The Age of Calamities
Author: Senaa Ahmad
Date: 2026-01-13 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Historical; Fantasy; Horror; Science Fiction; Anthologies
Description: For fans of Karen Russell and Carmen Maria Machado,The Age of Calamities is a genre-defying, mind-bending collection of absurdist, funny, and speculative short stories. In this bold and enchanting collection Senaa Ahmad takes license with history and its players, sending the reader on a thrilling ride. In “Let’s Play Dead,” Henry VIII wants Anne Boleyn gone, but there’s a tiny problem―she keeps coming back to life no matter what he does. “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” hurls readers back to 1945, where they assume the role of a technician for the Manhattan Project, surrounded by labyrinthine path
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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LET’S PLAY DEAD

There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky, because it’s such a mean thing to do.

Let’s make it so she can’t escape. Just for fun.

Let’s seal the bottle, and shake it, and shake until our hands fall off.

IT TAKES TWO swings to cut off her head. Everyone does their best to pretend that the first one didn’t happen. In the awkward silence afterward, the swordsman says something about mercy or justice, a strangely fervent soliloquy in French that might have made Anne herself emotional, but it’s a touch long-winded, and no one’s paying him any attention. And she’s dead, so it’s especially beside the point.

The ministers dither in the courtyard, venturing their last looks, murmuring, Exquisite, just exquisite. She is so beautiful, they agree, even beheaded.

Henry will return to the body later, when everyone’s gone and what’s left of her has been moved to the chapel. He’ll stand on the threshold, halfway between one momentous decision and the next. He’ll find it in himself at last to enter, to kneel on the dais beside her severed head and lay one rubied hand along her frigid cheekbone.

Maybe he stays five minutes, or thirty-five. Maybe he’ll cry softly, but it doesn’t matter, because no one ever commissions an oil painting of this moment for the textbooks. And it doesn’t matter because she’s dead. She’s still very, very dead.

He will leave as furtively as he came, wiping his hand on his smock. Anne’s headless body and bodiless head will be left to their own devices, her blood blackening, thickening on the ground, the gristle of her neck tougher with every minute. The clock ticks. Night falls.

It is her head that moves first. It says, “Is he gone?”

Her body spasms, maybe a shrug, or maybe just a reflex.

Her head opens its eyes and looks this way, that way. It says, “It’s over? It really worked?”

WE DON’T NEED to linger while her body crawls its way to her head and fits itself back together. Every excruciating inch of the stone floor is a personal coup, and every inch lasts the whole span of human history. It is slow. It is clumsy. The head falls off a couple of times. The body is floppy with atrophy. There is a lot of blood. She probably, definitely cries. It does not befit a queen.

HE’S READING THE Saturday paper, still in his shirtsleeves, when she breezes in the next morning. The horizon of the paper lowers to the bridge of his nose. He is a man who wears his tension in the way of a beautifully tuned piano, and in this moment he vibrates at a bewildered middle octave.

“Anne,” he says, at an absolute loss.

“Henry,” she says, the picture of politeness.

She sits at the table. Not a hair out of place, not a leaky vein in sight. She butters her toast in two deft strokes. A servant steps out from the shadows to fill her teacup to the brim. It’s all very serene, domestic. If it takes her a few tries to put her toast back on the plate, or if he dabs his napkin with a little extra violence, well, who can say.

She slurps her tea, which they both know he hates. He hoists his newspaper back up. Like this, they go on.

OF COURSE SHE knows what comes next. Let’s not fib.

She is seized from her bed some weeks later, in a state of drowsy dishabille, the wardens bristling with royal braid. This night will have the consistency of a dream. The palace swims in sound and darkness. The youngest warden, the boy or man who grips her arm with one rubbery fist and studiously avoids her gaze, reminds her of the sons she has lost in the womb. She wants to tell him, Don’t worry, the thing you’re afraid of, the girl, the job, the rising cost of real estate in London, it will all work out someday—you’ll see, it all comes to pass, but he’s leading her to her death, so it seems a bit impolite.

The cooks are baking down in the kitchen. The yeasty comfort of this aroma, which reminds her of the seam of volcanic heat that escapes when she cracks a fresh loaf, of a day opening beneath her, is too much. She shuts her nostrils. Her silk nightgown flaps at her ankles. When she can, she reaches out and touches the walls, the radiators, the edges of doorframes. Reminding herself that she is here, now, she is alive, that this dream is all too real. She can’t falter yet. There’s work to do.

A gibbet stands in the courtyard beneath a lonesome moon. They thread the noose around her neck with genteel care, snugly, even though the youngest one quakes every time his skin makes contact with hers. Up in the turret window, she sees Henry watching at a distance, as he does best. A coward in his big-boy breeches.

It is a quick death. The noose is tight. The drop is long. No one’s trying to be cruel here. One person cries out but is quickly silenced. The wardens double-check, triple-check to make sure she’s properly dead this time. From the courtyard to the turret, they flash a thumbs-up to Henry. He lets the curtain fall. This time, he does not visit her tenderly. It is done.

The wardens will return to their card games, all except the youngest one, who mourns her without meaning to. He will simmer with sorrow for hours until, without warning to himself or others, he punches a wall so hard he fractures most of the knuckles in his right hand, leaving a fist-sized whorl of buckled plaster as a signature.

And when she wakes up, hours later, on a slab of wintry marble in the royal morgue, it’s with a broken neck and very little air in her lungs. She adjusts her neck the way she might correct a crooked hat—difficult without a proper mirror, but she manages. She tightens the belt on her flimsy nightgown and slips through the haunted halls, pausing only when she reaches the king’s chambers. She doesn’t knock. She doesn’t crow or look for consolation, although the pang is there, and it feels unstoppable. Instead, with great effort, she continues on to her apartments, where she goes right back to bed. She is wiped, and the throb in her neck is telling her to conserve strength. But most of all, it is such a trivial insult to him, so small, so vicious, to fall asleep as soundly as she does this night.

FOR A TIME, it’s quiet. Henry stalls. He consults his advisers, who are just as baffled. He tries to get his head around the situation, but at least he has the grace to do it far from her.

You’ll want to hear that Anne takes solace in these precarious days, so let’s say that’s true: she takes that trip she always meant to, an ethereal island resort where every day the indigo waters whisper, Get out, get out while you still can, and the jacarandas whistle a jaunty tune of existential dread. She cashes in her many retirement portfolios, she doesn’t so much throw parties as fling them, handfuls of bacchanalia into those feverishly starlit nights.

Or: she digs her heels deep into the Turkish carpets of her palatial apartments and doesn’t budge. In the bruised hours between dusk and midnight, she feels a joy so grandiose that it fills the empty canals and sidewalks within her. She takes to promenades around the gardens, drinking in the virtuous geraniums in their neat rows and the slightly ferocious hedge maze with its blooming thistles and uncertain corners. She grows sentimental about centipedes and spiders and wasps and belladonna and ragwort and nettles and every other hardscrabble weed, every pernicious pest. I’m still here, she says to the wasps, the centipedes, the belladonna, the ragwort. I’m still here.

The joy of the narrow escape is that it unfurls into hours, hidden doors that lead to secret passages of days, even if those days are few, even if she knows it. None of it is hers and it’s all she’s got. She loses herself, like a woman in a myth, untethered in time, unraveling with possibility.

And yes, maybe she feels a few inches of gratitude for the armistice he has granted her. And yes, probably the waiting days smother her, the twinned knowing and not-knowing what happens after, imagining Henry at every turn, cartoony with rage or puzzlement, but what is she to do?

AFTER THAT, HE drowns her himself. And who could blame him? If you want a job done right, you’d better know the end of this sentence. He comes upon her in the bath. He wraps his hands around her bare shoulders and thrusts her beneath the bathwater. Soap bubbles and air bubbles bloom in multitude. An artery in his skull skitters wildly. The water fights. The walls steam with tension.

She tries to thrash away from him, of course. She tries to defend herself. But he’s six foot two, built like a person who wrestles lions in his leisure time, and she is not. There is nothing more complicated here. He is not the first man to do this, or the wealthiest, or the angriest. He certainly isn’t the last. As they say, it’s one of the oldest horses in the stable.

Eventually the water stills. Her body floats. He sits on the brim of the tub, head bowed, the cuffs of his doublet dripping, his fingers pruning a gentle shade of violet. Up close, murder is a messy business, decidedly unroyal, too much flesh and screaming. He sits in wait—for how long, who knows. When the surface moves again and she sits up, feral-eyed and vomiting bathwater, he sighs.

“What do we do with you?” he says, not so much a question as a regret. And she has no answer, of course she has no answer.

IT IS HE who helps her out of the tub, although she resists. He hands her the bathrobe, courteously studying the mosaic of the floor while she covers up. He helps her back to her rooms.

You will want her to scream at him, perhaps. To shove her house key through the soft wetness of his eye, to land a solid, bone-cracking punch to his solar plexus, or at the very least to kick him in his royalest of parts, but she has just survived death. She is alive. Today, that will have to be enough.

ANNE’S LADIES NEVER stray far. Where are they going to go? They hold their tongues. They massage their fists back into impassive hands. They, too, have intimate knowledge of the place between a rock and an even harder rock.

Sometimes they will perform small acts of metonymy. A pamphlet folded into a paper airplane is a clandestine invitation to the city. They will fetch her those darling meringue pastries if she is doleful, and so when they say, We will bring you the French cookies, it means We are rooting for you to find a way.

Or: an elegantly embroidered handkerchief means I bayoneted this cloth nine thousand forty-two times and imagined it was the flesh of your enemies. A pair of white gloves means We will help you bury the bodies. We will not ask questions. We know you did what had to be done.

