Dream of the Serpent
Author: Alan Ryker
Date: 2014-01-05 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Dark Fantasy; Thriller; Dark; Science Fiction; Horror; Science Fiction Fantasy; Fantasy
Description: Cody Miller is on the brink of having it all: an MBA, a high-powered job in corporate finance, and the girl of his dreams. And then one mistake, one unfortunate accident, takes it all away in the blink of an eye. His future, his health and his hope—gone—up in flames, leaving him the victim of an unimaginably horrific injury. Upon emerging from a coma, Cody discovers his life and plans have been shattered. As he struggles to find the strength to go on and a reason to live, he slowly begins to realize things may not be as they seem. His life has changed more than he could've ever imagined, but s
Publisher: Darkfuse

First Edition

Dream of the Serpent © 2014 by Alan Ryker

All Rights Reserved.

A DarkFuse Release
www.darkfuse.com

Join the Newsletter:

http://eepurl.com/jOH5

Become a fan on Facebook:

www.facebook.com/darkfuse

Follow us on Twitter:

www.twitter.com/darkfuse

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Always to Christina

Thank you to everyone at DarkFuse who helped in the creation of this book, especially Greg F. Gifune and Shane Staley.

PROLOGUE

Burning Burning Burning Burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

Burning

— “The Waste Land,” TS Eliot

I dreamed of an enormous serpent trying to ensnare me in its coils. It wasn’t trying to wrap me up like a constrictor, but to cage me within the huge pebbly walls of its own bulk, to circumscribe my existence. I wouldn’t let it. I kept searching its scaly limits, looking for a way through. And eventually I found one.

Or I thought I did.

But imagine a piece on a Snakes and Ladders board. It would have no idea of the danger until it stepped on the snake, and by then it would be too late. Up until that moment, it would think the world was an ordered, forward progression. But after its trip, through some kind of amnesia or belief that the serpentine backslide was an anomaly, it would get up and march forward again. I’m getting the strange feeling that if I were able to pull back, to gain perspective, I’d understand that, despite the enormity of those coils, I’d only known a small portion of the serpent. I’d see that the serpent, with its tail in its mouth, encircles everything, the entire board from first square to last. It’s a rigged game. We can’t escape the serpent. The concept is totally meaningless, because there is nothing outside of its coils.

We’re all pieces on this board, but I seem to be the only one who notices that we’re going in circles, that the world is not the logical place we think it is.

Because the bed I’m lying in isn’t the bed I was lying in when I went to sleep. And the woman I’m lying beside wasn’t here at all.

It’s watching. Here in the darkness, without the distraction of my senses, I can feel it watching me with cold, reptilian patience. I can feel its pulse. The entire universe thrums with it.

I can’t let it know that I know, that I’ve figured out the game. I don’t know what it would do, but I know it would be bad. Maybe worse than what’s already happened, which is hard to imagine.

And so here I lay, searching for the limits of the limitless serpent with its tail in its mouth, losing my mind with a tale in my mouth. Choking on it. Consuming it and consuming it and finding that I’m consuming myself and creating myself endlessly.

If there’s a way to end this cycle, it’s to be found in taking the tale from my mouth and telling it the only way I know how…the only way it can be told.

BOOK I

1

The last couple sat engrossed in conversation across the small table, his left hand and her right touching in the center. They were middle-aged and dressed nicely, too nicely for the restaurant. It was probably their anniversary. You had to find it a bit sweet, people that age still in love.

I hovered just out of sight. I could have found something small to do, but I’m the sort of person that can’t start on one task until the one at hand is complete. Then Janet waved me over.

Janet was a tall, waifish blonde, the sort you’d expect to see as a hostess until she dropped the facade and revealed herself to be a foulmouthed townie, which was probably why she was the hostess of Pajino’s—the Italian equivalent of Applebee’s—instead of a fancier establishment.

“Cody, why are they just sitting there? Hustle them out of here.”

“What do you expect me to do? Tell them to leave? That wouldn’t go over well.”

“Just loom over them. Look black. Blacker. That type, they’re terrified of ethnics.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “It’s unbelievable the things that come out of your mouth.”

“No, what you wouldn’t believe is what I’ll put in my mouth.”

I groaned, then stopped suddenly and waggled my eyebrows provocatively at her. She waggled hers back. I estimate we carried on like that for nearly a full minute before I said, “Besides, I’m only half black.”

“I know that, my incognegro. That’s why I said, ‘Look blacker.’ But really, your indeterminate swarthiness could be even more frightening. What are you? An America-hating Arab? A really tall, disgruntled illegal Mexican? The point is, you should intimidate them the fuck out of here.”

The point became moot as the man finally put cash in the black vinyl bill presenter.

“Like the wind,” Janet hissed.

He’d barely closed the cover when I took it and said, “I’ll be right back with your change.”

The couple’s eyes cleared, gained focus on the rest of the world. I’d burst the little bubble that had surrounded their table, and they noticed that for the first time the other tables were unoccupied.

“Not necessary. That’s for you.”

“Thank you very much, sir. You two have a great night.”

Within a minute they were out the door, which Janet locked behind them.

“Jesus Christ. Assholes think I don’t have anywhere to be on a fucking Friday night?”

“I thought you were being ruder than usual. What have you got going on?”

“Party over on 18th. Already getting crazy. I’ve been getting texts for the past hour about it. You wanna go?”

“Townie party? No thanks. I’ve gotta get to the country club. My future father-in-law is throwing a bash.”

“Oh yeah, ‘a bash.’ People getting wild on crab puffs and Chardonnay.” She rolled her eyes. “We townies be getting nasty, college boy.” Her hands came together and she gyrated her hips a bit.

“Hey, my phone’s been buzzing like crazy, too. This party must be nuts, because somebody wants me there, like an hour ago.”

Janet rolled her eyes. “Oh God, she does know that some of us have to work, right?”

“For some reason she thinks I’m one of them.”

“Getting that fancy MBA from that fancy college has her confused. I bet none of your classmates have to work.”

“Not many. Half of them are already at this shindig.”

“All that thin, blue blood.” She let her eyelids droop, brought her lips together in a slack pucker and held one hand limply up. With her lanky blond hair and fine features, she looked exactly like one of the women who would be drifting around the ballroom. Then she sneered. “Don’t you ever want to cut loose? Get freaky?”

“That an invitation?” I gave her a wink.

She opened her eyes wide and put a hand to her mouth, but when she took the hand away she was ramming her tongue lasciviously into her cheek.

We both busted up until she said, “Go close your shit out. And check on the kitchen.”

I turned and saw all the front house staff vacuuming and wiping down. Vultures swooped in as soon as I turned my back, taking the easy closing duties.

I closed out at the register, then stepped into the kitchen. Steam heat had me sweating immediately in my itchy, polyester Pajino’s polo shirt.

“What do you need?” I asked loudly to be heard over the running water and clattering pots and pans. I swore that dishwasher must have moonlighted as a drummer in a death metal band.

“Dump and scrape the pressure fryer?” George said. He always talked to us front house people in questions. He wasn’t used to this mingling of duties. But the manager of Pajino’s started his restaurant career as a dishwasher, and until everyone was ready to leave, no one got to leave.

I rolled the grease pump into place beneath the pressure fryer when my phone buzzed again.

“Jesus Christ, Madison,” I said, drawing my phone from my pocket with one hand and checking my texts while I twisted the valve to release the hot oil. A few drops splattered on my hand and got me cursing, sending my frustration up a couple more notches.

I licked at the back of my hand, which now tasted like fried chicken, and glanced at the text. It was indeed Madison. Of course it was Madison. Who else had so little experience with employment that she didn’t understand a party wasn’t a good enough excuse to step out early? As if my coworkers would pat me on the back and wish me a good time while I left them to do the disgusting closing duties.

Aren’t you done yet?

The grease continued to drain and I tapped out, Closing now. Leaving soon.

I had to take a deep breath and remind myself to keep things in perspective. These were rich man problems. Madison’s dad was CFO of one of the largest engineering firms in the world, and as long as I didn’t fuck things up, he’d be bringing his brilliant son-in-law on board in a few months and fast-tracking his career into the six figures and beyond.

I liked thinking of my future in the third person, because then I got to remind myself afterward that I was talking about myself. I was the guy who came from a lower-middle slash upper-lower class background and got a full academic scholarship to study business at a state school, graduated Magna Cum Laude and rocked my GMATs so hard that a prestigious university offered a scholarship equal to its enormous tuition so that I only had to cover living expenses (Madison: “With your school covered, why can’t you take out a small loan to pay your rent?” Me: “You should work in finance. You’ve got the right mentality.”). I was that guy who landed the smart, cool, beautiful girl whose father turned out to be the fucking man, which I swear I didn’t know beforehand. I was the guy who, because of his grades and his performance in the classroom had enough buzz about him to not horrify Little Miss Blue Blood’s parents when she brought him home, or later when he proposed marriage, despite the fact that he’s from a blue collar family and a halfrican. I was the guy with the charm and wit to be able to step into the restroom, clean off work sweat and kitchen grease, then show up at the country club and outshine all my silver-spoon classmates and get all the joking job offers (You sure I can’t steal you away? I’ve even got a worthless son-in-law you can replace).

I kept all this in mind as I texted an argument back and forth with Madison, trying to keep my cool. Glancing over at the fryer, I saw that the oil had all drained, and sent a final text (I prayed it was the final text): Gotta go. See you soon.

The pressure fryer accumulated a thick crust of concrete-hard fried flour in a ring that marked the top of the oil. It could only be removed with the vigorous application of a paint scraper, which I grabbed just as my phone rang again. I screamed, which drew looks from the kitchen staff, answered the phone with my left hand and leaned into the fryer to scrape with my right.

“Madison, for the love of God above, I’m almost done.”

“What are you doing?”

“Right this second? Trying to scrape a fryer with the use of only one hand.”

“How long will that take?”

“Probably ten minutes, but it’d go faster if I weren’t on the phone.”

“People keep asking me where you are. They don’t mean anything by it, but I don’t know what to say.”

“Work.”

“And then they ask where you work and…”

I sighed. I understood her position. I really did. She and somehow her parents saw the real me, but that whole country club crew…They were stuck-up assholes. I don’t know how else to put it.

“After that you can leave?” she asked.

“I just need to clean myself up, change and—”

Then came my first lesson in the malleability of time. Suffering is the path to immortality. Hell can be contained entirely in one moment. They say, later, that I couldn’t have seen this. That I imagined it, dreamed it in my coma. That it would have happened too fast.

But I saw the spark spit into life on the heating element. And I don’t know if it’s quantum theory or relativity, but I had time to think, “I forgot to turn off the fryer.”

The brain doesn’t follow the same laws of time that the body does. As I watched that spark turn into a tiny flame, then travel around the coils, then leap to the walls, I took in every detail, but I could not move. From the outside, I was in the middle of a sentence, and then in a split second I was bent waist-deep into a jet engine blasting flames to the ceiling.

But from the inside of that moment, I watched the cauldron fill with unfurling petals of red, orange and yellow. I watched it swirl and dance as it rose, new gases igniting, buffeting the pool of liquid flame back and forth. I wanted to pull back. As the pillar approached my face I tried to hurl myself back. It was like being pinned against a wall as the tooth-filled maw of some giant predator pressed forward inch by slavering inch. Pressing back. Pressing back. Going nowhere. Looking fate in its golden visage, the future blossoming up around my hand, my arm, my face.

When I told this to my parents, my dad asked me why I watched it. Why didn’t I close my eyes? Imagine trying to raise the drawbridge of a castle as an invading horde of savage barbarians charge, knowing that it’s too late, knowing that these men will take everything from you, laughing as they do it. Could you look away?

And it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.

What finally moved my inert mass wasn’t my conscious mind. My reflexive nervous system finally hurled me back out of the pyre, though one dishwasher would say that he saw the whole thing, that my argument on the phone had caught his attention, drawn his eyes, and as he scrubbed one of his last pans he watched me, not with much interest, but because his eyes had to point in some direction. He saw me leaned in to the fryer, and then he saw me disappear in a column of flame that roared up and spilled across the ceiling. He said that he thought that I wasn’t going to move, that I was going to stand there, one elbow cocked out of the fryer to hold the phone to my ear, but everything else above my chest down in that metal cauldron, staring into the flames forever. Time had gone soft for him, too. When I finally fell back, a man on fire, he expected that I’d be nothing more than a bundle of burnt matchsticks. Blackened bones. Because I’d been cooking for hours before I finally tumbled back, phone still clamped to my ear.

I slipped as I pressed myself back, and I fell. Not into the rolling tub of drained oil, thank God. Yes, thank that most loving and merciful God above for holding me in his loving grace and only roasting me, not deep-frying me. Bastard.

I hit the ground on my ass and tried to scoot out of the flames, thinking I could escape them, not realizing that I was no longer leaning into fire; I was on fire.

I tried to escape my pain but I couldn’t figure out how. I couldn’t see. My vision had gone cloudy on one side and wavered with flame on the other. I couldn’t hear. A sound filled my ears, a roaring. It was so loud my head shook with it. At the time I thought it was the roar of the inferno, but looking back I think it was the sound of my eardrums trying to burst into the airless vacuum the firestorm left behind.

I couldn’t scream. When I breathed in I choked on poisonous fumes, but no air. The fire consumed it all. My vocal cords shook. Nothing came out.

Pressing back, I slid along the floor, leaving my right palm behind to sizzle on the tile, but I couldn’t escape the flame. I thought that the whole kitchen was on fire. The whole world. I burned and burned and burned.

Of course the kitchen wasn’t on fire. My polyester shirt was. My hair was curly, and required some serious product to tame, product that turned my hair into a wick, my head into a melting candle.

It’s difficult to explain burning. Almost no one experiences it. Everyone gets burned, but almost no one burns. You escape the source of heat with reflex faster than thought and only experience the aftereffects. Burning is the sort of thing that changes you forever. It makes you realize that you’re an animal, that all the rest is pretense. I would have done anything to make the burning stop. Anything.

The flames wrapped around me tighter and tighter, clawing into my clothing, melting my clothing to me, which continued to burn like napalm. The flames held me in an inescapable grasp, digging claws into me, thousands of them, deeper and deeper, prying at skin, then fat, then muscle, flaying away my layers.

And then the fire was out. I tried to breathe, and a fine powder filled my mouth, turned to glue in my throat and deeper down so that I wheezed around it. When I could see out of my left eye, I saw this big lug named Brandon holding the dredging tub, emptied of its flour. I looked down and I was covered in white powder. He’d pulled the tub out of the metal counter top and dumped it over me. George was still trying to get the fire extinguisher off the wall. It had somehow gotten stuck.

Everything was quiet. The roar of the inferno had died when the oil burnt off the fryer. Flour choked out my screaming. No one moved. They stood around me, some reaching out to me, but no one daring to touch me.

In that silence, I heard myself cooking. Inside the flour, the fat beneath my skin crackled. My only hopeful thought was that I couldn’t possibly live much longer.

But the moments dragged out. These people loomed over me, staring down at me. If everything hadn’t been so strangely clear, they would have seemed like nothing so much as demons witnessing my torments.

I coughed until I found my breath, finally, after seeming hours caught in an airless vacuum and then a choking cloud, and I started screaming. There was no purpose to it, but there was no purpose to anything, and it poured out of my mouth and it didn’t seem worth the effort to stop it. I was still propped on my hands from having crab-walked halfway across the kitchen on fire, and I fell back and screamed. I screamed nonsense. I screamed curses. I screamed for help.

The pain only increased. I’d wanted to stop burning so badly, but inside that flour coating I still burned.

Someone stepped forward and grabbed at the remains of my shirt, but someone else yanked him back, saying, “Don’t touch him.”

After a few days or weeks, Janet appeared beside me. “What the fuck, Cody? What the fuck?”

“Is it bad?” I asked. “Am I bad?”

“What the fuck?” She held a hand over my cooked torso, either warming it or offering absolution.

With the flames out, the pain didn’t leave me, not by any means. It grew, but it grew in waves. I bobbed on those boiling waves, which somehow had grown so high that they carried me up to explode beneath the nuclear heat of the sun. A storm was rolling in, a storm of insanity, with merciful death blowing behind, only a hope, something to work through the agony in hope of. Each swell carried me higher into pain and madness. Each trough fell less. It was a rolling crescendo of torment, raking through my flesh with multi-hooked claws, lines of fishing-hook clusters being dragged through my veins. Each peal of pain felt like a magnified version of pulling at a hangnail that doesn’t rip off, but rips deeper and deeper, taking the first layer, then all the skin, then the meat beneath, until by the elbow the flap has hit bone.

At the peak of each wave, I felt blackness at the edges. I knew what it was. Not just unconsciousness, but death. It blew this storm in, but it hung back, refusing to take me.

I begged it to take me. I begged it to close in, to swallow me up, to drop me into a merciful, cool balm from which I would never emerge. Each time I felt life grow loose around the edges, and yet the wave would ebb and I knew that I’d survived. I grew angry, angry that I was still conscious, that I was still alive and still burning, somehow still burning, my skin growing tighter and tighter and still sizzling, cooking my blood and sending it back through my veins to tear at my core.

If the darkness wouldn’t come for me, then I would go to it. I slammed my head back on the rock-hard tile floor. Again. Again.

“No,” I heard. “No, Cody.” But I didn’t listen until hands caught me, a lap settled between my skull and the floor. When my vision cleared in the one eye I could still see out of, I looked up at Janet.

And another wave of pain hit, and I screamed. I screamed nonsense. I screamed for death. I screamed for help. My brain spun in my skull, looking for some escape from the unbearable and finding none, trapped in a sphere of bone stuck to a melting hunk of charred meat.

Janet finally spoke. Time had grown soft. Less than a second ago I’d been banging my head against the floor.

She said, “Cody, don’t.”

Her voice pulsed, the waveform falling apart, time so loose.

“Help me, please.”

Hours passed. Hours of unbearable agony. They stretched into days. Lifetimes. Then the doors to the dining room banged open and in rushed EMTs.

They talked so slowly that their words dissolved into grumbling nonsense, the sounds of hundreds of bombs exploding in the distance, of rumbling landslides. They aimed these sounds at me, buffeted me with them.

I wanted to kill them. I wanted the world to ignite again, to burn away everything until only ash surrounded me, piles of whispering, crinkling ash that I could poke with my blackened bones until they collapsed with the same “Shush” you use to silence a child.

If they couldn’t help me, I wanted them to burn.

They sat a stretcher beside me, rolled me onto my side to slide it beneath me. I looked down at my flour coating, watched it slip away, saw a wet glisten, didn’t understand, then did.

My polyester shirt had melted to my flesh, joined it almost completely. It didn’t slide away. My skin did. It flopped aside, big crispy flaps like a piece of chicken barbecued too long, the skin blackening, growing tight, curling away, revealing the juicy insides. Beneath, some glistening melted fat ran, the rest coated me, cooked white as tallow.

When the cool air hit it…Imagine sucking ice cold water over a cavity, then leaving it there, the electricity leaping through your nerves, jerking you like a marionette. Imagine that and you’ll be close to me saying, “Fuck you, asshole, you have no goddamn idea.”

They rushed me outside. The world pulsed around me, expanding and contracting to match my heart beat. Why was nothing solid? Why was reality so malleable, except the one aspect I wanted to change: the diamond-hard pain?

In the ambulance they hooked me to fluids, they wrapped me in a burn blanket, but they did nothing for the pain, no matter how I begged or cursed. They jammed a contraption down my throat instead, what I was later told was a laryngoscope, checking to see if I’d breathed enough smoke that my throat would swell shut. They spoke to each other, not to me, but I understood that my mouth was burned, but my throat looked fine.

Before they strapped an oxygen mask over my face, I pleaded one more time for them to knock me out. I couldn’t take the torment. It was breaking me, had broken me, and yet there was no end. I’d tapped out, begged uncle, but it was relentless.

“We’re barely keeping you out of shock. Sorry, but you’re not getting any painkillers until the doctors decide you can handle them.”

Once again I imagined burning the world. The agony was beyond comprehension, and I couldn’t believe the fire wasn’t in me somewhere, tearing through my veins. If it would only come out, ignite the ambulance, set off the oxygen tanks, leave us a fireball blazing down the highway. But it would do no good. They would all die and I would crawl out of the smoldering wreckage, leaving a trail of charred flesh behind me, the asphalt below my red-hot carcass turning to tar, coating me, igniting, always burning, always fucking burning forever, and never, ever dying.

* * *

They rolled me into the Emergency room, and it seemed that everyone was waiting for me. I tried to lift my head, but it felt so heavy. Then I saw my hand. It looked like it was in a Mickey Mouse glove. Just looking at it brought it into my awareness and it throbbed, seeming to inflate as if someone had jammed the dull needle of a bike pump into it.

“What’s wrong with my hand?”

The doctors ignored me, but a black woman with a kind face and a Jamaican accent said, “Edema. The plasma is leaking out of your blood and into the surrounding tissue. Don’t worry, we’ll get it under control.”

My words had come out strange. My lips wouldn’t meet. I touched them and before someone pulled my hand down to my side I found that my mouth had swollen into a sex-doll O of surprise.

“Can you put me under?” I asked the Jamaican angel of mercy.

“Your blood pressure is too low.”

Staring back up at the ceiling, I said, “Fuck you.”

They’d taken my burn blanket away to poke and prod at me, and I shivered. For all the flame running beneath my skin I felt like I was freezing to death. They rolled me beneath what I swear to God were heat lamps like you’d find at a fast food restaurant, and I shivered and watched them sweat as they continued to poke and prod at me.

“His blood pressure is up. We’re out of shock zone.”

“How much fluid are you putting in him? He’s inflating.”

“As much as we have to in order to keep his heart beating. His blood was turning to sludge.”

Someone finally spoke to me. “Nighty-night, buddy. We’ll take good care of you.”

I watched the man inject something into my drip, and in my thoughts I pledged eternal love for this kind soul.

Numbness, unbelievable, blessed numbness washed over me. My body disappeared, and a warm blanket wrapped itself around my brain. The last thing I heard was, “His family is coming.”

2

I dropped into a blackness into which I eventually gained awareness again. I don’t know how long I lay there before that happened. The world may have rotated around and under me while I was out, and resettled at my point of origin. That made sense. I crawled out of reality through a hole into the blackness. The world continued to spin, and the hole became lost to me until the rotation eventually brought it back and I crawled out of the blackness.

When I did, the world had changed. Everyone was gone. Everything was gray. I had emerged back on my rolling stretcher, feeling no discomfort at that moment. I stalled for as long as I could, occupying myself with the strangeness of a perfectly still emergency ward. No running staff, no worrying families, no screaming children, no bleeding patients. The TVs that hung in the corners were silent, their screens gray with a thick layer of dust, the couches that faced them no longer making sense.

I distracted myself with these things for as long as I could, and then I looked down at myself. A thick crust covered my torso. It would have been black if black existed in the world. Instead, it was a dark gray.

Touching my stomach gingerly, I expected an explosion of agony. I felt the heat deep inside. I felt pressure, something that could perhaps become pain but wasn’t yet. I pressed harder at the crust, feeling it crackle beneath my hand but still feeling no pain. I scraped at the crust, and it peeled away, and I winced, but it felt good. I scraped and scraped. Somehow, I’d hidden in the center of the Earth long enough that I’d healed.

What I found was that I hadn’t only healed; I’d transformed. I uncovered a chitinous shell. When I’d scraped nearly my entire stomach down to it, I stopped. I didn’t want to see any more.

Then I looked at my hands. On my left, a fine, gray, ashy powder covered my fingertips, pressed beneath the nails in dense, dark slivers. My right fingertips, however, had fallen away, peeled back in their scrabble at my stomach. My fingers crumbled like those snakes that grow from black pellets when you set them alight on the Fourth of July. I remembered clustering the pellets when I was a child, not satisfied with one spitting, hissing ash snake. I wanted a bunch, and they tangled and twisted, growing together and apart again, these pillars of dense ash.

My right hand looked just like that. I grabbed the stump of an ash finger with the good fingers of my left hand. It crumbled until it neared the base, where it became hard and black. Charcoal. I pealed this back, too, having somehow forgotten that it was my hand I was destroying. The char crackled and squeaked as I snapped each finger back. But it still encased my palm. So I smacked my hand against the metal rail of my stretcher.

Once. It held.

Twice. It cracked.

Three times. The fissures grew.

Four times. The charcoal crumbled away, and out of the ash emerged a multi-hinged pincer of dark gray chitin.

I screamed. It’s one thing to see your body covered in armor. It’s another to find the delicate structure of your hand devolved.

The scream itself brought me out of my terror, as it carried for only several feet then died.

I shouted, “Hello?” and the same thing happened. No echo, and no returning voices.

As I began to move, despite having just casually peeled my fingers off without the slightest sting, I still expected pain. But there was nothing except a heat deep in my core, as if a cinder still burned at the center of ash, ready to ignite if it found fuel. Me, I was all used up. I bore the spark, but I no longer owned it.

I stood and went for the ER admissions desk. Past the dusty counter, in chairs and on the ground were vaguely human-shaped piles of cold ash. One lay toppled on a copy machine, the torso lying on the glass, the legs collapsed on the ground.

Everyone had burned, a long time ago.

I started down a hallway. Somehow, I knew where I was going. I pressed an elevator button and waited for a moment before seeing that nothing was lit and no elevator would be coming. So I took the stairs up to the fourth floor. The burn unit.

There, in the beds, I found something that terrified me. There, the ashes weren’t cold. There, the people still burned. They looked like logs left in the fire for hours, black char split by glowing red fissures, the occasional flame spitting out, then falling back. Somehow, their beds didn’t burn.

Piles of ash that I assumed had once been nurses and family members surrounded the beds, still retaining some of their human shape, collapsed prostrate in worship to whatever god to whom they offered these eternally immolating sacrifices.

I looked at their split husks, and then at my dull gray stomach. I looked at the red glow that spilled from their fissures, and felt the heat deep within me. Was I looking at my future?

I ran. Unable to feel my legs beneath me, I floated down the stairs, through the lobby and out a revolving door, but then slowed to a plod, then a dead halt.

The city stood silent and gray, and its calmness, its graveyard quiet, its resignation filled me, became me.

Cars sat motionless in the street, the drivers slumped against their steering wheels, their crumbling ashen heads spilling onto their dashes or out open windows. The world had burned. It must have gone quickly, an inescapable firestorm of such fury that it sucked up the bonds between atoms instantly, spitting them out as flame and leaving behind the spent carbon nearly undisturbed, leaving the world a fragile sculpture, a snapshot of the final moment.

I wandered the streets for I don’t know how long. Forever, it seemed. I had no aim or desire. I was one of the burned, and the passions of life couldn’t catch hold of the cold, lifeless stuff I was made of.

The city seemed the same as I remembered it. On foot, I entered the Burnout, a part of town I’d never dared to even drive through. Urban decay. But even rotten flesh burns.

Let me explain the Burnout. Bad neighborhoods spread out, and the people on the edges flee the coming tide, leaving the area to crime. But eventually a bad neighborhood grows so large that even the lowest can no longer inhabit the center. Service people won’t venture that far in. Police and ambulances wouldn’t respond even if there were phone service to call for help. The wounded area dies, goes necrotic at the center, and then the gangrene spreads, too.

But even rotten flesh burns, and the firestorm cleansed it all, burning away filthy, messy life, leaving only sterile ash and empty buildings.

In the ambulance, I’d felt death as a storm, approaching but never arriving. Maybe it had arrived. Maybe, after I’d crawled into the darkness, it had torn through the world, and not finding me, taken everyone else.

On corners where—if absolutely forced to drive past—I’d have avoided eye contact with drug-dealers and prostitutes, I strolled leisurely by piles of ash. The air was so still that a person leaning against a building stood intact, like a cigarette smoked so fast it has no time to droop. I tapped it and it crumbled to the ground with a shhhh and a final whump, and I felt surprisingly guilty for taking this lifeless thing’s last remnant of humanity, leaving him a featureless pile.

I noticed a trend in my wanderings, a circling, day after day (though there was no day, there was no night, there was only gray). I’d imagined myself moving randomly, but then I felt a pattern, and I felt a tug, and when I looked closely, I found a snake’s coils wrapped around the area, walling me in.

My heart leapt in my chest at this evidence of another intelligence in a world I’d thought completely dead. I navigated the streets, trying to find my way back, trying to find a way out. Had I been caught in this constriction since the hospital?

Running, careening, spinning through the streets, I fought the pull of the maze, but whenever I thought I’d found my way out, I’d find instead that I’d worked my way deeper, my struggling allowing the constrictor’s coils to tighten, never to loosen, only tighten with every fractional inch given.

I sat down in the middle of the street, paralyzed by fear. Somehow I knew that every step I took, in whatever direction, brought me closer to the snake’s maw. Only stillness didn’t worsen my situation. I found a patch of street where the buildings had all crumbled, where when I lay back I could see nothing but gray sky above me. I melted into the gray. Being gray myself, it was easy.

And then my first fissure emerged.

I felt a pulling in my guts and ignored it, but it grew and grew, the “skin” of my stomach stretching tighter until something finally gave. I sat up after who-knows-how-many weeks and looked down to find a split as wide as a finger and long as my palm, and out of it spilled red light.

My time in the darkness hadn’t thrown death off, only delayed him.

I stood and ran.

By the time I caught myself, by the time I became aware of the immediate danger and squinted my eyes to search for the snake’s coils, I’d come to a dark, looming building. I’m not sure what it was, but despite the fact that it was crumbling it had an air of authority. It’s wide, brick wings seemed to want to gather me in.

And when I looked around, I found the serpentine body funneling me toward the entrance.

I stood frozen, but it was too late. All around me the coils twitched with agitated awareness. The creature in the building knew I’d come near.

How long it must have waited for me, the last living thing on Earth. What patience it must have had.

Its patience broke. The twitching became thrashing, and I was knocked to the ground and looped in cool, pebbly reptilian flesh. I rolled across the street toward the crumbling brick monolith which contained the last living thing in a dead world. But life feeds on life, and whatever lurked inside hungered, and it dragged me across pavement, across asphalt. I gripped at the ground with my good left hand and found no purchase at all. Instinctively, I slapped my ruined right hand against the road.

The hard, pincer-like claw dug in. The multi-jointed protrusions forced themselves deeper and deeper into the macadam, and I dragged myself forward, out of the crushing coils and away from the predator.

I let go of the ground and rammed my pincer into its enormous bulk, slipping between scales and then ribs. A shriek of rage froze me, carried not by the dead air which couldn’t transmit sound more than a few feet, but through the creature’s flesh. I had not yet seen its head, only the immense body it had encircled its home with, but I could sense its head approaching. It dropped me in a spasm, and I stood and ran, feeling the creature behind me near as I jumped and dodged and stabbed its coils.

I didn’t know what I was running toward, but I knew what I ran from, and I ran a long time. Away from the Burnout, the creature’s coils were fewer, but it still pursued me.

Sprinting through buildings in an attempt to escape, I didn’t realize where I’d arrived until I smashed through those double doors and froze.

The fryer drew me to it. I forgot the hunter. I didn’t want or not want to stare down into the fryer. I simply knew it was what I was about to do.

Every footstep I took hit the world like a drop of water into a calm pool. In the rippling of the ashy ground I saw other realities shimmer and spread and diminish, not yet able to challenge the primacy of that burnt reality.

I gripped the sides of the fryer and leaned down into it. It was nothing more than a cold steel cylinder wrapped in heating elements. Nothing evil. No malevolent consciousness behind it. No master plan to destroy me, to destroy the world. The tiniest mistake had done this. The proverbial flap of butterfly wings.

My thoughts about the fragile nature of reality made the already flexible world around me bend and twist. I looked up, and the piles of ash that had been the kitchen staff now lived. The lights were on. The ash that coated everything had been sucked back into the living world, full again with potential energy.

The moment hung heavy with that potential. It throbbed, and—as my mind probed at it—stretched.

I reached for the paint scraper where it hung on the wall, and the phone in my pocket rang.

I didn’t answer it.

Instead, I flipped the power switch on the fryer to off. The elements went cold.

That’s when the elastic nature of time revealed itself to me in full. I felt the pull as I marched forward, second by second, scraping out a safe fryer, a fryer that wouldn’t erupt into flames. That single, tiny movement changed everything. I marched forward in time. I went to the party. I palled around with Mr. Barrington, schmoozed with his friends, turned down all the joking job offers.

Madison and I were married, and the Barringtons gifted us a house. We’d have no mortgage hanging over us. I went into work every day and hustled in the world of corporate finance and came out ahead. It was hard. Long hours. High stress. But it was also easy, because I loved it.

Madison and I had children, little quadroons with the most exotic beauty, her big eyes and fine bones and my curls and big lips. In public people stopped, awestruck by their beauty.

Like everyone, I felt it all slipping. It was too good to last. Each success made the world more likely to collapse on us, a giant rock trap propped feebly over tempting bait. Each step forward became more of a struggle.

Then, as time slowed to a crawl and finally stopped, I realized this wasn’t the same fear everyone else faced. This wasn’t an irrational waiting for the other shoe to drop. This wasn’t a metaphorical time catching up with me. It literally had. Madison turned the page of a library book slower and slower, until if she was moving any longer I couldn’t perceive it. The kids played a video game, both holding their controllers high and to the side as if yanking them about had an effect on the screen. The images on the television stuttered, froze. The peppy little song deepened, turned into an industrial dirge, the waveforms spreading farther and farther until they flatlined.

The pull of time had matched my maximum efforts. Like running with a giant exercise band attached to a wall and my waist, I’d gone as far as I could. I tried to snap the band. I scrabbled at the ground, but I’d lost my pincer, had only two useless flesh hands, and I felt the world begin to slide around me. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the pillar of flame erupting from the fryer. There was a gap in the flame. A hollow. My place.

3

Waking up was a slow thing. I would open my eyes to a blurry reality, then shut them and once again struggle against the inevitable past.

It took days before I resided permanently again in the real world, the world of pain. I didn’t want it.

My parents sat watching a television high up on the wall. I tried to talk to them, but nothing came out. It felt like running in a dream, and I thought that perhaps it was just another dream, except that this dream hurt. And this dream didn’t fade. My hands felt as if they were strapped to fifty pound dumbbells, but I lifted my left and dropped it on the bed rail.

“Carl, he’s awake again.”

They both came to my bedside and looked down at me. The scene was too blurry to be a dream. My dreams had been so clear. This was real. I moved my mouth, but still couldn’t speak.

“Cody,” my dad said, “they’ve got tubes in your neck, below your vocal chords. Don’t try to talk.” He patted my hand as he said these horrible things.

“Do you think he’s back for real this time?” my mother asked.

“I see him in there.”

She cried.

I left them. It was so easy to slide back into the warmth of sleep.

Eventually, I could no longer escape.

* * *

I’d been kept in a medically-induced coma for three weeks, and each moment was like a fever dream, similar to those nights of flu when every moment ticks by but without lucidity there to calm the mind. To call what I’d had dreams or nightmares doesn’t even begin to touch this other reality I’d existed in. Whether or not it was real when viewed from the conscious perspective didn’t matter; it changed me.

The hospital staff had done a lot of work on me during my unconsciousness. I imagined myself then as something like a car brought in for repairs. Driven onto a lift and cranked up when necessary, parked quietly out back when not.

That’s not fair to the nurses, though. They were with me constantly during that time, vacuuming out the fluid collecting in my throat because I couldn’t swallow, changing my wraps, just talking to me. Sometimes I think their words slipped into my dreams, influencing them, making that burned-up world a little less dead and sterile.

While I was unconscious the doctors performed the escharotomy. Eschar is the dead, cooked flesh that the body transforms into an armor to coat a burn wound. My actual wound, the place where the living tissue bled and attempted to heal, was encased within an eschar resembling boot leather.

I asked how they cut it away. The nurses wouldn’t tell me. The doctor would.

Because a patient could only be kept on the operating table for so long, especially one with as compromised a system as a burn patient, they used a machine called a dermatome to remove the majority of the cooked tissue. It was explained to me as an enormous vibrating cheese slicer that you push forward instead of drag back, taking away great peels of dead flesh until it hit blood. When tiny red droplets blossomed on the surface, they knew they’d hit living tissue, and the rest was done by hand with a knife.

I was very glad this happened while I was in my coma.

