the more Jack began to feel like a doppelgänger to Old Jim, and lost forever the easy rapport from those first missions in the field, when they’d been brothers who could tell each other anything, everything—any sin, any fault, any obsession, any emptiness.
Maybe the residue of that carried them into the future now, because once it had been pure and true. Jack must believe that hold would be enough. Jack must believe they were still family. Old Jim didn’t doubt that.
“Where is my daughter?”
Maybe that unspoken pact was also in the look Jack gave him at the door a few minutes later, and the extra squeeze in the handshake. The handshake of a black op.
How black, though? As black as a ruined meadow full of traumatized expedition members? As black as a phantom faction at Central?
Jack thought the Rogue was still alive, still a threat.
The piece of paper Jack had passed him read: “Top Priority: Find the Rogue. Eliminate the Rogue.”
Did Old Jim talk in his sleep, because how did Jack know that’s what he called the stranger?
Overheard in the hallway his last day before traveling to the Forgotten Coast: “I wish you weren’t wonderful in so many ways, because you’re so awful.”
A wave of blood, spreading out in all directions.
00N: 301356.7048ELIXE893746.2036EHT
Things you find out right before you leave a haunted cathedral. Things that stay with you. Coordinates you can’t unsee. Two sets of coordinates. Surrounded by water. The information Old Jim took with him that made him feel guilty, as if he’d left with dozens of crimson streamers swirling out from his head, each one a different piece of intel, and a wonder that he didn’t become entangled, lose a step, trip, become so encumbered there on the curb that he became some version of the same guy Jackie had pulled out of the gutter months ago.
“Oh, and one last thing,” a whisper in his ear before he’d left Central, out on the street, about to climb into the black sedan, the crimson streamers obscuring his vision. A blustery day in the shadow of skyscrapers. Dribbled into his ear so the task became obscured by the sound of water. “A phantom’s flaming breath pulled me from my route…”
The one more thing to do, and Old Jim nodded because he’d expected it, even distracted so there was a hazy, heavy sense of someone talking to him while he slept, because whatever Jack wanted him to do seemed irrelevant next to what he’d already done, what had gotten under his skin about the expedition.
Separate coordinates like a form of death. Maps made into weapons and punishments.
Team Leader 1’s true name was Alexis (Alex) Aguilar and Team Leader 2’s true name was Kim Numi. They had been picked up by Central two days after the hurricane abated, in a motel room north of Bleakersville, one of those places unmoored from any town, surviving in the middle of nowhere without an anchor.
Central had “busted in the door” and found Aguilar and Numi “huddled on the floor behind the bed.” Two of the rabbit cameras were found on the bed and both expedition members appeared “pre-traumatized,” meaning the violent appearance of Central operatives had just been the blood-red cherry on top. Of whatever they had experienced.
“Both were underweight, suffering from some sort of withdrawal, although the drug has not been identified. Minor scrapes and bruises. Aguilar had a slight dislocation of her left shoulder. Numi’s blinking left eye appeared to be an existing tic that had intensified to a constant meaningless signal.”
Constant meaningless signal. Was there enough contempt in that analysis? What was worse, Old Jim wondered, than being a signal that held no meaning? A receptacle for light where no light need shine. A boat that sank into the depths at the first sign of water.
Numi, from her journal: “We were doing things we never did in life. We saw a terrible thing. We were doing impossible things to survive. But most horrible of all was the thought that it would continue on and on for as long as we watched it, so I shut the video off [at 3:21] and tried to sleep until morning.”
We saw a terrible thing.
We were doing impossible things to survive.
All signs pointed to Aguilar’s and Numi’s intent to flee the country, according to the interrogation. In the file, Central called it a “debrief,” perhaps because in the videotape both team leaders appeared resigned to some indecipherable fate and so “coercive techniques had been deemed unnecessary, perhaps counterproductive.”
Questioned separately or together their stories remained simple and the same. In the aftermath of the Rogue, the two had fled, despite the conditions, along a route that they had mapped out in advance, to an all-terrain jeep they had hidden in the underbrush along a dirt road. Their sole luck, initially, had been a bridge that had held against the flood, and a vehicle that navigated a dirt road suddenly under two feet of water.
The hiding of the vehicle, the evidence of a scheme for retreat, raised questions for which neither Aguilar nor Numi had answers.
“When the generator broke, we knew we needed a backup plan. For the expedition. An alternative way of getting help,” Aguilar said, separate from Numi.
“It felt like we were on our own,” Numi said, separate from Aguilar. “So alone we needed to take care of ourselves. That’s all.”
“But you didn’t go for help?” the interrogator asked when Aguilar and Numi coexisted in the same sad space at Central again. “Why didn’t you actually go for help? Why did we find you hiding in a motel?”
The two looked at each other, the video quality clear enough to tell that they found the question odd or even nonsensical.
“And the cameras?” the interrogator asked. “Can you tell us the thought process behind keeping the cameras?”
They had no good answer for that, either. For why they had taken two rabbit cameras with them and then tried to burn them behind the motel, but then brought them back into the motel and placed them in the middle of the bed … while they huddled on the floor.