If they tune up her automobile restlessly, it’s to say, Are you listening? We have a plan.

A book of poems with no poems inside is this: You are not defined by the tragedy of it. There is always one more page.

They will nod with such enthusiasm that they black out, which means Do you know how much we hate this?

Sometimes they will weep in private, because there is too much to be said and nowhere to say it. Because they know that leaving is the most dangerous thing she can do. Because all they want is the impossible and is that really so much? Because this is one of the very few ways they can uncork their anger, and it is such a fine vintage, the very best. Because their fury is the scaffolding upon which their waiting lives are begotten, and it is so fathomless and pure, it clenches up their jaws and grinds their teeth into their gums.

In this particular case, their tears mean We will be your remembrance. We will salt the earth with the blood of our eyes so nothing can ever grow again.

HENRY IS LEARNING.

He gets crafty. He invents the portable long-barreled firearm. Then he invents the firing squad. Then he invents acute ballistic trauma. Then he sends his wardens to find her.

But while he’s busy doing all that, she’s been busy, too, inventing: cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The telephone. The 9–1–1 call. First-response teams. Modern-day surgery. Organ transplants. Crash carts. Gurneys. Subsidized medicine. She improvises like it’s the only thing she knows how to do.

It is ugly, obviously. There is quite a lot of blood and gore and spattered internal organs. But she lives. Still, she lives.

LEST YOU THINK it’s all maudlin garden strolls and gallows touched by moonlight, let’s admit that Anne and Henry still have their moments. Like the time a scullery maid starts a stovetop fire and trips the palace-wide alarm. All around the castle, the sprinkler systems kick in, first in the kitchens, then in the great hall, and then everywhere, misting porous manuscripts, Brylcreemed foreign dignitaries, the throne room, everyone on their toilets, Henry’s collection of vintage cameras, and Anne in her finest silk pajamas, snoring over her watercolors. Still very much not dead.

She escapes to the nearest balcony. And as she wrings her ruined shirt and her hair in futility, a window creaks open and who should climb through but Henry, his arms filled with soaking scrolls almost as tall as himself. He sees her sodden in her nightclothes and begins to guffaw.

She says, “That’s not very kingly,” feeling hurt, and more vulnerable than she wants to be, and probably a little foolish.

He says, “For your information, you don’t look especially queenly,” and drops the scrolls in a heap. She despairs at her reflection in the window.

“The gossip magazines are going to love this look, aren’t they,” she says.

“Easy fix,” he says. “Here.” He sweeps up to the balcony’s edge, blotting her from view of the courtyard. So close that she’s immediately on high alert. She steps back. Every muscle clamped.

“You need more width,” she says, with all the calm she can summon.

He begins to windmill his arms like a complete fool. He doesn’t say a word, just churns his arms up and down with intense concentration. And to her own surprise, she starts to laugh. She can’t help it. He does his best deadpan, smile uncracked, but it’s there in the twitch of his eyebrows, the glimmer of warmth in his eye.

“What’s your plan here?” she says.

“Trickery,” he says, not missing a step. “Misdirection. Excellent upper-arm strength.”

You might think this an opportune time to push him off the balcony, make it look like an accident, and maybe you wouldn’t be wrong. But he’s still built like a professional strongman on championship day, and she’s still most decidedly not. And yes, she’s eager to please, and yes, even now, he can find ways to disarm her utterly. And yes, this moment, precious as it is, has a kind of power on its own, a force, and the ache of laughter in her abdomen will sustain her a few days longer. Do you really want to take that away from her?

IT’S EASY TO say that it becomes a game for him, and a game for her. In Anne’s case, if it’s a game, the game is Monopoly, her game piece is a pewter chicken with its head décapité, the banker is a scoundrel and a cheat, the properties disintegrate every time she lands on them, and the dice are made of fire. What game is this to him? If he’s winning, does it even matter?

But for her, how’s this for an alternative: on a spectral day in autumn, a cockroach tumbles across Anne’s writing desk like a very squirmy, very small shooting star. It is swift, intrepid. In its wayward progress, it hemorrhages anxiety.

Its clumsy, heroic journey plucks the tenderest meat inside her. Is it any surprise that she sees something in the cockroach that hums on the same frequency as she does? She builds tranquil highways with her hands, one at a time, and is rewarded when the roach travels safely through. Her triumph is no small thing.

She hopes the cockroach lives a long life, that the baseboards and the cracks in the wall are seething with its unhatched eggs, that beneath the floors the concrete is bulging with magnificent cockroach babies. She hopes they are abundant and hungry. That every day, each year, the cockroaches and their cockroach babies encroach in an ever-expanding circle from their nest. That when civilization crumbles into the ground, and textbooks get chucked en masse into the sea, and all of this is done and gone—and it will be done, it will be gone, she’s got to believe that the universe has a long memory and a short temper and that this, this is nothing—they will still be here, in the walls, under the floors, teeming, multiplying, ravenous, devouring, surviving.

HE HAS HIS body servant stuff handkerchiefs down her throat. What you might call a reverse magic trick. Silk handkerchiefs, floral handkerchiefs, designer ones, handkerchiefs dipped in eau de cologne, ones that carry the perfume of another woman, while Henry lurks in the doorway, exultant.

It is such an absurd way to die that she begins to laugh, and once she starts laughing, it’s too late, she can’t stop. She even helps the servant stuff them down her throat. It isn’t pleasurable, by any means, but it bewilders him and leaves Henry stunned.

“Um, should I keep going?” the body servant is asking Henry, the last thing she remembers before she dies.

SOMETIMES HE IS fuzzy on the details. Sometimes he will forget and call her by the names of his other wives and she will have to correct him. He might leave her alone if she were somebody else, it’s true. But she is unwilling to be forgotten.

“I’m Anne,” she says impatiently. “Anne. Remember? Not Jane or Other Anne or Catherine. You haven’t killed the rest of them yet.”

HE LINES UP everyone she has known, her mother and father, her dead brothers, her childhood friends, her nursemaid, her tutors, her grandmother, her priests, the snooty cousin she almost married, all the kids in high school who made fun of her. One by one, they tell her every mean thing they’ve ever thought about her.

“You’re such a needy person,” her grandmother says. “I often dread the sound of your approach.”

“You’re much less attractive than you think,” says her snooty cousin.

“We always thought your jokes were kind of repetitive,” her dead brothers confess.

“You probably shouldn’t have started the English Reformation,” one of the priests says.

“I didn’t want another daughter,” her mother admits.

“You still smell like farts,” says one of the kids from school.

“I always thought you had so much potential,” a childhood friend says. “I wish I could take more pride in having known you.”

It goes on like this for hours. In the center, Anne, lovely Anne, poor Anne, with her hands over her face, bawling, full-on ugly-crying. Shoulders shuddering, snot-nosed, basically a mess. At some point, probably during her father’s seven-minute monologue about everything they could’ve spent their fortune on if she hadn’t been born, she will faint with grief and maybe dehydration, and the court physicians will not be able to revive her. Everyone goes home: her mother, father, dead brothers, and so on. She passes later in the evening, most likely of a broken heart.

THERE IS A version of her story where she doesn’t die again and again and again.

There is a version of her story where she shivs him in his sleep.

There is a version where she is born in the future, and when she meets Henry at one of those rickety self-serious parties at Oxford, his discount-aristocracy vibes, prickly disposition, and fixation with his own poetry are clanging alarm bells. She walks away and never looks back.

There is a version where she gives birth to a daughter. In this version of the story, Anne still dies in the most ignoble and depressing of fashions: a sword, a Frenchman, a chopping block, gawking ministers, a wordless husband. It is her daughter who will avenge her mother—with the throne she takes by force, the wars she wages, the playwrights she patronizes, the papacies she outwits, the rebellions she crushes, the cults she accidentally spawns, the enemies she forgives, through all the many people she meets and never marries.

SHE WAKES UP one morning and the whole castle is closed for renovations. The imperial estates are empty and eerie. Set painters are giving the outer walls a fresh coat. A few crew members crawl on their hands and knees in the chapel, swabbing delicate graining details into the marble flagstones so they don’t look like plastic. In the state room, a prop maker wheels away a vase, completely oblivious to her presence. He replaces it a few minutes later with an almost identical, slightly more era-appropriate vase.

When she passes Henry in the hallway, he’s just as perplexed as she is.

But later that day, on instinct, he swipes a can of paint from the art department. He composes a sprawling landscape. A canyon, right in front of Anne’s apartments. He’s not the best artist, but what he lacks in talent, he makes up in cruelty. When she steps out of her room, she plunges down, all the way to the bottom of the canyon, where she breaks her leg.

She tries to call for help, of course. She yells until her voice is hoarse. Her leg is an unsteady line of fire beneath her. For days after, she can still hear the sound of the bone breaking.

And this time, yes, it’s bad. She’s hungry, thirsty, in tremendous pain. She is depleted from the ache of the last death, a grief she didn’t know was still possible. She’s worn down by his anger, his relentless need. There’s a limit to what she can endure, maybe, and it doesn’t seem so far away. She can’t do this forever. Did you think she could do this forever?

Still, she looks for a way out. She tries to set the bone herself, with little success. She prays to her god for an answer. It would be better if she knew how to die, if she had the grace of a dead girl. But she isn’t a body washed ashore at the start of a film, or arranged artfully in a back alley for the cameras to find. No, she’s disorderly, desperate. There’s skin beneath her fingernails, and throw-up on her T-shirt.

And do we want her to die? Do we want this to be the end? Isn’t it better if she finds a miracle, a mystery machine swooping out of the sky to save her?

Think about it: Do you want her to be just another dead girl? Do you really, truly want her to die?