This didn’t take care of all the dead tissue, only the largest parts. My wounds, which covered slightly more than forty percent of my body, exuded a soup of lifeless protein goo every day, and my wraps were removed and this was rubbed away. When I was unconscious, they said I’d moaned during the process. After I’d awakened, I screamed and begged for them to stop. It took hours, and I swear that those gauze pads felt like steel wool being raked across raw nerves.

But the goo and crust had to go. My body had become an enormous petri dish, and the exudate mixed with the dead cells and the flecks of remaining eschar to create the most lush bacterial paradise imaginable.

Looking at myself during those times, seeing the incredible damage that had been done to my body, seeing the way I’d wasted away, so that not only was I injured, but frail, so frail…I nearly gave up hope of surviving. I didn’t know if I wanted to survive, anyway.

My metabolism had skyrocketed. While in the coma, I’d gone hypermetabolic. My temperature never dropped from the low hundreds. My heart rate sat at 130, what it should have taken a brisk jog to elevate to. There was an all out war being fought inside my body, except that the enemy was my body.

They put as much protein as they could down my feeding tube, but the hypermetabolism combined with complete lack of movement had me wasting away at a rate of pounds per day. I’d entered my coma muscular from regular weight lifting. I left it a skeleton. A charred skeleton.

* * *

Due to nausea, I couldn’t have eaten enough to prevent starvation, so even after I awoke the tracheostomy hole stayed, filled with a feeding tube and a breathing tube that helped ensure I got enough oxygen for the ten-round, heavyweight main event my body was fighting, despite the fact that liquid rattled around in my lungs.

They told me how lucky I was to have not breathed in the flame. The bronchial system is fantastic at dissipating temperature. A person can breathe super-heated air or even steam and it will be cool by the time it reaches the lungs. But flames are another thing. They count lungs damaged by flames or smoke as an extra percentage of burned body when calculating a patient’s chances of survival. Trying to heal a bad burn without the ability to draw oxygen properly is like trying to run a marathon with a gas mask on.

When I wanted to talk, I did it with my phone, tapping out my sentences with my left thumb. Because my left hand had been pressed to the side of my face turned away from the initial explosion, it hadn’t been burned at all. Thank goodness my fucking head had been there to protect it. The left side of my face had burned as my polyester shirt caught fire, but my left hand was fine, as it had still been clutching the damn phone. My right hand, though, was bandaged to nearly the size of a volleyball. And no one talked about it.

Have you been here every day? I asked my parents.

“Every day,” my mother said, tearing up the way she did almost every time she spoke, as if her face were a wet rag and the twisting of her mouth muscles wrung out tears.

What about work?

“We’re both on extended leave.”

Has Madison been here?

My mother couldn’t speak anymore, so my father took over. “Yes, she’s been here almost the entire time. Her parents have been here with us a lot, too. But Madison didn’t leave your side.”

Then where is she?

He sighed. “When they started to bring you out of the coma, after you first opened your eyes, she said she couldn’t take it. Said she felt too guilty, that you wouldn’t want to see her anyway.”

Guilty? You don’t pop out of a coma tack-sharp. The dream haze still hugged me, wrapped my brain in the same cotton gauze that wrapped my burnt skull. And though they were no longer giving me enough narcotics to put me out completely, they were still switching me back and forth between morphine and fentanyl, because if I’d had to deal with the pain of a forty percent burn un-drugged I would have gone mad. An hour of it had driven me out of my mind before they had me out of shock and put me under. So I didn’t understand why Madison felt guilty.

My father stood waiting for a response, looking at my phone instead of at me, and the thought hit me that while the face seems so important, you mostly look at it because it’s where the words come from. Now that my words came from my thumb, that was people’s point of interest.

I looked at my phone too.

I’d been talking to Madison when the fryer ignited.

What does she think happened?

“She thinks that she distracted you while you were working. Your coworkers said that you had forgotten to flip the fryer off because you were talking on your phone, and that the element had ignited the oil coating the fryer.”

In my coma, I hadn’t answered my phone. Instead, I flipped the switch on the fryer and cleaned it without incident. Incident. Gaping straight into an inferno like some slack-jawed imbecile at the circus until my face burned off, that was an incident.

That one little moment of distraction had cost me the life I’d dreamed of in my coma, the life I’d dreamed of forever.

I’m tired. Done talking.

“Okay, Cody.” Tears appeared in the corners of his eyes. “I didn’t know if I’d ever get the chance to talk to you again. I know you’re strong, but…it was a close thing. I just want you to know that I love you.”

He touched my left hand. I nodded my wrapped head. Hoped that was enough. Closed my eye. It was too much.

* * *

My right eye was gone. Why had I stared into the flame? I don’t know that I did. It felt like I did, but time had gone so slowly in that instant. It’s possible that my brain just recorded every nanosecond of the flame blossoming out toward my face in the time it took instinct to shut my eyes.

Whatever happened, I didn’t shut them fast enough. They’d had to take my right eye.

I didn’t notice, at first, that it was wrapped in the dressings. That sounds strange, but laying there in that bed, cataloging my injuries took days, days of numb fumbling as I came out of my coma.

When counting my losses, I’m not even sure it ranked that high. The pinkie, ring and middle fingers of my right hand sustained fourth degree burns, all the way down to the muscle and tendon. Even if they could have survived, they would have been twisted into useless claws by the relentless pull of scar tissue. My pinkie and ring finger were amputated completely away. I still had the first joint of my index and middle fingers, and my entire thumb.

“Enough to hold a fork,” a nurse had said while changing my dressings one day when the issue of my hugely wrapped hand could no longer be ignored.

If I could choose my fingers or my right eye, I would have wanted my fingers back. My face. My life. I could do without my eye.

Because I could only use my left hand, the symmetry of only having my left eye made the fact less noticeable. I could text. I could still participate in the modern age of disembodied communication. Hell, with my diminished body and my lack of a face, the sterile, faceless connections were the easiest for me.

Why aren’t you here? I texted Madison.

It took her a long time to reply. Everything took a long time. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, finding that I had drifted off only twenty minutes before, trying to settle through the torment back into sleep. I remember before the burn, being a hundred percent unable to sleep if my fan wasn’t on and pointed in just the right direction, or if I hadn’t lotioned properly and a spot between my shoulder blades that I had trouble reaching itched, or if my pillows weren’t just the right height.

Now I was trying to find sleep while every nerve ending on my upper body that hadn’t been burned away still burned relentlessly. And my lower body…that was another hell. In my coma they’d begun harvesting my uninjured skin, the skin on my thighs and ass that had been protected by the thick cotton of my pants. Take a shaving razor, push it just into your skin, and then slide it along until you peel off a ten inch strip. How does that feel? Do it until your entire lower body is peeled, then try to sleep lying on it as your juices seep into gauze.

When I managed to sleep, it was because I’d complained enough to get more opiates, though they said I was building too much of a tolerance. So I spent most nights laying on my flayed back, feeling the screaming pain of my cooked front and waiting for some reason I couldn’t explain for the light of day to shine into my one good eye, because the daytime was just as much of a wait as the night.

I couldn’t take seeing you so hurt, she said.

My parents said you were here the whole time.

Another long pause. Another wait. Texts could make it through, but I had terrible data signal in the hospital, so I couldn’t distract myself with the internet. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care what was going on in the outside world. I’d been happiest when I’d thought it had burned as I had.

Do you blame me?

It was my turn to pause, her turn to wait. I’d avoided answering that question to myself. I knew guilt was keeping Madison away, so the question had been circling since I’d regained awareness, but somehow I’d managed to keep it circling, never letting it land, never examining it closely.

Rationally, who do you blame? Madison, for interrupting me continuously though she knew I was working? But she didn’t know I was doing anything dangerous. Me, for not flipping the machine off? That seems obvious, but the consequences are so disproportionate…How can my being set on fire, losing my fingers, my eye, my entire future be an appropriate effect from such a tiny cause? It couldn’t possibly be. There had to be something bigger.

There’s the manufacturer, of course. How do you get away with making a product that turns into a raging inferno at exactly the moment someone would be leaning into it?

But it was the universe, all of reality, that was to blame. Because if something like that could happen, then planning for anything was meaningless. Trying was meaningless. Decades of hard work, of study and struggle and late nights in menial jobs, it could all be lost by the smallest mistake. Years of doing everything right, of facing the big choices and making the right decision, could be undone by doing the tiniest thing wrong. I had spent so long denying myself the momentary pleasures in anticipation of a good future, and there was no future.

This was not a universe for me. It was not a reality I wanted, where this small act, no, small non-act, could be swollen with so much blame that there seemed to be enough for the whole world.

So did I blame Madison?

A little.

That’s why I’m not there. Because I blame me too.

I shouldn’t have said it. I should have told her that it wasn’t her fault at all. But I didn’t want to take care of anyone else right then. Her emotional fragility actually pissed me off. I was struggling to stay alive. My body had been operating at marathon level for weeks trying to heal me before infection could kill me. I had no energy left to be delicate with Madison.

4

Visitors had to wear full-body suits. I was one big open wound, the skin of my upper body cooked away by flame, the skin of my lower body flayed away by the surgeon’s knife.

I had the strangest sense of power, watching Mr. David Barrington and his thin-blooded wife Susan as they prepped themselves right outside my door, washing, sanitizing, suiting up from head to toe. When they opened the door, a gust of wind pressed into them. My room always had positive pressure, so that only the sterile air the hospital pumped in ever entered.

From what my parents said, the Barrington’s had been in to see me a number of times while I was unconscious, seemingly already part of the family except for that one pesky detail of their daughter’s abandoning me.

Despite having seen me a number of times, Mrs. Barrington teared up immediately, and put her gloved hand to her masked lips.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am to have you back with us. How are you doing, Cody?” Mr. Barrington said, pulling a chair closer to my bed and falling into it.

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I was as simultaneously crispy and succulent as a rotisserie chicken, with parts of my body literally flaking away while I marinated in the juices I leaked into my bandages. When my dressings had been changed that morning, the blackened tip of my nose had pulled away and fallen onto my pillow. Jake, one of my favorite nurses, and I had laughed. Well, he laughed, and I shook around my breathing and feeding tubes like a fish on a line. He’d decided to interpret it as laughter rather than sobbing. I wasn’t sure myself which it had been, but went with his opinion.

I’m surviving.

“You bet you are. You’re the toughest SOB I’ve ever met in my life. I’m dead serious, Cody. And I can’t wait to get you into Sanders & Stevens. I need a pit bull like you on my team.”

Thank you, sir. It’ll probably be awhile.

“Whenever you’re ready. I’m surrounded by yes men. I can use somebody with some spine.”

I nodded, not knowing what to say. Over the course of my successful academic career, I’d always disarmed flattery with a “Thank you” and a self-deprecating joke or two. Unfortunately, I’d lost most of my ability to joke. The closest my mind came anymore was irony so acidic I dared not let it out, instead keeping it flowing through my brain, burning. Burning. It was the fuel of anger, and I feared the engine that would roar to life if I let it flow.

By this time, Mrs. Barrington had managed to unstick herself from her frozen position of abject sorrow and horror and pull a seat over. She sat and touched me lightly on the leg, so lightly I couldn’t feel it through the bandage wrapped over a wound created by taking the healthy skin there to place somewhere else on my body, either covering an open wound that seemed ready to heal or replacing a slab of pale white cadaver skin, which helped prevent infection but which would never take hold, thank God.

If I’d said “Boo,” Susan Barrington would have fallen over dead of a heart attack. Mr. Barrington picked up the slack, filling the room with his booming personality, telling me about all the mergers he had in the works, telling me about the intricacies of international tax law with the new countries Sanders & Stevens was moving into.

“I’ll be glad to have you there. Nothing like having family watching your back when you’re swimming with the sharks.”

Mrs. Barrington gave him a look, and he actually heeded it for once, the patch of flesh visible between the light blue mask covering his nose and mouth and the cap covering his hair going bright red, and him stumbling for words, an avalanche of gaffs that finally ground to a halt, the abrupt lack of cacophany deafening.

Family.

I had to ask.

How is Madison?

“You know Maddy, flighty and aimless as a butterfly. I think she’s been meaning to come, she just…”

I nodded. I had the urge to press the issue. I wanted to ask why she wouldn’t answer my texts. I wanted to ask when she’d come to visit me. I wanted to ask a million questions with obvious answers, questions that weren’t just elephants in the room, but which were elephants sitting directly on my chest, crushing me down even as a machine pumped cold air into my lungs for me.

Jake saved us. “David! Susan! So good to see you again!” he exclaimed as he came into the room.

The man was a goddamn saint, a relentless engine of positive energy and good will. I don’t know if I would have liked him if I’d met him before, but then again I didn’t know how he was in the outside world. Maybe he saved all his energy for the burn unit. Maybe he sat silently for his few other waking hours, plugged into a wall, charging. I didn’t think a person could operate at that level all the time, especially when his audience wasn’t rowdy and receptive, but a bunch of people hovering in that wide space between life and death, a space I’d never even noticed, having the healthy, young person’s concept of the two states of being as perfectly delineated and separate. It didn’t matter if he were working with a comatose vegetable, a tubed-up mute like me, or a person who could actually respond, Jake brought the same vigor, compassion and humor into the room with him. That zone I talked about, that wide, habitable space between life and death, he was a magnet pulling his patients toward life.

“Jake!” Mr. Barrington exclaimed, his motor starting again. “I was just telling Cody how happy I’ll be to have him working for me.”

“I’m betting Cody would rather be anywhere than here. Even work. Don’t worry, Cody. I don’t take it personally. So how are things at Sanders & Stevens? Didn’t you say you were trying to expand into Africa?”

“Yes. We’re talking with one of the biggest petroleum infrastructure engineering firms over there. We can take them from one of the biggest to the biggest if we can get it worked out.”

“Isn’t it risky doing business over there?” Jake asked as he began to work at my dressings.

He couldn’t have known the nature of what he’d just unleashed by inquiring into this. Mr. Barrington got started on a lecture about risk that could have been delivered at a podium in front of an auditorium. But maybe Jake had known, because before David got too far into his opinions on economic theory, he said, “You can stay for this if Cody doesn’t mind, but I don’t know if you’ll want to. We need to get his dressings changed.”

Mrs. Barrington gripped her husband’s arm. He might have tried to tough it out. He’d want to show me that I wasn’t in such a bad state as to be unbearably repulsive, and he’d also want to test his own nerve. But Susan already looked pale enough to fall over.

“I think we’ll step out. How long will you be?”

“It’s been taking more than an hour.”

“Then I guess we’ll have to come back another time.” David Barrington put his gloved hand gingerly on my left forearm. “We’ll be seeing you really soon, Cody. Keep gutting it out.”

I nodded.

They left, and while I’d been glad to see them, it was good to be able to relax, to not have to pretend to be brave, which seemed difficult even when laying immobile and silent.

You did that on purpose. I held the phone up so Jake could read it.

“Did what?” he asked, batting his eyelashes innocently.

Got him started right before telling them to go.

“What? I find that stuff very interesting. Didn’t you know that as a student I was torn between nursing and huge mega conglomo coporate finance?” he rolled his eyes and laughed.

It surprised me, how close my family had become with my nurses. I awoke and intruded upon an entire relationship structure with my previously comatose carcass at the center.

I smiled at Jake, but then tapped out, Meds?

His smile left his eyes, only turning up the corners of his mouth. “If you need them, buddy, but let’s see how far we can get first. Your tolerance is getting too high.”

I nodded, but knew I’d be weeping and mewling soon.

* * *

My physical therapy began when I was still unconscious. Inside my dressings, my joints were fitted into splints that bent them or straightened them as necessary to maintain flexibility. If they hadn’t, while I’d slept my tendons would have twisted me into knots. Besides occasionally replacing my splints with splints set at different angles, the physical therapists also stretched me. Thomas said that even when I was unconscious he knew I was going to be trouble, that I fought him even in my sleep, trying to pull away from him.

It hurt. It hurt incredibly. And as my body healed, it actually began to hurt more. Because then I wasn’t just fighting tendon that had grown stronger than my wasted muscle (my heart rate still hadn’t settled below 120, even a month after my burn, and it was a constant struggle to prevent the loss of the small bit of muscle I still had), but against the newly forming scar tissue.

The scar tissue was thick and red and itched like you wouldn’t believe. Joining forces with all the things conspiring to keep me from sleep, the itching of my scars was the worst. It never stopped. It never slacked. Even the pain came in waves. The itching never relented.

“See, though,” Thomas said as he forced me to tilt my head from side to side, “this scar tissue looks bad, but it’s still soft. This is nothing compared to the torture you’ll feel in a year when it’s gone hard if you haven’t stretched it enough to get some slack. It can literally rip your joints apart. This, where your neck burned so badly, the graft has taken really well. But the scar tissue there is so thick it will twist your spine until something ruptures if you don’t fight it.”

They argued with me like this, my nurses and physical therapists and occupational therapists, and I couldn’t even speak. They could tell from my nonverbal communication and the few texts I typed them before the agony became so great that my hand shook beyond control, which didn’t matter because I lost my mind to that sea of pain soon after and couldn’t have thought of anything to say anyway.

When Thomas worked, my lips moved in soundless, mindless pleading. The bastard was relentless. They all were. They all wanted the best for me, better than I wanted for myself.

My arms tried to settle against my chest, bent like baby bird wings as soon as my elbows and right wrist came out of my splints. He folded my chest open, rolled my shoulders back. He worked my arms slowly, so damn slowly through their range of motion. The entire time the red, puffy scar tissue felt like it was going to snap like taffy. With each flex he pulled it a bit farther.

My entire body flexed with the pain. At its worst, though I was a feeble skeleton, I swear that only my heels and the back of my head touched the bed, my body forming an arch to match the arc of electric torment shooting through me.

The occupational therapy started later, the stretching of my right hand, because it took a long time to close.

It’s hard to explain how I felt when I finally saw the remains of my right hand. We protect our fingers. We clutch our hands to our bodies so quickly when they’re endangered. To see them chopped down to angry red nubs, my thumb seemingly free-floating, nothing much to press against…I hadn’t thought I could get lower until I saw that. The strangest part was the feeling of déjà vu, until I realized that I’d felt this all in my dream, when I’d peeled my fingers away to reveal a pincer. That’s what my thumb and the remaining joints of my first and second fingers resembled: the crude, fleshy pincer of a soft shell crab. I could have vomited if I hadn’t been on powerful anti-nausea medication to help me keep down the high-protein goop they pumped me full of and prevent me from gagging on the thick tubes going down my throat.

If they thought I was difficult before I saw my hand…

“They want us to talk to you. They say you’re not cooperating. You’re fighting the therapy,” my dad said.

I stared. I just stared. I found that my lack of a voice had given me strange power. I’d always been verbally gifted, always been an arguer, had killed at debate, but to not speak, to not let the other person settle in the fortress of their own opinions but to have to search out mine was more effective than I could have imagined.

“Don’t you want to get better?” my mother asked.

I didn’t look at her. She was too fragile for me to smash beneath the weight of my gaze. I simply tapped out, I won’t be getting better.

She teared up. Even without looking at her, I could feel it. I hated hurting her, but it was the fucking truth. All of this pain would come to nothing, because I would never get better. I’d lost everything.

Her silent tears became sobs. I turned away. What right did she have to cry as I sat there dry-eyed?

My dad led her out of the room, whispered something to her, probably about getting something from the cafeteria or going to the burn unit’s private waiting room, where apparently they’d developed great friendships with the families of other survivors. I was ecstatic my horrific injury had brought so many people together.

My dad sat back down, but I stared at the opposite wall.

“Son, look at me. We need to talk.”

I turned my head so slowly that the beam of my gaze ripped through drywall, reduced studs to splinters, would pulp any person it fell upon. I gave him time to move, and yet there he sat, waiting for my deadly eyes to land on his own.

There was a moment of strange father/son tension, where neither of us would look away, but this is what I did all day, every day. I could stare at him for weeks without feeling the slightest discomfort. What could he do to me? Spank me? The surgeons had already literally flayed my backside to bloody ribbons.

He looked down. I don’t know if I felt good about it as I stared at the curly gray hairs on the top of his head.

“You’re fighting the wrong battle, son. You’re fighting for the side that’s trying to kill you. You’re fighting against your allies. This is a war, and everyone is trying to win it for you, but we can’t win it against you.”

I jutted my phone out, showing him the screen that still said, I won’t be getting better.

“You’re going to live, Cody. Some part of you must want to, because we almost lost you a few times, but you fought through it. You did that. Now you need to finish what you started, because according to the doctors what your life will be is going to be determined by what you do over the next year.”

The tension had built until silence couldn’t express what I felt, and my left thumb flew across my phone. Kill myself so I can hold a fork? No fiance. No job. No future.

“I understand you’re in a dark place right now.”

You do not understand!

“Okay, I don’t understand, but you are in a dark place. Things will only get better from here. David still wants to give you a job, and I haven’t heard that Madison is gone. She’s just torn up with guilt. Do you know that she heard you burn?”

What?

“She was still on the phone. She heard everything until the paramedics took you away.”

I wanted to hurl the phone so badly that I sat it on the side table and slid it away with my fingertips so that I couldn’t reach it. That also signaled the end of my willingness to communicate.

“I love you, son. Your mother loves you. Even your nurses seem to love you. We all wish we could give you the time you need to recover from this tragedy. But your body won’t wait. What you do now, when your head is so mixed up, will determine the rest of your life. I might not understand what you’re going through, but you don’t understand that you do have a life ahead of you. Please trust in the people who love you and do what the therapists, nurses and doctors ask of you.” He stood. “That’s it. I’m going to stop harping at you now and let you rest and think about it.”

My dad left the room, left me to my thoughts. With no one to rage against, they all turned back on me. As if I wasn’t already facing enough from my body. And there was no escape. I tried to sleep, but I was too agitated to even relax my muscles. I wanted back in my dream world. I wanted to go back to the place where everything else had burned, too, to the place where I could go into the past and fight the future, flip that tiny little switch and take back the life that should have been mine, even for a little while.

I got my chance soon enough.

* * *

The morning they removed the bandages from my face was…I don’t know exactly how to describe it. It was bad, but in a low key way. The hurt wasn’t sharp. I was somewhat prepared for the worst. With all the surgeries I’d gone through, all the grafting, there was no way to imagine I’d come out looking okay.

And there’s something about hitting the bottom. Something comforting. Resignation gets a bad rap, but it’s the end of not just hope, but struggle.

They had covered my entire face and most of my scalp with grafts, and it took a long time for my body to completely accept them. Once they were closed, they needed to breathe, and Nurse Jake removed my bandages for cleaning, and then didn’t wrap up my head. I looked at him questioningly.

“I told you it was almost time. Today’s a big day. Your face and head are healing very well. No more bandages.”

I want to see, I tapped out on my phone.

He nodded. There were mirrors in the room. In all the talking he’d done over the month, he told me a lot about the unit’s philosophies. A big part was not hiding things from the patients. There was no benefit, and it was better to face reality as soon as possible so that internal healing could take place along with external healing.

“You’re sure? We could wait until the swelling goes down.”

I’m sure.

He brought me a mirror. Before he showed it to me, he said, “Your scar tissue is still very angry. It will shrink and grow less red over the next year.”

I nodded vigorously. I hated build up.

He pointed the mirror at my face, and my insides dropped out. The staples had all been removed, but I could still see the lines between grafts. My features were barely there. It was hard to tell what was a lump of scar tissue and what was my nose or my ear. They’d covered my right eye socket completely, paved it over like a pothole. Because the eye lid had burned away, there was no way to keep a false eye in place, and so no point in leaving it open.

The skin was raw and red and bulging. I looked like an enormous newborn rodent.

People say it feels like wearing a mask. It did, to some extent. Especially because my face was so puffy. Especially because I had one recognizable feature sunken deeply into the mess: my left eye. I watched my eye, and tried to guess what I was thinking. Because I’d gone numb. Disassociated.

I looked away, indicating I was done.

Jake said, “You’re going to be getting a lot of reconstructive surgery, and we’re going to make you a mask to help mold the scar tissue, to squeeze it down.”

I closed my eye. I didn’t want him there anymore.

It wasn’t so bad, though. What I didn’t want from Jake was a bunch of palliatives and pep talk. I wanted silence. My insides had grown so quiet in that second when I saw my ruined face, and I needed to know why. I needed to listen closely.

I found resignation. I’d been preparing myself for a life lost, but I’d held out some hope, as if I might be a phoenix. But no, my face was the final nail in the coffin of my old life, of my old future, if that makes sense.

I wouldn’t be a high-powered businessman. I wouldn’t one day be the CFO of Sanders & Stevens. No company would be sending me around the globe to meet with other executives. I couldn’t be the face of any company other than maybe a slasher movie studio. I could be the face of Freddy or Jason.

My dreams of a family evaporated along with my dreams of a productive career. Madison wouldn’t be coming back. I couldn’t blame her. Looking at me was literally enough to induce vomiting. She’d done the right thing, leaving when she did.

They made my mask as quickly as they could. Being half black, I had a predisposition to keloid scarring, and they wanted to get pressure on the tissue as soon as possible. So they made a mold of my face and then a silicon mask within a week.

I loved my mask. It wasn’t just that it covered my hideousness. I knew that in appearance, the blank mask was nearly as disturbing as my face. What I loved about it was that people stopped searching me for expression, stopped trying to figure out what I was thinking and feeling. I didn’t want the roiling, tormented flesh of my face to be some sort of external manifestation of my internal environment. Behind the expressionless mask I could be calm. I could settle into the nothingness of the future I saw stretching before me.

Even after I let go of hope, I found an empty spot left within me. In fact, my true, quiet sorrow was easier to hear without the noise.

I missed Madison.

We’d never be together, but we could be friends. I missed talking to her, hearing about her day, listening to her thoughts, always coming so fast, always so passionate, a tidal wave she was barely able to keep the crest of.

I texted my parents, telling them not to visit that day. I couldn’t handle them looking at me. Come evening, though, when I’d had some time to process the concrete truth of my present and future, I texted Madison.

What are you doing?

Drinking.

By yourself?

Yes. In my room.

Madison didn’t drink much, and never alone, always socially.

Why?

I like the warm fuzzies. And then sleep.

I miss you. We should talk more.

Text?

Yes, text.

I miss you, too.

It’s good you can’t see me. They took off the bandages. My face is raw meat.

I’m so sorry.

It’s okay. I almost said, It’s not your fault, but couldn’t quite bring myself to. I wasn’t sure if I meant it. It depends on how you define fault. Is that fabled butterfly at fault for starting the hurricane? If so, then Madison was at fault, and so was I, and so was the couple who’d stayed late, and so were Madison’s parents, for having that party, and so were all the people who’d built the fryer, and then maybe their parents for giving birth to them, and on and on and on and it didn’t matter.

But for some stupid reason, I couldn’t quite say it.

5

I wouldn’t be considered out of critical condition until my wounds all closed. A month and a half in they were applying the last grafts, and things were looking good. What no one could see is that beneath a graft on my right arm was a pocket of air. Whether due to a lack of contact, a bit of remaining eschar, or just bad luck, the skin hadn’t healed to my flesh, instead sitting over top of it, creating the perfect place for infection to breed. Because it hid beneath a graft, it wasn’t cleaned and wasn’t noticed. Because it was the site of a third degree burn where I had no nerve endings, I didn’t even feel the inflammation. I just started feeling worse and worse. The problem was, I was the boy who’d cried wolf. I’d managed to be the least stoic patient they’d ever had. And then there’s the fact that it’s hard to detect a fever when my temperature never dropped out of the low hundreds due to my hypermetabolism.

My body was once again conspiring against me.

I told them I didn’t feel good, but it’s hard to blame them for not believing me. By the time they understood what was going on, my brain was frying inside my skull, and I abandoned the outside world once again, this time without the need for narcotic assistance.

I slipped into that hole, and emerged again from it, time having passed, but backward, back past the first coma to when the world had burned. I’d escaped it once, but not again.

The drugs might have turned things strange, but also slow and dopey. The fever that raged inside of me manifested in the opposite way.

The world burned.

I went to the window and looked outside. From the fourth floor I had a good view of the city. The streets were an inferno. Torrents of fire ripped through them like blood through veins.

Outside my door, people screamed. I stepped out and found the nurses and doctors writhing in flame.

Jake lay on the ground, his skin turning black, splitting to reveal white, pillowy fat that began to melt and sizzle.

“Cody! Cody please!”

For a moment I saw him leaning over me, heard a high-pitched whine, and then I was back in the burning world.

I left the nurses and doctors behind. There was nothing I could do for them. I stepped out into the street, into the rushing flame. It hugged me close, once again grabbing me, slipping beneath my clothing.

Around me, people shrieked, fell to ashes, were hit by the next gust of inferno and blasted into a scattering cloud of dust and sparking cinders.

Me, though, the flame had already had me once. It sizzled away my shell quickly enough. The skin that had been so carefully grafted over me peeled up like strips of bacon, crisped, blackened, fell away. As people burned to nothing all around me, I stood in the center of it all, an island in the raging torrent.

My body was hard, crystalline blackness, split into fissures that glowed red. The fire had consumed me once, and now I only burned from the inside. Only I burned me.

As I walked, the city slid past me until I found myself in Pajino’s.

In the dining room, customers sat in various stages of immolation. Some were already human-shaped piles of ash. Others smoldered. One man gripped the table and screamed that same high-pitched whine I’d heard before. The flames couldn’t touch me, but the whine staggered me, made my vision pulse black, fading, fading, until with a jolt the world again burst into existence. Blow-torch flame sprayed from his mouth, silencing him, blasting away his lips, his cheeks, burning through his skull in several places until his silently screaming mouth opened wider and wider and his head fell backwards, leaving his lower jaw still attached to his neck.

I continued, found Janet behind the bar, twisting back and forth on the ground. Until that moment, I’d felt nothing, but the horror of the situation hit me like the torrent of flame couldn’t, dropped me to my knees beside her. I held her as she turned to ash. For a moment she saw me before her eyes turned cloudy like frying egg white.

She fell apart in my arms.

That was it. I needed out, and there was only one way. I ran into the kitchen, past the cooks and dishwashers who clutched at my slick black body as I passed, their fingers snapping off as they refused to let go and I refused to stop.

The fryer was a geyser, but I gripped the edges and leaned into the flame, followed it back to its source, where it had begun.

I flipped the switch, and everything went dark.

When I opened my eyes, the world still burned. No, the fire was contained. I poked at a burning log in the fireplace, turned and found my family sitting around a Christmas tree. My parents, Madison, and her parents all sat smiling on the couches, sipping coffee and watching our beautiful children opening their presents.

I’d done it. I’d escaped into the future that should have been mine.

Remembering what would come next, I dug my fingers into the moment. I wouldn’t let it slide away. I knew that as I went further from the reality I’d escaped, it would pull harder at me.

I wouldn’t go back.

I poked the fire one last time, impotent there in its brick prison, then joined Madison on the couch. She handed me my cup of coffee and we leaned into each other.

The draw of the other reality—the one where I forgot to flip that tiny switch—grew and grew. I gritted my teeth. Beads of sweat covered my forehead.

“Cody, are you alright?” my mother asked.

“Yeah, great.”

But I felt the breaking point approaching, I felt something give, and then—nothing. I had clamped my eyes shut, but when I opened them, I was still in the reality I’d dug into, clamped onto like a bulldog’s jaws, unable to let go if I’d wanted to.

The tension lessened and I laughed. But then I heard that whining, and felt a growing pressure. From out of the fireplace the flames roared, filling the room with fire.

I leapt from the couch, grabbed my little girl, turned my back to the flame. From there, I watched Madison, my parents, her parents all stiffen, then scream as one as they lit. I watched them burn.

The entire house went up. The windows blew out. Once again my false skin peeled away, leaving only my used-up, fissure-cracked core. I felt no discomfort, but in my arms, my little girl writhed and screamed and turned to ash.

I’d been strong enough to hold on, but we were meant to be together. Not me and my family. Me and the fire. And when the burning world couldn’t draw me back, it followed me. The gap between us had shortened. I hadn’t budged, but something had to give.

Carrying my child, stepping over the corpses of my incinerated family, I walked outside.

The blue morning sky had turned black and red. Now this world burned. That’s when I knew for certain that wherever I went, the flames would follow.

6

The return was quicker that time, as I had no narcotic stupor to keep me numb to the sensations of my daily routines. Once the infection had been beaten and the fever let me go, my daily wrap changes, debridements and therapy kept me locked solidly in the real world, though my confidence in reality was shrinking. I felt like a polar bear on ice flow drifting south into warmer waters.

When are you going to see me again? I’d sent a variation on this text a dozen times and hadn’t received a response, but this time I followed it with. I almost died again. Bad infection. My heart stopped twice.

Oh my God. You’re okay now?

Jim dandy. Except the antibiotics killed one of my kidneys. How are you?

Drunk.

It’s barely noon.

Haven’t you heard of a liquid lunch?

Now that you’re responding, when will you see me?

I don’t know. I came to the hospital two weeks ago. Talked to the nurses.

Why didn’t you come here?

Feel too bad. Every day it’s harder.

I need you.

You don’t need me. Nobody needs me.

I need you.

* * *

Madison and I met in the food court of the student union. It’s funny, the little things that determine your life. I usually didn’t have breaks on campus if I could help it. I just didn’t have the time to waste. I’d eat lunch in the fifteen minutes between classes. But one of the classes I’d taken was with my least favorite professor. And then I couldn’t get the books, and it’d be at least three weeks before they’d come in, which meant I’d have to try to borrow. And then I showed up to class the first day and found my grad school nemesis Mark Stoddard smiling at me from the front row as I stepped into the room, and I just turned and walked back out. Since our first class together, we’d spent all of our time trying to squash each other’s answers. I wasn’t going to deal with it, not with that professor, not without the book. I went and dropped the class right then.

So I had ended up with an empty hour and a half there on campus right over lunch time, and started going to the student union every day, where they had a food court and comfortable chairs to study in. And that’s where I saw Madison for the first time.

It was spring semester. She had on the classic rich-girl winter outfit: sweater, skirt, thick white tights. Her huge blue eyes peered out at me from beneath blunt bangs. Then she looked quickly back down at her basket of fries and the book she had spread on the table, pinned open with a phone.

I watched her for a bit longer. She was very pretty, like a little doll with her heart-shaped face and her small stature. But she was of a different breed. I could tell just from looking at her. She didn’t know anything about striving for something better or hustling every opportunity. Most of my classmates were well off. They’d have an easier time because of the paths their parents had forged, but they’d still have to work. They were using their advantages to the fullest, but this girl was of the sort whose status wasn’t used to give an advantage in the struggle, but which alleviated struggle altogether. I guess I’m class conscious, because I knew before I even knew.

Looking back down at my own book, I ignored her as best I could, though I could feel her eyes through those heavy bangs.

Two days later, she was seated at the same table when I sat down. I put my back to her, not wanting to be distracted. An empty hour and a half was bad enough. I could at least get some reading done. So why didn’t I choose a seat completely out of sight?

I was engrossed in the intricacies of corporate structure when a small voice said, “I love your hair.”

My hair sits in big, loose curls—what I call a halfro—and I was using a Goody band to wrangle it into a halfro puff and out of my face. Women constantly complimented my hair. I said, “You can touch it if you want,” before I even saw who it was.

That might sound strange, but my hair draws women’s hands. Especially in the more casual college atmosphere, I was constantly being petted. It might not be dignified, but I can’t say I minded.

When I looked around, my eyes fell into hers. It was the rich girl, looking at me from beneath those heavy bangs like a guard peering through a slot in the fortress door. She smiled and reached forward, and I tilted my head to her and she patted my puff.

“Oh my God, it’s so soft. I’d kill for hair like that.”

I laughed a bit. I always laughed when these white girls who obsessed over the position of every strand of their hair said that to me, while women with hair like mine fried their curls out attempting to get “good” hair.

“It’s kind of a pain in the ass,” I said. “If I wear it short I’ve got rogue clumps trying to curl all over, and if I wear it long it looks too casual. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it when I graduate.”

“It looks nice long. Don’t cut it.”

“I can’t walk around in a suit and my hair in an elastic band.”

“It’s beautiful, and I think you would look very handsome in a suit with your hair just as it is.”

“Are you going to hire me?”

“Maybe I will.”

I gestured to the other chair at the table, and she sat down. “And what do you study that’s going to enable you to take me on as an employee?” I asked, having no idea what kind of business connections she had, that her father was the CFO of one of the largest engineering firms in the world.