INTERROGATOR: Were the cameras part of the plot? Were you part of the plot?
AGUILAR: What plot?
INTERROGATOR: By the foreign entity.
AGUILAR: What foreign entity?
INTERROGATOR: The one that overran your camp.
AGUILAR: We don’t know what overran our camp.
Not everything existed on video from those sessions. Old Jim found the gaps interesting, but put it down to sloppiness.
Central wanted to believe that the gist or grist pried out of Team Leaders 1 and 2 meant they had believed they could sell the cameras and make enough money to disappear, to flee. That, somehow, they felt they could escape what they had seen on the camera.
“Why didn’t you do that, then? Why did you try to burn them?”
Old Jim felt the question unfair, intentionally obtuse, understood why Aguilar and Numi ignored it.
A chipper side note declared that “some functionality remains, even burnt,” which might “necessitate involvement by R&D,” with the subtext, disturbing to Old Jim, that studying the cameras might lead to incorporating the underlying technology of the “foreign entity” into Central’s surveillance devices.
Had that happened? Had that actually happened? For a dead second, sitting in the black sedan speeding toward the airport, he hoped that the surveillance they were installing right now in the Village Bar did not rely on knowledge gleaned from the bones of the Dead Town Disaster.
Eventually, in trying to explain their actions, the biologists had descended into a kind of obliterating babble or hysteria that the interrogator acknowledged in his conclusions: “Trauma from Dead Town created a series of glitch decision points, influenced more by general panic than intent to betray.”
No evidence of any outreach to foreign governments. Just of two exhausted women in a motel room fighting off sleep and malnourishment, bound only by the need to help each other.
That help never wavered during the interrogations. They remained loyal to each other. They refused offers that to Old Jim’s eye resembled “selling out” their partner. The nudge to say more, to assemble words from the abstract into concrete ways that pointed to the other being the ringleader, the one who really would have sold the cameras to a “foreign entity.” The one who really knew what was going on.
Nothing in their backgrounds suggested anything abnormal. Neither had much in the way of family, as was the norm for the expedition. They had both roved widely in their careers, the norm for field biologists, who often were funded (poorly) for a season or two and then moved on. If they had found each other—found each other during the Dead Town expedition, in a way that felt profound to Old Jim, a wanderer as well—it must have been almost as much relief as passion, a falling into an embrace made familiar because they both had been on the same journey.
The quickening pulse of the short half-life of the expedition, the uncertainty of what might or might not occur after.
So much, so vital, that journals could not reveal or articulate, a secret history no one else would ever know.
Shortly after questioning, Central deemed Aguilar and Numi “unfit for further operational duties/security risk,” although part of the team leaders’ confusion stemmed from believing they had worked for a shell corporation called Soothing Kiss, which used “nature-based solutions for medical problems.” They had had no knowledge of Central until capture and interrogation.
Aguilar and Numi were exiled to separate remote islands with one hundred miles of ocean between them. These islands appeared abandoned but had been controlled by Central for decades. An automated radar station on one served as a weather service for the area. A shack on the other had at one time been occupied by a light-station operator and a meteorologist.
The islands existed outside of commercial shipping lanes and did not figure into the military exercises of any nation. Their ecosystems included harsh mountainous regions and lush but malaria-filled jungles. Once every four months, a Central plane dropped supplies into the general area of each biologist’s release, but the pilots were under no orders to check on their well-being.
Old Jim wondered with a vague sense of unease how many islands with how many exiles the plane might pass over. How many sets of supplies the crew loaded onto the plane before it flew off from some black ops base a thousand miles away. And if, one day, he might look up at a similar plane from the shores of his own island. Whether Jack would be the one to give the order.
Was the idea of “island exile” a kind of quarantine meant to have an end, once they could prove the Rogue, the cameras, had not affected or infected them indefinitely … but, then, over time Central just forgot? Or they’d been stashed for now, to be decanted in some way, used in some way later?
A note in the file, near the very end, read that “these landscapes mimic in many ways those both biologists studied in grad school and thus they should be familiar with them.”
An emotion Old Jim couldn’t identify washed over him. This suggestion that Central thought it a kind of small mercy, when weighed against the greater cruelty. That at least they might recognize the places they had visited as postdocs and might feel comfortable there.
The two had been fated to live out their lives in a kind of solitude that, Old Jim felt, must still be full of voices and, perhaps, confusion, puzzlement, or worse.
Was it better for them to know or not to know the other’s fate?
Did they think about what the camera showed them, every day, or had it faded into the surf, the particular brilliance of light at sunset on the water?
He could not erase the image from the video, together in the interrogation room, holding hands. The last time, and how they held each other before being separated. For the last time.
“Do you have anything to say?” the Central interrogator had asked before they were led away.
But they had already said everything—to the interrogator, to each other.
It just wasn’t all in the files. There was something Jack didn’t want him to know yet, for whatever reason.
Stepping onto the plane to the Forgotten Coast, taking his seat, looking out the window at a landscape of metropolis falling away into mountains and forests … Old Jim tried to forget the Exiles.
Failed.