SHE DOES NOT die this time. One of the production assistants drops a permanent marker down the canyon by accident and Anne scrawls an amateurish ladder to freedom. Or, no, as everyone’s packing up to leave, a decorator spies the velvet flag she’s manufactured out of her French hood. He doesn’t seem to understand who she is, but she bribes him to haul her out with two fat pearls.

Why don’t we let you decide?

Either way, it’s definitely a miracle. Most unexpected.

ON ANOTHER DAY, she rolls over and looks at him.

“What?” he says.

“It doesn’t have to be this hard, right?” she says. “We don’t have to live like this.”

He doesn’t respond right away. He takes so long, she thinks he is considering the enormity of her question, that perhaps it has left him winded. She thinks maybe this is the moment he will realize how pointless it is, how hard she’s trying, how much time he’s wasted, how defeated they both are. Maybe he’ll say, Huh, why didn’t I ever think of that.

But he doesn’t answer, no surprise. Maybe it’s too obvious for words. Maybe he doesn’t think she deserves a response. Maybe he doesn’t know. When he looks at her, she has the sense of a man who is making up his mind one way or another. A man who stares at a dead end and sees his opportunity.

MAYBE YOU’LL WANT to look away for this part.

She will be taken to a laboratory, which, in the style of laboratories of the time and perhaps every laboratory in every time, feels a bit like the underbelly of a dungeon. Here she will be injected with a poison that liquefies her insides in a matter of hours. One of her captors will spill the poison on himself and this will derail the proceedings. They will perform an autopsy to confirm that she is dead. With a delicacy that is surgical, or at least very thorough, they will crack every bone in her body. They will take out her internal organs, still gooey and falling apart, and feed them to any nearby dogs, who may need a fair amount of persuading. She will wake several times, but never for long. There will be quite a lot of screaming, most likely, but you don’t want to hear about that.

They will set her corpse on fire, and put the scorched bone fragments and teeth and shreds of flesh into a box. They will ship the box somewhere very far away, perhaps the remote island from earlier on. They will wrap the box in weights and cast it into the ocean. They will train a shark to develop a palate for mysterious boxes wrapped in weights so it can devour her remains. They will send a nuke from outer space to the precise coordinates of the shark. The bomb will vaporize the island, too, and everyone who lives there, a few thousand tidy deaths, but it’s probably worth it.

THEY DISPATCH Acourier to Henry immediately. The courier tells him, “She’s dead,” and Henry sags against the wall in relief. He spends the day in devout prayer. He waits a week or two for the obvious to happen. But no, she doesn’t return.

He asks for extravagant bouquets to be delivered to her apartments, a mixtape of her favorites: English roses, bloody chrysanthemums, black tulips. He summons an architect to begin the blueprints for her memorial. He spends a whole day telephoning her parents and loved ones to break the news, with each call recalibrating his gravity, sorrow, and air of quiet suffering, depending on how much they care.

He will come to his bedroom later that night, a little weary, and there she will be, just like that. No explanation. She will be curled up in his favorite armchair like the slyest of cats, fast asleep, looking content. Fully intact, organs back in her body, insides unliquefied, most definitely not in a box, or a shark, or an ocean, or heaven, or hell.

DO YOU WANT to know how she did it?

Here’s how she did it: her ancestors were microorganisms, and a few years later here she is. The secret is this: her great-grandparents were monkeys and now she can do long division. The only trick is to know better. Didn’t anyone teach you to know better?

Here’s how she did it: she was always rooting for the cockroach. No one mourns the cockroaches, the dust mites, the bacteria, the weeds, the worms. The chickens that endure their own beheadings. But she remembers. She remembers the things that survive and those that don’t, and there are so many that don’t, so very many.

Here’s how she did it: she knows there’s no difference between the entrance and the exit. It’s not so difficult to turn around and walk right back in. Is it?

Here’s how she did it: no one wants to see her die. Did you know it’s that easy, to stay alive?

When you die, you should tell all the dead girls.

THE NAPOLEONS ARE MULTIPLYING

In the end, the Napoleons rented a gangly house near the edge of town. It was lovely, some might say decrepit. The mirrors were warped and spotted with rust. In the garden, enough space for a few chickens to run loose. The back door immediately came off its hinge and perhaps that should’ve felt portentous, but it didn’t. It didn’t at all.

This was the house Frogface found for them, though the others called him Frogface behind his back and he knew it. It wasn’t an insult so much as the concept of an insult, since they all in fact looked the same. But it made him feel like shriveled paper at the end of a roll—something to be used briefly and discarded right away. Outwardly, he didn’t make a fuss. He wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. He was chipper and sincere as ever, and probably that annoyed the rest of the Napoleons even more. Alas, he’d begun to refer to himself as Frogface on accident, and once it was fixed in his mind, there was little chance of going back.

And so what, was it truly fatal to be Frogface? He’d found them a place to stay. The house was his doing, his effort. He sat upon the leaf-strewn roof and watched the Dueling Napoleons wrestle each other down below in the yard, in full uniform as they always were. One fellow embraced the other’s legs, face squinched with effort, whilst the other folded over him, clutching his waist. It seemed almost tender, almost loving, except it was the opposite. Their epaulettes drooped from their shoulders in a sad, mustachely fashion.

Dueling II saw Frogface on the roof and looked away at once. His face was squashed against Dueling I’s knees. His nose bled freely. Frogface heard him say, “It’s Frogface. Shit.”

Dueling I staggered back, trying to upend Dueling II from the waist. Any minute, they’d topple over. He said, “So what, coward?” And, more pensively, “Is he going to shout at us? Does he seem shouty?”

Frogface had climbed out to admonish them, but now he found he didn’t want to. How inconsequential it felt. He was thirsty and sentimental. His mouth was full of grit. Someone burned charcoal downstairs on the kitchen stove, and the smell was sharp and everywhere, leaving room for little else, clarifying in vivid detail the roof upon which he sat, this birdlike vantage point of town, of chimneys and winged housetops, the trees with their untidy haircuts; everything.

“I’m not going to shout at you,” he shouted. The Dueling Napoleons lurched to the ground in a heap. Dueling I scrambled away first and drew his sword. Naturally, Dueling II did the same.

“Are you copying me?” Dueling I lowered his sword. “If I toss mine, are you going to toss yours?”

Dueling II hesitated. His head was tilted back and he held his bleeding nose with his spare hand. He glanced up at Frogface, quickly, helplessly. Frogface couldn’t understand why. Later, he’d wonder if this was the first time Dueling II envisioned himself as a Napoleon who didn’t Duel. But that was much later, after everything.

Here and now, Dueling I darted forward. The moment evaporated. Dueling II yelped and swung his sword at random.

Like this, they hounded each other toward the chicken coop.

It was a precipitous day, rain on its way. All things changed, didn’t they. That was hope; that was progress. Maple leaves clung to Frogface’s shoes like enormous soggy handprints. His coat smelled of charcoal. The house was theirs but it felt temporary, like it wasn’t fully formed yet but was only the idea of a house, coagulating. The idea of home.

It doesn’t belong to us yet, but that’s fine, Frogface thought, and he was more content than he’d ever been in this life and possibly every life before this one. Living here would calm the feral impulse in all of them. He was sure of it. He thought, There’s time. There’s still so much time.

A FEW WEEKS later, the new parson invited himself to the house of Napoleons. The Napoleons were multiplying, and this, Frogface understood, was a concern to the town, perhaps fair given what he knew of the very first Napoleon, the emperor or whatever he called himself, dead and gone for decades.

Frogface didn’t know the first Napoleon personally, or entirely comprehend him. But he sounded like an asshole, and he seemed unpopular in this little English village. So there was that.

What Frogface knew was the following: a Napoleon arrived in the world fully formed like something from Greek mythology, an adult of twenty-nine. Dressed in his military blues, a cowlick for a crown.

Hunger was the drone in his head, the only sound he could hear. A Napoleon newly arrived would shovel food down his throat, it was all he could think of—the hazy pleasure of desire sated, the sour smell of old beer. The peevish look from Napoleon of the Pub sitting across the table, growing steadily more peevish by the minute.

When asked, a new Napoleon had no memory of how he found the village, or where he came from before that. Frogface thought of each newcomer as a book of answers, closing before his eyes. Just like he himself had been.

A despairing notion. He must’ve known once, why he was here. What he was meant for. He felt it like a twinge in the knee. The past had a texture, it had pain. It reminded him: something here has been lost.

The parson was half an hour late. By the time he arrived, things hadn’t gone south exactly, but they trended in a southerly direction. One of the chickens got loose in the house, pelting off-kilter down the hallway like a frightened banshee. In the chase, a Napoleon crashed into the rickety table, upturning the cherry-glazed duck, the punch bowl, the little glossy pastries that split their seams when they hit the floor.

The silence afterward was solid and impenetrable. It was Napoleon Tencendur, aghast, and he said to Frogface, who stood open-mouthed in the kitchen door, “I hate myself, I do, I genuinely hate myself,” and a different man might’ve been touched by the sheer force of his anguish. In the far bedroom, the chicken squawked.

That was when the doorbell chimed.

IT WASN’T SUPPOSED to be like this. The morning before the parson’s visit, Frogface approached Napoleon of the Pub for his opinion, though Napoleon of the Pub disliked him vocally—he’d said once, knowing he was well within Frogface’s earshot, “Oh god, I can’t deal with him right now. I’m just not drunk enough,” and to be honest, Frogface often felt like he was slowly suffocating in Napoleon of the Pub’s presence. It took something precise and useful out of him to be around Napoleon of the Pub for very long.