“Philosophy,” she said, her eyes challenging me to say something. “With a special focus in ethics.”

“So you’re going to need a CPA for your…I can’t even come up with a fake philosophy business.”

“You practical people, always so proud of your practicality.”

I scoffed. “Come on, this country worships artists and actors.”

She scoffed right back. “This country judges you by one thing above all: the size of your bank account. If you didn’t think that were true, you wouldn’t be reading—Capital Structure and Corporate Financing Decisions. Oh my God, it’s worse than I thought.”

“I admit it’s not everyone’s thing.” I felt a bit indignant, but decided to keep any ‘little rich girl’ comments to myself. “So what are you reading?”

She went back to her table and gathered her things, then showed me Hegelian Dialectic. I fell back in my seat and started snoring.

“So trying to better yourself is boring?”

I snored even louder.

“Okay, well I’ll leave you to your nap.”

When her chair scraped, I sat quickly back up. “Alright, alright. I’m sorry. I don’t even know what a Hegelian dialectic is.”

She started explaining it to me, and it was the perfect topic of conversation because not only didn’t I have any interest, but even if I had I wouldn’t have understood a thing given the specialized vocabulary she was using that made business-speak sound like plain English. So I could just watch her talk.

She was very intense, gesturing with her small hands to emphasize her points, her forehead bouncing like crazy somewhere behind that wall of hair.

I liked her a lot. I liked her looks. I liked her passion. I liked how serious she was about it, never making light about her subject, or seeming apologetic for caring so much for something most people found silly.

When she was done giving me the basics, she stopped dead and just watched me. I knew that what I said next would determine if I got to talk to her again.

“Are you an undergrad?”

“Yeah.”

“What year?”

“Junior.” It felt like I’d walked out onto thin ice again. Given her stature and baby face, she probably got pegged as a teenager all the time, and seemed to be waiting for me to say something about it, to prove that I was as boring and predictable as everyone else. With this girl, I was betting it was all thin ice.

“How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-one.”

“Oh, I would have guessed forty, but you must hear that all the time. Seen a lot of hard living, huh?”

Her eyes opened wide and she stared at me in total shock for a moment before she hiccupped out an awkward laugh. She tried to find something to say, and it was funny to watch her mouth move without words after the long, eloquent lecture she’d just given.

“I’ve got to get to class,” I said, “but do you want to go get a drink sometime soon? Like, tonight?”

“Yes.”

* * *

At the end of my hospital stay, my metabolism dropped and my wounds closed, so I no longer needed massive quantities of protein poured into my stomach. On the breathing front, I was out of critical condition, and the infection seemed to be the last time I’d need a machine to keep me alive. I could also get out of bed without too much fear of a delicate graft ripping open, and spent quite a bit of time upright in physical therapy, so the liquid no longer settled in my lungs. So they removed my trach tubes and let the hole heal.

It was fun, the first time my parents visited and I was able to say, “Hi, guys.” No one had told them. The people who worked in the burn unit orchestrated these happy surprises, I guess to balance out just a bit of the tragedy they dealt with all day every day. My mom started sobbing so hard her legs almost went out from under her. My dad caught her, and Nurse Jake slid a chair beneath her. Seeing her reaction made even me a bit misty, a bit of moisture welling up in my eye. But what I soon learned was that the long weeks of silence—stretched to a seeming eternity by nearly unbearable pain—had turned inward. I no longer wanted to talk. It seemed a silly thing to do. Words were incapable of expressing what I’d been through, what I was still going through, and if they couldn’t communicate that, they couldn’t communicate anything worth saying. I wasn’t interested in chatting about the weather or what was on television. I was no longer interested in arguing politics with my dad, a blue collar, economic liberal but social conservative, me a free market economic conservative and social liberal. The conflict of ideologies had seemed so important to me before. I’d watched 24 hour news stations like an addict while I endlessly refreshed news websites on my computer or phone. It had seemed like the world was ready to collapse into chaos from a thousand different causes. The people championing their causes made me believe that with their fervor. And yet I fell away for weeks and came back and the prominence of the various catastrophes had shifted, but the same arguments were being made with the same level of boundless energy and I saw it for what it was: distraction. People needed to believe that what they did and thought mattered. I’d learned that wasn’t true.

Regulation or free market?

Fracking or coal?

Shimano or fixed gear?

Legal pot smoking or illegal pot smoking?

This celebrity versus that celebrity?

So much passion wasted. Ignore it for a few days, weeks, years and see what happens. See how much it counts for. What would have happened if we hadn’t argued about it? Talked about it at all? Thought about it? The only problem I could see was obvious: too many people. It was a problem that we couldn’t solve with policy, but which would eventually take care of itself.

For awhile, I tried to make small talk, and found that it took more effort than reading one of Madison’s books on continental philosophy, so that I wished I had never regained the ability to talk.

“Who do you like in this fight?” my dad asked me, about an upcoming MMA event being advertised on television. I was the one who’d gotten him to accept the transition from boxing to MMA, to see the skill and strategy in the match instead of “two guys hugging for fifteen minutes.”

It was a big fight, the light heavyweight title. I shrugged.

“I think the champ is staying put,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the division who has a skill set to challenge his.”

I nodded.

“What do you think his weakness is? I’d say wrestling, but he’s obviously a good wrestler. That kind of takedown defense is good wrestling on its own, so that people have forgotten what he can do on the ground because he never chooses to take it there.”

He waited for me to interject. I had once been able to talk for an hour at a time about any given fighter. I tried to respond, fished around inside for something but found nothing that could be put into words. I nodded.

“He didn’t even wrestle in college, did he?” my dad asked.

“No, he didn’t.”

“That’s what’s so crazy to me. How did he get so good so late? Most really good wrestlers start in grade school. I’ve heard it’s not just about learning the skills, but developing that special strength. But he never even wrestled until he started training for MMA, and he’s got this natural skill. Kind of makes you question how far hard word can take you, you know? Other guys put in decades of work, and when they try to use the skills they’ve spent thousands of hours developing, he shoves them headfirst into the mat because he was just made for this. What does that do to a person?”

It destroys him. For some sadistic reason it doesn’t kill him. It proves to him that life is struggle, but that the struggle is meaningless, and then it leaves him with this meaningless life. It leaves him paralyzed as if it had broken his neck at the fifth vertebrae.

“These documentaries have been popping up showing these guys training for big fights,” my dad said. There was quiet panic in his eyes, barely covered by light-hearted joviality. I watched him with my one eye from behind my silicon mask. I’d grown to love how it hugged my face, reminding me that it was there between me and the world. He kept his eyes on the television, where they were showing highlight reels of the two light heavyweights. “They put themselves through hell. They bring themselves to a level of physical perfection that can be maintained for only a few days. It takes months of careful planning to get to this point where they operate at what I think must basically be a superhuman level. They get to the perfect weight so that after losing every ounce of water they can they can make their class, then rehydrate and step in fifteen pounds heavier just to match the extra fifteen pounds the other guy has put on. And then it only takes one mistake. I’ve noticed that these documentaries mostly end with the fighters losing. I hate it. You want to think all that work pays off, or you want to be able to ignore it all and just enjoy the competition. To know that the worst performance you’ve ever seen, the dopiest move, the fastest knockout, to know that those guys had worked for months to bring themselves to a level of perfection to perform for say—how fast was the fastest knockout? Eight seconds?—trained like that, sweated like that, sacrificed like that, lived in the back of the gym, lost girlfriends and wives, gave up careers, all that for eight seconds and then to become a joke…It’s horrible.”

Why was he saying this to me? I couldn’t believe that he would consciously undermine all the energetic pep talks he’d been relentlessly giving me.

“What should they do?” I asked

“I don’t think they have a choice. They fight until they can’t fight anymore. They’re fighters. It wouldn’t be tragic if they said, ‘Well, I’ll just go back to psychiatry, now that this hasn’t worked out.’ They just keep fucking fighting.”

“Should they?” It was more than I’d spoken all day, but I felt that this moment might decide everything. Here was my father expressing what I’d thought inexpressible, what I thought I alone understood. But did he understand? Did he get what a root existential problem he was discussing, or was he really talking about two guys stepping into a cage to punch each other in the face until one fell down?

“Should? I don’t think should comes into it.” He looked at me for a quick moment before looking back to the television, that great excuse to look away, to avoid facing what you can’t face. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m getting so worked up. Those two, though…I tell you what, I think it’s going to be a good fight, but not a close one.”

It wouldn’t be a close fight at all. It would be a savage, decisive beat down.

7

When they released me, I went home with my parents. There was no way I could live alone, at least not for awhile. I needed too much help. There was too much to adjust to. In the burn unit, I had constant assistance. The real world didn’t offer that. The real world went on, and expected me to catch up or stay out of the way.

Anyway, I wasn’t making any money. I might get something out of the fryer manufacturer or Pajino’s parent company or I might not, but that was in the future. At that moment, I couldn’t pay rent.

Luckily, my parents had never done anything much with my old bedroom. It had just been cleared of my personal effects and made into a guest bedroom. So while I was in the hospital, my parents moved my stuff out of my apartment and into their house. What did they go through, to do that? How painful must that have been? I was still in my coma. Rent came due, and the question wasn’t, “Will he still want his apartment when he wakes up?” but “Will he wake up?” I can imagine them stepping into my apartment and seeing it left as if I had planned to come back in just a few hours, as if I weren’t planning to become a vegetable. A few dishes in the sink. Half my clothing clean, half strewn about into different piles based on re-wearability. A very small amount of pot in a little stone box on my coffee table, I remembered with a wince, that my parents never mentioned. Bread grown moldy in the cabinet.

My mom kept a hand on my arm as I walked through their house, near my elbow, where she could catch me if I fell. My legs worked fine. After lying in bed for weeks it took awhile to get my mobility back, but I’d done it in the hospital. It annoyed me, this kind but misguided gesture. I wanted to shake her off, but didn’t want to deal with the consequence, even if it was only a hurt look in her eyes. I let her guide me to my room, my dad following far too closely behind. She opened the door for me.

It felt like not only my future had disappeared, but the last decade of my life, with it. They’d set the furniture up exactly as it had been when I was in high school, the main difference being that they’d made space for my television and game consoles. So that was what a decade of struggle had got me. When I was in school, my parents didn’t think I needed a television in my room, that it would only distract me and mess with my sleep. Now I was allowed to have in my bedroom a flatscreen TV I didn’t care to watch and video games I could no longer play due to missing most of my right hand.

My mom had even put my favorite childhood comforter on my bed, a thick blue one. I sat on it, rubbed it, feeling how the batting inside had bunched up. I was glad it was there. If I was going to regress, I might as well get some comfort out of it.

“Do you like it?” my mother asked.

I nodded. Even if I’d had something to say, I don’t think I would have risked a word. I just sat behind my blank mask.

“The rest of your things are in the basement. If you think of anything you want, we’ll help you get it. We weren’t sure what all was important.”

They stood there in the doorway like jailers. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I managed, “Thanks.”

“We better let him rest,” my dad said. “He must be tired.”

“Okay. Let us know if you need anything, sweetie.”

When she finally shut the door I felt as if a truck had rolled off my chest. The room depressurized and I could finally look around.

They’d replaced my baseball curtains with beige ones years ago, but the walls were still the same sky blue I’d chosen to match them. I stood and went to the closet, intending to see what my parents had considered important enough to put in there rather than in the basement, but I froze at the sight of my height chart. Scratched into the brown finish of the door so that the raw pressed wood showed through were lines marking my height at different ages. The highest was age eighteen, the last birthday I’d spent at home.

What struck me, like a goddamned sledgehammer to the chest, was that I was looking up at it. I’d grown almost another two inches after leaving home. I put my nose to the door and tried to straighten myself, pulled my neck out of its rightward tilt, tried to open my chest and pull my shoulders back.

It hurt. I felt joints already inflamed from constant strain trying to separate. Tendons cried their threats to snap loose if I didn’t let them curl back up on themselves. And all my red, knotted scar tissue with zero give, zero elasticity—fuck. I stood there shaking, my nose touching the wood, trying to force the tip higher a slow fraction of an inch at a time. I could barely breathe as my stretched scar tissue spread my chest open as if I was being crucified. Finally, when I could feel my body threatening to collapse back on itself, my will be damned, I put my left hand across the top of my head, touching the door with my fingertips and leaving them there as I slumped again. My body shook as if I’d just gone through two hours of physical therapy.

It took several moments before I realized I was purposefully not looking and forced my eyes up.

Stretched almost to my breaking point, I was barely taller than I’d been at eighteen. I’d lost almost two inches. Standing relaxed, I was probably three or four inches shorter, but I wasn’t going to check.

No longer interested in what the closet held, I shut the door on the damn chart and sat back on the bed, still trying to catch my breath.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, breathing hard through the thin, rectangular slot in the mask, I noticed my laptop sitting on my desk. After a moment, I sat before it and fired it up.

It had been a long time since I’d had internet access. No data signal had made it into the hospital, and they’d offered no wifi. Yet, I hadn’t been that concerned. I really hadn’t been interested in what was going on in the outside world, whether in general or in my friends’ lives. Like some sort of metamorphosing insect, I’d wrapped myself fully in a cocoon, not just in the literal one of gauze, antibacterial creams and cadaver flesh, but also of indifference to everything outside myself.

My browser automatically opened to the social networks I used to check multiple times a day. I’d received a lot of messages, a lot of motivational quotes, bible verses, and pictures of cats. A lot of “Bro,” “Dude,” and “Man.” Fuck my dumbass friends.

They talked to each other on the posts they put up on my page, talking like I’d never read it, talking like people at a funeral, people who weren’t close enough to the deceased to be devastated, to be more curious, instead. They even joked with each other. Not about me, but still.

I closed the browser. I supposed I should go through and acknowledge every kind sentiment, but they’d piled up like a Looney Tunes trap, a huge pile of boulders supported by one little quivering stick, and if I tripped that stick, I’d be buried in an avalanche of questions and well-wishes, and I didn’t have the energy.

In fact, I nearly shut the laptop and went to lie down. Instead I checked my email. I did all this with my left hand, which had grown pretty nimble. I didn’t work nearly hard enough to regain mobility in what remained of my right hand to suit my occupational therapist, but by tapping out messages with my phone I’d nearly transitioned into my new status as a lefty. I thought that maybe I’d become more creative. I guessed since my business life was over I might as well turn into an artistic flake.

My heart thudded in my chest as I immediately spotted the emails from Madison sparkling from out of the morass of junk mail.

I moved the arrow over the oldest, but hesitated in opening it. I looked at the date sent. It was from a couple of days before I regained awareness, the time when they were dialing back the narcotics to let me (make me) float up out of my chemically induced coma, out of my dream and into agony.

I stared at my inbox until the white space around the text burned nuclear rainbows into my eye. Finally, like sneaking up on yourself to do something that’s probably going to suck, like ripping off a bandage or getting out of a warm bed, I clicked the email open without ever concluding the should I / shouldn’t I argument going on inside myself.

Cody,

Yesterday you opened your eye for the first time since the fire. I didn’t think I’d ever see that again. I cried. We all did, even your dad. Your mom hugged me. We were all so happy. You were coming back to us. They warned us to temper our excitement. They told us you were still in critical condition, that the prime window for infection hadn’t passed. But we didn’t listen to them. We were so happy.

I went home and told my parents. They wanted to come see you right away, even though visiting hours were over. You know how my dad is. My mom finally convinced him not to go make trouble at the hospital. I kept quiet, of course. I’ve never convinced him of anything. But she convinced him that we’d go in the morning. He went to tell people he wouldn’t be in to work the next day.

“Did he see you?” my mom asked.

I explained that you were still out of it.

“He knows you’re there. The way you’ve stuck by him shows a lot of maturity. It’s helping to bring him back.”

I went upstairs and sat in the dark. My brain wouldn’t stop working. I saw your eye, cloudy, opening onto your new hell. I saw your fingers twitching. The fingers that had held the phone.

I thought to myself that if you hadn’t been talking to me, you might have burnt your left hand badly, too. Then I punched myself in the head as hard as I could. It hurt my hand a lot more than it did my head. I did it again. I slammed my head backward into the wall, but only once, because the boom resonated through the house. My mom would come if I did it again.

To be so happy about your barely opened eye. It literally made me sick to my stomach. You always dwarfed me. You, so tall and gregarious and alive. Me, your little remora. What is safe if you aren’t? I’m standing on nothing. Being tucked under your arm was like standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and peering safely over. Now I’ve found myself standing in the air, looking back at solid ground, waiting for the fall to start.

If I had known, I wouldn’t have kept bothering you.

What a stupid thing to say. Of course if I had known. Of course. Of fucking course.

Now it’s morning. My parents left, went to the hospital. I told them I hadn’t slept. My father was very disappointed in me. He tried to guilt me.

I didn’t laugh, but I could have if I were someone else. No one can ever guilt me again anymore than you can murder someone twice. Dead is dead. Guilty is guilty.

My mom told him to leave me alone. I really hadn’t slept. I look like the walking dead. I actually managed to bruise my cheekbone with one of those sad little punches.

I can’t go see you. I’m sorry. I don’t know if it’s for me or you or both of us, but I can’t do it.

But I can’t stop talking to you, either.

You didn’t know me before. Do you know how little I spoke? I watched people when I spoke, watched how their eyes turned inward, scanning their vast repertoires of anecdotes. Which would they reply with when I finally stopped talking?

You listened, though. I don’t know why. Maybe you found the silly, rich little philosophy student amusing. Different from your fratty friends.

And now I can’t stop talking to you. I need to tell you these things.

Did you hear me whispering in your ear? I sat for hours leaned into you. When the blackened top of your ear fell off, Nurse Jake said, “Look at this. You finally talked his ear off.”

I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair. I started hyperventilating.

Did you hear me? Did you follow my voice back?

And now that you’re back, I’m gone.

But there’s always tomorrow.

Maddy

I backed out to my mailbox. She’d written me every day, sometimes more than once. Seeing all those letters felt like uncovering a treasure trove. She had replied to my texts, but I’d thought out of a sense of obligation. Rightful obligation. We were still engaged, I supposed. But these letters weren’t written out of obligation. She still thought of me.

I’d decided that nothing waits. My classes had moved on. My career was receding into the distance. The world had forgotten me. I took too long to recover. I hadn’t emerged until the world was over whatever amount of interest my story sparked. Even my friends weren’t commenting on my social network pages as much, except to each other. But I looked at Madison’s emails, written right up until yesterday. She hadn’t forgotten.

But the misery she described…She didn’t deserve it.

Don’t punish yourself for me, I texted.

You must have read my email.

The first.

Delete them. Self-indulgent blathering.

I sat my phone aside. I wouldn’t delete them, and so there was no point in continuing the conversation. Especially because the texts she was sending just then were self-conscious, infected with the horrible, endless prism of awareness of self and other that could trap and paralyze until finally you resisted expressing anything personal because having your motives questioned about those things hurt too much.

The letters—if the first was any indication—were raw. They were pure Madison, exactly what she was thinking when she wrote them, because she only half-expected me to survive.

I read a few more emails. They ripped me in every direction. She felt so bad, and I felt bad for her, but I felt incredibly happy that she felt bad for me. That sounds horrible, but like I said, I figured she’d moved on. Everything else seemed to have.

She felt guilty, and I knew that she shouldn’t feel that way, and I didn’t want her to, either, exactly, except that part of me did. A big part. The part that kept trying to solve the problem of my immolated existence, and saw impossible obstacles in trying to find answers in the future: a face like a pink, shiny death’s head, one hand burned away, a body wrapped scar tissue constricting tighter and tighter as it matured. So my brain, if I wasn’t watching, tried to turn to the past for a solution. After all, there the fix was so much easier. I just had to flip that little switch, and everything would be better. For some reason, my unconscious mind did not differentiate between the past and the future, and it kept returning to that moment again, whenever I wasn’t actively preventing it from doing so, and it kept triggering this little sensation of joy. That feeling I used to get when I solved a math problem or a difficult chess puzzle, a mate in five or something. And then my conscious mind would quickly turn to examine what my subconscious had worked out and found this idiocy, over and over and over. So it made no sense, but what I thought a million times a day is that all I had to do was not answer Madison’s call. And so, it was all her fault, and I couldn’t understand why I was the only one suffering for her mistake.

It was this bitter, petty part of myself that enjoyed seeing her enduring mental anguish as I endured anguish of every possible sort, mental, physical and existential.

Her emails continued to describe her guilt, inescapable guilt that smothered her however she turned and struggled against it. She couldn’t escape it, day or night. She dropped her classes for the semester. She said they wouldn’t hold it against her, despite being after the usual cutoff for appearing on her transcript, because of the extenuating circumstances. But she didn’t see her self going back.

It’s over. The future is over. That sounds funny, but it’s not. It’s terrible. The future is dead. There is nothing to move towards. There is only this same place forever, and I don’t know if I can take it, she wrote, and I couldn’t believe that someone else understood.

She told me about getting drunk, about the warm burst at the base of her skull, the meaningless good feeling, which was all she could hope for, and so why not reach for the attainable? I remembered texting her, and her mentioning her drunkenness at strange times. She’d never been a teetotaler, but even on the weekend it took a bit of convincing to get her to drink in the middle of the day.

You’re still reading them, aren’t you?

I closed the computer before truthfully replying, No.

Did you delete them?

No, and I won’t.

I’m sorry I sent them. You have enough to worry about. Selfish of me.

You don’t deserve this.

You don’t get to decide what I deserve.

What? I’m the burnt one.

The injured party can forgive, but that doesn’t change the status of guilt or innocence.

You’re not guilty.

Maybe.

Maybe was how Madison ended arguments she didn’t feel like continuing, at least not externally. I could often see in her face that her brain still worked over a situation long after she’d tossed out her decoy “maybe.”

Will you come see me now? I typed out. My thumb hovered over “send,” but settled on “delete,” where it sat until the input box was wiped clean.

She’d say no, and I couldn’t handle it just then.

Instead I stood slowly. Slouching over the computer had let my scar tissue tighten into its preferred fist-like grip around my neck, chest and shoulders. I hobbled over to the bed and settled onto it, laying on my back and trying to let gravity straighten everything out.

8

“I need you to lift your arm a little higher,” Ed, my physical therapist said, as I sweated and strained to lift my right arm in the same way I used to struggle to shoulder press two hundred pounds.

“No,” Ed said. “Don’t tilt at your waist. That doesn’t count. Lift your arm away from your side.”

Gasping, I let the arm drop and fell to my bed. “I can’t.”

“You have to—”

“No, I don’t have to, because I fucking can’t.” I hugged my right arm to my body with my left, kneading the tissue beneath my arm pit.

“I’m going to advise that they cut that scar, but you have to fight anyway. If you don’t, no amount of surgery will save you. You’ve got maybe a year before that tissue sets up, and whatever mobility you have at the end of that is the mobility you’ll have for life. I’ve seen people with burns just as bad regain full mobility.”

I wiggled my finger nubs at him. “Full mobility?”

“Well, obviously your fingers won’t grow back.”

“Then who fucking cares if the arm fucking works? I can’t fucking do anything with it anyway.” These people, they wanted heroic effort for heroic effort’s sake. They wanted super-human determination not because it would do any good, but because as a super human I’d become magically happier. For some reason, the adversity of being burnt to a crisp had brought out the best in a lot of people, and everyone seemed to expect the same of me. They wanted some made-for-TV movie Cody, and they weren’t going to get it.

Ed sat back and looked at me with a look of infinite professional patience that I wanted to slap off his face. “It’s your choice, but you need to really consider how you’re going to feel in the future, because this is your only shot.” He waved through the air, erasing the conversation. “Enough of that. Have they discussed the possibility of putting a bladder beneath that arm?”

“Yeah. Sounds delightful.” Because the scar tissue beneath my arm pit was locking my right arm against the side of my body and growing tighter all the time, the doctors talked about inserting a bladder under the tissue, then slowly inflating it over days and weeks, forcing the scar tissue to stretch. It sounded horrendous, like a huge blister in my armpit that would torment me for weeks, inflating bigger just as the ache of straining scar tissue began to fade, my arm levitating out from my body. All to get mobility in a useless limb. “I’m not sure I’m going to sign off on that. I’m getting tired of surgery.” I’d been through dozens, each one resulting in pain I had to work through in physical therapy and a tiny positive result. And as far as my face went, it seemed they could carve me up all they wanted, but a carved cooked ham doesn’t look much more like a face than an uncarved one. Anyway, I had my mask.

Ed shook his head and opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He turned my computer chair from my desk and sat in it, leaning forward so that we sat face-to-mask only a couple of feet apart, a couple of men talking mano-a-mano. “You need to really think. You’re depressed, and you have every right to be, but you have to think about your future self. Eventually, you’re going to want more out of life than lying in bed in your parents’ house.”

“And what if I don’t ever get more? Should I keep fighting against my reality? Is that really the path to happiness? A couple of billion Christians, Jews, Hindis and Buddhists would argue that point with you.”

Ed tossed his head back and let loose an exasperated laugh as he stood. “You’re smart, Cody. You’re too damn smart. Just make sure you don’t end up outsmarting yourself while you outsmart all us dopes. Okay?”

Hidden behind my mask, I didn’t feel the need to reply to rhetorical questions. I just followed him with my eye as he left the room. But I listened, too, and I knew he didn’t leave the house immediately. A low rumble of voices meant he and my dad were talking. My dad had switched to second shift so that someone could always be home with me, which was goddamn ridiculous. I could take care of myself. Sure, I hurt all the time, but he couldn’t help with that. It’s not like I needed to be monitored in case I wandered out into the street. Maybe they thought I’d proved that I couldn’t be trusted with a hot stove.

I sat in front of my laptop and opened it. It powered up to display my email, the only thing that really interested me anymore, because I still had letters from Madison to dole out to myself. Reading them was all I looked forward to doing, though they hurt, because they reminded me of what I had and couldn’t get back. My mind worked endlessly over my physical pain and disfigurement, and the emails gave me something else of equal intensity to obsess over. I couldn’t pay attention to the news. Movies no longer held my interest. I’d once been obsessed with sports stats, but now nothing could seem more stupid than trying to memorize a bunch of numbers that abstractly represented guys performing actions that seemed stupid even in the concrete. After months of chewing on the same few terrible seconds not only every waking moment, but even in my dreams, the attraction of something else that could grip my attention was powerful, even if the thing itself was horrible. The feelings of sorrow, anger and jealousy were preferable only for not being the same thoughts that had burned trench-deep neural pathways through my brain.

Madison was slipping. No, she’d already slipped, because I was reading emails she’d written weeks ago.

She’d moved on from alcohol, gotten back in touch with the Dorset brothers, her drug hookup from high school when she’d had a pill problem that had gotten her sent to rehab for two months. She’d started doing Oxy again, and she’d started doing it wherever she’d scored it, not even able to make herself wait until she got home. If she took too much—and she was tiny without a tolerance anymore—she would pass out wherever she was. Not in crackhouses. The homes of the affluent overflowed with pills. But honestly, I didn’t know which was more dangerous.

But why was she telling me about this? Why would she tell me about waking up sprawled on a leather couch, the rising sun falling directly across her face, and feeling at her panties to find them definitely askew, pulled aside?

I thought she was tormenting me, but then I realized that she saw every bit of degradation as recompense. She was working off her sins, and by telling me, she was letting me know that the scales of justice were being balanced. She was letting me see that she wouldn’t allow herself to escape unburned by the fire she felt she’d set. She’d stood outside it, watching the building go up with me inside until she couldn’t take it anymore, and then she’d thrown herself on the pyre so that we could burn together.

But unlike mine, her wounds weren’t visible, so she described them to me.

Some part of her hoped it would make me feel better, but I felt terrible. I felt angry with her for ruining her life. I felt rage at the thought of the people taking advantage of her desperate sadness. But something kept me reading. I had her permission to stop. I’d received numerous commands that I delete the emails, that she hadn’t been in the right frame of mind when she’d sent them. But I kept reading them. Why? Consciously, I didn’t think she deserved this, but somewhere down deep…All I can say is that I kept reading, and that I parceled them out sparingly, counting and recounting like a junkie checks his stash.

Sitting there, looking over my inbox so intently, I jumped at the knock at my door, and clapped the lid shut so clumsily that I almost knocked my laptop off my desk.

“Yeah?” I said, trying to force my heart to slow.

My dad opened the door as if I’d given him permission to enter.

“Ed says that you could be doing better. I explained to him that you’d never half-assed anything in your whole life, that you’d always worked harder than anyone at everything that you did. He didn’t buy it.”

“I’m trying,” I said, not looking up at him. The scar tissue on my chest and the front of my neck was thick from my polyester shirt burning against the tender skin there before Brandon dumped the bin of flour on me. It hurt to try to look up, and that was a convenient excuse.

My dad sat on the bed. “I know you are. You’ve been fighting like hell for months now, harder than any of us could. But the thing is, you might be getting tired and not even know it. But right now, you need to work as hard as you can. Harder than you can.”

“I am.”

He sighed. He wouldn’t snap at me. He’d never had a problem doing so when I was a kid, but he wouldn’t do it now. But he was getting closer. I’d gotten my temper from him. At first, he’d had nothing but sympathy. But the temper was starting to smolder beneath. I didn’t care. I welcomed it. I wanted to cut loose, too. The sullen child act didn’t feel right anymore. I was a decade past that. They thought that they were getting fed up? They felt ready to explode? I was waiting, just waiting for them to slip up so that I could share just a bit of what was clawing its way through my brains and guts every day.

Instead, he patted a stack of books I hadn’t noticed he’d brought in.

“I ordered these. They’re autobiographies. I guess they’re calling them memoirs these days. Of people who were burned and recovered. I thought it might help to see what’s possible.” He stood up, leaving the books on my bed. He didn’t try to hand them to me. I don’t know what would have happened if he had. A bit stunned, I stared at the small stack as he left the room.

My dad wasn’t one for self-help nonsense. He was a bootstrapper. You didn’t get anywhere by moaning and bellyaching. You put your head down and pushed forward, and you kept doing that until you either keeled over dead or retired and had a few years to look up and see how far you’d gotten.

The door closed. My dad had left. I stared at the books, my right arm clenched tightly to my side.

* * *

They put forth more effort than they thought possible. They found new depths of strength and heights of hope and faith. They found their inner beauty, and challenged anyone to say it was of less value than their outer beauty had been. They fought and never relented, because they knew it was God himself who had a plan for them and they weren’t going to buckle under his gaze.

I hated them. I hated them so much.

Reading those stories was the opposite of motivational. I knew that I couldn’t be like those spunky, vivacious, inspiring burn victims. The fire hadn’t burned away my brittle sense of entitlement and complacency, leaving me with a diamond-hard sense of urgency and resolve to live my life to the fullest, so that my prior state should be considered more handicapped than my scarred one. If one of these people had been a little bitter, a little angry, a little crushed…If their frustrations hadn’t all been overcome, their every disadvantage turned into an advantage, maybe I could have taken from their stories other than a now concrete understanding of my own shortcomings. I had previously suspected my pathetic nature, but I had no true point of comparison. I could try to convince myself that no one could withstand what I went through and emerge from the ashes a phoenix rather than more ash. Now I knew. These people didn’t just get back to their pre-burned state. They became better. They were tempered in their flames.

Fuck them, and fuck me.

I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. And I didn’t think I should feel guilty about it. Because guilt wasn’t just one more negative emotion to add to the pile, along with despair, frustration, anger, sorrow, mourning, and simple, mind-destroying pain. It would be bad enough just adding guilt to that list. But guilt was an amplifier. Guilt told me that all of those feelings were my fault. Those books implied that I chose those feelings, that I chose to allow my scar tissue, my lost fingers, and my nightmarish face to control me. Those things were real. They weren’t figments of my imagination. The people in these books were positively solipsistic, a word Madison taught me when I went on one of my ego trips.

If I had total control over those things, it was in the way the existentialists described. I chose this life because I chose to live it. There was always a way out. No one had to live in a world of atrocity. We chose our world. One bullet, one pill and vodka cocktail, and we could reject it.

So if I was responsible for my pathetic existence, it was because I was too scared to off myself. I’d rather haunt my parents’ house, a specter of what I’d been, a living reminder of my dead future, bringing sorrow to us all. No one can live with the dead without living as the dead.

So fuck those Pollyanna freaks and their uplifting messages that ground me further into the ash bin. Fuck them.

But it was good. I laid the books out where I could see them, where I could see the smiling, shiny, patchwork faces of the heroic authors staring out at me, challenging me to be heroic. It was good to know who I really was, to lose the last of those illusions, to be able to let go and sink and sink and maybe find bottom, now that I saw how deep I already was.

I laid back on my bed and stared at the row of book covers, then pulled out my phone.

I feel shitty.

It’s a shitty world, Madison replied.

What are you doing?

Disappearing.

I wish I could.

You have pills. Take one. Take two.

Then I wouldn’t have any later. They’re strict.

So responsible. Let me take them then.

Would you?

No. Not yet.

Where are you?

Some bad place or another.

That could be anywhere.

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.

As far as she’d slipped, she was still miles above everyone else. An ache suddenly wracked every cell in my body. They all screamed to be near her.

Come back to me. It’s not your fault. I love you, I typed. I stared at the words, the truest ones I’d ever thought, and then I watched them disappear a letter at a time as I hit the delete key.

My last illusion was that she might come back if I asked. I knew she wouldn’t. I knew it deep down in the same place that made me stare at the people on the covers of those motivational memoirs, the place that knew I deserved all of this. But I couldn’t hear her say it.

9

Obviously, an unsustainable tension was building in the house. It was a bubble, growing bigger and bigger until it had to burst. My mother responded by growing more manically helpful every day, trying to prevent the growing catastrophe with love and care alone, which, of course, only spurred it on faster.

It was morning. The capacity of my bladder had grown huge, because I hated to leave my room for any reason when one of my parents was home, and one of them was always home. But I had to piss upon waking. I was heading back down the hallway to my little refuge when my mom called out from the kitchen, “Cody Bear, do you want some breakfast?”

“No thanks.”

“I made toast and eggs.”

“No thanks.”

“How about a bagel?”

“No.”

“I picked up some of those frozen toaster thingies you like.”

I continued towards my room, not answering, keeping my mouth sealed tightly shut for fear of the tone I was about to take.

“Cody? Cody? Toaster thingies?”

“I said I don’t want any damn breakfast!”

Boom boom boom. My dad was awake and in the kitchen. He stormed up to me, breathing hard, eyes wide. A decade disappeared. After having wasted away in hypermetabolism and atrophy, I was even skinnier than I’d been in high school, and with scar tissue curling me forward and to the side, I was again shorter than him.

“You don’t talk to your mother like that.”

His lower jaw jutted forward, begging to be punched. My right hand clenched, my thumb trying to wrap around fingers that weren’t there and pressing instead into my slick, numb palm. I started shaking. So much rage filled me, and the only pressure release seemed to be in my eyes, and I couldn’t let that happen. I nodded once and turned away.

“Apologize to your mother.”

“Honey, no,” she said, standing behind him, pulling at his tensed shoulder.

“You’ve been running your ass off to cater to him and all he can be is rude. He’s going to apologize.”

“I shouldn’t have pushed. I’m sorry, Cody, I just worry because you’ve gotten so thin.”

“No!” my dad shouted into the side of my face. “You don’t apologize to him.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said, turning fully away to slink back to my room.”

“It’s okay, Cody. I understand.”

“No, it’s not okay. Do you see what you’re doing to her? Do you see how much weight she’s lost? Do you know that when one of the therapists or doctors tells us that you refuse to do your exercises or refuse surgery, do you know that she can’t eat? That she can’t sleep? And that she spends every moment she’s not working trying to think of ways to make you happy?”

My rounded back turned to him, the tears spilled out of my eyes, pooling where my cheeks pressed against the inside of my silicon mask. As he let loose the torrent of resentment that had built in him for me not being the brave, angelic burn victim he’d read about while I was in a coma, each phrase nicked the thin thread of my self-restraint. I didn’t have much anymore, and each insult he hurled at me, each guilt trip he laid on me cut away at it until I spun around.

“Fuck you!” I poked him in the shoulder and he pulled back a fist. “You want to hit me?” I laughed. I laughed as hot tears filled my mask until I yanked it off, splattering them on the hardwood floor. “Do it! You think you can do worse than this? Try. I fucking dare you. I fucking want you to!” I pushed my face up to his, and he backed up, his mouth hanging open. “Do you really think you can even hurt me? Beat me to death. Please. You think I care? Look at me!” I used to wear T-shirts, but I couldn’t lift my arms high enough to put them on anymore. I ripped my pajama top open, sending buttons ricocheting through the hallway.

His eyes opened wider as he looked at the thick bands of scar tissue gripping my chest like an impossibly tangled knot of red, fleshy ropes. Some that had been recently shaved down seeped. I tried to straighten my neck, pulling my head to the left, straining and straining against my scars and finally giving up in vibrating failure, letting him take it all in. “Your stupid fucking books…Fuck them. Fuck those people. What do I have to fight for? What do I have?” I roared at him, begging him for an answer. The question had been running through my head on repeat since I awoke, and though I’d hurled it as a weapon, now, after asking it of someone for the first time, I prayed he had some answer. “What the fuck do I have left? Tell me!”

He stared at me, mouth working, and then drooped, covered his face. His anger had passed. But my anger…My anger was the same as my sorrow was the same as my despair was the same as my frustration. It boiled, and as it boiled over I felt good. I felt relief for the first time, until I looked into my mother’s face, collapsed in on itself in a wet twist as she tried to hold my father up.

She said, “Your face…”

I started backing toward my room. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “Why did you make me do this in front of her?” I shouted at him, but he didn’t come from behind his hands. He hid there. I saw then where I got it from.

When I’d made it inside my room, I stood with my back pressed against the door, shaking. As I lifted my mask to my face, blood fell in a stream, pooling in the semi-opaque silicon. I went to the mirror. My right cheek had ripped in my screaming. I wore a mask, but my face itself was now a thick, immobile mask, better at hiding my emotions than expressing them. My mouth didn’t stretch far enough for a scream without an hour of warming up. The thick, inelastic scar tissue pulled the ragged edges of the tear back, revealing my teeth even though my mouth was clenched shut with molar-pulverizing force.

That’s what she’d meant by, “Your face.”

It never ended. There was no catharsis, no relief, no righteous, triumphant moment. Life was a constant, humiliating crawl on hands and knees.

There was a soft knock at my door.

“Honey?” she asked, checking to see if I’d realized yet what I’d done to myself.

“Coming.”

I slipped my feet into my shoes so that my mother could take me to the hospital for stitches.

* * *

They mostly left me alone after that. It would have made for tension, except that I stopped leaving my room when they were around. I’d listen carefully before making food runs to the kitchen. They wrapped up my meals in tin foil. I felt bad, but it was nice to have breathing room.

I’d acted unfairly, but I tried not to think about my parents. The problem was that I didn’t have much to think about that made me feel any less terrible.

The one thing I enjoyed doing was talking to Madison, but she was slipping further away. I didn’t feel so bad about her debased state, except that she couldn’t keep it up forever, and I knew that she’d either drop out entirely and I’d lose her, or she’d pull things together, get sober, get her head straight, and then realize I was her albatross and move on.

I think I must have really still loved her, because I think that’s what I wanted. She could still emerge from the ash anew. Unfortunately for me, I was the ash.

Around noon I texted her, You up yet?

I’m awake. Not vertical.

Me neither. How are you today?

Pretty shitty. You?

Thinking a lot. My heart rate spiked. Madison was like a timid forest creature who’d wandered into a clearing, but would bound away at my slightest misstep.

That’s the worst. I’d stop if I were you, she said.

I’ve been thinking about you. You need to stop doing this to yourself.

Have my parents been bugging you?

No. What?

People have been saying they’ve been coming around, looking for me. The Dorset brothers say they’ve been by a few times.

The Dorset brothers were scumbag trustfund assholes who dealt drugs to other rich kids just for kicks. I’d met them a few times at Madison’s friends’ parties, and I really didn’t like them, or the idea that she’d been hanging around with them.

You haven’t been going home? I asked, imagining her in one of the brothers’ beds.

Not for awhile.

Maddy, this is insane. You could have an amazing life. Don’t throw it away.

She was always quick with a reply. Her phone was constantly in her hand and her nimble fingers tapped out messages as fast as most people could type. So when several minutes went by without my phone buzzing, I knew I’d pissed her off or otherwise scared her away. In rereading my last message to her, two things jumped out at me. The first was how similar it was to what my parents and doctors were saying to me. They had no idea what I was going through, seemed to believe that I wasn’t smart enough to know what I’d lost, so their bromides were transparently Pollyanna-ish bullshit.

But then I tried to put myself into Madison’s place. I tried to imagine a hurricane of guilt that roared so loud it drowned everything else, and that ripped up everything that had once seemed important, exposing it as silly, ephemeral nonsense. Her whole life might as well have gone up in flames at the same moment mine had.

The second thing I noticed about my message was that in talking about her life, her future, I’d left myself entirely out of it. I’d accepted my place as a ghost. Had she noticed, and did she view it as rejection? Was it possible that she was staying away because she thought it’s what I wanted?

I almost started tapping out the question on my phone, but then stood creakily from my bed and looked in the mirror at my scolliod posture and the patchwork of inflamed flesh pulsating around the edges of my mask. The truth was apparent instantly, but I didn’t look away. I stared at myself, reminding myself of what I had become, how lucky I was that Madison would even text me when it must have brought images like this to mind. Slipping my phone into my pocket to keep myself from hurling it at the glass, I nearly laughed at the idea that she was staying away because she thought I was rejecting her. It was amazing, the kind of delusions a person could build up to protect his ego. Some part of me still saw myself as the tall, strong, handsome man I’d been, the one who was ready to conquer the world. I took my mask off and got closer to the mirror. I needed to remember. This needed to go deep, deeper than third degree burns. This thing before me that could never be seen without invoking overwhelming feelings of pity, disgust and fear, it was me. The pain and the limitations were with me all the time, but what needed to stick, and what hadn’t yet, was this. People didn’t see the pain. They saw the monster. If I could just internalize that, the confusion would end. The expectations would end, and the inevitable disappointment. Things would hurt less.

* * *

That evening the doorbell rang. The doorbell had stopped ringing. People called my parents, or pulled them aside when they saw them out. My parents passed along a lot of well wishes. But those well-wishers never came around, which I was glad for, except that if they couldn’t bear to face me, I wished they’d just stop pretending they cared at all, so I could stop telling my mom, “Oh, that’s nice,” when what I really thought was, “Fuck their frightened pity.”

I listened closely, and though only a rumble made it down the hallway and through my door, I thought I recognized the voice. When I heard footsteps coming my way, I clutched at my mask, reassuring myself that it was there, then opened my door.

My mom smiled at me from the other end of the hallway. “The Barrington’s are here to see you, if you’re up for it.”

I shrugged, nodded, and followed her out into the living room.

David stood broad and strong as ever, but with a stiffness about him that emanated nervousness instead of the usual confidence. Susan was even thinner and paler than usual. They both looked up at me after just a fraction of a second of hesitation. After a suspended moment, they smiled and relaxed slightly. I was confused, because it wasn’t just that they were happy to see me. They looked relieved. Then I understood that they probably had been nervous about having to react positively to my face, regardless of its grotesqueness, and then they saw the mask, which freed them of that polite responsibility.

So much of standard social interaction is based on custom. Throw off one thing and no one knows how to act.

“Cody! It’s so good to see you again,” David said in his booming voice. “I’m so happy to see how well you’re recovering.”

I took his proffered right hand in my left and nodded and smiled for an instant, but the pull of flesh along my mask reminded me that I didn’t need to pretend behind there.

“It’s good to see you, too. And you, Mrs. Barrington.”

She took my left hand in hers, not as locked into the sacredness of the handshaking customs as her businessman husband. Her thin hand bones were as frail as her smile.

David jumped into the space left by his wife’s silence with awkward gusto. “We’re sorry we haven’t been around, but we thought you were probably enjoying a bit of space after the scrutiny of the hospital, and we’ve been dealing with some problems of our own.”

“Why don’t we sit down,” my mom said, guiding us into the living room.

Mrs. Barrington finally found her voice, or an automatic compulsion took it over, and she said, “You have such a lovely home, Jody.”

“Thank you. Would you like anything to drink? I can put on some coffee.”

“That would be great.”

Our home wasn’t lovely. My parents were neat people, but the furniture was old and nothing matched. My dad had finally entered the new decade and gotten a forty inch LCD television to replace the bulging tube TV, and it had a place of honor as the room’s focal point. This was all very different from the Barrington’s home, a small mansion where the living room didn’t even have a television, because the purpose of it was hosting and conversation. The family room, theater room and game room, however, all had huge televisions.

I didn’t like them being in my house, and while my mother worked in the kitchen, I sat silently, not attempting to alleviate their discomfort. Instead, I examined my anger at their intrusion. They could look down on me now. Going into their environment, I felt perfectly comfortable. I knew I was smarter, smoother and better looking than 99% of people in their world so that no one ever questioned my place among them. But here our different castes couldn’t be avoided, and it infuriated me that they had breeched my world. Maybe I should have been ashamed, but I wasn’t. We had an unspoken agreement. The disparity had always been there, but when they approved of me dating their daughter, they had tacitly given me the leeway to follow the old maxim, fake it until you make it.

But what did it matter now? Sitting there, staring blankly, I realized it might be the last time I’d see them.

“Degas,” Mr. Barrington said, gesturing to a poster-framed print of a blurry ballerina. “Your parents have good taste.”

“I’ve been a burden on them for the past few months, but once my disability checks start coming in they’ll be able to fix the place up,” I said, staring him in the face with my one eye.

He made the strangest series of gestures and noises I’d ever seen, not able to settle on a proper response, and so smiling, frowning, guffawing, clearing his throat, turning red, but finally saying, “We still have a place for you at Sanders & Stevens. Your mind is still good.”

Mrs. Barrington put a hand on his knee, suggesting he’d made a faux pas, and he blurted, “And it looks like your making a good physical recovery, too.”

My laugh pressed through the square mouth slot of my mask as a cross between a cough and a bark. “Well, thank you very much.”

We sat silently until my mother came in bearing a TV tray of coffee cups and a glass of soda with a straw so that I wouldn’t be left without something with which to keep my hands busy. For some reason, this consideration hit me hard, and I wanted to give her a hug and apologize for everything, but it wasn’t the time, and by the time it was the time, the feeling would have passed. But I gave her shoulders a squeeze when she sat beside me on the couch, and she gave me a surprised look.

Holding the cup of soda in my left hand, I pinched the straw between my thumb and the nub of my forefinger, inserted it into the mask’s mouth slot and took a sip.

“Is Carl still working second shift?” Susan asked.

“Yes, but only until they can get his schedule changed back. Cody doesn’t need anyone around during the day anymore.” She patted my knee.

“I’m sure he’ll be glad to get back on his normal schedule.”

“He’s looking forward to it. I worked second shift a few times when I was younger, but my body says the day is done at 8 PM.”

“I imagine so,” Susan said, sipping her coffee and possibly imagining very hard since she’d never worked a single day in her life, second shift or any other.

We were all silent as she imagined, allowing for the appropriate amount of time to pass for the Barrington’s to jump to the point of their visit.

Finally, after everyone had acknowledged and declined the opportunity for small talk, Mr. Barrington spoke. “We’re sorry to interrupt your day like this, but it seemed that what we have to talk about would best be discussed in person. Madison hasn’t come home for weeks now, and we were worried about her long before that.” He looked at me, perhaps expecting me to say something, to interject once I understood what he wanted so that he didn’t need to air all of his family’s dirty laundry. Seeing the worry in his face for this person we both loved, most of my irrational anger passed, but I honestly didn’t know what to say.

So he continued. “Even people who are very close don’t know everything about each others’ pasts, so I don’t know how much you know about the problems Madison had in high school.”

“Are you talking about rehab?”

He nodded, and I saw both him and Mrs. Barrington quickly glance at my mother to gauge her reaction. She’d had no idea, and unlike these blue bloods wasn’t adept at presenting a completely blank front. So Mr. Barrington seemed compelled to say, “Madison fell in with the wrong crowd and developed a problem with prescription pills. She was well beyond that by the time she and your son met. At least we thought she was.” He sighed, shook his head, leaned forward and stared at the ground. “I guess it was the stress of the situation. I don’t know exactly what caused her to slip back, because she wouldn’t talk to me. Still won’t. But it started then. At first, I thought she was just avoiding us because we’d had an argument about her not going to see you once you’d woken up, but then we started noticing old patterns. We confronted her. Things went badly. Now we can’t get her to respond to our calls or texts.”

I still didn’t know what to say, still hadn’t interjected, so Mr. Barrington heaved one more big sigh and said, “What we want to know is if you can help us help her. Are you in contact with her?”

“Yes. We text.”

“Does she come to see you?” he asked, looking mortified immediately after uttering the words.

“No.”

Silence then. Silence thick as oil waiting for a spark.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re both so sorry that she’s putting you through this while you’re already dealing with so much. But she’s not herself right now, and if we can get her help, maybe she’ll come to her senses and…” He trailed off. I thought over the possible endings to his sentences. Maybe she’ll come to her senses and realize she wanted to marry a hideous freak? Maybe she’ll come to her senses and realize that she wants to spend the rest of her life caring for a useless, angry cripple? Or maybe, and most likely, once she’s off drugs she’ll realize that she can land someone as good as I used to be in a heartbeat, and she’ll get on with her life without a backwards glance.

“Do you know where she is?” Mrs. Barrington blurted. Already upright, the tension had been building in her posture as she waited for her husband to cut to the chase, to stop tiptoeing about.

“No. I’m sorry.”

“Can you find out?”

“I’ll try.”

She nodded, but her body hadn’t relaxed. She still sat like a lit stick of dynamite. “Did you—”

“Dear,” Mr. Barrington said, putting a hand on her knee.

“Did you know? Did you know what was going on with her?” she said, pushing away his hand in a surprising display of frustration.

Susan Barrington had never liked me as much as David had. He’d made most of his fortune, while she’d come from old money. He believed that ability, drive and intelligence counted for something, and would rather have someone like me for a son-in-law than a wealthy but dimwitted noble. He believed the United States was a meritocracy. Her thoughts were more aristocratic.

I didn’t answer her, and I didn’t look away.

“That’s enough,” Mr. Barrington said, cupping her elbow and standing, bringing her up with him. She didn’t struggle. She wasn’t as far gone as that. “You have my number. Please call me if you learn anything useful.”

I nodded. “I will.” At the door I said, “I want what’s best for her, too.”

“Of course you do, son,” he said. He put a big mitt on my shoulder and gave a gentle squeeze and a pat. “You’re a good young man.”

Mrs. Barrington didn’t say anything, but the thin line she’d pressed her lips into told me she wasn’t sure about that.

* * *

Your parents came by. Asked about you.

Jesus. Sorry. What’d you tell them?

Nothing. I don’t know anything.

I wish they’d give it up.

They care about you. They don’t want to see you hurting yourself.

That’s why I don’t let them see it.

I want you to stop, too.

My hand shook. I was putting too much out there, making myself too vulnerable, and at the same time risking scaring her away completely.

I found something, Cody. I have to follow it.

What do you mean?

I can’t explain. I fell back into this to escape, but now I think I can fix things.

I hadn’t thought her this far gone. She was out of her mind. It was hard to tell through texts, but she must be crazy high to be talking such nonsense.

She was going to die. The one bright point still out there was snuffing itself out, and I was lounging there in my bedroom letting it happen. I had one more card to play, but preferred to drag out this ridiculous excuse for a relationship than play my card and risk it all ending.

But the longer I waited, the closer she got to death.

Please come see me. I still love you.

My thumb hovered over Delete, but I suddenly hit Send. As I watched it processing, I wished I could take it back and was glad I couldn’t.

My phone buzzed in my hand. I’d thought my heart was beating as fast and hard as it could, but it redoubled its attack on my ribs, smashed my lungs so that I couldn’t breathe, bounced up and squeezed my throat down to nothing.

Fuck. I didn’t want to read this response. I wanted to close my eyes and refuse to move, refuse to speak, maybe fall back into my coma, live in this suspended moment, this last moment of potentiality. This was my final, tiny spark in the ash pile of my life. It would either flare up, or it would go out, and there was nothing there left to ignite again if it did.

It took me fifteen minutes to build up the courage or whatever you want to call it to look at that text.

I can’t. I love you too. Goodbye.

Of course. Of course there was nothing good left for me. I knew that. I’d known it since I woke up. Lying on my back, I dropped my phone off the side of the bed onto the floor. I didn’t need it anymore. I went limp. I cried. I didn’t sob. Tears leaked out of my eye, filled it, had nowhere to go with the silicon of my mask pressed tightly to my face, trying to smash my scar tissue smooth but now creating a pool over my left eye.

But there were no sobs. I was too tired to sob. I was too resigned. Too prepared. It made too much sense.

* * *

I let Mr. Barrington know that I was now also cut off from Madison. He thanked me, again expressed his sorrow and his hope for the future, those two emotions following one after the other like the wounded dragging the dead.

A few days later, I awoke and headed for the kitchen to get a glass of milk, and found my parents sitting at the table drinking coffee and ignoring the paper. They talked low. They turned and looked at me, my mom smiling.

I became suspicious.

“Good morning, hun,” she said. My dad nodded to me, lifted his cup of coffee a bit in my direction.

“Morning.” I hadn’t expected to find the both of them, and for just a second I was confused, knocked off track by the unexpected. Then I put it together. “It must be Saturday.”

“You don’t know what day it is?” my mom asked.

It irked me. It felt like a judgment, though I had to admit that everything felt like a judgment. I was a sullen teen again. I lashed back, though I suspected I hadn’t been lashed at, and said, “I lose track. Not much difference between my days anymore.”

I’d expected a hurt expression. Instead, my parents shared some sort of conspiratorial glance.

I took out a glass, poured a little French vanilla coffee creamer into it and then poured in milk. I dropped in a straw. Turning to half sit on the counter, I stared at them as I slipped the straw through my mouth and took a sweet sip.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Nothing,” my mom said. “What’s going on with you?”

I shook my head, not willing to play that game. “Dad, why are you two acting so strange?”

He didn’t say anything, just picked up a section of the paper and opened it up, not exactly hiding behind it, but almost. What confused me was that he didn’t do it with any hostility. I was getting the silent treatment, but not the cold shoulder. In fact, when he peaked up at me, there was sadness in his eyes as he shook his head, a covert plea to me to not pursue this any further.

Taking another sip of my milk, I let my dad off the hook and looked back to my mother, who’d also decided that being preoccupied by the paper they hadn’t been reading seemed like a good idea.

What the hell was going on?

I thought back to the one unguarded thing she’d said. You don’t know what day it is?

No, I often didn’t know the day of the week or the month. Hell, at some point I’d probably start losing track of the years. I went to the calendar that hung over the trash.

“It’s July already?”

But then it hit me. It wasn’t July. I saw the bits of paper caught in the spiral from where a month had been torn away. June had been torn away, even though it was still June, because my mother had encircled one of those Saturday squares with a big heart, and a doodle of a wedding cake topper.

It was my wedding day.

I didn’t say anything. I don’t think I had a visible reaction, and besides, I wore a semi-opaque mask of silicon and a red mask of scars. I took my glass of milk and walked out of the kitchen and back to my bedroom.

Sitting in my desk chair, I realized that I wasn’t going to have an emotional meltdown. Judging by the impossible weight pressing me down, I’d already melted. I should have spilled through the arm rests of the chair in a puddle.

It felt as if I’d inhaled lead shot, but there were no tears.

It surprised me, the way I kept thinking I’d hit bottom, and then I’d step off a cliff and go weightless right before smashing myself against the floor of a new low. I don’t know if that idea of “this must be the worst” was pessimism or optimism, or some weird combination of the worst traits of the two.

But this, this had to be it. What else could happen? I could die? I would have laughed at the thought if a semi-truck hadn’t just parked on my chest.

I should have been starting my life, my real life, the life I’d been waiting for, working towards, putting off so that I could get it just perfect. I should have been settled into my job at Sanders & Stevens, working for my father-in-law. I should be getting married to the only girl I’d never gotten bored with, the one who had seemed so loyal that I didn’t know if I could be good enough to warrant that sort of love. That day should have been the start of everything, almost a birth. But there had been that phone call, and that little switch, that tiny little unflipped switch.

There couldn’t be lower.

I still had painkillers, because I still had pain, pain which I would have at one time thought unbearable, before I had the sensation of roasting alive to compare it with.

Sitting on my bed, I opened the drawer of my nightstand and took out the prescription bottle. My tolerance was still high. Not nearly as high as it had been, but high, requiring that I take an amount that would knock most people out just to dull the sharpest edge of my pain.

I took off my mask, but then felt a sudden wave of panic and put it back on, which meant I had to feed in only a couple of pills at a time and then wash it down with a mouthful of sweet, vanilla milk taken through the straw. Eventually, the small handful of pills disappeared.

I wasn’t trying to hurt myself. Right? I just needed to sleep. I just needed to disappear for awhile.

It was my wedding day.

I fell back on the bed and waited, distracted myself by finding the old familiar faces in the texture of the sprayed ceiling.

It was my wedding day.

* * *

The next thing I remembered was trying to awaken, not being able to, not being able to figure out that I was asleep, that waking up was something that happened.

A ringing and buzzing finally cut through. I’d fallen—no plunged—into dreamless sleep that morning and now it was dark. I moved my hand to the buzzing. It seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, and I let it flop to the ground beside my bed. Pawing around, I finally found the object creating the horrible sound. My phone.

It was ringing.

That was strange. People had given up calling me weeks ago, because I refused to answer except with a text saying, What? I didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to carry all the weight in repetitive conversations about how I was doing. So eventually people stopped calling.

I picked up the phone from where I’d dropped it after the goodbye text from Madison, held it a couple of inches from my face and tried to get my eye to focus on the small screen.

Madison. This was her sixth call. I hit several other buttons before I managed to answer.

“Madison,” I said, and though my body still refused to believe I was awake, my voice was solid.

“I didn’t think you’d answer. I was afraid I wouldn’t get to talk to you again.”

“What do you mean? I was just asleep. I…Are you…” Too many thoughts were jostling for a place in line.

Madison cut me short. “Cody, I think I’ve found a way to fix everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Ouroboros. The serpent eats its tail. Nietzsche was being literal when…I can’t explain it. It doesn’t matter. I need to ask you something. I know I’ve treated you badly, so I don’t deserve to ask you this, but I have to know before…Cody, do you still love me?”

“Yes. Yes I still love you.”

“I love you, too. I love you so much. I’m sorry I have to go.”

“Have to go where?”

“I have to go, now. Goodbye.”

“Wait—”

But she hung up. The screen of the phone went black, and I lay in total darkness, trying to figure out what was going on. The pills hadn’t let go of me. My limbs were numb, seemed not there at all in the darkness, like my brain floated free of my crippled body, but also from my senses.

I tried to think about what Madison said, but every moment carried it further away, made it more dreamlike, until the darkness took me completely.

10

I dreamed my dream. Somewhere in the city, the serpent writhed, and I could feel the vibrations of its bulk as it slammed about in its search for me.

I approached the fryer. I flipped the switch off. I did not burn. I lived my life, feeling the drag of reality, pulling against the elasticity of that false moment. Trying to make it farther than the last time. Trying to live just another good day, another hour, another minute. One more moment of the opposite of my real life. But as always, with every step away from the inferno the pull grew stronger as it attempted to correct this small event which caused cascading changes, unacceptable changes. Behind me, the fires burned. But I plodded ahead, second by slow second. I would not go back. I had nothing to go back to. I would fight the universe. I would destroy it all.

The pull grew until I once again faced that pivot point of perfect balance: my greatest exertion versus the universe’s desire to take the correct shape.

Fuck that. I dug my fingers in. I pulled and strained. I took one more step into that impossible future.

And then…it snapped. I slipped the past’s fingers. The flames receded. I flew, tumbling, confused. Free.

BOOK II

1

That’s what I remember. I swear that every bit of that is as solid as any memory I have, as solid as any of the other building blocks that make up who I am out of who I’ve been.

But I’ve been sitting in bed not in my parents’ house for several minutes now, staring at the indistinct form of a woman lying beside me, feeling the warmth coming off of her, human warmth, human contact that I feel starved for though we’ve been lying side by side all night long. I’ve been examining my body as I run through these memories, and I have no scars. What I have are ten fingers, two eyes, and a scalp covered in long, loose curls.

I’m afraid to move, afraid to do anything that might awaken me back into that nightmare world of agony and hopelessness. I remember so many times through all that wishing that I’d just wake up, and now I have. A few minutes ago my alarm went off and I awoke from what seemed like an endless nightmare.

So why am I so scared?

I have other memories. Memories somehow occupying the same spot on the time-line as the ones I just described, just as vivid, just as real.

Everything is one until I lean into the fryer, hurrying to get done with cleaning duties so I can head to the Barrington’s party. But then everything divides. In one set of memories Madison calls and I forget to flip the switch and I burn, and I remember burning. I remember watching the flame approach. I remember feeling the pain, and trying to hurl myself back like you’d reach away from a hot burner but not being able to, the pain following me. I remember the flames going deeper until it felt as if my bone marrow was on fire, and I remember hearing my fat sizzle.

But I also remember not receiving any call. Instead, unharried, I flip the switch off before leaning into the fryer and scraping all the crust from the sides. Instead of lying on the floor covered in flour, praying to die as I continued to cook inside the powdery coating, I go out to my car and get my change of clothes, a suit, and head into the bathroom and emerge looking nice, smelling of cooked food and hoping that no one notices the incongruity but knowing that people will even though they won’t say anything.

Instead of an endless ambulance ride in which I beg over and over to be knocked out, I enjoy a long drive to the country club, singing along to my radio because I don’t feel like committing to a single CD, instead flipping around, using my famous memory to drag up the lyrics to pop, rap, R&B and classic rock songs as something catches my ear.

My famous memory, which possesses several months of two distinct layers.

I feel about for a shared memory of this moment, whole, in bed, a nightmarish memory, one in which my flesh is melted and fused and I’m staggering through my parents’ house without purpose. Memories of a living death. There isn’t one. Things have converged again.

I arrived at the party to find that Madison had just left around the same time I was lying beneath fast food heat lamps, freezing and cooking at the same time as plasma flooded my burnt flesh and my blood turned to pudding and my heart almost stopped beating.

Mr. And Mrs. Barrington greeted me warmly, introducing me as their future son-in-law to whoever they were talking to. They didn’t know where Madison had gotten to, but they were sure she’d be back any moment.

I’m sitting up. I slide back down beneath the covers, reach over and put a hand on a smooth, naked hip, breathe in the musky warmth.

I get out of bed. I need to see something. My feet go from a soft rug to hardwood and then one foot through the bathroom door lands on tile as I flip on the bathroom light, which cascades out, drawing a groan from the bed.

I cross the bedroom, but I can see the truth already. As she turned away from the light, she revealed long, blond hair. I continue, though, kneeling on the bed, crouching over the sleeping woman.

Janet Ericsson, the beautiful, foul-mouthed hostess from Pajino’s. She opens one eye and looks at me. “What?” she mumbles thickly.

Our schedules are dissimilar. She closed Pajino’s last night, while I get up at five to get in a workout before heading in to the Gerhardt Fund.

“Just wanted to look at your beautiful face.”

She smiles sleepily, barely turns her head toward me and puckers her lips, twisting them to the side for a kiss. I kiss her and stroke her silky hair once. Despite her crass, hard-nosed front, she’s wonderful. She helped me so much when Madison disappeared the night of her parents’ party, abandoning me and leaving me at the mercy of the local police.

“Now turn the fucking light off,” she mutters before slipping back into slow-breathing sleep.

I walk back to the bathroom in the master bedroom of the condo I recently bought. Shutting the door behind me so as to not further disturb Janet while she sleeps, I stare at myself in the mirror. I’m me.

Standing straight, I know I’m 6’4”, and quite a few inches taller if you include the pile of sleep-mussed curls atop my head. My shoulders are broad, my arms and torso covered in gym muscle, my body no longer wasted to a twisted skeleton by months of hypermetabolism. My skin is the flawless milky-coffee tone that confuses so many people. I’m young and strong and beautiful. The nightmare is over. I smile. It broadens and broadens until I look like a maniac. The nightmare is fucking over.

Was it a nightmare? It seemed so real. It still seems so real. Nightmares are supposed to fade, to feel real while they’re happening and then to fade. They aren’t supposed to claim space in the real time-line of memories. But all of my memories are doubled from the night of the party until I just awoke.

I shake my head. It will fade. It must have been the dose of Klonopin Janet gave me. I’ve been sleeping badly recently. Work is going so well, providing me with these problems that are more like puzzles that my brain won’t let go of even when I get home so that I’m in a constant manic state. I’ve been sleeping so lightly that I’m not used to vivid dream anymore. That’s all it is.

I rub at my chest. Remember how it had resembled a cow carcass left out in the desert sun, scraps of rawhide stretched haphazardly over blasted ribs.

The nightmare is over.

I brush my teeth and force my thoughts to my coming workout, the routine I’ll go through down in the building’s badass gym, one of the amenities that comes with my hefty homeowners association fees.

I’m me. The nightmare is over.

* * *

It’s back and bicep day, and I warm up with some easy curls. I remember reading that Arnold Schwarzenegger loved lifting weights so much that once he got his pump going and got deep into a set, every rep felt like an orgasm. I’d always thought he was a nutbag, especially imagining him talking about it in that thick Austrian accent, but now I know what he’s talking about.

I grip the bar of the chin / dip stand and begin pulling myself to it, and it feels amazing. I’m so damn strong. After a warm-up set at body weight I cross my ankles, settle a twenty-five pound dumbbell between them and start my working sets. For being 6’4”, that’s pretty damn good, but it feels better than pretty damn good. It feels like I’m flying up to the bar, like my 215 pounds plus the dumbbell could be blown about by the wind. Even when I get to the seventh rep and my pace slows and I’m grinding the reps out to get to ten, the point where the ache of my assaulted body usually overwhelms my pleasure in physical exertion, I still feel fantastic, am loving every straining flex. I’m not quite jizzing my gym shorts like Arnie, but my nightmare has lingered, the events real enough to make me appreciate even the pain of a healthy body, so different from the sour, sickly pain of disability.

As I shake the acid out of my biceps, the door beeps and Todd steps in, pocketing his keycard.

“Sup Cody?” Todd says, a big smile crossing his handsome-but-goofy face.

“Sup Todd?” I say, walking over and grabbing his hand in a semi-elaborate way that I know he enjoys, me being the only ethnic friend he’s got.

“What are you hitting today?” he asks.

“Back and biceps. Got some burnout curls left. You?”

“Second chest day. High rep.”

I nod. He does have a massive chest, and his barrel torso and short arms help him move crazy weight. Chest was the only day he’d ever beat me. Competing with him put an extra fifty pounds on my bench, but I started coming in a half-hour earlier because, despite enjoying the friendly competition, I needed that time to myself. Todd was a bit much at 5:30 in the morning. A few of the other residents worked out at 5:00, but none I worked with and felt compelled to pal around with. Todd was the guy who let me know someone in his coveted building was selling.

Then it hits me again, a tidal wave of alternate memories flooding over my brain, drowning my present reality, leaving it bobbing dead beneath the water. I live with my parents again, in my old bedroom, where I do nothing all day but pray for time to pass faster though I’m not looking forward to anything in particular. The memories hit me so hard they knock me dizzy. I close my eyes, stagger back a step.

Todd’s calloused hand grabs my bicep, steadies me. “You okay, man? You must have pushed it too hard.”

“Yeah, I’m okay. I just slept badly.” Which isn’t exactly true. Not true at all. I slept so deeply that I can’t let go of it.

“You didn’t eat, did you?”

“You know I never eat before I work out.”

Todd rolls his eyes and huffs in exasperation. “Dude, you’re cut. You’re beach ready all the time. The only reason to not eat before you workout is if you’re cutting. If you’re lifting, you need sugar and amino acids in your blood or you won’t gain.”

I flex. My blood-filled, vein-roped bicep rises impressively. “I’m gaining just fine, my friend.” He looks like he’s about to speak. After that wave of vertigo and fearing another, I’m done with my workout and definitely done with this conversation I’ve had a hundred times. So before he can get a word out, I say, “In fact, I’ve got to go eat right now.”

He shuts his mouth, recalibrates, nods. “That’s a good idea. I’ll see you at the office.”

We slap palms again and I gather my water and towel and head for the door. Despite the normalcy of that interaction, or maybe even because of it, I’m even more creeped out than when I woke up.

2

I walk to work. Besides amenities like a great gym, a rooftop pool and some of the hippest loft space in the city, my building’s other big draw is that it’s only a few blocks from the building whose sixteenth floor houses the Gerhardt Fund, the biotech venture capital fund I work for as an associate. During nice weather—and the early summer mornings have been beautiful—it’s an easy walk. I’m still enjoying my healthy body, feeling the morning sun on my maskless face, walking briskly to my amazing new job.

After Madison disappeared, the police came looking for me. They had no reason to think I had anything to do with it other than the fact that I was the boyfriend, and that I had no alibi for half an hour that night, the half hour during which I drove from Pajino’s to the country club, the half hour when people noticed she’d left the party.

The time-line wasn’t exactly damning. I had to have been traveling for most of that time. They also had to acknowledge that it would be stupid for a man to kill his rich fiance before marrying her rather than after. But for a while I was their prime suspect. By default, because it also seemed that I was their only suspect.

They never cleared me, but they moved on, only keeping tabs on me from a distance, checking in intermittently. But the damage with the Barrington’s was done. Her father wasn’t hostile, but also was no longer championing me. Her mother seemed sure I did it. I feel bad for her loss. I do. But besides being a desperate mother, I can’t help but feel that—with her priviledged background—she’s extra suspicious of the swarthy fellow from a working-class background.

And it was my loss, too. I feel guilty about getting with Janet so soon after Madison’s disappearance, and I know it looks like I don’t care, but it’s the opposite. I was going crazy. I still can’t believe she’s gone. I still can’t figure out where she went when she drove away from that party.

These new memories feel right, not just in the fact that they seem just as real as any memories I have, but also because in this alternate reality, my life was burned away at the same moment I lost Madison in this reality. It makes sense. These two sets of memories fit together, I just can’t quite fit them. They’re two images placed over top of each other, and I know that if I squint just right, focus my eyes at the right point, the point in between them, they’ll come together.

No, that’s crazy. One set of memories is right, the other was a dream that somehow expanded out of proportion.

I focus on my feet slapping the concrete, heading toward this job which is even better than working for David Barrington at Sanders & Stevens. And it happened on that night, that strange night that has split off into so many different realities, some of them with full sets of false memories.

After Madison disappeared, but before people got worried, Mr. Barrington introduced me to Tyler Norris, one of the top GPs of the Gerhardt Fund. We chatted. He asked if he could steal me away, and he seemed to mean it a bit more than most of Mr. Barrington’s friends. So when it became obvious that I wouldn’t be working at Sanders & Stevens after all, I gave him a call, and he gave me a job as an associate at the Gerhardt Fund.

As I ride a tightly-packed elevator up to the sixteenth floor, I try to clear all this nonsense from my head. What matters is what’s in front of me. What’s in front of me moves too fast to share brain space with anything else. People who can’t focus get lesser jobs and stay average.

I smile at Debra, the very attractive receptionist, and she smiles and waves at me as she says, “Uh huh. Uh huh,” over and over into her headset. Then I step into the Dungeon.

The Dungeon is a windowless room filled by four low-walled cubicles. It is where we associates narrow down the hundred applications for capital to the one package that gets handed to one of the junior GPs. There’s no question that it’s a grind, but for some reason I love the grind.

90% of what comes through our online application system isn’t just wrong for the Gerhardt Fund, but for any venture capital. The other guys get furious. If an application is especially ridiculous and the recipient sees that none of us is on the phone, the swearing goes from breathless mutters to shouts. But I love it.

Amanda and Michael are already at their desks working through applications.

“We’re a biotech fund. How fucking hard is that to understand? We won’t give you money to expand your dog grooming business. Fuck,” Michael says to no one in particular, not looking away from his computer as he deletes and moves on. Amanda smiles at me, rolls her eyes at Michael.

I smile back, shake my head in commiseration. I’m glad my cube isn’t right by his. The guy is incredibly tightly wound.