But they were different from the rest of the Napoleons, the two of them. They inhabited solid ground. Sometimes, when the others were being impossible, Napoleon of the Pub would exchange an evocative look with Frogface, as if only the two of them understood their predicament—as if to say, What terrible transgression did we make in a past life, to end up thus?—and for a fleeting instant, Frogface would be lifted.

They sat on the back stoop, Napoleon of the Pub because he always said it was the quietest place in the house, Frogface because he’d pursued Napoleon of the Pub out there. The grass was shabby and sparse. Thistle sprouted in vengeful bursts around the yard.

“You want to make a good impression, is that it?” Napoleon of the Pub said. “I’d better be there, then.”

Frogface did his best to emit serenity. It was good, bracing. One ought to be challenged by one’s peers. Napoleon of the Pub added, “Or are you trying to deceive him?”

“Why would I try to deceive him?”

It was deceitful of Frogface to even ask the question, and Napoleon of the Pub made no effort to hide his skepticism. Frogface didn’t want to think about it. After all, social pleasantry was a kind of deceit itself, wasn’t it? Didn’t that prove something? He said, because he did want Napoleon of the Pub to attend, although Napoleon of the Pub didn’t need to know—“You can come, if you like.”

“You shouldn’t be afraid of him,” Napoleon of the Pub said.

“I’m not.”

“He’s outnumbered, the poor goose. There’s one of him and what, eighteen of us? That’ll show him.”

It was one of Napoleon of the Pub’s peculiarities. Despite living above the Burton Arms, away from the other Napoleons on purpose and with some disdain, he was always visiting the house for one reason or another. Then complaining about the noise. Then sitting outside to find some peace and quiet.

Anyway, it wasn’t very quiet anymore, because of the chickens. The garden had been overtaken by their ruffled heads, their animal odors and scattered feathers, the pocks they left in the earth—and unfortunately by their various ejecta, as they hadn’t been adequately trained in that department. For now, they warbled near their coop, where Napoleon Chicken-Herder scattered feed and refilled their water bowls and spoke to them in quiet, earnest undertones of nonsense that floated out toward Frogface and Napoleon of the Pub. With unkempt hair, Chicken-Herder looked a bit like a chicken himself.

“There’s nineteen of us, actually,” Frogface said. Beside him, Napoleon of the Pub’s face made an unpleasant crumpled shape. He hated to be corrected, which was too bad for him because Frogface couldn’t abide mistakes. It was a compulsion; he always felt sick afterward, as if he’d spoiled something, even with Napoleon of the Pub. “Don’t look at me like that, please. It’s true. The new one from last night, remember?”

Napoleon of the Pub opened his mouth and shut it again. Frogface violently suppressed the urge to apologize. He gazed at the chicken coop until it hurt to look. Napoleon of the Pub said at last, “You’re such a pedant.”

With all the dignity he could muster, Frogface said, “I don’t know what that means. I’ll take it as a compliment.”

In his periphery, he felt rather than saw the world begin to shiver around them. The thistles were the first to wilt. They collapsed into the ground, sucked into the earth as if by some unseen mouth. Then seedlings probed furtive green antennae out of the soil. They sprouted, budded, flowered, then wilted again, all within the span of a minute or so.

At the edge of the yard, the tree was changing, too—shedding leaves, sloughing off bark, sprouting new buds. A maniac loop of growth and death. A slip in time, if you will, a lapse; perhaps even a time-lapse.

He couldn’t understand it. It was unearthly, horrible almost, but Frogface held his breath. Inside of him, everything had stopped whirring and humming; it had gone quiet, beautifully still. Napoleon of the Pub didn’t fidget once.

They sat side by side and didn’t move and didn’t speak. What could they say to each other now, in this moment the world revealed itself so plainly to them? What was left to say?

Then the thistles stopped and the tree stopped and the sun was warm and pleasant above them. It could’ve been any ordinary day.

This was the other difficulty. They’d started something. Or something started to occur, contemporaneous to their arrival: changes around the village.

The time-lapse was one example. A weaver had vanished for a day, along with his entire cottage, only to reappear without explanation. Maybe a coincidence. But none of the Napoleons thought so.

Then there was Napoleon Moon-God, the conundrum himself. Standing on the roof of the house. Pinching at the sky with his fingers.

“You think the parson knows any of that?” Napoleon of the Pub said. “He has no idea. We don’t even know what we know.” With this maddening input, he shut his eyes and tilted his face back toward the sun. One side of his face was lost to shadow. Beyond them, Chicken-Herder let the chickens loose into the yard again; Napoleon of the Pub didn’t even flicker an eye open.

If the effects of the time-lapse still reverberated through him, there was no sign. He had this air of nonchalance, which Frogface secretly envied. They had the same hiccup in their step when they walked, the same pale moon face, but Frogface could never slouch his features that way, as if nothing would hurt him or imprint his life with strange meaning. He couldn’t fathom it. He was miserable that he couldn’t do the same.

And Frogface knew better, he did, which made it worse. Napoleon of the Pub was worried, in fact. The thought of leaving his room above the pub filled him with unspeakable dread. He loved this little place.

“We can be friendly, we can be charming, don’t you think?” Napoleon of the Pub said out of nowhere.

Unlikely, Frogface thought.

The dun-colored chicken bobbed toward them with keen interest. Napoleon of the Pub said, this time with the faintest touch of amusement, his eyes still shut, “We’ll have plenty of food, right? Because you can’t help yourself and there’s always too much food? And that seems to work out for you, somehow?”

NOW TENCENDUR WAS on his knees, scraping ruined pastry off the floor and onto a plate with his fingers. Three more Napoleons rummaged through the cupboards, digging out cheese and crackers and mismatched saucers. The chicken gave another terrified squawk somewhere at the end of the house.

Frogface opened the front door to the parson, feeling as if he was going to vomit fire.

It looked like the parson had been practicing both a smile and frown at the same time, but his smile faltered when he saw them all crowding around the door. Only the frown remained.

“Come in,” Frogface said, what any good host might say, except in his current state, the words came out as an angry, icy rush. Behind him, Napoleon of the Pub took a very audible breath. The parson raised his eyebrows. Frogface added, “Please, come in,” which somehow wasn’t much better.

“Sorry to be late,” the parson said. “Unfortunately there was—”

Then all the other Napoleons were swarming past Frogface to say hello. The parson seemed alarmed by their profusion, their enthusiasm. Dueling I said to him, “I can take your coat,” and Dueling II said, “And I’ll take your hat,” and Dueling I elbowed him away and said, “Uh, no, you won’t,” and the parson said, “Actually, I’ll just hold on to my coat and hat, thank you so much.”

Frogface faded to the back. He could feel the ripe tomato color of his own face. He wanted to explain to the parson that this wasn’t how they behaved in normal circumstances, even if it wasn’t true and the parson likely knew better. He’d seen them in church.

Too late, he could see the parson appraising the wallpaper, which scabbed off the corners in greenish clumps, the whiskers of dust gathered in the windowsills. The dent in the entryway table.

It was dingy, Frogface thought. The house was dingy. He wanted to disintegrate into a column of ash.

Someone reached over to pat him on the shoulder, perhaps to be reassuring, but the gesture was moreso a tepid swatting. Similar to being struck repeatedly by a tall child.

Napoleon of the Pub—who else?

To Frogface, he muttered, “Calm down,” except he didn’t even say it. He mouthed it.

Frogface could only stare at him. By now, every nerve in his body twisted to the point of straining. The other Napoleons jostled the parson away, leaving the two of them alone in the front hall, but he didn’t register it. A red haze was settling around his vision.

All the bluster went out of Napoleon of the Pub. In other circumstances, it might’ve been funny. Perhaps he saw how badly he’d gone astray. He said, looking like he wanted to be eaten by a serpent, “Ah—that didn’t help, did it.” Then, begrudgingly, “Sorry.”

The regret on his face was real. Somehow, this was what reached Frogface through the haze of red: that Napoleon of the Pub might be capable of actual sympathy and remorse, even when it came to Frogface. Even if only in private.

When they rejoined the others, Dueling I was inexpertly leading a tour, explaining how the house had belonged to a local judge until he fell out of favor with the squire. This was incorrect in every way.

The parson, likely well-acquainted with the squire, didn’t debate the finer points of the presentation, instead asking, “And how many of you are there now?” (“Oh, maybe thirty, or could it be fifty? I try not to bother with counting”) and, “So you plan to stay for some time, then?” (“I suppose we might, why not?”) Frogface could only watch, unable to wedge his way through the others.

To make matters worse, the last Napoleon to join the tour group was Moon-God. He came up behind Frogface in the hallway to the kitchen, while Dueling I entreated the parson to visit the cellar, a place unsuitable for visitors, mostly just a frightening hole dug in the ground. Napoleon of the Pub saw Moon-God first and said, “What are you doing here?” and then, to Frogface,“Didn’t you send him away?”

Frogface felt an ache of foreboding. In fact, he had dispatched Moon-God on a last-minute errand, thinking they could avoid the issue if he was gone. But here he was, Moon-God: the stickiest problem of all.

Moon-God wasn’t offended. He said, “Ooh, do you think I should show the parson? Would he like it?”

Hard to imagine a more disastrous idea.

Frogface saw, with close to a shudder, that they’d caught the parson’s attention. The clergyman was watching them from the kitchen—Moon-God, Frogface, Napoleon of the Pub—taking in the little scene without a word.

IF THE PARSON could tell the story, he might tell it a bit differently. Earlier, he’d stood in the drive for a minute or two, stalling for time, until the tension ebbed from his shoulders and he could find it in himself to look imposing.

Up above, the sun and moon hung in the sky, distant relatives. When the wheelwright came to see him that morning, the man had been jagged with agitation, almost distraught.