“How’s it going?” I say.

It was a general question, but Michael doesn’t even acknowledge that I spoke.

Amanda says, “It’s going to be a long day, apparently.”

Todd bounds through the door with a smile on his face. He’s a morning person, and is still probably riding his endorphin wave.

“How’d it go?” I ask.

“High-repping with 270,” he says with a smile on his face. He slaps me five on his way to his chair. Amanda rolls her eyes again. She rolls her eyes a lot.

Eventually we settle into our work, and the only sound is Michael’s muttering and the occasional phone call to an applicant entrepreneur.

I’m going through the fresh applications that came in overnight. At this point, I’m just looking for a reason to reject them. This company is a startup and could use an angel investor, not venture capital. Rejection. This one isn’t in biotech. Rejection. This one looks good until I get to the projected financials and see that they’re obviously working backwards from a number they think we want to see rather than forwards realistically. No way their personnel costs will stay that low. Their scalability isn’t even close. Rejection.

The door opens and Tyler steps through. I look at the clock and see that an hour has flown by.

“How’s everyone doing this morning?” Tyler asks. After a bit of small talk that even draws Michael into speaking, Tyler leans on the four-foot wall of my cubicle.

“We liked your report. I can’t wait to try out one those training machines.”

“So you’re going forward with Fortress?”

I sense Michael’s eyes on me, a glare boring into my back.

“Well, they’re not getting our investment yet, but from your report they’re definitely worth another look. We’re taking the jet to DC next week. We’d like you to come with us.”

My heart pounds so hard I have a flashback of the hypermetabolic state I’d been in when I came out of my coma. I’d be lying perfectly still but my heart would be racing, a war-drum rhythm pounding in my chest and reverberating up into my brain.

But that never happened…I’m having a flashback to something that never happened.

I brush aside the waves of confusion and focus on the enormous news at hand.

“Sounds great,” I say, my excitement and disorientation combining so that I can’t play it cool at all. “I’m so glad to have helped.”

“I bet you are, because I talked to the guys, and if this deal goes through, you’re moving up to junior GP. Say goodbye to the dungeon. And in a few years, if the liquid event is as big as it looks like it’ll be, well…Let’s put it like this: performers get rewarded. We’ve run the numbers, and our multi-million dollar investment could net a multi-billion dollar profit.”

He laughs, takes a deep breath. “Sorry. This deal is potentially so big that even I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s hatch the chickens before we count them, and let’s buy the eggs before we do that, right? I’ll let you know about the trip details. Don is still massaging his schedule. Good?”

“Good.”

Tyler pats me on the shoulder, then turns to the rest of the room. “And let this be a wake-up call. I know what it’s like to slog through hundreds of applications until your eyes glaze over and your brain goes numb. I know that you’re looking for any reason to reject an application to get it off your desk. I know that you’re trying to mitigate risk. I know that they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them, that for most of the companies we invest in, there are ten we don’t who would give us the same return. But there are exceptions, and you need to be able to spot them. Who your parents are matters. Where you went to school matters. Being willing to put in twelve, fourteen hour days day after day matters. One or all of those things landed you your spot in the dungeon. None of those things will get you out of the dungeon. Do your job well, and you get to stay here. Right here in this windowless room, pulling a very decent paycheck. It’s the details that will get you out of here. Anyone can see the solid choice. It’s spotting the exception that will get you out there, that will get you a percentage.” Tyler laughed. “I do love to give speeches. Okay, back to the grind, and keep your eyes peeled.”

I’m watching my cellmates as Tyler speaks. Michael is seething. Amanda is blank. Todd is smiling, knowing that the kindness he’s shown the new guy could pay off big in the form of an ally in the upper ranks.

The door shuts. Amanda gives me a nod, then turns back to her computer. Todd rushes over and thankfully blocks out Michael’s death stare and massive, grinding jaw.

* * *

Three weeks back I was working late when I decided to switch from going over fresh applications to my coworkers’ rejections. The Dungeon might better be called the Shark Pit, because in a feeding frenzy it wasn’t the shark who ate the most fish who survived, but the shark who ate the most of his brethren.

The pile of rejections I’d never seen was three times the size of the new applications I worked on, as it contained the refuse of all three of my cellmates. So I was cherry-picking, grabbing at anything that looked interesting enough to keep me awake, to keep my eyes focused on that screen which I’d been staring at for thirteen hours and which felt like was melting my brain.

We all knew what we were doing, and most of the rejections were easy calls, anyway. But an application by Fortress Defense Inc. grabbed my attention with its cool name, then with it’s current business, then cemented my interest with its proposal.

Fortress Defense began as an arcade game company. Of course arcades died a long, slow death at the hands of consoles awhile back. Fortress held on by making game experiences you couldn’t get at home, highly immersive games, many utilizing primitive virtual reality technology. Even that market died as the last arcades began to close and, no matter how cool the game was, they wouldn’t sell without any customers. So they switched gears.

They began creating military training simulators. Games by another name. They had much more experience than any defense contractors in creating intense games and working with VR, stretching its capabilities in cheap hardware. The political environment was just right, and they got a defense contract and sold their machines to the Army, making a killing.

The Army found that most soldiers benefited greatly by the training. They stepped into desert cities feeling as if they’d been there before, because they had been, virtually. They were less overwhelmed, and therefore less likely to freeze.

The Army reported a couple of problems, though. Some soldiers still froze up. Some never could take the stress of real combat, or even just walking a real combat zone. The VR games were intense, and weeded out some who should never step on the battlefield, but others were able to see it as the game it was, perform great and then fall apart at the real thing.

They also reported that some soldiers who’d had lackluster performance in simulation were amazing in the field. In the simulator’s role as a tool to choose commanding officers, this was a huge failing. The problem was that these soldiers were so able to keep their cool that the simulator was only a game to them, and was unable to inspire their best performance.

Fortress Defense had a slight edge over their competition, but if they could fix these problems, they could sell their machines to every branch.

The issue was cognitive. It was in the nature of the product, the fact that it was really a game. No matter how realistic they made their simulations, they couldn’t get rid of the soldiers’ knowledge that it wasn’t real.

Except that they thought they could, and they tested their method on themselves. A bunch of mild-mannered game programmers and computer engineers took a low dose of LSD and then began the training simulation. The result was absolute realism, to the point of several mental breakdowns requiring extended leaves of absence.

That was exactly what the military wanted: to find out who couldn’t take the stress of combat before putting soldiers into combat. The results would be fewer casualties, fewer suicides, less PTSD.

Fortress Defense hired a pharmacologist to study the medications currently on the market. None were ideal. They needed to develop their own. They had a starting point. They’d found several patent-lapsed formulas they thought they could tweak to get the proper results, but it would take a lot of money to develop and then to put through the proper FDA tests.

If they could expand their simulators into every branch of the military, the potential payoff was enormous. Defense money wasn’t like other money. Most government contracts overpaid by two or three times, but defense…Defense money was how the government gave tax dollars to their rich friends, and the profits were beyond belief.

Beyond the military, if Fortress Defense Inc. became the only name in simulation, with small software modifications these machines could be sold to law enforcement, opening another huge market.

Michael had rejected the application, and for good reasons. The Gerhardt Fund required a solid sales record. They didn’t give money to startups. Fortress Defense had a solid sales record, but only of simulators, not of pharmaceuticals and simulators. They had no proof that their current customers would be future customers. We saw that situation a lot, where a company decided to branch out and thought their current success would guarantee venture capital, but the differences made their situation more like a startup. Startups were too risky. Angel investors handing out their own money might assume that risk, but the Gerhardt Fund had limited partners who expected returns on their money.

The other problem with Fortress Defense was that it wasn’t a biotech company. Yes, this new move was into biotech, but really it was ancillary. Our LPs had made their millions in medicine. Many were doctors. They understood medicine, so they invested in medicine. They wouldn’t understand Fortress Defense. The Gerhardt Fund passed up good opportunities every day because they were in the wrong fields.

Michael played by the book. He was solid. But he didn’t look much past the filter. When he dabbled in day trading, like we all did, he never varied from his buy and sell formulas, to such a degree that he let his software sell for him. He never lost big, but he also never won big. When his investment had tripled, he sold, regardless of if it might shoot to a hundred-fold profit later in the day. He didn’t look for exceptions. What he didn’t see was that the potential rewards made Fortress Defense at least worth a deeper look. Any of the junior or senior GPs would have seen it, but they couldn’t spend their days going through the slush.

For about a minute I considered passing the application back to Michael, telling him his mistake, giving him the chance to pass Fortress Defense up to the bosses.

I didn’t seriously consider it, though. Not even for a minute. It was more like a thought experiment of what someone who wasn’t me might do.

* * *

So now everyone in the company knows that at best, Michael could be utilized in the Dungeon, and at worst, he should be let go for someone more intuitive and he could go work for a mutual fund or something where the investors would be ecstatic to get 10% annual return.

He looks like he wants to kill me.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to say on the jet?” Todd asks.

I drag my eyes away from Michael. It’s difficult. When I was a kid we had a cat who would stare at me like he was better than me and I covertly kept a little squirt gun handy to blast him when he wouldn’t look away.

“I just found out two minutes ago when you did.”

“And I’ve already thought of about fifty topics. You’ve got two hours alone with them. They’re all tired of each other. You’ll be the new toy. It’s a huge opportunity.”

Todd sometimes seems like he received brain damage during a keg stand gone wrong, but there’s a reason he has even an entry-level spot at the city’s hottest venture capital fund.

“That’s a good point.”

“You’re the golden boy. You might never get this lucky again. Don’t squander it.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I’ll think on it.”

He slaps me on the shoulder and stands up. “And remember who gave you such great advice. Don’t forget me when you get a window, brah. My God, a window. Actual sunlight!”

Taking a notepad, I begin to scribble ideas for topics of conversation as I go through applications. The others can pick up the slack today.

As the adrenalin wears off, my worries from earlier that morning begin to creep in. I’m still unable to sense a significant difference between these two sets of memories.

I shake it off. I’m doing it. I’m a hair’s breadth away from realizing my lifelong goals. I’m living the dream.

3

I work late, as usual, but after a time I’m not really working. The day began with a strange, disorienting dream, but I figured the strangeness would fade. It hasn’t. In fact, as my mind has desperately worked to do the impossible, to place two sets of memories on top of each other, things have only gotten stranger.

I didn’t feel this way yesterday. Yesterday I was fine (except for the yesterday in which I was horribly disfigured and living—no, existing—in my parents’ house, the yesterday which I only know is false because today I’m not burned), but if I have double memories of that time, how can that be? I haven’t had double memories for months, though I have double memories of months.

It feels like my brain is trying to expand to absorb all this, but there’s not enough space in my skull to hold the paradox.

Work is impossible, so I gather my things and head out. When I get home, I don’t even bother to go inside. Janet’s at work. I head straight to the parking garage. I need to get some food, and I need distraction. The last thing I need is to sit alone in an empty apartment and think.

Tiny’s Pizza is busy, because Tiny’s is always busy. It’s only a block off the college campus, and being an urban campus, night classes are nearly as popular as day classes.

Tiny’s pizza is surprisingly good, considering they could make anything and if it were cheap enough students would shove it down without complaint.

The short line moves quickly due to brusque employees, and I take my tray with two big slices of pepperoni and look for someplace to sit.

I shouldn’t have come here. Madison and I must have eaten here hundreds of times. She’s sitting at every table, eating a slice of thin crust vegetarian, the worst value, which drove me nuts, and gesticulating as she went on about some philosophic theory or some student’s or professor’s thoughts on it. She always made it seem like a life or death situation. She could share her intensity like that, if she chose to, if she deemed you worth talking to. How had I made the cut? And if I was worth it, where did she go?

Minutes have passed, I think, and I’ve been standing in the middle of Tiny’s Pizza holding my tray. I notice someone giving me oblique, hostile glances.

Oliver.

Oliver was a classmate of Madison’s, and followed her around like a puppy. I’d come close to having a talk with him about it a few times, but she always talked me down, saying he was harmless and socially dysfunctional and didn’t realize how he came off to people. Besides her looks, smarts and personality, I think Oliver was obsessed with her because she was the only person who tolerated his presence when it wasn’t absolutely necessary to do so.

He sits alone, of course. So I take the seat across from him.

“Hey, Oliver. How’s it going?”

He glares at me. I haven’t talked to him since Madison disappeared, though several times before I graduated I felt eyes on me and looked up to find him watching me from a distance.

“I was doing fine,” he says, looking back at his open book and pointedly finding the place he left off with a fingertip.

I nod to the book. “You must be pretty close to graduating.”

“As close as Madison would have been. This is my senior year.”

I nod, take a bite of pizza. It had cooled during my lost moments.

“What are you doing next?” I ask through a mouthful of pizza, then give a sharp laugh, swallow. “I’m sorry. You must hate that question. Maddy always did.”

He smacks the book shut. It’s a survey of analytic philosophy. Maddy didn’t like analytic philosophy, preferred the stuff some Europeans were doing around the same time.

“I’m not going to sit here and reminisce with you about her.”

“Why’s that?” I ask, setting my slice down. I know why.

“You know why.”

“Because you think I did it.”

“Exactly.” His thin face goes red, but from anger. I wouldn’t have expected this from the mousy little nerd. “I don’t know why you did it except that your type always destroys things it can’t understand.”

“My type? This should be interesting.”

“Yeah, your type. The frat boy, business school, weight lifting cave man. What she saw in you I’ll never know.”

He’s losing it. People are looking over at us as his voice rises and his face flushes deeper. He shakes. He’s been thinking all this for months, for longer, since he met me. He probably had me pegged as Maddy’s downfall for years before she disappeared. What he’s said seems excessive except that it’s only the barest glimpse of the fury raging inside him.

“Actually, I told the police I thought they should talk to you about it. I think several other people did, too,” I say.

“Why would I ever hurt Madison? Why?”

“Maybe because you’re completely obsessed with her and couldn’t stand that she was with someone like me. How did that change her in your eyes? Did she become less perfect after she fell for a caveman?”

“Don’t turn this around…”

I don’t think Oliver had anything to do with Madison’s disappearance. When it first happened I was grasping at straws like everyone else, but as weird as Oliver is, he’s not dangerous.

I say, “The cops looked at you just like they looked at me. My point is that you should know that things aren’t always as they seem from the outside.”

His hands shake as he begins to pack his books into his bag.

I say, “Don’t you think that maybe she just left? Did either of us really understand her?”

Oliver barks out a laugh as sharp as a chisel hitting rock. “No, she didn’t leave. She wouldn’t have left you. Nobody could understand how she’d fallen for some businessman, but we could all see how hard she had. She was crazy about you. I knew her before you did. Being with you changed her. She never would have left you.” Oliver picks up his tray, as even in his rage he’s unable to break Tiny’s self-busing policy. “I’m saying that because if there’s some tiny piece of you capable of human feeling, then I want it to suffer with the knowledge of what you destroyed.”

I don’t watch Oliver walk away. I don’t look up to meet the eyes of the other students watching me. I stare at pizza I can’t eat, as the few bites I’ve already taken jump and bubble in my gut like a pot ready to boil over.

Madison disappeared in between the time I left Pajino’s and the time I arrived at the party. She was not abducted from the party. There is parking lot security footage of her getting into her car on her own and driving away. There are only two possibilities. She left and kept going, or she left to meet me and I killed her. I know the second isn’t true. What I didn’t understand is that everyone else understood the first couldn’t be true. I didn’t know Madison before I knew her, of course. Yeah, her friends had told me how being with me had seemed to bring her to life, but I guess it hadn’t sunk in.

Madison didn’t abandon me.

But what about when she left me to lay in that hospital bed, so despondent that I wished the machines and doctors would just let me die?

That didn’t happen. That didn’t fucking happen.

Am I crazy enough that I killed her and don’t remember? Jesus Christ, is any of this even happening? Am I dreaming? Will I go to sleep and wake up again in my old bed in my parents’ house?

Those months of double memories, they’re bookended by the same event: Madison disappearing.

In this world, she disappeared at the beginning. In that world, she disappeared at the end.

I think I’ve found a way to fix everything.

It’s all tied together. She didn’t abandon me. She loved me.

It’s all tied together.

I have to figure out how.

* * *

I pretend to be asleep when Janet gets home, but as soon as she’s snoring (she snores. This tall, wispy, aristocratic-looking girl snores) I open my eyes. I’m tired. Exhausted. Can you be tired in a dream?

Here in the dark I can’t help but work my mind over these double memories, looking for spots when things could have flipped, when I could have turned the corner into this strangeness. Maybe if I go to sleep I’ll wake up in my other life. You can turn the corner and find that everything has changed. You close your eyes and open them and nothing is right. You blink and find yourself somewhere else.

How can I sleep?

Maybe it happened even earlier. I remember a coma. I remember the dreams of that coma, vivid dreams, another life almost. I thought I woke up, but did I? Maybe I’m still in a coma, everything shifting around me, every single facet unstable, but my mind unstable too so that I can’t catch the inconsistencies. Hell, maybe I’m not in a coma. I remember burning. You don’t forget burning. I remember how deep the flames went, how my skin split and my juices sizzled. Who would have expected me to survive? I went into the coma, but maybe I never came out.

Maybe I’m dead. Maybe…Maybe this is Hell.

As soon as the thought crosses my mind I expect the facade to drop, for the walls to fall away, for everything to be revealed as ash that crumbles and blows away to show the darkness beyond the borders and the creatures in the darkness.

I close my eyes tightly and then open them. When I have a nightmare, and I finally realize I’m dreaming, this is how I wake up. I squeeze my eyes shut and then open them slowly.

Janet still lays beside me, snoring lightly, but something is wrong.

So I lay awake for as long as I can.

* * *

I chug coffee as I drive the few blocks to work. I’ve got two full travel cups. Janet shook me awake because my alarm had been going off for minutes. She was pissed. I turned the thing off and went back to sleep. No way I was hitting the gym this morning. When I woke up I was late and tired and confused.

I check myself over and realize I forgot to put on a belt. That’ll bug me all day.

Walking into the Dungeon, I expect to catch shit from Todd about missing my workout, or about how bad I look. Instead, everyone is talking animatedly, even Michael, who usually avoids conversation.

“Dude, did you hear about the wreck on the interstate?” Todd says.

“No. What happened?” For a moment I’m glad that people have something to think about other than me.

“There was a fifteen car pileup, started by a chemical truck. It exploded.”

“What? How?”

“A driver who barely avoided the accident said a car got a flat, and the guy pulled over, but not far enough, and opened his door and started to step out like, all exasperated and yelling and shit, but he hadn’t looked and he was practically in the right lane and this truck swerved to avoid him, hit a car in the other lane, over corrected and jackknifed going like seventy. A couple of cars plow into the trailer and boom.”

“Todd, Jesus,” Amanda says, shaking her head.

I drop into my chair. It’s these little things, these tiny, meaningless events. A nail in the road, being in too much of a hurry on a morning commute, opening a door without checking…Forgetting to flip a switch. And everything changes. The world as we know it burns.

“How many people were hurt?” I ask.

“A lot. A whole lot,” Todd says.

“Jesus Christ, Todd, can’t you see he’s shaken up?” Amanda says. She comes over to my cubicle, where I’m sitting with my face in my hands. “Do you know someone who comes in that way?”

I’m such a selfish bastard. I didn’t even think about that. I run through a list in my head. “I don’t think so.”

“That’s good. First thing I did was call my mom to make sure she wasn’t in it. She’d passed by only a few minutes earlier.”

“God, that’s lucky.”

“The good news is that the radio said that our burn unit is one of the best in the nation, so these people have a good chance—”

Amanda stops speaking as I leap to my feet. Why didn’t I think of that before? There’s one aspect of this alternate set of memories that I can verify: the burn unit.

“I have to go,” I say. “I just remembered…” I don’t finish the thought. I just leave.

4

The hospital is in chaos. I know I should leave, come back another time, but I have to know, and I’m already here. News vans surround the entrance to the huge building, and I can feel the eyes of the city on me as I pass in behind the jabbering reporters and in front of the cameras.

I can see from a distance that both the emergency room and the main entrance are choked with frantic family and friends of the accident victims. I go through a lesser-used side entrance. For some reason I expect to be stopped. I feel like I’m doing something wrong. No one gives me a second look as I get on the elevator and start for the burn unit.

When the door opens, the smell hits me and knocks my knees weak. A smell is not a memory you can imagine, especially not the smell of burned human flesh and the chemicals used to treat it. I step out of the elevator into the chaos and I know instantly that it wasn’t a dream.

This lobby was the end goal of a hundred walks down the hallway to build my strength. Now it’s filled with dozens of distraught family members, some weeping, some stoic, some totally out of it, but all worried and confused.

I step forward, heading for the desk though I have no idea what I will say. But the smell…The rooms have positive pressure, to keep bacteria from wafting in. Air always goes out, never in, carrying the smell of the occupants with it. It grows stronger. It stuffs my sinuses full. I feel like I can taste it.

The acidic coffee begins to roil in my stomach. I fight it down, swallowing over and over, a trick I use to keep from puking when a shot goes down wrong. It’s not working. My mouth fills with saliva, and I know what’s coming next. Spotting a trash can, I charge for it, knocking past people I can barely see.

It comes up easy since I haven’t eaten anything yet today, but I gasp down air as I get control of my wretching and the smell of burnt people fills me again and my guts heave, trying to eject something I will never, ever be rid of.

A hand begins to rub my back. “It’s okay. Calm down. Just breathe.”

That voice. I turn to look, my eyes filled with tears and thick ropes of bile hanging from my lips. Wiping my eyes, I see that it’s really Jake, the nurse who watched over me hour after hour, talking when I couldn’t talk back, changing my dressings, keeping me clean and as comfortable as possible and never showing a hint of disgust or frustration.

“Nurse Jake,” I say, wiping my mouth on the sleeve of a very expensive suit coat. “It’s me, Cody.”

“Cody? Do I know you?” He pulls back a little to get a better look at me.

“Yes, I was here.” I was here. I was. I remember every detail. I remember the desk, the vending machines, the couches in the waiting room, even the one cable hanging from the television that had been zip-tied to the others with a bunch of slack in it so that it looped out and bugged the hell out of me.

Nurse Jake seems accustomed to dealing with confused family members, because instead of trying to figure out how or if he knows me, he tries to help me instead. “Do you know someone who was in the accident? Let’s get you to the desk.”

“Is Dr. Grossman here?”

“Yes, but he’s extremely busy,” he says as he guides me to the nurse at the desk. “Now who are you here to see, Cody?”

I followed him because of his voice and his gentle touch, but I don’t know what to do now. I don’t know how to explain what I need. I don’t know what I need.

The nurse behind the desk is ready to type a name into the computer, but I have nothing to say. Then I recognize her. “Nurse Colleen?”

She smiles at me, confused but still ready to help. She was all business, never putting up with any whining or dawdling from a patient when something needed to be done. It’s not that she wasn’t sympathetic, but she realized that many of us weren’t in the proper mindset to be reasoned with.

She smiles, though she wonders how I know her, and says, “Yes. Who are you here to see?”

It comes crushing in on me. The other set of memories, the ones where I burned, they’re real, they’re definitely real, but they’re not real here and now.

My head spins. The smell, the eyes on me, the wailing friends and family, the crush of desperate people closing in behind me…I can’t take it. I turn and press through the crowd that’s gathered behind me, the people who’ve only just arrived to try to discover the fate of their loved ones. I see my parents there, trying to keep on brave faces as they wonder if I’ll live, trying to keep on positive faces when I emerge angry and hateful and not at all like the son they’d known.

I see Madison. Though I’d never seen her by my hospital bed, I see her there, trying to stay unreadable, to hide how her guilt is killing her. I wonder about the man who’d thrown his door open and stepped in front of the chemical truck. What would he give to take that one tiny mistake back?

I press the button for the elevator again. Jake is standing behind me, asking if I’m okay. I don’t know how to answer.

The elevator isn’t coming. I go around the corner and down the stairs.

5

My phone rings. It rings again because I don’t answer it. It’s Tyler, my boss. I can’t do it right now. I can’t pretend that things are normal.

I head home instead, to my condo. When I open the door and hear the television, I realize my mistake.

“Cody?”

Janet is still there. We don’t live together, but we might as well. My place is nearer Pajino’s than hers, so there’s no point in her driving out to her apartment in the burbs after she’s stayed the night and has to go to work the next day.

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing here? Are you okay?” Stepping around the corner, she looks me over, and the surprise turns to concern. “Shit, you look terrible. Are you sick?”

“I guess so.” But I’m not. I know that now. Something is going on, but it’s not in my head.

Janet puts the back of her hand to my head. “You don’t have a fever, but you smell like puke.”

“I threw up.”

“I felt you tossing all night. You shouldn’t have gone in to work.” She takes me by the hand and leads me. “Do you want to lay on the couch or in bed?”

“Bed.”

Some part of me must believe I need mothering, that there’s something wrong with me, because I meekly follow her to the bedroom where she helps me out of my jacket.

Holding it up, she says, “You got some puke on this. It’ll have to be dry cleaned.”

I nod, taking off my shoes and socks and pants. She flings the covers back and I get into bed.

“Do you want anything? Do you need something for your stomach? I can go get soda.”

“No, I’m okay. I just need to sleep.”

She nods and pets my curls, twisting her fingers through them. “Okay. I’m going to be here for another couple of hours before going in to work, so think of what you might want before then and I’ll go out and get it for you, my little pussy lip.” She kisses me on the forehead, then leaves the room.

She’s being so nice. She’s been so nice. So concerned. No one at Pajino’s would believe it.

Did she have something to do with this?

How could she have possibly had anything to do with this, and why?

The unlikelihood is no longer good enough, because the impossible has happened and in the wake of that, the unlikely becomes probable by comparison.

Janet moved in so quickly. Didn’t really give me a moment to think. Took advantage of my despair and confusion at Madison’s disappearance and my need for a safe haven as the police hounded me and my friends and family-to-be doubted me. And now, just as I’m starting to piece things together, she’s keeping an eye on me.

Or she’s a caring woman with a tough front necessitated by a rough life, so that her concern is always a little surprising.

I don’t know. The ground I’m standing on is so shaky that from my perspective, everything is moving, nothing and no one is safe.

No, there are two points of stability that everything is careening around, even time.

One is me. Unless I’m being secretly persecuted, I seem to be the only one who knows that reality has gone crazy.

The other is Madison.

Cody, I think I’ve found a way to fix everything.

She knew this would happen. No, she made this happen.

So where is she now? Why did she have to leave? What did this cost her?

I close my eyes and I see her standing across from me, shy, over a foot shorter than me, seemingly fragile, but strong. Strong enough to do this, to fix things.

She wouldn’t want me to follow her, but I wouldn’t have wanted her to give up her life to give me mine back. All I wanted was to have her back, but I was so stupid I couldn’t make myself ask for it until it was too late.

I have to find her.

All of reality spins around us.

After Janet leaves, I get up and start pacing. It’s how I think best. My bare feet slap the hardwood floor as I circle the living room.

Madison had been slipping into the old comforts of her past. Drugs. After a certain part of her decline, I don’t know where she was going. We all lost track of her.

I wrack my brain, trying desperately to remember her texts and emails, feeling them slipping further away as I snatch at my memories of them, flitting just out of reach like silvery little fish.

I smack my forehead. The silvery little fish fill my vision, then fade. It didn’t help.

So I backtrack. After I burned, I never saw her again. She became a disembodied voice to me. Especially as I willed the outside world to fade away. It’s hard to think of her as being anywhere during that time except on the tiny screen of my phone.

I turn my phone on again and flip through it. The last messages are from the night she disappeared.

Aren’t you done yet?

I flip through the messages again, but the ones I clearly remember her sending in that other world never appear.

I have to accept that I had no idea where she was at the end. I search my earlier memories, to when she was less secretive about what she was doing.

The Dorset brothers. She said she’d seen the Dorset brothers, the trust-fund brats who sold to all the confused rich kids.

I put on pants, pocket the roll of quarters I used to carry when I walked the urban campus at night, and head out the door.

* * *

The Dorset brothers live in the same suburb as the Barringtons, in a big colonial with a circle drive spotted with luxury vehicles. Either their parents had bought the place or they’d bought the place with their parents’ money.

By the time I met her, Madison had been through rehab and was done with drugs, and so was also done with the Dorset brothers. But I knew them through some of my frat brothers and business classmates. I’d accompanied my friends to parties at their huge house, adding a dash of color to an otherwise very pale crowd.

I didn’t like the Dorsets, which was good, because I didn’t know what I might need to do.

I press the doorbell, hear it chime through the house. No one answers. I press it again. Again, no one answers. I look at my watch. 2:14 PM. I press and hold the doorbell. Eventually, a bellow makes its way through the thick door and the ringing of the bell, and I let go of the button.

“…the fuck do you think you’re doing, you stupid…”

The door opens, and there stands Jackson in a silk robe and boxers, looking like he just woke up and his lifestyle is catching up with him. “…fucker.” He stares at me for a long second, and so does his brother, Connor, from the stairs across the foyer. “I know you.”

“Cody Miller.”

His eyes unfocus, and soon he finds me in there. He cocks an eyebrow. “Cody. We have some mutual friends. What the fuck are you doing here?”

While everyone else fawned all over the brothers, I never made an effort to ingratiate myself. He must remember that.

“You know that Madison went missing several months ago.”

A spark of interest lights up his eyes, burning away some of the fog of disturbed sleep. He steps aside, says, “Come in.”

I step past Jackson into the cavernous foyer. The place isn’t quite a mansion. I think mansions should have marble floors, and these floors are hardwood. My footsteps slap up into the high ceiling.

The walls are covered with pieces of modern art. I know that these two aren’t connoisseurs, but will take a piece for payment in lieu of cash from the artists who mingle at their parties as conversational decoration or exotic pets.

“What is it?” Connor asks, coming down the stairs as we head towards chairs.

“It’s about Madison Barrington,” Jackson says.

I turn to catch the expression on Connor’s face, hoping it will reveal something these two sleaze bags might not otherwise admit. On Connor’s face is the same look of interest as his brother, but nothing that raises suspicion.

I settle into an arm chair, and they sit across from me, first Jackson, then Connor. Connor is older by a couple of years, but meeker. I don’t think he’d be living this way if it weren’t for his hot-headed younger brother.

I stare at them. It doesn’t take long for Jackson to get exasperated and say, “So, what? Why did you wake me up?”

“What do you know about Madison’s disappearance?”

He rolls his eyes and flops back into the couch. “Jesus Christ…Are you just playing detective? I thought you had something interesting to say.”

“Humor me.”

Jackson smirks. “It’s pretty humorous all around, because from what I hear, a lot of people think you did it.”

I expected this, but it brings up the old anger, feelings of persecution, rage and just plain frustration at having to explain myself over and over, first to the cops, then to everyone else as the truth of what happened to Maddy receded further.

“I had nothing to do with it. What else did you hear?”

“I haven’t heard shit else. I saw what everyone else did when they played that footage on the evening news: she got in her car and drove off.”

“And you haven’t seen her since?”

“We haven’t seen her for years, not since she was a precocious little school girl.”

I feel a strong urge to break Jackson’s jaw. Apparently Connor sees it on my face and says, “We really haven’t seen her in forever. Do you think she’s back into…”

I shrug. “Yeah, I think she might be. I didn’t think you guys had probably seen her, but she mentioned something, and I thought that you’re connected enough to know about it.”

“You should have started with that. Spill,” Jackson says.

“Ouroboros.” I lean forward, scrutinize them for a reaction.

“What?” Jackson says, screwing up his face in disappointment. “I can’t even say that. What is it?”

Damn it. That was my lead. My one lead. I rub my eyes. I’d been running on hope and when it goes it leaves exhaustion. “If I remember right from the show Millennium, it’s the snake that ate its own tail.” I stand to leave.

“Alright. Sorry to wake you so early in the day.” But I don’t even feel the sarcasm. I don’t feel anything except my systems crashing and my ability to tolerate the outside world diminishing quickly. I need to get back to my dark condo and my nightmares, and I leave the brothers without saying another word.

* * *

With the heavy blinds shut and the lights out I lay in the direct center of my big bed, covers pulled up, not sleeping.

My mind spins relentlessly, but not smoothly, instead in fits and starts as it hits the jutting irregularities of the world it’s trying to process. My head is a whirring hard drive and the read head is colliding.

I should let it go. I tried. I thought for months that Maddy abandoned me. I worked through that. With Janet’s help, I moved on, created a new life. But the core was rotten.

But now I know that Maddy didn’t betray me. In fact, I think she somehow saved me. I should take it. I should live this amazing life I’ve been granted.

But my mind spins. My mind is Ouroboros eating his own tail, spinning, spinning, and being self-sustaining, never slowing.

This is a great life.

I need to know what happened to Maddy.

I hadn’t remembered Maddy saying Ouroboros until I was talking to the brothers. The memory nags at me. Is it a clue to what’s going on, or was it just the confused rambling of a drug-addled mind.

At my desk, I open my laptop and start researching.

The symbol is old. Really old. It has been found on ancient Egyptian engravings from 14th century BC, and since that time its been passed through different mystic traditions, representing the infinite, the cyclical nature of time, and self-sufficiency. Those first meanings fit with what I’ve experienced, in that I’ve lived the same time twice, but I don’t know how self-sufficiency fits in. Plato described a creature that was fully contained, even to the point of eating its own waste as nourishment. A closed system.

That’s gross.

Moving to more relevant information, I discover that the symbol is still associated with secret societies due to its association with Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism.

Now I’m wondering if this could involve the occult, if Maddy fell in with people more dangerous than the Dorset brothers.

I’m freaked out following this path, but then I read something which I find strangely comforting. The symbol also represents Karma. What I find comforting about this is that it’s said that even if only a portion of the serpent can be seen, the entire system is still intact, just not yet comprehensible. Even if I can only see a small part of what’s going on, what’s going on does make sense, somehow, and I will discover how. For Maddy’s sake.

I’m so deep in thought that I jump when my phone rings. It’s not a number my phone recognizes. I reject it.

A minute later the voicemail buzzes.

“Cody, it’s Jackson. We have information for you.”

I return the call with shaking hands. Hope is light stuff, amorphous enough to fill any sized void no matter how slight the amount.

“Cody, I have news for you about what we talked about earlier.”

“Yeah, I got your voicemail. What is it?”

“Just a second.”

“Quit jerking me around. What is it?” I say, but I get the feeling that there’s no ear at the ear piece of the phone at the other end.

My phone beeps. I see it’s a media message from the number I’m currently talking to. I open it, and there’s a picture of Madison.

My heart flops, feels for a moment like it’s going to stop.

She’s dirty, sitting in a corner with her knees hugged to her chest, her long dark hair matted and wild, chunks shooting off in all directions. She barely peeks at the camera, showing it one eye. All around her, shiny vertical bars reflect the flash. Some kind of cage, maybe?

Someone who didn’t know her so well would have a hard time identifying her, but it’s her. It’s her.

Her arms are different. They’re veiny. She always had a youthful softness, and however she’s been living in the last few months has taken that from her.

But the most dramatic change is the tattoos on the back of each hand. The light is dim. The photo a bit blurry because of it. They look like thick circles, but I recognize it from my research as something more.

Ouroboros. The serpent eating its tail.

A tiny, tinny voice awakens me, and I realize it’s been talking for some time.

“Cody?! Cody?!”

“Tell me where—”

“First of all, don’t say her name. We can’t have this conversation over the phone.”

“I’ll be there in twenty.”

* * *

You’d think twenty minutes would seem like an eternity with something like this hanging over your head, but it’s not. As I drive to the Dorset’s, my brain spins in my head, but it’s my subconscious. At the forefront, I can only see Madison. What did she get herself into? What does this have to do with my duel memories?

A couple of times I nearly drive off the road when I can’t keep from looking at the picture of her on my phone, and can’t keep from getting lost in it.

Before I know it, I’m pulling into the Dorset’s circle drive. But by the time I reach the Dorset’s front door, some of the shock has worn off. They might have made a big mistake by inviting me over, because I’m half insane to understand what’s going on.

Connor holds the door, and I step past him.

“Where the fuck did you get this picture?” I say, shaking my phone at him.

“Hold on. You need to chill out.”

“No, you need to tell me what the fuck is going on, because this is chill.”