He’d tried to explain it to the parson. How he’d seen one of the Napoleons with his hand in the air. The Napoleon had done this thing—it was impossible, the wheelwright understood it was impossible, even profane to speculate—but the Napoleon had reached into the air and adjusted the position of the sun with his fingers. Just plucked it up and scooted it a little farther west in the sky.

Before today, the wheelwright seemed like a mild person in church, a man who only remembered to attend Matins because he could see the church from his window when the bells pealed. But that morning, after Matins, he’d held his hat in his hands, pressing his thumb along the brim, and he’d said to the parson, “If that house burns down, no one will be sorry.” It was on the very cusp of a threat.

The house of Napoleons was a shambling old relic, sinking deep into the grass as if it were already departing from this earthly plane. The parson could hear a commotion inside—a table crashing, someone yelling, was that the cluck of a chicken?—but he stood in silence and felt for the gravel beneath his too-thin shoes. Then he put a stern expression on his face and went to ring the doorbell.

Two years ago, he was a scholarship student at the seminary in Cambridge, living out of a cramped dormitory with a bed that felt and smelled like a block of wood, composing sermons for an invisible audience. Now he was here.

He’d come so far in life already. Was he optimistic? Or was it something else?

NOW EVERYONE CRAMMED into the drawing room, more Napoleons than he could count. Less than thirty, more than ten. Which of them had frightened the wheelwright with that silly trick?

They made watery tea and poured beers directly from a tapped barrel in the kitchen. They served him a dowdy little spread on a tray, crackers with strawberry jam and cheese. He took a tentative bite of cracker and almost coughed. The one they called Frogface caught his eye, his expression grim.

“It’s very tasty,” the parson offered, which wasn’t a lie exactly—it did have a taste, of sorts. Frogface’s grim look deepened.

Some hushed drama was transpiring at the back of the room, with the Napoleon who arrived late and smiled with all his teeth—they hadn’t been introduced. Napoleon of the Pub was speaking to him in a quiet, urgent tone, but his voice was rising. The parson tried to eavesdrop from afar, but Frogface came over and sat across from him, as if determined to obstruct.

He leaned in and asked the parson intently, making an aggressive amount of eye contact, “And you’ve raised funds for the new doors, I heard?”

The parson tried to envision Frogface as a hostile person, even as a threat, but he couldn’t. Despite his bravado, Frogface was a little fragile, in how he took big nervous gulps of air, in the brittle set of his features; he might easily break if dropped from a very short height or put in any serious predicament. It was possible Frogface, and by extension the others, didn’t know there was any trouble. Perhaps they’d missed the stir around them.

“Yes,” the parson said, craning his neck. At the back, the smiling Napoleon raised his hand and gestured to the parson. Napoleon of the Pub pushed it away. One of the other Napoleons stepped in to bar the smiling Napoleon from going anywhere.

An eruption seemed imminent. Maybe he should intervene, but he had another task, didn’t he?

To Frogface, the parson said, “I have to ask—how are you finding the town? Especially as of late?”

Napoleon of the Pub sauntered over to stand behind Frogface, which seemed to irritate Frogface and also blocked the parson’s view of the smiling Napoleon in the background. Were they doing it on purpose? He gave up.

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Frogface said, with a terribly affected chuckle. The parson wanted to reach across the table and shake him until the loose pennies fell out of his head.

“Well, to be more specific,” he said instead, “I wonder what you think of those irregularities we’ve been experiencing. Surely you’ve noticed them. The changes.”

The conversations of the other Napoleons diminished around them, came to a halt. It was like being in a hall of mirrors as a ghost. So many people, all with the same face. None of them his own.

They all knew, the parson realized. He didn’t consider himself a perceptive person—he often felt clumsy when greeting his parishioners around town or speaking to them after prayer, as if they could peer through his inexpert costume and see something that he himself didn’t know was there—and now he was astonished to discover how transparent it seemed. Of course they’d known.

Frogface sighed. An errant chicken feather drifted through the air toward them. Frogface couldn’t see it from where he sat, but the parson could. He thought if he spoke or shifted in his seat or even tried to prompt Frogface, the feather would change its direction, and this would alter the balance of their conversation.

Sunlight fell in a triangle on the table—three was a holy number, he’d once been told, an invocation of the divine order that held the world together—and when Frogface looked at him, it was with a kind of agony the parson couldn’t entirely comprehend.

“What sort of changes, Father?” Napoleon of the Pub said, several seconds too late, still standing over Frogface.

At the same time, Frogface was saying in a smooth, apologetic way, “Oh, I don’t think we’d care to speculate. We’ve hardly noticed them, to be honest, and we’re still getting settled in—”

The parson was more disappointed than he thought possible. He couldn’t listen to the rest—he interrupted, saying, “I see. You’re going to deny any involvement.”

The tension in the room expanded and released. What had he wanted? To himself, the parson could admit at last that he wasn’t really there as the town’s emissary, or even out of fear; he’d wanted to see something extraordinary, inexplicable. Something that rendered the universe an unknown place to him again.

The smiling Napoleon had slipped away. Napoleon of the Pub was doing a very good job of keeping his face expressionless. The parson felt cross and cagey, surrounded by all of them—was that how they felt? How did they bear it?

He heard himself say, in a voice that wasn’t imploring, but impossibly level—“You may not believe it, but I’m not an enemy.”

Was it true? Even he didn’t know for certain.

AFTER HIS VISIT, the parson stood on the road and looked back at the gangly house. Up above, the moon and the sun lingered in the sky; the chickens burbled in the garden, making their happy chicken noises; the dishes clinked from the open kitchen window.

He’d learned nothing about the Napoleons. This thought almost defeated him, and worse, he felt overwhelmed with melancholy, a pang that reached out in every direction.

One of the Napoleons emerged, out on the roof of the house. The parson couldn’t tell which one—all those juvenile names—but he was rooted in place. There was strawberry jam in his teeth, he could feel the distant pressure of seeds between his molars.

Even from the road, he could see how precarious it was, how the Napoleon was liable to tip over in an instant. He would fall, the parson was sure of it.

But the Napoleon didn’t fall. He reached his hand out into the sky and grasped at the air. With his forefinger and his thumb, he touched the moon.

It wasn’t physically possible, that’s what the parson was thinking. But it didn’t matter. As he watched, the Napoleon plucked the moon out of the sky, just as if it were a marble.

Its light wavered, trembled. The parson’s throat strummed, some apprehension made manifest. He thought he might be a bit drunk, after all. Did the first Napoleon drink beer? He couldn’t recall. He could only see the place in the sky left absent by the moon.

He’d read about Napoleon in the college library, where the words would blur together pleasantly and he’d fall sleep in small, indiscreet sips, lurching in and out of the long dark passage of unconsciousness. His physical presence slowing down while the light changed around him and the rest of the library ticked on at the same steady pace.

Now he watched the Napoleon set the moon back into place gingerly, as if handling something delicate. The Napoleon turned and saw him, and from the road, the parson couldn’t entirely read the look on the Napoleon’s face. Whether it was pleasure or triumph or something else. But he thought he could feel it, even if he couldn’t describe it.

The Napoleon climbed back into the house, and his departure only heightened the sense of a wonderful dream reaching its end. Any moment now, the parson thought he’d wake and find himself back in the college library again, knowing nothing had changed except himself.

THAT NIGHT, FOG gusted down the road to the house. It blotted the road past recognition, so the world beyond the hem of the house went ghostly, and it seemed to Tencendur that the Napoleons alone were real, the only ones left.

After the parson’s departure, the Napoleons continued drinking. They drank to stay warm, for company. To remember what was lost. In Tencendur’s case, he drank simply to feel the vividness of the day recede into the distance. He could still feel the flush of heat in his face from when he knocked over the table that afternoon, all those pastries in pieces.

He’d tried to apologize to Frogface a few minutes ago. Instead, he’d spilled most of his drink on the floor and, worse still, Frogface didn’t say anything at all, he just watched. His arms crossed, his mouth an unpleasant line.

Tencendur couldn’t help himself. To his own dismay, he started sputtering with laughter—it was too intense, and once he was laughing, he didn’t know how to stop. He backed away from Frogface because he couldn’t think to do anything else, clutching his dripping glass, trying to control whatever hideous mechanism made him snicker.

Frogface said with a dramatic and martyr-like weariness, “You’re not going to clean that up, are you?” and Tencendur made an awful snorting sound. Then he turned and fled.

Meanwhile, more Napoleons had materialized from the fog—three new Napoleons, who stood in the doorway of the house, blinking at the light and merriment in the manner of newly hatched birds.

Tencendur passed them as he escaped Frogface, or hastened to the kitchen for unrelated reasons, depending on perspective. He said, “You don’t have to stand there, you know,” with a final cough of laughter, and then he was serious again.

In the kitchen, the first slosh of beer in his cup made him thirsty. He didn’t want to be clumsy or graceless, he didn’t. But it was no use. He was no use. Foam bloomed in the glass, a white fungus. He became faintly aware he wasn’t alone. The new Napoleons had followed him in, and now they hovered at his shoulder with interest as he refilled his glass. They didn’t move in tandem, but he had the impression they did, anyway—like they were one organism, channeled through three distinct bodies.

“Let me help you with that,” one of them said, except it seemed as if they all said it. They were in his way.

He said, “It’s fine, you’re fine.” Their eagerness touched him; it made him feel some responsibility to them. He couldn’t see himself in them, but he knew if they all stood together on a street corner, nobody would know the difference. They looked the same and yet they weren’t. Wasn’t that the problem? One inspected the hogshead of ale, another took stock of the cupboards. The third one stared point-blank at him. The effect was still eerily synchronized, a creature with three heads and six hands.

He thought he should explain something to them—he stood there, trying to summon some jolting wisdom to impart—when Napoleon of the Pub stuck his head in.

“Oh, there you are,” he said to the new Napoleons, who shifted themselves toward him at once. Tencendur saw it slipping away, whatever fledgling bond could’ve grown between himself and them.

Even worse, Napoleon of the Pub said to him, “You’re not one of the new ones, are you?” He had this habit of pretending he didn’t know who anyone was, as if this could separate him from the others, or lend him character, as if an entire personality could be contained within a sense of haughty detachment.

“No,” Tencendur said. “Do I look like one of the new ones?”

Napoleon of the Pub squinted. “Ah, yes. Aren’t you the one who knocked over the table?” he said. Before Tencendur could answer, Napoleon of the Pub said, “Come along, chickens,” and he herded the new Napoleons out.

Tencendur trailed them back into the drawing room. Frogface saw the new Napoleons; then he noticed Tencendur in their proximity and said, “Oh, no,” loud enough that several other Napoleons turned to watch. He ushered the new Napoleons away from Tencendur, how one might beckon others from a noxious plant, so Tencendur was left holding his glass, alone, shrinking into a flyspeck.

Now he sat beside Moon-God on the windowsill. Nearby, the Dueling Napoleons were riling each other again—or, rather, Dueling II pestered Dueling I, who tried to ignore him but did it badly, getting furiouser and furiouser in the meantime.

Moon-God said to Tencendur, presumably about Frogface, “He’s really such a negative presence sometimes. Don’t listen to him. Things have a way of working themselves out, don’t they?”

“Do they?” Tencendur said. He was sure that part of him was listening to Moon-God. But another, more important part of him had detached itself from his body and the night and the house altogether, and was now floating in the ether, in a deep gloom.

“Well, what’s the worst that can happen?” Moon-God gave a lofty shrug. “He’s a bit despotic, in my opinion. It ages him quite tragically.”

Dueling II fished out a match from his pocket in broad, flourishing pantomime. He struck it with glee. Dueling I, his back turned, hadn’t yet noticed.

While this was developing, Tencendur said, his eyes glued to them, some part of him still drifting in the ether, far away, “Sometimes, I think we’re just—just—these horrible little forgeries of Napoleon Primary. Except that whatever we share with him has shrunken in transit, so instead of someone grand and important and useful, we’re just small—we’re insignificant. And soon there will be too many of us, and we’ll suffocate each other in our sleep.”

In front of them, Dueling II extended the lit match, reaching toward Dueling I’s eyebrows.

“Hey!” Dueling I shouted, seeing him at last. He stumbled away. “Hey!” Trepidation rippled through the other Napoleons. They scattered at once. They ducked into the corners of the room, spilled out into the hallway, all while trying to get a good view. Where was Frogface when you needed him?

Dueling II said, “I have a present for you. Don’t you want it?” He fished for another match with great drama. Tonight he had a hysterical edge. He was leaving, a fact he’d confided to Tencendur earlier.

Tencendur and Moon-God stayed where they were, perched on the windowsill. It wasn’t that Tencendur was interested in the proceedings—perhaps it was his duty to tell someone, at least Dueling I, about the firecrackers that Dueling II had concealed on his person, but what did he owe them? what did he owe anyone?—it was simply too much effort to move. He could hear Moon-God turning to look at him. The hot waft of beer on his breath; Moon-God was drunk, he was happy. Tencendur felt glummer than ever.

“Let me show you something,” Moon-God said.

TENCENDUR STOOD IN the garden, his neck craned up. The moon was a smudge in the fog. The Triumvirate of new Napoleons clustered together near Frogface and Napoleon of the Pub. Frogface was saying, “This isn’t wise—if the parson sees, we’re finished”—but he remained there, watching. He wasn’t fooling anyone.

Above, Moon-God stood on the roof, and with his fingers he twitched the moon out of the sky. A quiver of delight went through the Triumvirate, perhaps through them all—the rest of them had seen it before, Moon-God’s little trick, but it never failed to inspire wonder.

Moon-God hopped off the roof, and he came toward Tencendur. His face was lit up from below, the moon in his open hand. He looked like a magnanimous god, a king with his many beatitudes. None of the others could do what he did, although they’d all tried.

“Here, take it,” Moon-God said to Tencendur, who understood Moon-God was trying to be kind. This thought made Tencendur almost mournful with gratitude.

In his own palm, the moon was pleasantly warm. A holy light, pitted and uneven. He hadn’t expected its warmth, which wasn’t unbearable but a distant heat. It felt as if the moon’s radiance was transferring to him; he could feel himself grinning, but more than that, he could sense the grin came from somewhere deep inside of himself, a lick of happiness that went on and on.

He closed his hand and the night was snuffed in darkness at once. Between his fingers, the moon glowered. For a moment, it finally happened—he forgot. The memory of the afternoon receded from him, and with it, every other earthly thing.

“Isn’t it something?” Moon-God asked him, spoiling the mood. He reached to take it back.

Tencendur stepped out of Moon-God’s grasp. He did it without thinking. He wasn’t done, and it wasn’t like the moon belonged to anyone in particular, whatever Moon-God might think. He meant to say, Hold on, but the words didn’t emerge, and he didn’t think it mattered. Moon-God couldn’t possibly mind.

He didn’t know until this moment that light was something he could feel, something with weight. It was incredible, almost more than he could withstand. He opened his hand again.

“Okay,” Moon-God said, nudging forward again. “All right.”

But to Tencendur, the others had briefly vanished. The garden was formless and empty, and he could only see the moon in front of him. He wondered now—was it dominion over others that Napoleon Primary craved? Or was it worship? Was he only trying to plug a hole deep inside of himself, somewhere? And if this peculiarity of his nature had transferred to Tencendur—then how had it been compressed, made lesser?

Or was he just the same man, with the same impulses, displaced from himself?

He stuck the moon in his mouth. He gulped it down.

Moon-God gasped. Frogface gasped. The moon was in Tencendur’s throat. He wanted to tell them it was fine, or to describe the chalky flavor it left behind. The other Napoleons watched him and he could observe the moon’s path in their dimly lit faces as his throat began to glow, and the glow slid down his chest and into his stomach.

Everything was darkness except for him. Tencendur huffed with laughter again, and this time it was real, it was joy, confusion, even victory. He could see Moon-God’s growing rage, and some part of him understood that he should stop laughing, but he couldn’t. He didn’t even mind it.

He hadn’t believed it would be so easy to reorient the universe, to change it through carelessness or impulse or curiosity.

Moon-God bulged with wrath. He looked smaller than he’d ever looked before. “Why on earth would you do that?”

Tencendur felt sorry for him then, even if it was too late, and he would’ve done it again given the same choice. Moon-God seemed to diminish before his eyes, like the person within had withered away and all that remained was a strange, sad husk.

“Why does anyone do anything?” he asked, because he didn’t know the answer. He had no comprehension of why people did the things they did. If he knew, maybe he’d be a different, better person. Maybe he’d be Frogface. He glowed and glowed.

REAL NIGHT FELL then—absolute night, darker than anything before. The chickens had a sixth sense for unforeseen change. They wailed in their coop, unafraid to show their fear, their complete desperation. Chicken-Herder plunged into the dark with only a lantern as his companion, which he hung near the coop; then, worried it would ignite the little hut, he slept in the grass near his chickens, their wayward sentinel.

When he returned to the house proper in the early hours of morning, he wafted odors of chicken coop. Wood shavings and feathers and chickenshit, so Frogface passing him in the hall was reminded of the day they moved in—the Dueling Napoleons goading each other through the yard, the imprint of the house beneath him. The sense that this place was expansive and theirs. That everything tipped toward possibility.

And in the same moment, for no discernable reason at all, the trees outside started to shiver through time. As if they, too, were full of remembrance.

As Frogface climbed through the detritus of yesterday’s festivities, the opaque humps of nameless Napoleons sleeping, he remembered how he used to fixate on this idea, that all Napoleons emerged from the same origin point. A hairline seam of light in the sky, maybe, running vertical. An impossible split from the heavens down to the earth.

In Frogface’s version of events, the light would widen, sort of like the view was a curtain, and there was something else backstage. From out of the widening light, from behind the curtain, each Napoleon might extract himself.

What he’d wanted was to witness this, just once, so he could see what lay beyond. He’d understand their purpose—because there must be a point, he felt it even now, even though he no longer believed in the origin, the gap, the curtain—it was all they needed, a sense of purpose. They couldn’t be an anomaly, an accident. It was unbearable to imagine.

That’s what he’d wanted to tell the parson the previous afternoon. He thought perhaps a man of the cloth would listen, even if it was all fairly unorthodox—he wanted to be understood, wasn’t that how everyone felt?

In the kitchen, he found Dueling II in a jolly mood, cramming various foodstuffs into his haversack, humming to himself. Where was he going? He carried himself with such equanimity, for once he didn’t look like a Dueling Napoleon. Frogface didn’t know how he’d managed it—certainly he’d tried not to look like a Frogface—and actually, officially, Frogface’s name was Napoleon Most Glorious, because upon arrival he’d swallowed five boiled eggs whole, and Napoleon of the Pub had said in astonishment, “Most glorious!” That was a good day. But no one called him that anymore.

“I’m off,” Dueling II said. “I suppose this is the last time I’ll see you.” He stuck out his hand and Frogface shook it, feeling as if he’d missed some important piece of an unknown puzzle.

“It is?” he said.