Connor puts his hand on my shoulder. I shake it off. He puts it back. “Cody, we’re trying to help. We’re sticking our fucking necks out here. Madison is in deep, and if we don’t all play this right she could take any of us down with her.” His hand is still on my shoulder, and he gives it a squeeze.

I grab the hand and twist. I learned this in my undergraduate PE elective Aikido class.

“Fuck you and your good intentions. It’s not us against the world. You are this world. Talk, motherfucker.”

“Jackson, no!” Connor isn’t looking at me, but at his brother in the sitting area where he probably expected to lead me. Jackson’s hand is shoved down between the arm of the couch and the cushion and he stopped in mid-stand.

Trailerpark junkie or trust-fund Scarface wannabe, there are only so many places to hide a gun for easy access.

I let go of Connor’s wrist. Jackson sits back down, but leaves his hand shoved out of sight.

We’re going to leave things concealed, and as long as they stay that way, we can continue civilly. But once they’re brought out into the open, someone will have to die. I agree to go along with this because they have what I need.

That thought wakes me up, turns my rage down from boiling over to simmer. Because that thought begs the question: why are they agreeing to this arrangement? What do they need from me?

“That’s quite a move,” Connor says, rubbing his wrist. “Were you a bouncer or something?”

I shake my head, walk to my arm chair, let the weird brothers sit beside each other on the couch, let Jackson glare at me, his forearm muscles twitching.

Connor says, “Let it go, bro.” Then to me, “When you said that weird word yesterday, neither of us knew what it meant.”

“Ouroboros.”

“Yeah. But when you said it was a snake eating its own tail. Well, everyone in our world knows that symbol.”

I think of the worlds the Dorset brothers occupy. The idle rich. Drug dealers. The brotherhood of scumbags. For which did the image of Ouroboros hold special meaning?

“I’m not following you. You’re being cryptic.”

“I’m not trying to be cryptic, but it’s hard to reveal an entire hidden world to someone when they’re really only interested in one person. I’m trying to show you the whole city and you’re zoomed in with a high-powered telescope.”

I nod. I agree. Something bigger than one missing girl is going on here, even if that one girl means more to me than all the rest, even if I’d burn down the rest of the world to get her back. But to get her back, I need to work through the rest of the world.

“We’ve been doing this awhile—”

“Doing what?” I ask. Connor talks around things. Jackson is a dick, but I almost wish he’d take up his usual role as the brothers’ blunt spokesperson.

“Selling drugs. Living the party lifestyle. Watching people who can’t handle it destroy themselves. We were happy to see Madison get away. We really were.”

He looks at me earnestly. I nod to start him talking again.

“There’s constant turnover among our customers. Some people get help, get out, and we don’t see them again. Some people die suddenly. They OD. They get murdered. They murder someone else and go to prison. Obviously, we don’t see them again. Some people start sliding, like we’re up here in the sun at the top of this hill, and they slip and start sliding down this muddy side that leads into darkness and filth and eventually death. You try to give them a hand up, but at some point they’re too far gone and you just have to let them go.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that when a person starts losing teeth and hair and gaining seeping track marks and a certain aroma, when someone loses the ability to maintain, we refer them to someone else.”

I’m having a hard time disguising my impatience. I’m trying to see the big picture, but it feels like I’m being shown an entirely different picture, like one at the other end of the gallery.

“But there’s one other group who disappear suddenly. It seems like maybe they dropped out or got murdered or went to some foreign rehab, but then someone spots them marked with the sign of the Serpent. And after that, people stop asking questions. That person is as gone as if they were dead.”

“No. Fuck that. What does that mean?” I say.

“If you see that symbol on a building, on a package, on a person, whatever it is, you pretend it’s invisible. You do not touch it. You do not talk about it.”

“You talked about it. You asked someone about her and got an answer.”

“We like Madison, and this doesn’t happen to people like her. This happens to people who are already in deep, not people on the right path. The Serpent is like a sudden pitfall in a downhill slide, a drop straight to the bottom, to nowhereland. But on a downhill slide. It doesn’t just happen. So at first, I couldn’t believe it. When I got that picture in response, I thought about deleting it.”

“So why didn’t you? Why tell me?” The slope they mentioned, I feel myself sliding along it. I have been for awhile already. The people who disappear, they might start like this, with the world slipping around them. The only question is if a hidden pitfall is up ahead.

“Because we’re already in. If the wrong person finds out about this and decides we’re a liability, we’re all gone. We stuck our necks out and we’re waiting for the ax, but if it’s gonna fall it’s gonna fall and we might as well do something with what all this trouble bought us: that photo, and an address.”

I jump forward in my seat. My eyes flick to Jackson. I expect to be staring down the barrel of a gun, that the sudden movement spooked him, but apparently he’s got a short attention span, has forgotten that he’s playing a tough thug with a short fuse.

I turn back to Connor. “So who sent you the picture?”

“That’s the thing; I don’t recognize the number. I contacted a guy who contacted a guy who contacted a guy, and this is what came back. I don’t know how this person got my number, but it probably means I’m fucked.”

I look him in the eyes, and I see real fear there. For all the talk, the fear is real.

“Thank you for this.”

“Save it. I never would have asked if I’d thought I’d get an answer. Here.” He hands me a folded sheet of paper. There’s a phone number and an address. “That’s the number the picture came from, and that’s the only message that came with it.”

“Did you try to call it?”

“Hell no.”

“I want your contact.”

“Who?”

“You know who. The person you asked in the first place.”

Jackson has been squirming. I don’t know why he’s been keeping quiet, but it hasn’t been because he’s got nothing to say. He finally busts. “You’ve got what we’re giving. Get out.”

I meet his eyes. He wants a reason. I can’t believe someone like this isn’t in prison or dead, but his family has a lot of money and a lot of connections. He’d probably do it. He’s probably looking for an excuse.

I nod, stand. “Thanks for this,” I say to Connor. “For whatever reason you got involved, thanks.”

He nods. “I hope it turns out. For all of us.”

They let me see myself out.

6

The address they’ve given me is in a bad part of town, and night is falling. The closer I get, the more activity there is out on the sidewalk and in the street. Young men and boys stand on corners in groups, trying to look casual but watching everything. Women approach slow-cruising cars. I actually see two pit bulls running down the sidewalk with no leashes, one chasing the other.

The address is deep into the bad neighborhood, sitting almost on the edge of the Burnout, the necrotic circle that no one enters. I’ll drive through the shady but inhabitable areas. I wouldn’t fly over the Burnout.

I’m driving slowly, looking for little numbers as the sky gets darker and darker on streets bristling with mostly unlit street lamps. I’m looking at houses with plywood nailed over the doors and windows. At one point, I actually find myself scanning a pile of burnt rubble for numbers.

Finally, I spot the house. It’s abandoned, the windows are all boarded up, and a large sheet is leaning against the railing of the small porch.

I should be better prepared than I am. I should have brought a flashlight, or better yet, a gun with a flashlight on the end. But I’m here, and I’ve never fired a gun anyway.

I park and get out. At the corner I see two teenage boys. One points me out to the other, who cranes his neck to get a look at me.

I feel like a moron when I click my lock button twice so that the alarm sounds. Besides doubting that it is any sort of deterrence, I worry that I’ve shown fear, and also that the squawk has gotten the attention of anyone else lurking in the darker corners. The scowling young men standing in the light seem like the least of my worries.

Weeds attempt to strangle the narrow walk like a closing fist. Brambles grab at my pant leg as I go by. I wonder if anything hides in the knee-high grass, and marvel at milk thistles almost as tall as I am.

The porch creaks beneath my feet, announcing my presence as well as a knock, so I just go in.

There is a smell, but it’s not as bad as I’d expected. There’s the pulpy smell of water damage, mildew and mold. There’s the smell of the house itself, the disintegrating plaster and the hardwood floors, the smell that the more overwhelming aromas of human inhabitation usually drive away. No one has lived here for a long time.

I pull out my phone and turn on the phone’s camera flash.

There’s no furniture. No trash. No one is squatting here, I suppose because there are so many unoccupied houses that not even the swollen ranks of the dispossessed can fill them.

There’s dust. A lot of dust. It burns my sinuses, sending snot running down the back of my throat until I finally sneeze and get that one moment of nasal clarity.

An acrid smell. A smell I know.

I follow it through the living room, turning down a hallway.

And then I freeze.

There, tacked to the wall, is a print of the photo of Madison that was sent to my phone.

It hits me: I will not find answers here. I will only find more questions. I should turn around and leave and live my good life. I should go home and play video games until Janet shows up and make love to her or fuck her, whichever she wants because she wants different things on different nights, and I should fall asleep holding her, breathing in her wispy blond hair until I can’t take the tickling and roll away and she follows me and buries her forehead in my curls and breathes so hot between my shoulder blades. And then I should wake up and go to my dream job and live my dream life.

Dream. It’s all a dream.

I take the picture from the wall. Printed out, not compressed to fit in a text message, it’s better quality than the version I have, but the focus is terrible. The lighting is strange, reflecting harshly off her pale skin and leaving deep shadows, creating features in her face which were never there before, showing the skull beneath the flesh, showing the wrecked life.

Her eyes are so vacant.

Looking back at the wall, I see the arrows carved into the walls and into the floor, leaving fresh, curled strands of plaster and wood.

They point to the closed door at the end of the hall.

The acrid smell. Smoke.

I should go home. I should forget about what’s behind that door and live this amazing second chance I’ve gotten. I shouldn’t be trying to wake up from this dream.

I grab the doorknob.

I don’t know where home is, but I’m pretty sure it’s not back at my condo. It might be gone. It might be somewhere between my two worlds, some third possibility. But there’s no point trying to go back. I know that now.

I go forward. The door resists, then opens with a strange, thready rasp, and the smell hits me, the full smell, not just what leaked out.

It’s the hospital. It’s me, beneath the heat lamps, begging to be put under, begging for the loss of consciousness even if it comes by way of death.

The memories hit so hard they loosen my knees and I brace myself in the doorway, my hand finding the strips of duct tape that had sealed in most of the smell. I breathe through my mouth, but then I can taste it.

It’s a losing battle. I give in, get it over with, and puke my guts out.

When the heaving slows, I breathe and start wretching again, this time trying to bring up organs from even deeper in my abdomen.

When my body gives up on finding anything else to vomit, I stand up straight on my shaking legs and aim my puny phone light at the heap in the center of the room.

On an asbestos fire blanket lies a burnt corpse. Its flesh is blackened beyond what mine was, much of the burning going down into the muscle and even the bone. It’s impossible to tell if it was man or woman without digging through the char, the thought of which tightens the noose around my guts.

I look away. The walls in this room should have been white as in the rest of the house, but they’re mottled black and gray. This person burned right here. A plastic bottle of lighter fluid and a phone lay in the corner.

I don’t get it. I look back at the body, trying to discover what it means. It’s staring up at the ceiling, screaming, staring with empty sockets. I follow it’s gaze, and there I find my answer, written on the ceiling.

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT?

This was all a message, to scare me off the trail of Ouroboros. The Dorsets were right. These are not people you fuck with. These are not people you even ask about. These are the sort of people you pretend don’t exist. Not just because to do otherwise will leave you like this poor soul, but because to acknowledge that this is a reality reveals the entire world built on the social contract to be a massive inverted pyramid balanced precariously on a needle tip, ready to topple, ready to send us screeching and slavering back to our true natures as the most brutal animals to have ever skulked through the shadows.

I’ve seen enough. I skirt the edge of the room and grab and pocket the cell phone. But turning to leave, I notice again the duct tape. I hadn’t fully processed its significance with all of my senses being assailed.

The door had been taped shut from the inside.

Turning back, I scan the room. There’s a window, but it’s been boarded over from the inside as well as the outside. There’s no way a person could have lit this corpse on fire and then left the room. I look up at the ceiling and down at the floor, but I know this is true. There’s no way out except for through the door that was sealed from the inside.

I had hoped that this person had already been dead when he’d burned. I had hoped that he’d died easily, shot in the head, maybe. That hadn’t been the case. This person burned alive.

Because this person set himself on fire.

* * *

Sitting in my car, I try to pull my thoughts together. I can’t. They spin in my head, a maelstrom of confused images and fatalistic impulses which I can’t allow to settle or they’ll be the end of me. I have to focus on moving forward. Instead of pulling my thoughts together, I shove them back, down, close a door on them. I hear them pounding. They’ll break through eventually.

I take the phone out of my pocket and begin to flip through the menus. Following a hunch, I check the camera image files first.

It contains a full set of images of Madison, of which the print out was only one. I flip through them slowly. My lungs want to clamp shut just beneath my collarbones, but I stare. The monsters—my monsters—bang on the cellar door, wanting out. I stay pragmatic, looking for clues.

They reveal nothing to me that the first photo didn’t. I can’t tell where she is. I notice nothing that will do so. They confirm, though, that Madison is in terrible shape, that I need to find her soon, because that slope the Dorsets talked about…She doesn’t have much farther to slide. That pitfall…She’s going to hit bottom soon.

The house had been prepared just for me. Whoever contacted the Dorsets had set the scene for me, but why? As a warning? In that way, it should have been effective. If I didn’t have this set of alternate memories, the charred corpse would seem like a horrific threat, a display of what would happen to me if I didn’t back off. But it wasn’t just a glimpse into my potential future, it was a recreation of my alternate past.

IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT?

Once again, that could be a threat, or it could be a real question. Is that what I want? Do I want to return to the world where Madison didn’t make this deal with the devil that saved me? Is she worth it?

But if someone is asking that question, it means that someone else has the same memories I do. They know what should have happened, how things should have turned out.

The full import of that idea hits me. No one else remembers. Not Janet. Not my or Madison’s parents. Not the doctors at the burn unit. I was alone in this, but if this was more than a threat, then someone else remembers. Someone tied to Madison.

The connection between Madison’s two disappearances and these two worlds seemed tenuous, but now I know its connected. Somehow, she saved me and damned herself in the process. Somehow, it’s connected to this gang or cult or whatever is symbolized by the mark of Ouroboros.

They’re giving me a chance to turn back. I don’t know why. Why set up a display like that? If I’m annoying them, they’ve shown that they could have easily killed me instead.

I turn on the phone I picked up from the floor. Clicking around, I find the system menu. It’s number is the same as the one the Dorsets gave me. Like I thought, a dead end.

I flip through the phone, trying to find a thread leading into this mysterious network.

The phone has either been wiped entirely clean, or, as I suspect, was purchased just for this purpose. A pay-as-you-go burner with no links back to the buyer. There are no texts. No contacts. There is one number in the call history. Whoever helped set this up. I dial it, listen to the dial tone. No one picks up, and there’s no voicemail. The phone on the other end of the call is probably in a trashcan somewhere.

For a moment I wonder why they bothered leaving it. Every aspect of that scene was orchestrated, so why leave something that looked like a lead but turned out to be a dead end?

To give me hope, then take it away. They sent what seemed like information to the Dorsets to give to me, and they wanted me to know for certain that this thread had been cut.

I thought about going back to the Dorsets and getting their contact out of them, but if this thread had been severed, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that even if I could get the number out of them—something that would probably require violence—it would lead nowhere.

I put that away as a possibility for later.

The Dorsets had recognized the symbol as soon as I described it, though they hadn’t known it by its mythological name. They said that when you came across something with the mark, a person, a package, a building, that you pretended it didn’t exist.

Out there, in the city, this symbol was placed in the open. It didn’t need to be hidden because it didn’t mean anything to most people, and the people who it did mean something to were too frightened to talk about it. The Serpent sat hidden in plain view.

But now I know. Now my understanding of the city I live in has changed. It was the difference between staring into darkness while in light, and staring into darkness when you already stood in the shadow. My eyes were previously adjusted to the sunshine, and the shadows were solid. Now I knew darkness, now my mind was dilated, and I could see the different shades of horror. I could see the definite gradation between pretenders like the Dorset brothers and whoever could inspire a man to burn himself alive.

I look up from the phone, out of my car. On my side of the street is a terrible neighborhood. On the other is the Burnout, a place which I hesitate to even call a neighborhood. It’s the necrotic core of the city. Without streetlights, without lights spilling from windows, it’s completely dark. But now I can see movement in the shadows.

My door flies open behind me, I tilt back into the open space, because my elbow was rested against the inside of the door, and something small and hard is pressed against the back of my head.

“Get out of the car, motherfucker.”

I turn to face a teenager holding a small revolver. He’s smiling. His friend smiles over his shoulder. They’re giddy.

I spin my long legs out of the car.

The kid jumps back a step, colliding with his friend, causing them both to stagger, making the gun jerk and dance. I watch it like a cobra I’m trying to hypnotize into not biting.

“Slow, motherfucker!” he shouts.

“Slow,” I say, standing up, unfurling myself until I’m looming half a foot over the tallest of the two.

“We weren’t sure at first,” he says, “but you’re in the wrong part of town.”

I nod. I should be terrified, but everything is different since my memories doubled, ever since I burned.

I reach for my wallet.

He jerks the nasty little pistol at me, gripping it in shaking hands. “Fuck you doing?”

“My wallet. I assumed you wanted it.”

He relaxes a bit. “You know what assuming does, right?”

“So you don’t want it?”

“Yes I want it, motherfucker. Don’t get smart.” Then over his shoulder. “Listen to how this faggot talks. Jesus Christ.”

His friend laughs. He’s a happy guy.

I take my wallet from my pocket—slowly, slowly motherfucker—and hand it over. The one without the pistol snatches it, happily counting the decent wad I was carrying.

“How’s it look?” Mr. Gun says.

“Good. Fucker’s loaded. You don’t need all this, do you? This ain’t shit to you.”

“Then why’s he driving an Acura? Poor man’s Lexus.”

That actually stings. I’ve thought that myself and looked forward to the day when I can afford a real luxury car.

The happy bastard laughs, shoves the cash in his pocket, drops my wallet to the concrete.

“The phone,” little Mr. Gun says, flicking his eyes to my left hand. I hadn’t even realized I was still holding the phone from the house.

My hand moves automatically to hand it to him. My brain is already set to give him whatever he wants, because I know I’m not going to get out of this with anything of value still in my possession. I’m already wondering if any of the pay phones in any of the corner stores I passed are working.

But then I stop.

“This isn’t my phone. Just a burner. Here,” I say, jamming my free hand into my pocket, gaining another spasm of his arms as I get my phone free and shove it at him. “This is my phone. It’s much better.”

He takes it, pockets it. “I want that one, too.”

“You can have my car. The keys are already in the ignition.” I start to back away, going in the direction they came from, the direction I vaguely know, having come that way myself.

“I know I can have the car, asshole! I want the fucking phone.”

The happy one, his eyes are wide, his smile is a frozen grimace.

I put the phone in my pocket. I turn and walk away. I won’t give up this phone. The pictures…And it might have some information on it that I haven’t found yet.

“What the fuck?” little Mr. Gun says. Then I hear the happy one muttering. I can’t tell what he’s saying, but he’s the devil on Mr. Gun’s left shoulder. I know this.

My face hits the sidewalk. A sledgehammer slams into my back. There’s a loud crack. Another. I think in that order. I think maybe.

Fuck. I try to push myself up. I can’t get to my hands and knees. I can’t even move my arms.

There’s a tug at my hand.

“Dumbass,” Mr. Gun says. Then the slap of feet running away.

“Hey! Hey you little assholes!”

It’s what I’m thinking, but the words didn’t come from my lips. They came from across the street. I can’t see from whom. I can hear his footsteps getting closer. He’s running. But I can’t see him. The night is dark and getting darker.

“Shit. Shit.” He’s right beside me. He might be touching me.

“He’s dying. Cody. That’s right. Some punks shot him. Yes, tell him. Tell him now.”

Everything is going numb. My ears buzz, so loud, but then the sound recedes.

“I’m standing right beside him. He has two bullet holes in his back, one I think in his spine. He’s fucked.”

7

I start my car. I’m about to pull away when the memories hit me, slam into my brain under pressure, threatening to split my skull.

I reach out with both hands, catch myself as if I’m falling, start to hyperventilate.

It’s happened again.

I look at the two overlapping sets of memories. In one, two kids hold me up and shoot me because I stupidly refuse to hand over this phone. In the other, the real set, the set of memories that lead to this moment, I sat examining the phone and my situation in peace.

I look in my rear view mirror. The kids are standing there at the end of the block, still looking in my direction, but behind them stands a man.

I’d bet anything that if I spoke to that man, he’d sound like—

The phone from the house had one call in the call history, I click to it and call it. Once it starts ringing, I look up to the rear view.

The man takes a phone from his pocket, looks at it, looks at my car.

I get out. He’s half a block away.

From this distance we stand staring at each other. It’s a long moment. My moments right now are strange anyway, pulsing, trying to make room for memories that shouldn’t be there.

I was dying. Goddamn.

The man turns and runs. I run after. The kids whip around, startled at his movement, then look back to see me charging straight at them.

The one has a gun. It’s not in his hands, but I know he has it because he shot me with it. Twice. He jumps to the side and watches with wide eyes.

I get to the end of the block just in time to see the man run into the front door of a house. A minute later I’m bounding up the couple of porch steps and through the still-open front door. A woman and her kids stand in the living room, staring toward the back of the house. The television is way too loud, so that they don’t seem to notice me until I’ve already run past them in the direction they’re gawking.

“Hey!” the woman shouts, but I’m already in the kitchen. Three long, booming strides and I’m out the open back door.

I don’t know where the man has gone, but then I look to the pit bull barking at the far side of the yard.

Fuck.

It hasn’t noticed me yet. Beyond it there’s just enough moonlight for me to make out the man as he slows and turns towards me, trotting backwards for a few steps as he watches to see if I’ll give up the chase, which sets the dog off in a barking frenzy.

I head straight for the dog, making as little noise as possible on the hard-packed, mostly bare earth. At the last moment it hears me over its own barking and spins. I hurdle the fence, and its teeth rake the heel of my trailing shoe.

I flip the dog off, one hand extended out behind me, as I continue the chase. I’m gaining. The man isn’t as fast as me, and is having a harder time with the opposite fence.

Then I’m flying, my upper body continuing at the same speed, my legs unable to swing forward to catch it, trapped instead on some large, plastic object hidden by the darkness and my focus on the opposite side of the yard.

I hit the ground hard. I take some of the impact with my hands and elbows, but I was moving really fast. The sprint already had me struggling for air, and for a moment my body panics as it can’t draw in the oxygen it desperately wants.

Across the yard, the man makes it over the fence, then looks back. It’s too dark to make out his expression, but I imagine it’s confused as he scans the yard for signs of me and finds none. He trots off, not moving quite as quickly as before.

Slowing my frantic, shallow inhalations, I get control of my breathing and push up to my feet. My shins are scraped and bruised, and the palms of my hands burn. I don’t vault this fence with as much gusto as I vaulted the other, though if a pit bull were nipping at my heels I could probably find a little more enthusiasm.

Away from the Burnout, the intermittent street lamps provide enough light that I can now see the man clearly again. He lopes slowly along until he looks back over his shoulder and sees me. Frustration fills his face for a moment before he turns and runs, this time straight up to a pack of young men loitering outside a huge apartment building.

He talks to them for a moment, points back at me and says something. They don’t respond. He barks something and they nod.

I’ve slowed to a clomping jog, not eager to charge into whatever is being set up. But one of the young men takes keys from his pocket and opens the front door, holding it open and stepping aside as my quarry steps through. He lets it shut, drops the keys into his pocket and looks at me.

They all look at me. I pick up my pace.

Six sets of eyes watch me. I’m trying to control my breathing, to not seem as frazzled as I am.

“Where’s he going?” I ask.

No one speaks. I look directly at the one who let him in. He shrugs.

“Let me in, then.”

“Get the fuck out of here.”

A couple laugh. The two seated on a low concrete divider continue their game of pocket chess. The rest turn and begin to ignore me. Any interest they had in me was spurred by whatever the man I’m chasing said, and it’s worn off.

I take off around the huge building. It runs the full length of the short side of the block. There’s a door, and more young men and a couple of young women stand around. I don’t approach them, but shout, “Did a guy just come running through here?”

“Fuck off,” one says half-heartedly. One girl shrieks a sharp, short laugh, but the rest continue their conversation.

Deciding not to push my luck any further, I stand and wait for a moment to see if the man emerges, but I don’t think he will. If he ran through, he had a good lead on me and a much shorter path. If he has a place to hole up in there, there’s no way I’ll find him. The building probably contains a hundred small apartments. A concrete beehive. Though to an obnoxious interloper, more like a concrete hornets’ nest.

“What the fuck do you want?” The muscular young man stands and rolls his traps forward.

I’ve stood here for too long. They’d tolerate me passing through, but not hanging around.

“Nothing,” I say, hating myself for it, and for turning and going back the way I’d come.

* * *

I’m fully inside my head as I walk back to my car, oblivious to my surroundings, trying to put together these pieces I keep uncovering. It’s like a puzzle, but not a two-dimensional, flat puzzle. Not even a three-dimensional puzzle. It’s like trying to fit together pieces of tesseract, pieces that extend through time as well as space, an act the human brain simply isn’t made for. The harder I think, the less I see the world around me.

Until the doors to my car open, and the two kids step out.

“We watched your car for you, man. You left the keys in the ignition!”

I’m walking down the sidewalk and Mr. Smiles steps out of that door and he’s maybe fifteen feet away. He’s still smiling. I remember that smile from right before he convinced his friend to shoot me in the back, which at that moment seems like the worse crime for some reason. He’s also closest. His smile wavers as I say nothing but pick up my speed and step through a punch that would have broken my hand if it hadn’t landed on his very forgiving, now very broken jaw. His eyes go solid white and his legs go stiff instead of loose, he does the cartoon “Timberrrr!” fall and his head bounces off the concrete. He starts to spasm, his limbs shaking. I might have hit him too hard.

Little Mr. Gun had been headed around the car to meet me, probably expecting a reward for watching my car. Seeing that won’t be the case, he stumbles backwards, fumbling at the gun shoved in the back of his pants beneath his light jacket and I tackle him. He hits the ground with his right arm still behind his back and screams and I think I hear a pop. Sitting on his chest, I wrap my fists in the collar of his jacket and bounce his head off the asphalt a few times.

I stand, lifting him with his jacket as I go. He’s so light. I can’t believe this embryo of a human being killed me. He’s kicking at the ground, trying to get his feet beneath him and I’m going to shove him in the passenger seat of my car when I see the gun where it had lay beneath him. I drop him. He screams. I pick up the gun, shove it in my jacket pocket, then look to the kid. He’s rolling back and forth, clutching his right shoulder in his left hand, crying through squinted eyes and growling through a clenched jaw. In my mind, in memories that never happened but which I know are real, I hear him, as I lay dying, throw out a casual Dumbass.

I stomp little Mr. Gun in the stomach, really putting my weight in it and he curls up like a bug around my foot as an arch of vomit projects from his mouth, some of it splashing my pant leg, the rest settling on his face and chest.

I look over at Mr. Smiles. His seizure seems to have stopped. He’s not moving at all, possibly because he’s dead.

I have to get the hell out of here.

I open the passenger side door. Little Mr. Gun is covered in puke, so it’s with less enthusiasm that I lift him up this time and toss him in. He lays curled up in a ball, no fight left in him at all, if you can call the willingness to pull a gun “fight.”

I shut the door on him and circle the car. Mr. Smiles still isn’t moving. One of the most common ways to die in a fight is to hit the back of your head on the ground after a knockout. That’s why most people’s knees buckle when they lose consciousness, so they fall straight down. I don’t know why that doesn’t happen sometimes, why the whole body locks up instead. Mr. Smiles brain is swelling inside his skull right now, and even if someone were to find him right now he’d probably be dead soon.

I feel a little sick as I drop into my car through the open driver-side door. Then I feel a lot more sick as the smell of vomit hits me. Little Mr. Gun is still curled up in a ball groaning. The night air is brisk, but I roll the windows down. Then I reconsider, roll his back up, lock the doors and switch control of the locks to my panel before driving off.

I need to stop, assess the situation, deal with the kid, but I can’t keep my eyes off the rear view. If anybody’s going to come looking for me, they aren’t yet, but I can’t shake the feeling, can’t bring myself to stop no matter the blocks I put between myself and the dying or dead Mr. Smiles.

So I go where I know no one will follow. I’ve been skirting the Burnout. Now I turn into it.

* * *

I park on a dead corner where a building has collapsed across the sidewalk in a spill of brick and rubble. I don’t stop here for any particular reason. No place I’ve passed since entering the Burnout looks any better or worse.

I turn out the headlights. Except for the moon, the street is completely dark and the lights feel like a beacon, like a lamp the junkies will bumble toward like clumsy moths.

The moon is dead ahead, and its silver light pours through the windshield. The kid is looking at me, the play of light and shadow bringing out the youthful roundness of his face. I look at him and he averts his eyes. He’s maybe fifteen, but small for his age.

Except for the shoulder he’s still babying, he seems to have recovered from the beating. I can see him tensing, wonder what he’s going to do. He grabs the door handle and leans into the door. The door doesn’t move, and he gasps as his fucked shoulder absorbs the impact.

He looks at me then, tears in his eyes, “Why are you doing this? Just let me go.”

Why am I doing this? Why? Seriously? “Because you shot me.”

He shakes his head. His eyes widen. He thought he was just dealing with another sociopath. He’d seen enough violence. But now he thinks he’s dealing with someone delusional, and now he’s really scared.

“Who was that man?”

“I don’t know. Please let me go.”

“You don’t know? You know.”

“I’ve seen him around but he doesn’t talk to people like me.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s a Serpent.” Little Mr. Gun calms down a bit. He probably is getting the feeling that his abduction doesn’t have much to do with him, and that once I get what I want I might let him go alive. I see it in his eyes, his brain pulling back together its scattered pieces, thinking instead of panicking. “We were just standing there and he came up to us, told us that you have the protection of the Serpent. That’s why we watched your car. Someone would have stolen it if we hadn’t been there, and you…” He stops himself. Looks down to hide whatever is in his eyes.

Protection of the Serpent? What the hell did that mean? They were threatening me, trying to scare me off. But it makes sense when I think about it. That guy stopped the kids from fucking with me. Did he remember the other time, too?

The kid is watching me think, and I can see the gears in his head turning, trying to figure out how to either kill me or get away from me.

“You were watching me when he came up to you. What were you going to do?”

“Nothing. I swear. We were just curious.”

Liar. Little sociopathic fucking liar. “You had a gun.” I take the little, snub-nosed revolver from my jacket pocket. “What were you going to do with this?”

“It’s for protection, man. You have to carry out there.”

“If you’re so scared then why weren’t you safe inside your house?”

He scowls at me, looks away. “I don’t go home until I have to.”

So, what? He wanted me to care about his sob story? What, his dad beat him? His mom’s boyfriend? I’ve read the papers, watched the news, seen the movies. Drugs, prostitution, abuse, whatever…I’m supposed to forgive the kid for shooting me because he has a rough life?

I drop the pistol into the door compartment.

“Tell me about the Serpent. What are they? A cult? A gang?”

“It sounded to me like you were one of them. Shouldn’t you know better than me?”

“Humor me.”

He looks at me askance, seems to be choosing his words carefully.

“They’re people you don’t want to fuck with. You see that snake, you turn the other way. Just about had a heart attack when that big, bald motherfucker walked right up on us. I would have run but I didn’t think he could possibly be coming at us, just passing by.”

“What do they do? Do they sell drugs? Guns? Run protection?” Growing up, my neighborhood wasn’t fancy, but it was safe. I’m trying not to let my ignorance show.

“They take people away. I don’t know what they do with them, or why they want them. They take the lowest people they can find, the ones you expect to see dead in a gutter in a week.”

“Where do they take them?”

“Here. Somewhere in the Burnout. Nobody knows for sure.” He groans and hugs his shoulder. “I think you broke something.”

I feel bad for the kid with his fucked up shoulder and his coating of puke. But he killed me. He didn’t kill me now, but he killed me sometime else. Does my mind recognize this reality as more real than the other, or am I just so damn soft that I’ll forgive being murdered?

He’s just a kid.

One who’ll grow up to be a killer. The world would be better off if I shot him in the head and dumped him on the sidewalk. No one would even ask any questions.

Who am I trying to fool?

“They have a mark. You know what it is?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’ve seen it around.”

“Yeah. They don’t try to hide it. It’s up with everyone else’s.”

I think about the walls of graffiti, know that it means something to people who pay attention, who don’t dismiss it immediately as visual noise. They hide their mark out in plain sight.

“So what places do they claim?”

“Alleys. Abandoned houses. Empty warehouses.”

“And do they live there?”

“Nobody knows. If you see the mark, you steer clear.”

“What do you think, though?”

He shrugs, winces. After a moment, “I think they claim some places to do what they need to do, but I think they live here.”

I look out at the Burnout. Catty-corner to the collapsed building I’m parked beside stands a lot that’s gone completely feral. Whatever building stood there is gone, leaving only a somewhat-less overgrown patch where a crumbling foundation must sit. Weeds stand tall, though, silver in the moonlight, rustling in the occasional night breeze. Who knows what creeps through the low tunnels of stalks.

“I need to find them,” I say.

“That’s crazy.”

“If you help me find them, I’ll let you go.”

He’s shaking his head, but not saying anything. His eyes dart to the lock and window control panel beneath my far elbow, then back to my face to see if I saw. His real hesitation is that he knows the Serpent is dangerous, but he’s not sure if I still am now that I’ve calmed down.

He’s searching my face for an answer.

I reach out, put a hand on his thin shoulder. He’s just a kid.

I shove hard, leaning across the car, mashing his broken shoulder into the door. He tries to shove away. I grab his throat, press his head against the glass. He claws at my wrist. I let him, then start to squeeze.

His neck is so thin, this neck of the kid who put two bullets in my back after stealing my wallet, phone and car to get a twenty dollar pay-as-you-go flip phone.

I fucking clamp down. He gasps, his eyes bugging out. He starts to kick, and his nails rake deep furrows in my forearm.

I let go. Sit back. Start the car. Flip on the lights. Am certain I see dark things scurry to chase the suddenly receding shadows.

I give him time to recover. He gasps, wheezes, coughs, and eventually begins to cry and mutter curses. He’s had enough time.

“Where?”

“I know about…” he croaks, then has a coughing fit. He turns red again, but gains control and clears his throat. “I know about one place, down in the flats, by the river.”

“Tell me where to go.” Putting the car in drive, I head toward the abandoned warehouse and industrial district down by the river.

Little Mr. Gun directs me once we get down to the flats. A few times I have to stop and backtrack, as the roads have crumbled to the point that I’m afraid to drive across the rubble.

Being situated low in the river valley, the flats are even darker than the rest of the Burnout. Crumbling warehouses and factories still stand precariously tall and patches of trees have taken up empty lots, all absorbing the moonlight that at night is all that illuminates an area without electricity.

Across the river, lights twinkle. The flats are on the edge of the Burnout, since across the river normal civilization continues. But the flats are central to the Burnout, because it was the collapse of this industrial center set up along the river for ease of transportation that started the rot that spread until the area around it eventually went completely necrotic.

Bad neighborhoods—those plagued with drugs and crime—skirted the Burnout the way the area around a dead, charred area of flesh inflamed, turning red and painful, taking its proximity to such misery out on the tissue around it.

The Burnout is a fourth degree burn, down all the way through the skin, through the muscle, to the bone and into the marrow. The Burnout had no living tissue, and no antibodies, and so only infection remains. Even bad neighborhoods were filled with families trying to get by and people trying to run honest businesses. The Burnout is gangrenous, supporting only bacteria which flares up, then drowns in its own waste.

And nowhere is this more clear than down in the flats, which started going downhill sixty years ago and where the last of industry fled thirty years before the complete collapse of the area. Nothing but vermin has resided here since. I’ve seen it from the highways that pass around and over, but being down in it is something else. It’s positively post-apocalyptic.

The kid guides me, but once we’re down by the river it’s a pretty straight shot. He says, “There, the cold storage place.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s marked—”

“Everything is marked.”

“Let me finish. And everybody heard about these development assholes who went in there, looking to try to reclaim the flats, turn it into a shopping area, wanted to turn the cold storage building into yuppie condos. Went in there with people from the city. Nobody ever came back. Cops went in after. Cops didn’t come back.”

I pull into the gravel lot, and then realize as my headlights play over the ground that it isn’t gravel, but asphalt crumbled so badly that it resembles gravel half gone to grass. The building looms above, five stories of brick dissolving into red dust.