In that moment, he was sure the other man pitied him. It was a wretched, clammy feeling. Dueling II leveled his gaze at Frogface and said, as if telling him a secret no one else knew, “Don’t let them tell you you’re a bore. Of course you are a bore, but they depend upon you.”

“That’s—that’s very unkind?” Frogface said, bewildered. “Surely you can’t just leave?” But Dueling II was already on his way. Frogface could hear him in the front hall, greeting Napoleon of the Pub, who must’ve returned just then.

The fact was, Frogface did know. He understood the others needed him, a thought that gave him comfort on those difficult days when he felt he might have a rare bleeding disorder, for how easily he bruised at the smallest slight. He felt it now, in the loss of Dueling II, as if it’d been his duty to keep them together and no one had told him; he thought it might be his lot in life to discover what he was meant to do, but only after the fact, when it could do him no good.

All night, he and Napoleon of the Pub had waited for Tencendur to expel the moon, the way someone else might expel water or food: a necessary condition for life itself. He hadn’t. He’d said to Frogface, to Napoleon of the Pub, with an air of panic, “I don’t know how.”

They’d decided at last to fetch the parson. They had to tell him; it would be difficult to conceal what Tencendur had done. And so Frogface met Napoleon of the Pub in the entry hall now, and Napoleon of the Pub said, “Well, the parson’s on his way,” and he was unreasonably cheerful. Worse, he seemed unmoved by Dueling II’s departure.

Perish the thought he display any real sentiment. Heaven forfend.

Before Frogface could say this, they heard someone clattering down the upstairs hallway. It was Dueling I. He stopped dead at the top of the flight.

“He just left,” Frogface said shortly. Horror dawned upon Dueling I’s face, and Frogface felt an unexpected lump of sympathy, the sorrow of understanding what was there, only when it was gone.

But the expression on Dueling I’s face was still shifting. It went from horror to something poisonous, ecstatic. He came down the stairs with halting wonder. He said, “He’s gone. That means—I’ve bested him, haven’t I?”

“Congratulations,” Napoleon of the Pub said drily.

Frogface couldn’t look at Dueling I any longer. He thought if he kept looking, he’d see his own face, how hateful it could become, brimming with delight and venom, and he’d give up on all of the other Napoleons. And so it wasn’t some noble spirit or a sense of earnest obligation that made him turn to the door; it was the revulsion of seeing Dueling I, and knowing he could see himself, in one way or another.

He said to Napoleon of the Pub, “Shall we go meet our fate?” He meant to say it lightly, even ironically. That didn’t work.

It was the last half hour before sunrise, the world an unlit blue in which the sun’s arrival didn’t yet feel inevitable. The stars were dwindling from sight. Frogface and Napoleon of the Pub stood on the drive and watched as the parson came walking down the road.

“What do you think?” Napoleon of the Pub said. He didn’t seem quite so buoyant anymore. “What happens now?”

Frogface shook his head. The parson was a distant figure, too far to decipher the hunch of his shoulders, the oblique shadow of his face. He could’ve been anyone. Even a Napoleon.

Up at the top of the house, Tencendur was starving. Who knew he could be so hungry, endlessly hungry, even with the moon in his stomach. He wondered if he could make it to sunrise. If it was possible to reach out and pluck the sun. He’d find out, wouldn’t he?

Down below, Frogface and Napoleon of the Pub set off to meet the parson. They were certain, both of them, separate but in unison, that it wasn’t too late. Nothing was fixed, not their fates or the parson’s mind or even the universe itself. Somehow they could change, and it wouldn’t be the wrong change.

Beyond them, in tandem with them, the trees were out of sync with the world again. And they whipped through the seasons, moving through time.

THE WOLVES

1.

She says to him: If you won’t believe me, I can’t tell you. It’s as simple as that. You have to promise.

When I was young, there were wolves who turned into men under the light of the full moon. Just imagine. Three days under the full moon, they were people. Completely ordinary. They were sacks of meat like the rest of us, with tear ducts and sweat glands and extremely breakable bones. But when they turned back into wolves—

They came out of the winter night. Slipping out of holes in the ice-slicked steppes and thorn forests where they bided their time, gargling saliva sour with hunger. Their eyes cut from the sharp swords of old stars.

You’d hear stories. Creatures in the dark. Strangers opened from the inside out. Whole towns gone overnight.

Everyone was afraid, in those days, of Genghis Khan’s wolves. That sense of impending catastrophe. It was like watching all the lights go out in the distance, one by one, closer and closer with every passing month, every day. Even then, even when we knew it was too late, we didn’t think the wolves were possible.

It was so long ago. You see a wolf now, it’s the size of a person. It’s nothing. Boys like you only see monsters at the movies, isn’t that true? Your monsters, they clomp around in the dark with too much hair glued on their faces, and maybe it’s frightening, maybe everyone shits themselves, but you know it won’t last. The movie ends, you go home.

What’s that? Oh, yes. I did tell your mother I wouldn’t swear, didn’t I?

You’ll just have to promise you didn’t hear me swear.

What I’m trying to say is—it’s such a waste of time, dearest boy, to fear you’ll be disbelieved. But what can you do.

You live with the fear that nothing happened. You live with the certainty that it was all true.

2.

Four of us lived, escaping by the hair of our necks. Five, if you’re going to count the baby. But he was a baby—surely every day is a miracle when you can’t wipe your own ass, isn’t it? Was this day any different?

Yes, that’s right. There’s no swearing in this story. Don’t forget.

We followed the dark muscle of the river out of the city, clutching one another when we tripped or flinched or fell. The steppes lurched around us, newly awoken with suspicious antelopes and muttering nightjars.

It was night when we fled. We didn’t imagine we’d make it through the hour. We didn’t even sleep the first night. Thinking that if death was a journey, we could at least get a head start.

Far behind us, the wolves of Genghis Khan were still pouring into the Shah’s city from the northern desert, cutting a path to the citadel in the fortified town’s left lung. The city burned. I didn’t know it until then: dread is a fire that starts everywhere at once.

The wolves were an act of annihilation, with no beginning or end. The death of all things.

Four of us—and I was the youngest. Thirteen or fourteen. There was an older woman, a neighbor, a widow, Mrs. Farzaneh, whom I’d secretly been afraid of. She’d sewn all her gemstones into the lining of her petticoats—everyone knew her jewels were mostly paste, but she did it anyway. So she clattered like a loose tin can, and it was harder to be afraid of her now.

Her kitchen girl, she came with us, too. A beast of a knife with her. And the baby’s mother, Mrs. Zayneb, who was young and pretty but always seemed so tired, as if she were being worn away into nothing by an unseen force.

That night, I didn’t want to live and I didn’t want to die. I’d find myself in a place I had no memory of—standing beneath the moth-eaten tent of an elm tree, undeniably here, alive, while the other women melted into the night—and then I’d be gone. A body with no occupant.

I was remembering the old ladies in black. The grandmothers who weren’t mine, who shuffled so slowly in the narrow streets that I had to dodge around them. If they caught me, they ran their spidering hands through my hair, and with such tenderness, as if recalling something from long ago.

In the dark, on my own, I was still in the city. I could see them. Here is one grandmother, with her legs splayed in a doorway, her throat cut.

Here is a man with a smudge for a face. Even with a smudge for a face, I know him at once: the Guangzhou merchant who sells gently rainbowing salts at the Friday bazaar.

In a regal old Samanid mansion, arched with limestone, the wealthiest man in the district is taking a weapon first to his wife, then his son, then his father, trying to save them in his own way. When I see him—grimacing, maybe, grinning, maybe—I won’t be sure if he’s one of us or one of them.

And here, here is the east gate of the neighborhood, where women fall like distant fireworks. With such light, such purpose, to be delivered from this earth.

I couldn’t stay like that for long—on my own, in the dark, remembering. The women I’d escaped with, they always came back for me.

They took me by the arm. They were more determined to keep me alive than I was.

“Brave girl,” they said, their voices trembling with impatience. “Just a few more steps.”

Why did they save that girl? I wouldn’t have. They did, and I’ll never know if it was instinct or accident.

Hours ago, I’d had a family. A father who cupped my head in his hands and spoke to me with the sensitive pain of a man always losing his train of thought, and a flock of wild tulips in the interior courtyard that I nursed with all the gravity of a new mother. And an actual mother, who once watched me put her beautiful turquoise cabochon into my mouth and asked, “Why? Why are you like this? You’re almost a woman now, what are you doing?” except she was laughing through her dismay.

Why would anyone come back for a girl like that? Who could possibly want her to live?

In the city, that handsome pearl in the crown of Khwarezmia, we’d all lived on the same canal-lined street, where the night watchman chased away stray dogs that slipped through the gate—there was no point; in the heat of the summer, it smelled like a horse’s armpit anyway. Everyone knew Mrs. Zayneb and Mrs. Farzaneh. They were famous in our neighborhood. They used to get into these horrible fights that all our neighbors could hear—at the greengrocer’s stall by the east gate, or from one well-groomed courtyard to another. Probably the new Shah could hear them from the other side of Khorasan.

No one understood why they disliked each other. My mother used to say it was how sisters might’ve fought; they knew each other’s tenderest spots too well. I only knew that if you saw them nearby, it meant you’d made a mistake and should get as far away as possible.

Only now we were all together, the four of us. And Mrs. Zayneb’s baby, if you’re still counting the baby.

We hovered anxiously every time Mrs. Zayneb stopped to nurse or adjust the child. Each of us certain that, at this instant, the wolves were lifting their snouts from the dimming well of a corpse to remember us, thinking, They’re still out there, but not for much longer.

The kitchen girl wilted from the weight of Mrs. Farzaneh’s bags. She gave me a look once, as if the two of us were stranded on the same sinking ship. I just stared. I couldn’t remember how to use the muscles in my face. She looked away quickly.