“Yeah, I do think I remember that,” I say.

“Sure you do. You’re real streetwise. Now let me the fuck out of this car.” He’s set his little jaw in a way that makes me want to crack it.

I’d been thinking I would make him come in with me, but I really do remember the story. When the officials and the developers disappeared, it was big news, but then you didn’t hear much about what happened afterward, and pretty soon it was like nothing had happened at all.

This is as far as the kid will be able to take me. I finally feel like I have a path to follow, and all it took was getting murdered.

I hit the locks. The kid scrabbles at the door handle, apparently afraid I’m going to change my mind. He hops out and starts running, doesn’t even bother to shut the door, leaving me feeling vulnerable in the illumination of the dome light.

I step out, grabbing and pocketing the kid’s revolver as I do, then walk around to the other side to shut the passenger side door. Clicking the lock button and the small warning beep it emits almost makes me laugh as I look at surroundings which are half jungle, half industrial nightmare.

“Hey!”

I turn. The kid stands halfway up the hill leading out of the river bottom, cradling his bad arm with his good.

“You’re fucked, man! They’re gonna do shit to you I wish I could watch!”

“Thanks for all your help! Go back to your corner at Grove and 15th!”

Even from the distance I can see panic make his face go slack, then rage twist it back up. It’s the face of a toddler about to explode in tantrum, not a cold-blooded killer who’ll shoot you in the back. Then again, most people wouldn’t give a tantruming toddler a gun. “Fuck you! I hope they make it hurt!” He turns and runs.

Whatever. Hopefully I’ll never see the kid again in this life, though I know I’ll be seeing his face in my nightmares.

I head for the cold storage building, stumbling in the dark over the larger chunks of asphalt and more tenacious and tangled clumps of grass and weeds. I’m approaching from either the back or the side, because instead of a main entrance I’m heading toward a loading dock. As I near the building, its height blocks the moon and I can barely make out what I’m walking into.

I take out my phone and turn on the flash LED, though I know it makes me a lot more visible than my surroundings. Still, it keeps me from from tripping, especially as I near the building and scattered bricks litter the ground along with the crumbled pavement.

Soon I’ve stepped into total darkness, and I’m not even inside yet. I can feel the weight of the building above me. I’m an insect, and the building is a hand waiting for just the right instant to squash me.

There’s a door beside the dock, and I head for it until I see that the stairs that once led up to it are a twisted, rusted wreck hanging precariously by bolts stuck only halfway into the brick of the building. So I turn back to the dock. It’s about four foot high, and I’m glad I’m tall as I plant my hands on the concrete and press myself up. I hesitate for a moment. It strikes me that this morning I sat at my desk at a venture capital fund. Now I’m standing on the brink of the pit, about to walk into an abandoned warehouse in the worst part of town imaginable. This morning seems years away. It seems like a part of a different life as much as my memories in the burn unit.

I realize that if anything is in the dock, it’s watching me standing here framed by the night sky. Taking my phone from my pocket and using it again as a makeshift flashlight, I step into darkness.

8

I’d expected heaps of industrial junk, but of course the owners of the building had sold off anything of value before abandoning it. The evidence of small fires spot the concrete floor, piles of ash with the occasional chunk of ancient unburned pallet jutting from the black center. I tilt my head back to scan the ceiling for smoke stains, but the ceiling is far too high, and staring up into the perfect darkness above makes me feel strange, like someone is stepping on my heart and squeezing the air from my lungs. I feel like I’m at the center of the Earth.

As I walk, I step around liquor bottles and rusted tins of food. There’s something strange about them, and then I realize what it is: they’re all so old. The cold storage facility had once housed the occasional squatter, but from the dust and rust on this glass and tin, it hasn’t for ten years.

Rats, though, scurry out of sight. I hope they’re rats. I catch the occasional dual pinpoints of reflected light close to the ground. Some blink out quickly and I hear more of the tick-tick-tick and sandpaper scrape of claws on concrete. Some, though, stay put, small rodent eyes locked on mine, belligerent, challenging.

Walking straight ahead, I eventually find the brick wall that marks the end of the loading dock. I turn left and follow it and eventually come to a wide-open doorway covered with frayed rubber flaps, and also a smaller doorway. Pushing aside the rubber flaps, the sight of the main floor of the cold storage building nearly takes my breath away.

Unlike the cave-dark docks, the top of the five-story main area is an almost solid row of windows, and silvery light bathes the interior. I step through the door and see faces in the light of my phone. My heart thumps against my ribs as if I hadn’t been looking for people the whole time, as if this were a big mistake, which it probably is.

“Get that light out of my face,” a woman’s voice says.

I turn the light away and try to let my eyes adjust. The light from above spills on a huge pile of rubble that dominates most of the vast chamber. The entire five-story cold storage building is basically one huge room. Catwalks circle the walls, but bridges from them either jut out into nothing or hang precariously. This pile of rubble at one point must have been some sort of interior structure almost as tall as the building itself, because it takes up almost the entire floor, making the huge room seem claustrophobic.

My eyes adjusted, I look at the woman. I can’t tell her age. She looks like one of those people who might be older or younger than they appear. Her flesh has the thin but tough appearance of a mummy, which is in contrast to her lively eyes that glint from black pits.

I’m looking at her so intently that I don’t notice the man sitting propped against the rubble ten feet away from her until he moves. He has the same look of having been wrung out by a hard life, but he’s younger, and his gaze isn’t as fierce.

“Are you—?”

“He’s not the Serpent,” the woman said, twisting her face in scorn. “So who are you?”

“How do you know he’s not?”

“I’m looking at him.”

I decide to cut the conversation short and say, “I’m not.”

“Then what are you staring for?”

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You surprised me. So you’re waiting for the Serpent?”

“Nope. We’re not doing this,” the woman says.

“Doing what?”

“Having some heart-to-heart about why we’re here. He tried that earlier.” She waves a dismissive hand into the darkness to her left. “Wouldn’t shut the fuck up until we shut him up. Not interested in your story. Not interested in telling you mine.”

This woman is horrible. “You’re very pleasant.”

“Fuck off.”

I have to bite my tongue, take a breath, remember that she probably had a lot of reason to be like this, remember that getting into a conflict wouldn’t help me find Ouroboros.

Instead of continuing the useless interaction, I look off in the direction she gestured and see a third person I hadn’t noticed, huddled against a pile of rubble so that he looks like refuse himself.

As I walk towards him, he recedes into the pile, but he doesn’t have far to go. I briefly shine my phone on him. He squints and holds up a hand. I know it’s rude, but I want to get a glimpse of him.

I see a homeless guy, a guy I would pretend not to see if he were panhandling from the edge of the sidewalk on my way to work. Hell, I might have pretended not to see him before, a hundred times before. He has the sort of old homeless guy face that melds into the type because you never look at it directly. Now I’m looking directly at him, and it’s making him very nervous. I turn my light away from him. I saw enough. Deep crags. Few teeth. Bushy gray beard. Black eye.

I look back at the other two. She meets my eyes with defiance. They hurt him, when he wouldn’t be quiet.

“I’m Cody,” I say, taking a seat a few feet away from the old man. A lot of the rubble is surprisingly soft, and I see that among the wood is a lot of moldering cork. This must be the remains of an insulated tower. So the brick building was just a shell containing this tower, which was the real cold storage.

“I’m Bill,” the old guy says. “Are you a member of the Serpent?”

“No.”

“I don’t get it. Do you know who they are? Do you know they come here?”

“I know some.”

“So why are you here?”

“Why are you here?” I ask. I try not to look too eager, but I can’t believe I’ve found someone who won’t look the other way when the Serpent is mentioned.

“A million reasons. I’ve made just about every mistake it’s possible to make. I can’t…” His eyes flick past me and he trails off. I turn and find the other two glaring at them. I remember what she said about shutting the old man up.

“They won’t hurt you. You can talk.”

He looks at me questioningly, searches my face. I think he decides that I’m being sincere, but he still has something of the whipped dog about him.

He shrugs. “No need to go into specifics. I’ve done plenty to warrant a trip to the Serpent. The question is why someone like you is here. What could you possibly want from them?”

“I’m not sure.”

His brows knit together and he says, “Then you need to get out of here. This is something you need to be sure about.”

“Why are you so sure you need to be here?”

I’m fishing. I’m afraid that if I confess that I have no idea what’s going on that he’ll clam up. It seems stupid to pretend that we’re on the same team, but it’s what I’ve got. I figure that if I can get him talking, I can narrow in on what the hell this Ouroboros secret society is all about. I feel like I’m on the right path. These people are desperate, and remembering how Maddy was right before everything changed…I think I’m on the right path.

The man peeks past me again, searches my face again, then its like a bursting dam. His story starts with him supporting a wife, two kids and a slight drinking problem. It doesn’t get better from there. I knew that it wouldn’t, that a story that ends with a man squatting in an abandoned warehouse in the Burnout waiting with a couple of junkies for a group called the Serpent to come snatch him up wouldn’t be a light-hearted romp, but it’s stunning how everything went wrong for this man. If he could have seen how he’d end up from the beginning he never would have let it happen, but that’s the rub: it’s one damn thing after the other. It’s the little things that turn into the huge things that destroy your life. It’s not looking before opening your car door and causing a multi-car pileup. It’s forgetting to flip a little switch to turn the heating element off and getting cooked alive. It’s a drink every evening to unwind, then a couple, then…

It’s unfair. That’s what it really is. Unfair. And people will tell you that you get what you deserve, and those same people would beg for mercy if they went through what you went through. And those people will tell you that life isn’t fair for anyone, but they will still act as if it is, as if we chose this, as if we all haven’t been tossed blindfolded into a maze full of deadly traps and slippery slopes.

Finally, his story ends with him sitting there in the cold storage building, trying to commiserate with fellow unfortunate souls and getting beaten for the mistaken belief that seeing the world’s cruelty will make a person more sensitive to it when it makes so many more willing to add to it when they get a chance to get their own licks in.

“But what does this have to do with the Serpent?”

He looks at me, finally understanding the depths of my ignorance. But now we’ve traveled together. “Because they’ll fix it.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. No one knows. But if you’re willing to give everything to them, people say they can fix your mistakes, unhurt all the people you’ve hurt. I was on the Mayfield bridge just up the river. I’d climbed over the rail and spotted some rocks and was about to jump when I noticed this building and remembered that it belongs to the Serpent. I’m tired. I’m so damned tired. But I figured I’d try this one last thing.”

Cody, I think I’ve found a way to fix everything.

Bill says, “You need to get out of here. There’s no reason for you to be mixed up in something like this. You’re not like us.”

He’s made the mistake people make about him every day: thinking you can understand a man by looking at him. It must be evolutionary. It must go back to the days when we had to decide friend or foe in the instant before a stranger saw us.

But I have to get Madison back. I don’t understand what deal she made. I don’t understand how the Serpent does it, but they can change things “if you’re willing to give them everything.” I can’t live with that.

A few hours pass. Bill and I continue to chat despite the dirty looks we get from the other pair. He tries to convince me to leave, but when he sees I won’t, he just talks. I think it’s been a long time since anyone’s listened to him.

Then the door to the loading dock lightens, glowing yellow, and we all go silent. A man steps into the wide doorway and slides his flashlight over us.

My eyes have to readjust after the beam of the light passes over me, and because he’s standing behind the light source all I can really make out is a silhouette, but it speaks to me. The air of authority could mean cop. The bearing of possession could mean land owner. But the casual expectation…This is a member of the Serpent.

He runs the flashlight over us again. I fight an urge to reach into my pocket and wrap a finger around the trigger of my pistol. Instead, I remind myself that this is what I want.

“What’s your story?” He shines the flashlight into the woman’s face. It’s much brighter than my little phone light, and it puts every feature on display. The crows’ feet and thin, pinched lips. The sunken eyes. The jutting jaw. They begin her story before she ever opens her mouth.

She has a few false starts. Between every one she clamps her lips and glares at the man who we still haven’t seen.

“You’re part of the Serpent?”

We all know that he is. She’s stalling.

“Yes. Why are you here?”

She huffs, squints angrily into the light. “I’ve made mistakes. I need you to fix them.”

“What mistakes?”

“Now? In front of…”

“Yes, now. Do you think this is a…Okay, I’m going to lay this out for all of you, how this works. You will tell me what you want. If I decide you’re full of shit, you walk away. If I decide you’re prepared to do what’s necessary to cut a deal with Ouroboros, you come with me. If he decides to help you, he helps you. If he decides that you can’t or won’t be helped, you get shot and dropped in the river.” He gives a moment to let that resonate. “If you have doubts about him or your own dedication, then this is the time to leave.”

The man who sat near the woman fidgets. We all turn and look at him as he’s illuminated by the flashlight. He shields his eyes, making a brim of his right hand.

“Do you want to leave?”

After a moment, he says, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m going to leave.”

The junkie grabs his backpack from the rubble and sidles out. Ouroboros’ man follows him with his flashlight, and I’m able to make out a few details. He’s tall. Not quite as tall as me, but over six foot. He’s muscular. He has hair. The man I chased after was shaved bald, and I thought it was some sort of requirement of the cult. As the flashlight follows the nervous junkie out, the beam finally hits the brick wall to spotlight the junkie sidling onto the loading dock and then turning and running. The light hitting the wall reflects onto this man, and I see large, dark circles on the back of his hands.

He turns back and I see nothing of his face as I’m blinded again.

“How many do we have left? Come forward.”

Bill and I stand beside the woman, though Bill makes sure to keep me between himself and her.

He scans us with the flashlight, stops at me. “This should be good.” Then flicks it back to the woman. She squints until her eyes almost disappear.

“Can you get the damn light out of my face?”

“No. What do you need fixed?”

Her lower jaw juts out until her chin is a shelf, but eventually she says, “I used to have a family. I had two kids, an apartment, a boyfriend. He and I had smoked crack before the kids, but I stopped. He did too, for awhile. He started again. He brought these people around the house, around our kids…I told him not to, but he kept on. One night, a couple of them broke in, held us at gunpoint and searched the apartment. They found his little stash, but they thought he was holding out. They…” The deep wrinkles around her squinted eyes moisten. “They executed my kids. He wasn’t even holding anything else.” She bears her gritted teeth. “Is that enough? Is that fucking bad enough for you? You can kill me and throw me in the river. Good. I’ve been trying to die every day since. Fuck you. Fuck you.” The last words she forces through gray teeth that look ready to crumble in her grinding jaws.

“That’s good.” He moves the light past me and onto Bill. “Now you.”

Bill tells some of what he told me before the man gets frustrated by the length of the tale and interrupts, saying, “Yeah, that’s good enough.”

Bill shuts his mouth without protest.

The man moves the light to me, and it’s my turn to squint. “I can’t wait to hear what makes your life so bad that you need Ouroboros.”

I wait for more taunting, but when it doesn’t come, I say, “My girlfriend disappeared, and it’s my fault.”

“Your girlfriend? You’re going to trade everything not for your family, not for a wife and kids, but for a girlfriend? Girlfriends come and go. If they didn’t, they’d be wives. Get the fuck out of here.”

He motions to the other two, and they start to move for the door.

He’s going to leave without me.

I almost reach for my gun before I think of one other way to get his attention. “Her name is Madison Barrington.”

He stops, puts his flashlight back on me. “Hold on.”

He pulls a phone from his pocket and dials it without moving the light from my face. I don’t want to close my eyes, obviously don’t trust this bastard, but I have to. It barely helps. The light pounds through my eyelids and into my brain.

“Let me talk to him. Yes, it’s important. I’m looking at Cody Miller.” After a few seconds he says, “Here.” When I open my eyes, he’s handing me his phone.

I take it and turn away. “Hello?”

“Hello, Cody. You’re very persistent.”

“Who is this?”

“Ouroboros.”

“The serpent eating its tail? What does that mean?”

“You’re smart. You’re too smart to be messing around with us. You’d be dead if it weren’t for me. So maybe you’re not that smart.”

“So the kid…He did shoot me?”

“Yes, he did. And so will this man. But this time he’ll be doing it for me, and I won’t save you.”

I turn and am looking down the barrel of a much bigger handgun than mine. I almost drop the phone, hitting a few buttons before I get it back to my face. “You still there?”

“Yes,” he says. “The question is: why are you? Go enjoy your life.”

“I can’t. I can’t let her do this. Let’s make a deal.”

“How can a person who just spent the past twenty years in school be so stupid? Maybe you need to go back to school. Learn some common sense.”

“Please, just tell me what…”

I get the distinct feeling that I’m talking to myself, pull the phone away from my face. He hung up.

Ouroboros’ thug reaches his hand out to take the phone with one hand while at the same time pointing his gun menacingly at me with the other.

“Go get in the SUV,” he says to the other two.

I start to talk, and he shakes his head, and I know it’s useless. My one hope is to follow him to Ouroboros’ lair.

He gives them a minute, then backs out after them, keeping his gun on me until he’s out of sight. I run after, but stop when I find him aiming at the door as he backs across the loading dock.

Finally, he jumps off the dock, turns and runs. I get to the edge of the dock just in time to see the SUV start up and roll across the crumbling lot. It stops by my car, an arm extends out of a window and a burst of light and an explosion fill the dark, quiet night. One more shot, and then I hear the hiss of air leaving my right front tire before the SUV pulls away and all I can hear is the crunch of coarse gravel beneath big tires.

It takes me half an hour to get the tire changed in the pitch dark on unstable ground. When I finally manage it, I drive home, defeated.

9

Janet’s waiting for me when I open the door. She usually doesn’t stay up much past her shift, but she’s sitting on the couch and old sitcoms are playing on the television. She hates sitcoms, so I know she wasn’t watching them, which means I’m in trouble.

“Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

“I was in the middle of something and I forgot by the time I wasn’t anymore.”

“What were you in the middle of at this time of night?”

I’d been so focused on thoughts of Madison and the Serpent’s man and having spoken to Ouroboros that I don’t have an excuse ready, didn’t try to think of one until I was on my way up to the apartment. I guess I should have stopped and come up with one, but I’m so damned tired and I’d hoped that she’d just gone to bed.

I know that Janet can see my brain working. There’s no point in giving an excuse now. Even if my exhausted brain managed to dump out a brilliant one before shutting down completely, she wouldn’t buy it.

“I found out today that Madison is alive and in trouble with some very bad people.”

Her face goes terrifyingly blank. “Did you go to the police?” she asks in an uninflected voice.

“No. I went to check it out myself.”

She nods slowly, not looking at me, then heads for the bedroom. “You should stay out here.”

She walks with such rigid control that her long hair, which usually swings back and forth, hangs limp. She steps all the way into the bedroom before shutting the door behind her.

I go to the fridge and pull out stuff to make sandwiches. It feels like my ravenous hunger is the only thing keeping me from falling asleep on my feet. Once I’ve made a couple of turkey sandwiches and a PB&J, I settle onto the couch and begin to eat and ignore the television.

Ouroboros knew. He knew. I already had the proof that I’m not alone in seeing how crazy the world has gotten, how one thing doesn’t follow from another, but to hear someone else admit it. And with such calm.

He takes people who’ve made terrible mistakes and fixes their problems, and they give him everything in return.

What does that mean? No part of that sentence makes any logical sense. If I were still in my comatic dreamworld, the one that never happened because I never burned myself and so never spent a month in a medically-induced coma. There this would have made sense.

What if I am still there? Things have gotten strange enough. A cult hidden out in plain sight striking dark bargains and carrying on criminal activities with impunity? This isn’t the world I’ve known. Am I dreaming? Am I crazy? If so, the fact that a figment of my imagination agreed with my insane delusions wouldn’t matter much.

I wonder again if I’m even alive.

I try to feel if my body is real, but my head feels like a balloon, my neck a string. I’ve reached the point of exhaustion where my brain’s ability to consistently translate chaotic stimuli into coherence has gone slightly off and nothing feels right. It wouldn’t even if I weren’t doubting the reality of my own existence.

What would Madison call this? Existential crisis? Nihilism? Solipscism? I don’t know. I wish that I were as smart as her.

So far, the only person who’s admitted to me that they have also witnessed these alternate realities is the man on the phone who answered to Ouroboros, a man I’ve been considering my nemesis. He wants me to leave this alone. I don’t feel that I can trust his opinion. I don’t know that he saved me, all I know is that he also has memories of the time when I needed saving.

I don’t want to, but I need to talk to Janet. I need to talk to someone, and she’s stood beside me since Madison disappeared, been so kind and understanding. And this involves her, too.

No, I’m trying to validate selfishly dragging her into this so that I don’t have to experience it alone, and I do feel so alone. She’s the one person I dare to describe what’s been happening to me, in the same way that the cruelest things I’ve ever said have been to people I love, because I know they won’t throw me away for it.

But I do need an outside opinion. I’m too far into my own head. My brain is spinning and it needs something to focus on in order to stop.

So I walk up to the bedroom door, knock, feel ridiculous as I wait for an answer that doesn’t come outside of my own bedroom.

“Janet?” I say as I open the door, as if she might be asleep, but I know she’s not asleep. Still, I don’t turn on the light. I don’t want to see her face as I tell her the things I’m about to tell her.

I sit on my side of the bed with my back to her, lean onto my knees, run my hands through my curls. I sit there for too long.

“Something strange is happening to me,” I blurt out, jumping into it because I know I’ll never start if I wait for the right way to phrase this, the way that won’t piss Janet off and that won’t make me sound crazy, because I don’t believe that particular phrasing exists.

“A couple of days ago…” I pause as I try to think how long it’s been. Just this morning seems like a week ago. “A couple of days ago I woke up and I had two complete sets of memories of the past two months. The only thing that made one more real than the other is that one led up to that moment waking up beside you, and the other led to a dead end. Up until that second, though, it seemed just as real. In the other set of memories, Madison didn’t disappear. Well, she did to her family, but she stayed in contact with me. What I realized is that the two sets of memories are connected, and I’ve confirmed that since.”

I stop talking, wondering for a moment if I should have checked to be sure Janet was awake. As tough as she acts, and as good as she’s been with my troubles, she has a habit of escaping her own at any cost. She might have popped some pain pills or something and knocked herself out.

I’m about to make sure she’s okay when she says, “Are you being serious?”

“Yes. Trust me, I wish I weren’t, I wish this were some crazy excuse, but it’s real.”

“Okay. Give me the whole story.”

I go over all of it, from getting burned that day and the month of coma and months of rehab, to then waking up beside her as if from the longest, most vivid dream I’ve ever had, to visiting the burn unit after the accident that morning to the Dorset brothers and then the really crazy stuff, the Serpent, being shot in a second round of double memories, Ouroboros, and finally the abandoned cold storage place in the Burnout.

She sits silently for the whole story, but her silence continues after I finish, and it grows heavy, and I become afraid to disturb it, afraid that whatever it’s holding back will crush me.

“Well…?” I say.

“You’re really going to make me say it? You heard yourself telling this story and you’re still going to make me say it?”

“Yes. Say it.”

“Cody, you’ve been under an incredible amount of stress recently, and you’ve held up amazingly. Between graduating, losing your fiance,” I see how it hurts her to say this, “losing your old job prospect, landing this new high-stress job, and maybe even me. Maybe even how fast we’ve moved—the fact that you’ve somehow managed to keep up a calm front is unbelievable. But I’ve seen the toll it’s all taken on you. I think I’ve seen the start of all this for awhile now, and I’m so sorry I didn’t say anything.”

I turn to her, can only just see her in the light coming through the cracked door, sitting propped against the headboard, a look of sadness on her face.

“What do you mean? What are you sorry about?”

But is it sorrow for my sad condition, or is she sorry because she’s somehow a part of this. When I mentioned that I discovered what happened to Madison and her face went blank, I thought Janet was hiding her hurt, but was she hiding something else? Did she know about this?

She says, “I mean that you think you went to bed fine and woke up to all this, but this has been coming, I’ve been watching it coming and I didn’t say anything, and I’m sorry.”

I can barely sit there. I can barely look at her looking at me. I want to run.

“What? What did you see coming?”

She hesitates, looks at me, gives me a big, sincere expression. How many people does it take to do something like this? To change the whole world? Is everyone in on it?

“You need to talk to someone,” she says. “You’re confused. Your mind is mixed up, playing tricks on you because it’s been going so hard for so long without a rest. I can barely imagine how hard this has been on you.”

I’m getting double meanings from everything she says, one treacherous, one caring, and I can’t take it anymore. “You have to talk straight. Whatever you’re saying, just say it.”

She closes her eyes. When she opens them again they’re wet and shiny. “This is your only life, Cody. You’re delusional. These delusions made you step out on your job and then run around the most dangerous part of the city. You’re lucky to still be alive. You need help.”

I relax a bit. “So you think I’m crazy. Why didn’t you just come out and say it? You scared me.”

But I’m still scared. The seed of doubt has been planted and I’d thought Janet was on my side, but now I’m not sure.

She looks confused. These are confusing times.

“You think I made all this up, but how do you explain that I recognized everyone at the burn unit?”

“Did you write down this alternate set of memories before hand?”

“No, why?”

“Then if you were delusional, what makes you think you wouldn’t incorporate what you saw into your delusion after the fact?”

She’s right, but I know she’s wrong. I know it. Don’t I?

“So what can I trust?” I ask.

She curls up to me, pulls me down onto the bed, but I stay stiff. “You can trust that I love you, and other people love you, and that you need to talk to a professional to get perspective.”

She lays her cheek on mine, but I can’t feel back. She’s wrong about what I can trust. If I can’t trust what I’ve experienced first hand, how the hell can I trust what other people say? According to this theory, I’m capable of making people up entirely.

Then I remember the phone. I do have proof. I jump up, pull it from my pocket, flip to the pictures of Madison.

“Look,” I say. “That’s her.”

Janet looks at it. “These pictures aren’t very good. Are you sure?”

I cough up something resembling a laugh. “Yes, I’m fucking sure. I’d know her anywhere.”

If she has doubts about this, she keeps them to herself. Well, almost. She has doubts—I can see them all over her face—but she doesn’t speak them.

“How do you know these were taken recently?”

“The files are date stamped.”

“And that couldn’t be changed?”

I’m about to say no, but I hesitate. “I don’t know,” then, “But the tattoos on the backs of her hands. These had to have been taken after she disappeared, because she never had those tattoos.”

“How do you know those are tattoos and not drawings?”

I don’t. “But can’t you see how much older she looks?” I point to the screen. “Look at the lines around her eyes and mouth.”

“It’s blurry. I honestly can’t make out that kind of detail. But even so, she’s only been gone a few months. Doesn’t that make it seem like this maybe isn’t her at all?”

She’s right. I don’t know why I thought that proved my point. I’m so damned tired.

But she’s wrong. This is Madison, and she’s in trouble.

I hold out my hand for the phone. She looks at me for a moment, hesitates for a moment, then puts it in my hand.

“If that’s her, you need to take it to the police. They probably have ways to tell who owned the phone, when it was used, where it was used. You don’t.”

The police have done nothing so far but look at me with suspicion. That’s the best effort they could manage, pursuing “the boyfriend/husband probably did it” angle. Giving them this phone will result in one thing: them scrutinizing me again.

“I guess you’re right,” I say, slipping the phone into my pocket. “I’ll go talk to them in the morning.”

Janet curls up on my chest as I force my muscles to relax. Her hair smells so nice, and in just a few minutes she’s breathing the slow rhythm of sleep, and I’m so, so tired.

* * *

My bladder wakes me up. I look at the clock. A little after six in the morning. The events of the previous day hit me and I’m awake and even though I’m dog-tired I know I won’t be going back to sleep.

At some point in the night Janet rolled off of me to her side of the bed. She’ll probably sleep for another four hours if I can get out of the house without waking her. Having fallen asleep while still fully dressed makes this easier.

This time I take a flashlight.

Outside in my car, I pull out the phone full of Madison’s pictures and flip through them. Janet’s right, in that I’m not equipped to solve this, and yet I think I’m the only one who can. This puzzle has pieces that exist in two different worlds, and I’m the only person who walks in both. The police couldn’t solve this because the police live in a world where the Serpent and Ouroboros don’t even exist.

Talking to Janet didn’t help. It wasn’t right for me to bring her into this last night. Hell, it wasn’t right for me to bring her into this months ago, when I was mourning Madison’s loss and feeling persecuted by everyone who thought me responsible for it.

There’s one person in my life who I felt I could never fully please, and he seems like the only person who can offer me advice right now.

My mom starts work at seven, my dad at eight. If I go right now, I can catch him.

* * *

He opens the door with confusion in his eyes but a real smile on his face. I haven’t come around enough since Madison disappeared.

“Hey, Cody! Is everything okay?” He steps aside and let’s me in, gives me the pat on the shoulder that from him counts as a long hug.

I don’t know what to say. The fact that he asked means that my face is showing my distress more than I realized. This is when I would usually say that everything is okay and switch to a light topic, and I almost reflexively say, “Yeah, fine.” But I’m not here for small talk.

“Things are kind of tough right now,” I say.

“Your mom already left for work, but her shift hasn’t started yet. Do you want me to call her and ask her to come back?”

“No. No, I wanted to talk to you.”

His eyebrows rise. “Okay, well, I was about to eat. You hungry?”

“Not really,” I say as I follow him into the kitchen and sit at the mottled-green Formica table.

“I can tell you need some of this, though. You look like crap.” He grabs a mug and fills it with coffee, sits it in front of me. I mix in sugar and creamer. He drinks his black. I think he can’t possibly enjoy this, but then again I thought that about his penchant for drinking his scotch neat, and now I’ve grown a taste for it. Maybe in ten years I’ll be drinking my coffee black and my scotch neat and nursing a stomach full of ulcers.

“So what’s up?” he asks.

I don’t know how to start. I thought I did, but now everything I thought to say sounds stupid or insane.

Then I realize that the advice I want isn’t about my particular situation. I don’t want to know what he thinks of Ouroboros and the Serpent and all that. What I want to know is what I’ve always wanted to know from him: how to behave like a man.

“Dad, what would you do if mom were in trouble?”

His brow knits, and he sets his piece of toast down. “Is this about your mom?”

“No, it’s about Madison.”

“Have the police discovered something?” He never doubted me. And that means something to me, because unlike my mom, my dad never had any delusions about my ability to do wrong. He saw my fallibility, and he still never for an instant thought I was responsible for Madison’s disappearance.

“No, they haven’t found anything out.”

“They’re useless. Absolutely useless. Do you feel more or less safe when you see a cop? I think that’s the test for a police state, and I think we fail that test pretty badly.” My dad grew up in a different time and was treated differently than I have been.

“I just want to know, what would you do if mom were in trouble.”

“There’s nothing you could have done, Cody.”

“I know, Dad. I’m asking about you.”

“Anything. I would do anything.”

“What if, say, she got in trouble trying to help you?”

He gives me the look again, the look that says that he knows that I’m up to something, and that he’ll figure it out sooner or later. “What is this about?”

“I’ve got all these thoughts spinning around in my head and I can’t seem to find stable ground.” I take a long gulp of coffee that burns my tongue, then stand up. “This was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

“No,” he says. “Sit down. I can only imagine how hard this has all been on you. Okay, if your mom got in trouble trying to keep me out of trouble? I wouldn’t let her.”

“She already did. Would you undo what she’d done to get her out of trouble?”

“I’m having a bit of trouble imagining the scenario, but yes. There’s no way I’d let her take a fall for me.”

“Even if she wanted to? Even if it meant so much to her that she gave everything? Wouldn’t you respect that?”

His eyes turn inward, and I can see him really thinking about the dilemma. “I see what you’re getting at: am I sacrificing for her if it would make her unhappy? Should I let her sacrifice for me? What happens when a couple who would give everything for each other both try to give everything?” He’s silent for a minute. “There was a story I read when I was in high school that stuck with me, a Christmas story where the husband sold his watch to get his wife a hair trinket, and his wife sells her hair to get him a watch band. It’s like that, but without a happy ending.”

“Yeah, I remember that story, too.”

He snorts a short laugh. “So they still have kids read that. To answer your question: I wouldn’t let your mother sacrifice herself for me. From the terms you gave, I have to admit that it would be out of selfishness, that I couldn’t live with myself.” He stops short, looks at me, trying to stare into my brain. “I don’t like giving advice when I don’t know what it’s about. I’m not sure that was the right advice.”

For some reason, the memory of him giving me the stack of burn victim memoirs hits me like a brick. I remember how angry it made me, and looking into his concerned face, all I can feel is ashamed. I’m not the man he is. The words don’t even matter. Who he is, that’s the advice I need.

“Don’t worry, Dad. I just needed some of that parental concern.” I finish my coffee, take the cup to the sink. “Thanks for the coffee.”

He stands, puts an arm around my shoulder and shakes me a bit. “Call us or come around if you need to talk. Your mother misses you.”

I nod. “I will. Have a good one.”

“You too,” he says as I walk out the door.

* * *

It’s weird driving downtown in rush hour traffic, considering I live downtown. It’s not something I usually get to experience.

The drive gives me time to think, time to talk myself out of what I’m about to do. It doesn’t work.

My phone rings. It’s Janet. I let it ring.

By the time I arrive downtown my bank is open. I go in and withdraw five thousand dollars in twenties and fifties. Then I get on a bus and ride it as close to the Burnout as it will take me.

10

Being on the streets of the Burnout during the day is even more surreal than at night. At night, quiet streets are expected. During the day, the lack of people and crumbling buildings give the Burnout the look of a bombed out town that was never reclaimed.

The weird thing is that I find myself feeling safer here than in the neighborhoods that are bad, but inhabitable. Then I look into the shadows of shattered windows and remember why no one lives here, and I walk quickly. When I feel the malice of the place, déjà vu washes over me, and then I remember wandering these streets in my coma, the one that never happened.

I know, now, the sign of the Serpent, and I can spot it if I look hard enough.

The plywood over the windows of an old filling station is marked. The pumps are missing, and as I circle the building looking for an entrance I see that the lids covering the underground gas cistern are also missing.

I find a back door still intact and pull it open on screeching hinges. The smell of piss punches me in the sinuses, and as I pull my flashlight I try and fail to acclimate to the stench.

I find an old bag woman, and I keep the light in her face.

“Are you here for the Serpent?” I ask.

“Yes. I’m ready to go.”

“Do you know where the Serpent lives?”

She doesn’t answer. Her face goes hard. “No.”

“Do you know another place like this? A place they go?”

“No!” Her wrinkled face screws itself up. Saliva glistens in her nearly toothless mouth as she tells me to go fuck myself.

“They won’t want you,” I say. “You’re too old. You have nothing to give them.”

I feel terrible as her face collapses on itself and tears immediately fill her eyes. But this isn’t the time for compassion.

“But I can help you,” I say. “Show me to another place like this and I’ll give you twenty bucks.”

“Fifty,” she says, her eyes glinting even beneath the tears.

“Fifty.”

She moves slowly, muttering to herself as she goes. I want to hurry her along, but I feel she could change her shattered mind at any moment. It feels like I’m asking an old land mine not to explode, and I want to do nothing that might set her off.

Her cart doesn’t help. She gets stuck in areas where the road has crumbled, where pipes have been dug right out of it.

She stops in the middle of the road, and I think that one of her squeaking wheels must have gotten stuck again, but she points to a house, and on the house, hidden in layers of spray paint is the snake swallowing its own tail.

I hand her the promised fifty and go in.

* * *

This is how it goes, hour after hour, bribing, cajoling, threatening. No one will ever admit to knowing where the Serpent lives, but we can all feel its coils sliding around us, its scales rattling.

Once, I’m abandoned in the middle of the street when I look away from my guide. Later, I have to duck into a half-collapsed building to avoid a small band of searchers, my treacherous guide at their head wanting more then the promised hundred dollars, wanting everything I’ve got in my pockets and probably more.

They pass, and I find another sad soul, and I keep going.

I only have to pull my pistol once, but I keep a hand on it the entire time.

The hours pass. I’ve walked miles and gotten nowhere. It reminds me of Ouroboros circular path, only able to move forward and back but always eventually returning to the same point. There’s something there, something in that thought, but my shifty guide, some drug-ravaged junkie, stops before an old shop in a strip of shops and holds out a filthy hand. I give him fifty.

This building is empty. I’ve found them empty many times over the course of the day, but managed to find another Serpent marked building, or a person living like a rodent in a trash heap who knew of another. This time I sit, heaving myself up onto the dusty countertop of what was once a checkout area. As the sun sets, the light is leaving the Burnout to its true self, its dark self. The residents of the shadows will be easier to find as the shadows expand and merge, but I don’t think I’ll want to find them.

I’m so tired.

I take out my phone, turn on the GPS and open a map of the area. I start marking the places claimed by the Serpent, leaving a little virtual pin stuck everywhere I’ve visited over the course of that long day. A pattern begins to emerge almost immediately, and I don’t even have to finish to see where this is leading.

I’ve been going in circles. No wonder it feels like I’ve walked so far. Everyone knows the shortest path is a straight line, and I haven’t taken the straight path from one side to the other once today.

I’ve been wandering the dead core of the city, but been unknowingly avoiding what I suspect is the rottenest cavity of the dead core.

Did they know? Some part of them knew. Even if they weren’t consciously aware, they were skirting an area where even the burnouts of the Burnout don’t dare tread.

I zoom in, and one huge structure dominates the center of my satellite orbiting. It’s the center of many communities.

Maybe you need to go back to school.

Ouroboros and his Serpent cult live in Franklin High School.

11

My exhaustion is washed away by a tidal wave of adrenaline, and I take off in the direction of the school.

The clue, the cute little clue…Ouroboros wants me to find him. The pictures…Now I know what those strange, gleaming metal bars are. Not the bars of a cage. Desk legs. The photos are of Madison sitting on the tiled floor of a classroom, surrounded by the old school desks.

I could have spent weeks wandering within a two block radius of the school the way things were going, but as soon as I see it, I feel its gravity, I know why an orbit around the building is so easy to fall into.

Franklin High School stands three stories, but seems taller. It’s old, not one of the new, sprawling schools that look more like a shopping mall. Franklin High School is three stories and two wings of dark, looming brick.

What better place to house a cult? Leaving alone the social commentary of a school already being a place of indoctrination, the building is made to keep students in and intruders out. The first floor windows are all caged. There’s only one apparent entrance from the front. It’s not marked with the seal of the Serpent, but it doesn’t need to be. The Serpents coils guided me here as surely as they’ve kept others out.

I enter the chain link fence, and the gravity of the building grows as it begins to loom overhead. I have a strong urge to fight its pull, but to where? This is where the answers are. I could turn around and live my made-up existence and try to forget this, but I never could. I could never let it go. I need to know.

So I go on.

I wonder how I’m going to get inside the huge, sturdy-looking metal doors if they’re locked, until a man opens one and waits as I approach. I resist the urge to shove a hand down into my jacket pocket there to find small, false comfort from my heavy little pistol.

The man stands before darkness, and it seems to reach out of the school to envelop him. None of the light of the setting sun reaches him so that I don’t recognize him until I’m twenty yards away. At least I think I recognize the bald man from the night I didn’t get shot by two street punks.

“Are you—?”

“Yeah,” he says, stepping aside to let me in. “He’s been waiting for you.”

“So he did know. How?”

“Some posh mark wanders around the Burnout flashing a stack of cash, and you think that goes unnoticed? You think you’d still be alive if he didn’t want you to be? Do you know what kind of people live here? They could leave, but they don’t. Ask yourself why.”

Any feeling of being streetwise leaves me at this. There are no double memories this time, but Ouroboros saved me today nonetheless. I should probably be dead a dozen times over. The urge to grab my gun hits me hard, and then the recognition of the futility of that urge hits me even harder and I bark out one sharp laugh before I catch myself.

“You think that’s funny?” He turns in disgust and walks away into the darkness, and I only assume I’m supposed to follow.

To the left and right are huge hallways whose walls are broken by doorways every few dozen feet, continuing until darkness swallows the sight and I have to assume they go on forever. Those are the classrooms. Baldy doesn’t lead me into these wings, but straight down the center of this three-story high atrium that bisects the school. Men sit silently back. They don’t chat. They just watch. Men like baldy. The Serpent. They must keep the junkies and bums elsewhere. I think this dismissive thought, reducing human misery to a snide joke, until I remember that Madison is one of those burnouts that they have stored somewhere in here. I consider myself civilized, and it’s that easy for me to reduce suffering people to less than human. So how easy is it for men like these?

The walls are lined with wood and glass cases in various states of wreckage. The air is thick with dust and mold, though I can’t see it for the darkness, which our footsteps echo up into.

Because it’s dark and because of the debris, I watch the floor as we go. A few yards ahead of me, the floor shifts, slides...slithers. For a moment I feel dizzy, as if everything sturdy in the world has gone limp.

“What the fuck was that?” I ask in a voice I’d prefer not to have let this dangerous man hear.

“A snake. A big one.”

I freeze at that. Baldy walks on a few steps without me, then stops and looks back. With a smirk he says, “You come looking for the Serpent when you’re afraid of snakes?”

“Who isn’t afraid of snakes? Why are they here? Are you keeping up some sort of fucking theme?”

He laughs at this, looks at me like maybe I’m not quite as dumb as he thought. Nearly, but not quite. “They were here before me, but from what I understand, this building used to have a rat problem.”

Glancing around the place, it’s not hard to imagine.

“People showed up. Their trash piled up. The rats poured in from blocks around. Somebody brought in some cats. The rats ate the cats. Someone suggested dogs, like terriers. Ratters. Ouroboros, he doesn’t like dogs. So some freak brought in a few snakes, and they got the rats under control.”

“Shouldn’t they have moved on afterward?” I ask, as if maybe the snakes will hear me and clear out once they realize how illogical they’re being.

“Yeah, they should have. But they didn’t. They started pouring in like the rats did before. No one knows why.” His expression hardens again. “Question time over. Let’s go.”

But we don’t go more than twenty feet before he points up at the wall. There’s little light, but I clearly see the school seal, a big, round placard. I wonder why he’s calling attention to it, until I see what encircles the seal.

An enormous, serpentine skeleton, its bony tail in its mouth. The thing must be ten feet long.

“That was Leviathan. He was Ouroboros favorite,” he says with a smile before moving casually on.

I pray Leviathan was unique in his size, that like the dinosaurs, his progeny have diminished.

As we pass the men sitting beside battery-powered lanterns, I stop watching the floor for snakes for long enough to finally get a look at the members of this brotherhood of the Serpent. I expected something else of a secret society, something more postured, civilized, impressive. The men are well-fed, but otherwise fit their blasted environment, looking like refugees squatting in wreckage. They’re dirty, so that their eyes stand out large and glistening in the lamplight as they track me. Many have shaved heads, but what I took for some cultish denigration or monk-like casting off of the worldly I suspect may be a way to prevent lice.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

Baldy looks at me like I’m the world’s biggest idiot before saying, “This is where he lives.”

“But you, why are you here?”

“Some people he helps immediately. The stronger of us, though, he makes wait. We serve him until he agrees to help us.”

“What help could you need so badly?”

“None of your fucking business,” he says without even a glance back.

We approach an end to the atrium, the school office. I follow baldy up to what was once a glass wall. Beyond it stands a long counter where the school secretaries would have helped students and parents.

Oh God, Ouroboros has settled into the principal’s office? What a joke.

But we don’t step into the administrative section. Instead we turn and approach a metal door marked MAINTENANCE. Beside it stands a man with a shotgun. He stiffens, recognizes Baldy, or maybe both of us, and opens the door. We walk through a room lined with shelves stocked with moldering cleaning supplies. We pass an industrial sink, turn a corner, and another man with a shotgun looks us over before waving us forward.

I follow baldy, but the guard stops him, gestures to me and says, “Just him.”

“That’s not safe. He never—”

“It’s what he wants.”

Baldy steps aside, shaking his head and giving me a glare as I pass him. When the man with the gun makes way for me, I see that the door he stood before is also marked with a sign.

BASEMENT.

As the guard opens the door and cool, musty air rolls out of the door, I’m surprised by how much I want baldy to continue escorting me. I don’t want to go into that darkness alone. In the face of that prospect, this man is suddenly my friend. Maybe that’s all friendship is.

My musing is cut short as I’m ushered through the door and down onto the first dark step, and every rational thought leaves me as the metal door clangs shut. It bumps me in the back, and I have to grab the metal rail bolted into the concrete wall to keep from falling. I turn and grab the door knob, and despite the fact that I searched this out I think I would go back if a man with a gun weren’t blocking my way.

My lungs suck in only the shallowest breaths of the sour air. I slow them. Deepen them. Take in my surroundings. My eyes begin to adjust. There’s more light than I first thought, and I begin to descend the stairs. Halfway down, the right wall stops and opens up into the basement. I’m about to peek around the corner when I hear a noise behind me and turn.

The door is still shut, but I hear a distinct rustling and a very light, dry slapping. Then I notice a semi-circle of light at the bottom of the door, now at eye level, the shape of a mouse hole but dark in the center. As I watch, the darkness in the center diminishes.

Then I see it. Someone had cut a hole in the door. The light came from the maintenance room beyond. The shrinking darkness was the narrowing body of an enormous snake as it slithered through to join me on the staircase.

Seemingly on their own, my legs attempt to run down the remaining stairs, but I’m turned sideways and my legs twist around each other and I fall. Somehow I manage to only tumble head over heels once, and slide after that, and come to rest on my hands and knees on the concrete floor. There’s no thought of checking myself over for injury. The snake is still coming. I try to push myself to my feet and stumble, and so start scrambling across the floor on all fours as I look back over my shoulder, waiting for the creature to emerge.

Then my hand presses down hard on something firm, but not nearly as firm as concrete, and it moves quickly away, sliding over my other hand. I try to scurry back and my feet bump something else that also slides away on its own.

I look around the floor to discover that I’m surrounded by snakes, big and small, coiled and writhing, and I shriek. I don’t bellow. I don’t roar. I let out a high-pitched, ear-piercing shriek of pure terror.

“You should stand up.”

I take the suggestion and try again to get to my feet. This time my leg—though tingling with thousands of pins and needles as if the smack against concrete knocked its nerve signal to static—almost holds. My ankle rolls, but I take another step onto another angry snake and manage to keep my feet.

Around me, the once quiet snakes roil. I don’t know how to interpret the writhing of these ancient creatures. They might be scared, or angry, or acting purely on instinct.

They brush my ankles, and of the conflicting instincts to flee and freeze, I settle on the latter. I haven’t been bitten yet, so I risk a glance up.

Surrounded by agitated snakes, illuminated by a single battery-powered lantern, a hospital bed dominates the center of the otherwise empty basement. A shriveled man lays in it, one hand dangling off the side, holding the hand of someone sitting beside him. His flat eyes watch me.

“You’re Ouroboros?”

“Yes. And you’re Cody Miller. You don’t know me, but I know you very well.” I expected an old man’s voice. He doesn’t sound much older than me, though very tired.

I still haven’t been bitten, and the snakes seem to be settling. As some of the adrenaline drains from my system and the blackness recedes from the edges of my vision, I look around the basement. This is a central area, with a dark tunnel leading farther back and several steel doors set into cinderblock walls.

But aside from the snakes, Ouroboros and whoever sits beside him, the room is empty. I can’t believe there are no armed guards. Sitting in the shadow of the big, metal-framed hospital bed, I can’t make out much of the person beside him, but they don’t seem poised for action.

As Ouroboros sees my eyes stray in that direction, trying to find the person’s features in the darkness, he says, “This is who you’ve been searching for.”

Madison stands up.

She looks at me glassy-eyed and out of it, but says, “Cody,” and smiles.

I pull my gun. I don’t know how we’re getting out of here—through one of those doors or down that tunnel, maybe back up the stairs with my arm wrapped around Ouroboros’ neck and my pistol in his back—but we’re getting out of here.

And then there’s no gun in my hand, and I’m standing about a foot farther into the room than I just was. I drop to the ground gripping my head. My skull feels like a water balloon held to the spigot too long. My brain feels like it’s trying to squirt out my ears as new memories, double memories rush in.

I’m not holding the gun because I never brought it in. Baldy met me at the front door, had me hold out my arms, patted me down, took the revolver daintily between his index finger and thumb, and said, “He said you’d have a gun, not a Nerf toy,” as he slipped it into his pocket.

He said you’d have a gun.

“You remember, don’t you?” he says.

“How did you do that?”

“Tell me what you remember, and I’ll tell you.”

My brain makes space for the new memories, rearranges itself, and the pain and nausea subside. I’m wobbly, but I force myself to my feet, away from the snakes.

“I had a gun.”

“Yes, I had them take it from you at the door,” he says, but his voice is strange, especially for the environment. It contains a tone I hadn’t previously found here in the Burnout: hopefulness.

“No, I had a gun in here, just a moment ago. And I didn’t.”

He makes a strange, sharp, rhythmic sound, and at first I think something is wrong. Then I realize that he’s laughing. “You’re the one. You’re the one I’ve been hoping for.”

I don’t understand, and I don’t know where to begin asking questions that might bring answers that would make me understand.

“Madison, are you okay?”

“Yes. I’m so glad you’re here.” But she doesn’t sound okay. She sounds lobotomized.

I walk toward her, picking my way through the nest, circling the bed.

“Stop,” Ouroboros says.

I stop, expecting to hit the floor again, to feel that head-splitting pain again. For everything to have changed again.

“No closer,” he says.

But I can see her better from here. It’s Maddy, but it’s the Maddy from the photos. She’s too old, too worn for only a few months to have passed.

I’m frozen to the moment, my brain unable to move past the strangeness.

But Ouroboros remembers our bargain, and begins to explain how he performs his trick.

“After you were burned,” he asks, “did you think about the moment right before, the moment when you could have done something differently?”

“What does that have to do with—”

“It has everything to do with it.”

His tone, surprisingly sharp, snaps me back to reality. His eyes are flat. He shifts in his sheets, coiling. He’s eager, beyond eager, but for what? What could he possibly want from me? “Yes, I thought about it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.” Obsessing about it. Dreaming about it.

“From that point, did you imagine a different life? Was it so vivid it could have been real?”

“Yes.”

“And you wanted to stay there, but you couldn’t. Eventually, you had to return to your real life, the one where that moment happened as it happened, where you didn’t flip the burner off.”

“Yes.” My head spins. I expected him to know the details of my accident, but not my thoughts. “How do you know that?”

“Because I lived it, too. When I was a teenager I was in a bad bicycle accident. A pickup truck hit me, rolled over me, mangled me. I was in a coma for a week, and even when I came back I kept slipping away again and again. And when I did, I dreamed. I dreamed that I waited for that pickup that should have seen me but didn’t. It raced by, never having checked right before turning, but it didn’t matter, because I’d noticed and sat and waited for him to go, then continued home, ate a snack, watched TV, ate dinner, did homework, went to school the next day…Lived my life. Many times I imagined this, dreamed this, lived it in comatose unconsciousness, but I’d feel a pull. The farther I went, the harder it was to hold it all together, to drag myself one step further, to live one second longer in a life that would never happen. Eventually I’d find myself back in that hospital bed. Until one time, I didn’t. One time, months later, I woke up in my own bed at home, and that other life I had imagined, the one where I changed that one little moment, it was my real life. The other had just been some strange delusion.

“Except that then I did it again, because after I did it once, I could do it over again. And I did. But Cody, how old do you think I am?”

My brain spins in my head like a carnival ride, and I wish for nothing more than to sit down.

“Seventy-five? Eighty?”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“The fuck you are.”

That noise again, wind whistling through a sun-bleached rib cage. “I made a mistake. I lived my few years over again. I’d jump back in as soon as I returned to the moment, trying to do everything perfectly and imagining that I’d figured out how to cheat death and that I would live forever. But the age of the body catches up with the age of the soul.

“Then I realized I could travel back in others, hide in their minds, and though I aged some, not nearly as much as before.”

“You drained her. You’re some kind of—vampire?”

“They have to let me in. I can’t force my way into their minds. So I give them something in return. I fix their pasts for them. I find people whose mistakes have already ruined them. They’re already throwing their lives away in an attempt just to forget their mistakes. We both get what we need.”

“So that’s how you justify it to yourself?”

“When she came to me she was hooked on heroin and had no thought of cleaning up. How many elderly heroin addicts do you see? Now she’s happy.”

I look at her. She does look happy, but it’s a stupid happiness.

“Why did you do it?” I ask her. “You could have just come back to me. That’s all I needed.”

Confusion fills her face, and she looks to Ouroboros.

“She doesn’t remember, Cody. Neither should you. But you got too close to death. You saw what I saw. And now you’re like me. Maybe there’s something else to it, some mutation. Maybe we’re the next evolutionary step. But the catalyst was your coma. Your life balanced on a razors edge, and somehow, despite yourself, you tilted towards life. You almost managed what I did. Imagine if you had, if you’d pressed forward one more step and that old reality snapped, leaving you unburned, leaving Maddy happy. I can give that to you.”

“So what? You take over my mind?”

“No. It only takes some nudging.”

I gesture at Maddy. “If all you do is nudge, how do they end up like this?”

He looks at her, licks his lips, looks back with flat, unapologetic eyes. “I nest in their minds. Even a cozy nest requires space.”

“And they agree to this?” I can’t keep the disdain out of my voice.

“You never heard of the Serpent before, did you?”

“No. I can’t believe all this goes on and no one notices.”

“It goes unnoticed because the people who find me are no longer among the living. They’re looking for death. I’m their alternative. I give them the opportunity to live the lives they should have. Yes, they eventually die, but we all do.”

I look at him in his hospital bed, propped up because he can’t hold himself up.

“Even you,” I say.

“I thought even me.”

“How many years have you lived, altogether?”

“A thousand. More. But it’s taken its toll.”

The thought staggers me. He’s lived it over the same—what?—fifty years? But a thousand years. A thousand years.

“That’s not enough?”

That horrible laughter. “It’s never enough. There’s so much more to see.”

“How am I the answer?”

“I think that from inside you, I can continue on as Ouroboros, I can—”

“What’s your real name? I can’t call you that.” These other people hold him in high reverence. To them he’s a god, but I know the truth. He’s just a freak of nature. A mistake.

“If you had lived a hundred lives over a thousand years, what would you call yourself? Would you remember who you were? Do you really think you’d be the same person?”

And that’s the falsehood I’d sensed. He impressed me at first like he did the others. Then he told me his story and revealed himself to be an eternal, spoiled child. But he’s not even that. Yes, this might have begun as theater, all this symbolism. But he’s changed. Profoundly. And I don’t think he understands the extent. The human mind isn’t meant to stretch as his has, as he wants mine to.

He has become Ouroboros. He has become self-sufficient, his own end leading to his beginning. He’s no longer one of us.

“You think you can continue this from inside me, then?”

“Yes. You are different, in the same way I am.”

No. I’m not. I could be. I might have been going down that path. I’m a selfish person. I’ve always admitted it. But now I see the end result. For all his work to inspire fear, the greatest fear I have isn’t one he intentionally fostered: I fear that I could have become him.

“So you’d abandon your body. Build a permanent nest in me.”

He looks at me with his flat eyes, tries to read me.

I should be afraid. Look at him. He’s a force of nature made conscious, and that consciousness is focused on weak, little me. But I have a plan. I just can’t let him know that I do.

He nods. He’s too far above me to have to worry about my intentions. They’ll turn out as useful as my little pistol.

“You’re telling me all this because there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“That’s right. But you have to be willing. You had to come to me.” His expression changes, becomes a mask of empathy. “You know, you surprised me, Cody.”

“How’s that?”

“I’ve watched you. Inside her, I watched you. I know you. You know the reason I didn’t have my man bring you to me from the cold storage warehouse?”

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t think you were capable of what brings people to me.”

“And what’s that?”

“Guilt. I saw what happened. From inside her brain, I saw. You made her feel it was her fault. You—”

“I never said that! Never!”

“You didn’t have to. In all those emails and texts, you never once told her otherwise, though you knew it was killing her. So she gave herself for you. Will you do the same?”

He’s right. Goddamn it, he’s right. I could never bring myself to say that it was my fault, that I should have paid better attention. No wonder she couldn’t bring herself to come back to me.

“You’ll still be there,” he says. “Some part of you will be there, and Madison will be able to live her life. She was always better than you. This isn’t fair, and you know it.”

I do know it.

“I need to talk to her alone,” I say.

He nods, says in a surprisingly loud voice, “Bring the other!”

The man with the gun ushers through another wasted wreck of a human down the stairs before him. He walks dreamily to the bed, takes the old wretch’s hand. Ouroboros releases Madison.

She stands, smiles, comes to me with her arms outstretched, stepping over snakes as if she doesn’t even see them anymore.

I squeeze her close and she wraps her arms over my neck like she used to.

It’s her, but it’s not her. My heart sinks into my guts and I can barely breathe.

“Come on,” the man with the gun says.

Holding hands, we follow him farther into a basement. The corridor eventually opens up into another chamber, one full of old school desks. He hands me a lantern and leaves us.

I don’t see any snakes. Somehow, they know they belong with Ouroboros.

I lead Madison to a desk. She sits, and I slide another beside hers. It bothers me how compliant she is, that she makes no move without me, but follows me. She was always a tough cookie, and it alleviated some of the fear I felt for her, being such a small, pretty girl. But now she’s all compliance. I don’t want to think about what could have happened to her since this started.

Her dark hair is matted, and her usually blunt bangs cut ragged, I imagine by some classroom scissors. She looks at me, and I can see an echo of the love she used to feel.

No, that’s not fair. I can see that she still loves me, feel it in the way she holds my hands. But before it was backed by such ferocious intelligence. I felt like I’d somehow passed a tough test, being found still deserving by her. Now she’s different.

She’s so blank.

A tear slides down my cheek, and then another. I take a hand away from her to wipe my face.

“Why are you sad?” she asks.

“Seeing you like this.”

“I don’t understand. Aren’t you happy to see me? I missed you.”

“Yes, I’m so happy to see you. Why didn’t you come to me?”

“I couldn’t. I can’t leave him.”

“Do they lock you up?”

“No. I can’t explain it.”

“Why did you come here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You were at your parents’ party, and you just walked out and drove away. You don’t remember why?”

“To come here.”

“But why come here?”

I see how hard she’s thinking, how confusing this question is for her. The part of her brain that brought her here is gone now, back inside Ouroboros, and she’s left without any answer.

“But you love me still?” I ask.

“Yes, of course,” she says. Her eyes refocus, ending their search for the missing part of herself and landing on me with such conviction it almost looks like anger. “You don’t think I do?”

“I know you do,” I say, pulling her close to me, where I can forget the thinness of her lips and the wrinkles in the corners of her eyes and the hair going white at the scalp and I can feel that it’s really Madison.

She squeezes me, breathes contentedly into the crook of my neck.

If I could have let go of my useless anger in that other life, this wouldn’t have happened. I keep thinking of the moment at the fryer as the chance I had to change my life, but I had another one, one that I didn’t have to look back on and wish about. One that didn’t require the freak ability that turned Ouroboros into an inhuman monster. I could have let go of my anger, seen it wasn’t going to change anything. Change anything for the better at least. It changed plenty for the worse.

If only I’d told her it wasn’t her fault. If only I’d been a better person.

I keep getting do-overs, and I keep letting them slip away.

If I do this, though, it won’t be for this Madison. It will be for another Madison, one I’ll never see, in a universe I’ll never really live in. It will be for a Madison who never fell back into drugs, who’ll never know what I gave for her.

She fits so perfectly in my arms. I hadn’t forgotten, but I’d almost forgotten.

There are so many things I want to say to her, but they would only confuse her. So I don’t tell her that the worst part of being burned was her not being there. I don’t tell her that the world will be better off having her rather than me, because she’s special and I’m a stock item. Yeah, a high-quality stock item, but not unique. Not like her. I don’t tell her that she’ll be fine without me, but that I never could have done without her, neither burned and living in my parents’ house nor healthy and working my dream job. But she’ll be fine. She’ll be fine.

I don’t say these things. Instead, I walk hand-in-hand with her back to the Devil’s lair to strike my bargain.

“I’ll do it. After this, you’ll leave Maddy alone?”

“Of course. You’re the one I want.” Then to the gunman still standing at the foot of the stairs. “Bring the injection.”

The man leaves, and I say, “Injection? What the hell is this?”

“You were in a coma when you got close to breaking through. Think of this as another medically-induced coma.”

I don’t know why this bothers me so much at this point, considering what I’ve agreed to do and what I have planned. Still, I ask, “What is it?”

“A cocktail. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t do anything to risk hurting you.” He turns to Maddy. “You can go.”

“No,” I say.

She stutters, moves one way, then the other. I understand the hold he has on her, but I remember my old Maddy and I can’t believe it.

He says, “You can stay,” and her near-fit ends.

The man returns with a little leather case. He sits me in the one chair and ties my arm off. I hold Maddy’s small hand as he injects me.

There’s a moment where gravity loosens, a moment of swimming, a moment of…

BOOK III

The last couple sits engrossed in conversation across the small table, his left hand and her right touching in the center. They’re middle-aged and dressed nicely, too nicely for the restaurant. It’s probably their anniversary. You have to find it a bit sweet, people that age still in love.

Hovering just out of sight, my head swims as I realize that I’m back. I look to the kitchen door, to what I know happened, happens, whatever, just beyond. Bullets of sweat bead my forehead. I wipe them away.

He can hear my thoughts. I look for him, think I can maybe feel him, but if he’s there, he’s still small. Not if. He is there. I can’t start thinking that way. If I think I got away clean, I might—

He can hear my thoughts. Stop thinking.

Janet waves me over. She’s a tall, waifish blonde, the sort you’d expect to see as a hostess until she drops the facade and reveals herself to be a foulmouthed townie, which is probably why she’s the hostess of Pajino’s—the Italian equivalent of Applebee’s—instead of a fancier establishment.

She’s more than that. She puts a facade over the foulmouthed townie which is a facade itself, a defense mechanism to keep people at a distance because she cares too much too easily.

“Cody, are you okay? You got sort of woozy looking,” she says.

“Yeah, I’m okay. It’s just been a long day, I guess.”

“Okay, then let’s try to cut it short. Hustle them out of here.”

“What do you expect me to do? Tell them to leave? That wouldn’t go over well.” My lines come easier than I expect. I wasn’t in this moment a moment ago. I shouldn’t be able to pick this up. But a part of me was here a moment ago, and the two halves are both operating at the same time. Most people don’t remember what I’m remembering. They fall right back into the moment. That’s what he wants with me, and why—

Stop.

“Just loom over them. Look black. Blacker. That type, they’re terrified of ethnics.”

I shake my head in disbelief. This isn’t her. It’s really making me sad. “It’s unbelievable the things that come out of your mouth.”

“No, what you wouldn’t believe is what I’ll put in my mouth.”

I remember this conversation perfectly, or rather, it’s coming together exactly as my memory says it should, but I cut it short. I don’t have the heart for it. She waits expectantly for the loaded banter, the ironic flirtation that has become our standard mode of interaction, but I just look at the ground.

“Are you okay?” she asks again, but then the man puts cash in the black vinyl bill presenter and she pushes me toward the table and hisses, “Like the wind.”

He’s barely closed the cover when I take it and say, “I’ll be right back with your change.”

The couple’s eyes clear, gain focus on the rest of the world as I burst the little bubble that surrounded their table and they notice for the first time that the other tables are unoccupied

“Not necessary. That’s for you.”

“Thank you very much, sir. You two have a great night.”

Given thirty years, Madison and I might have become them.

Within a minute they’re out the door, which Janet locks behind them, saying, “Jesus Christ. Assholes think I don’t have anywhere to be on a fucking Friday night?”

I thought you were being ruder than usual. What have you got going on? jumps into my mind and almost out of my mouth before I can stop it. I literally open my mouth and shut it, then think carefully about what I’m going to say.

Janet has one eyebrow raised, expecting a zinger, and with an expression that says it better be a good one for taking this long.

“You’re a really good friend.”

She waits for a moment, expecting a punchline, then says, “What?”

“You’re a good person, and I think you should let more people see it. Not everyone, maybe. Most people don’t deserve it. But…” My face starts to burn. “I don’t know.”

“That makes two of us,” she says, but I can see through the wariness, confusion and tough front that she’s touched. Hopefully, after the rest clears, she’ll understand what I meant.

I look into her face, think back to what a wreck I was when Madison walked away from that party for no reason, when everyone looked at me with suspicion. Maybe we were just using each other, but I don’t think so. Not on her part, at least.

Why am I getting so sentimental? I have months before I need to return to the Burnout. If I want to spend them with Janet instead of Madison, I can.

Vertigo rocks me as contradictory thoughts fill my brain. I’m not going back to the Burnout, I’m going to the fryer.

Then I understand. I didn’t think that thought. He did, with my mind, and he got out of me the information he wanted. Now let’s see what he can do about it.

“Maybe you should skip the country club party tonight. You really don’t look good.”

“Thanks,” I say.

“No, I didn’t mean it that way. I meant that you’re hideously ugly.”

I wrap my arms around her. She hesitates a moment, then squeezes me back.

The life we had, the one where I used her as a stand-in for Madison, it wasn’t good for her. She’ll be better off without me, too.

“What was that about? You’re freaking me out.”

“Looks like there’s nothing to do out here,” I say, gesturing to the front house staff vacuuming and wiping down. “I’m headed for the kitchen.”

Through those double doors. The vertigo hits me again, déjà vu. I’ve done this a hundred times. A thousand. In my dreams. In my wishes. But this time, when I flip the switch off, it’ll be for good. I’ll walk away unburned and I’ll stay that way.

I know that’s not my thought, and you know that’s not how this is going down, you bastard.

So why don’t you tell me what is going down?

This thought finally isn’t in my voice. It’s Ouroboros. This is how he controls people. They think his thoughts are their own.

That’s how it works at first. Later on, once I’ve cored you out I’ll wear you like a flesh suit. Now what are you doing?

Steam heat has me sweating immediately in my itchy, polyester Pajino’s polo shirt.

“What do you need?” I ask loudly to be heard over the running water and clattering pots and pans. I swear the dishwasher must moonlight as a drummer in a death metal band.

“Dump and scrape the pressure fryer?” George says. He always talked to us front house people in questions. He wasn’t accustomed to this mingling of duties. But the manager of Pajino’s started as a dishwasher, and until everyone was ready to leave, no one got to leave.

You can’t resist for long.

You know I’m different from the others. They didn’t remember the deal they made. They didn’t know you’d dug in like a disgusting little tick. I do. You have no idea if you can take over someone who’s resisting you, do you? I’ve seen you. You’re sad and frail and pathetic. You can’t take me.

I am Ouroboros. I encompass my own beginning and end. I have lived for thousands of years. I will rip your mind apart.

I roll the grease pump into place beneath the pressure fryer just as my phone buzzes again.

As I twist the valve to release the hot oil with one hand, I take my phone from my pocket with the other. A few drops of oil splatter on me and I curse, and I remember what it feels like to burn. It makes my hands shake, the memories.

I calm myself, take a deep breath, glance at the text. It’s from Madison, of course, and reads, Aren’t you done yet?

I can feel Ouroboros spin inside my head at the text, at the reminder of why I made this deal, and I know what’s coming. Even if you’re right, you have to sleep. And when you do, I’ll take over. I’ll kill everyone you care about. I’ll spill that bitch’s guts with your hands. So do what you agreed to do.

I guess that’s what I needed to hear. I needed one more reason, one confirmation that this is the only way. Because it’s a goddamn horrible way.

I call Madison back instead of continuing the text argument I remember having.

“Are you out of there yet?” she asks immediately.

“I’m almost out of here. Babe, I love you. I love you so much.”

There’s a moment of silence as she switches gears from the passive aggressive argument I know we’ve been having all evening about whether or not I can leave early. “I love you too, Cody.”

“I know you do. I’m going to turn my phone off now so that I can concentrate. See you soon.” I hang up and shut the phone off before she can say anything else. I heard what I needed to hear. I don’t like that the last thing I said to her is a lie.

But maybe it’s not. Everything that’s happened seems too confusing to draw a meaning from, but if there is one, it’s that existence is more complex than I thought, that time is more flexible, that the human spirit can stretch the boundaries of the physical, and that maybe there’s something after this. Maybe I will see her again. I don’t know if I’ll get to the Heaven I never once considered a reality until this moment, but maybe I’ll see her again.

Heaven? Don’t be stupid. We can work something out.

Glancing over at the fryer, I see that the oil has all drained, exposing the accumulation of a thick crust of concrete-hard fried flour deposited on its insides. It can only be removed with the vigorous application of a paint scraper, which I grab. At this point, my phone would ring if it were on. It’s not.

“Hey guys, I’m not on the phone or distracted!” I shout loud enough to be heard over the din of a busy kitchen.

The clanging and talking stops as everyone stares at me in silence.

“That’s good, Cody. Thanks for the update,” George says, and everyone goes back to what they were doing.

I lean into the fryer to scrape.

Damn, I almost forgot to flip the fryer off again.

No, Ouroboros. I didn’t forget.

My knees go weak as it feels like someone turned on a garbage disposal in my head and dull, roaring blades are chopping through my gray matter.

And I find my left hand has crept down toward the switch, and I yank it back.

He can take control, and he’ll take it soon.

Cody, this is insane. We can make a deal.

I wish we could. I smell the coils heating up now that there’s no oil to draw away the heat, and I really, really wish we could. But I’m not going to live as the brain-dead husk of a parasite that has already sucked the life out of hundreds of people.

And you threatened Maddy.

I didn’t mean it, Cody, just hear me out.

My knees buckle, and I have to prop myself on the sides of the fryer until I can regain control of them. I feel him slithering through my brain, taking parts as his own. It was stupid pride that I didn’t think he could do this so fast. This is how he’s spent his thousand years.

This wasn’t the deal!

I had to get Maddy out, but I never intended to live as your puppet.

This isn’t you. I saw you, over and over as I lived Madison’s life. This isn’t you. You set up your future meticulously. Think of your future.

This isn’t me. I could have a great life still, the life I planned for so long.

I don’t know if that thought was mine or not. I won’t see her live her life. I won’t see her grow old. I won’t see what she becomes.

But I want to give her that chance. Now I know. This isn’t me? No, this isn’t who I used to be. Thank you, Ouroboros, for giving me this second chance.

There’s an acrid smell as the thin layer of oil on the coil nears its ignition point.

This won’t stop me. I’ll just go back to my own body. It’s a pointless, painful gesture.

No. You die with me. We both know that. All this horror ends here.

I’m gripping the sides of the fryer hard as my brain and body revolts. I’m shrinking inside myself, falling down a hole. I feel chunks being sliced away. But he’s too late. Is it too late for me, though? I don’t want to burn. I don’t. I don’t.

I hold fast.

This was my first lesson in the malleability of time. I think back to the first time I learned that suffering is the path to immortality, how Hell can be contained entirely in one moment. They’ll say later that I couldn’t have seen this, that I imagined it, dreamed it in my coma.

No, this time there won’t be a later. They said if I’d sustained any damage to my lungs, I wouldn’t have survived.

They said I couldn’t have seen this, that it would have happened too fast, but I see the spark spit into life on the heating element.

Ouroboros has given up on words and thrashes inside my skull, trying to wrench away control of my body. I hold fast, and leaning into the fryer up to my waist, I watch the spark turn into a tiny flame, travel the coils, leap to the walls. I watch the cauldron fill with unfurling petals of red, orange and yellow. I watch it swirl and dance as it rises, new gases igniting, buffeting the flame back and forth, my unfuture a blossoming flower in the wind.

This time, though, I know to search for a pattern in the chaos, and I find it. I find Madison and my fear dissolves as calmness washes through me. Not long ago, I thought the world only fuel for flame. Flame can’t touch what matters. Then I thought the world food for the primal serpent. The serpent quakes inside me. The world is Madison. I see her big, searching eyes, her little knowing smirk. I see her portrait in flames, and I’m going to her. I’m breathing her in.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alan Ryker is the product of a good, clean country upbringing. Though he now lives with his wife in the suburbs of Kansas City, the sun-bleached prairie still haunts his fiction.

His first DarkFuse release, The Hoard, was published in November 2012.

You can visit his website at: www.alanryker.com.

JOIN THE KINDLE CLUB

The premier dark fiction book club for your Kindle!

Get 5 free titles on joining, then an original newly-released novel and 2 new novellas delivered each month right to your Kindle from Amazon.

All for less than $60 per year!

http://www.darkfuse.com/book_club

Table of Contents

Prologue

Book I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Book II

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Book III

About the Author

Join the Kindle Club