The waning moon licked its chops. So far away from a full moon, we weren’t safe. We would never be safe again.

I was trying to remind myself that I wasn’t really there. To move was to invite remembrance from the deep.

My parents, slit open like lovely silk purses. Their skin like wetly wrinkled leaves. The young men and boys of our district, yanked out of hiding from apartments, tea shops, minarets, synagogues, bathhouses, pistachio stalls.

We knew, by then, what the wolves could do. And now, we knew what the people around us could become.

3.

I’ll tell you what happened to our young men that night. You’re old enough to know, but maybe don’t tell your mother. Just in case. Maybe you can add that to your promise?

You can tell her nothing bad happened. Nothing bad will ever happen.

The young men. Some of them were really just boys, a few years younger than me—yes, maybe younger than you, like Khaled al-Rahman, who swore, he swore a holy man showed him how to read the future in ordinary shale stones.

How do you tell a boy like that that he’s wrong about the world? He was a baby to me. A wise baby, perhaps. With an indisputable knack for predicting the weather, perhaps. But a baby still.

Others were older. Ibn Khoury was old enough to have two little children who drooled into his beard. But, you know, I have this memory of my father laughing to my mother at how Ibn Khoury was still afraid to hold his wife. He was painfully inquisitive about touching her the right way, that’s how my father put it. So I think he must’ve been very young after all.

They were dragged out into the market square, the youngest men of our district. Now shivering, now gripping one another for comfort, here at the end where there was little comfort to be had, while the wolves killed the first man, the second man, the third.

When they got to the fourth man, the wolves didn’t kill him. Instead, they stood before him and asked, “Will you die or will you live?” What could anyone say to that? What would you say?

We watched the young men we knew as they transformed into wolves. It was a simple thing. None of the horseshit you hear about. No one took a bite of anyone or said any kind of hocus-pocus. It was a tacit agreement, made in silence, sealed by the unvarnished longing to stay alive.

Just like that, the young men we once knew lost their bony necks and tubby cheeks, the topographical features that made them vulnerable and peculiar and familiar and precious. To me and my friends, they were neighbors and crushes and older brothers and companions. A few days earlier, the Kabir boy up the street had said to me with the suave certainty of a man several years older, “I’m going to marry you someday,” and his friend, eavesdropping, hooted, “Yeah, right, you ugly turd! No girl’s going to marry you unless you fall on your face and get a new one!”

Now both of those boys, all of them, were changing. The piddly chicken wings of their arms lengthened, became graceful. Their shoulders sharpened. Fur grew fast, faster than they’d ever grown beards or little mustaches—we’d teased them for so long and they’d flushed and stammered, hardly able to meet our eyes, and now here they were, aging into horror.

They shook their mouths and all their teeth fell out. In their place, new incisors split through tender gums. They looked at us, and we looked at them. There was nothing familiar between us.

“Run,” they said with mouths full of new blood, and were they threatening us? Were they begging us?

We didn’t stay to find out. We ran.

You feel badly for them. It’s fine. You don’t have to pretend. I can see your face. I think you have more compassion than I ever did. I didn’t know how to feel badly for them. Not for a long time.

That night, there was no such thing as a good choice. Is it worse to believe you have a bad choice or to know you have none at all?

No, I’m really asking. How could I know?

4.

Morning came, and somehow we were alive. We were so exhausted, we fell asleep right there in the wild barley, cupped in a palm of sunlight, Mrs. Zayneb sheltering the child. The kitchen girl sleeping a little apart from us at Mrs. Farzaneh’s insistence.

We couldn’t see the river, but we could hear it. It was a knife blade, whetted to a teething point by spring ice melt, separated from us by a thicket of cane grass. And on the other side, the old Shah’s highway, which weeks ago teemed with the everyday havoc of travelers coming and going, Nishapuri pilgrims, long ropey camel caravans, scholars with more beard than face—everyone on the verge of collision, only missing by a miracle. It was completely abandoned now, as if the city had ceased to exist. Now it was strewn with left-behind pushcarts and deflated saddlebags. Reminders that we weren’t the only ones who’d fled.

I woke up and a short-tailed rat was in the barley, nibbling at my ankle. I lay still. I wasn’t afraid, you must understand. It was just that I didn’t want the rat to go.

I lay there, thinking, Now do I want to live? Maybe now? If the answer was yes, I thought, I would kick the rat away.

I fell asleep again still asking myself, Now? Maybe now?

In the afternoon, it was the kitchen girl who said, “Do you hear that?”

And before Mrs. Farzaneh could scold her, we heard it. The ground, galloping beneath us. Our teeth, chattering without us. The wolves, coming this way.

We raced into the cane thicket, the kitchen girl dragging me with her, as they came roaring down the highway between our city and the next one. Probably a hundred of them, too few to be anything but a small company of Genghis Khan’s army.

We clung to one another, our hearts sloshing somewhere around our anklebones. The cane grass pressed against us with urgency.

The kitchen girl got too close and Mrs. Farzaneh slapped her away and Mrs. Zayneb whispered, aghast, “What—what are you doing?” and Mrs. Farzaneh’s face got tight and mean and she said, “I’ll scream. I swear to God.”

Two weeks ago, I remembered, they’d quarreled outside our home about Mrs. Zayneb’s brother: Mrs. Farzaneh shouting in her croaky voice that he’d lain on Mrs. Zayneb’s roof and thrown a rock through Mrs. Farzaneh’s window, almost killing her niece, Mrs. Zayneb saying, “You think the worst of people, and what grown man throws a rock through a window?” even though everyone knew he’d done it, Mrs. Zayneb included. My mother muttered, “Those women, I’d sacrifice my left tit to give them any self-respect,” and when she saw me, she coughed and said, “You didn’t hear that,” and then she said, “Oh, you know what I mean.” Although I didn’t.

In this moment, I missed her so direly. Now did I want to live? Maybe now? The kitchen girl crouched still, her hands balled. The arteries in her arms banging to be set free.

The wolves whirled past us, one incinerating blast, a blaze of fury, a fist of God, and then they were gone. We didn’t know they were in front of us until they weren’t. Mrs. Farzaneh sat on the ground, the stiff cane swatting her, and she said, “Oh God. This is too much. I’m going back. I can’t live like this. I’m going home.”

I remembered then that Mrs. Farzaneh had been the first to return for me the night before. She had such steady hands then. She seemed so certain that I must keep going. She’d watched over me when I couldn’t.

I thought I should say something now. But I wanted to go home, just like her.

Mrs. Zayneb said, trying to be encouraging, perhaps, “Well, all right. Why don’t we all go back and you can browbeat them into letting us stay, yes? You can tell them their hedges are too long and their parties are too vigorous,” and Mrs. Farzaneh started to hiccup, something between a cry and a laugh, and she said, hiccupping, “Stop. Just stop it. For one second, please, can you be decent.”

But somehow it helped. I knew, then, I’d never understand whatever lay between those two.

And meanwhile, the kitchen girl was stealing away. I thought, She’s going to run, good for her, and then I saw it standing at the top of the road. The wolf, watching us.

It wasn’t just any old wolf. We all knew him. He was one of the boys, our boys, or he used to be. He was no longer a boy, obviously. He didn’t look anything like himself.

The kitchen girl saw him first. She’d seen him as the two women were fighting or teasing or whatever. As I stood there, wishing I knew how to die with conviction.

Mrs. Farzaneh and Mrs. Zayneb fell silent. And the baby, the little baby, he began to cry. The wolf, who up until that moment had been watching the kitchen girl pick her way toward him, snapped his head at the sound of the baby.

Was it fear? Was it hunger? Was it rage? He was a wolf, and we weren’t. We couldn’t tell.

The kitchen girl said, reaching as close to him as she probably dared, “Please.”

With great difficulty, the wolf looked at her. He was once the son of my father’s friend, a friend who taught at a college in the district. When we were children and our families would visit, the boy wouldn’t eat anything at dinner. The little shit, he’d upturn bowls, and if he got going he could writhe himself into a yodeling, feral panic. Everyone would look at one another with piteous eyes, because my mother wouldn’t say a word to him if his mother wasn’t going to say a word, some unspoken compact of motherhood.

Once, I said to him, “You’re going to die if you don’t eat,” which was just the sort of thing my mother would normally tell me, and he said, “I don’t care, I don’t! I don’t!” and threw a spoon at my face.

Did he remember us now? I hoped he didn’t.

I swear to you, the kitchen girl reached out and touched the wolf on the shoulder. Her hand sank into his fur and disappeared briefly. So small in comparison to him. He was so close, the heat of his mouth touched us, an unspeakable smell.

If he takes her, I thought, maybe he’ll leave the rest of us.

And before my eyes, it happened. He picked her up in his mouth, lightly, his muzzle fitting around her waist. That’s how big he was. She went limp. She wasn’t dead, but that made it worse.

Without a backward look at us, he leapt his way up the road and into a fringe of trees. Wild grape and caper bushes swiped them from view in an instant.

Like that, the kitchen girl was gone.

For once, Mrs. Farzaneh didn’t have anything to say. She just clamped her hands to her chest and took these awful gasping breaths, and it seemed like maybe she was dying. I knew I should be afraid.

I put my hand on her shoulder, surprising myself. I didn’t know I could do that. I didn’t know there was any kindness left in me. It didn’t matter. She didn’t seem to notice.

We should’ve picked up our things and started to run. Any moment, the wolf could come back, looking for another meal. But right then, we didn’t have it in us. At some point, Mrs. Farzaneh’s breathing evened out and it was quiet.

When we heard the bushes rustling up on the far side of the old Shah’s road, we didn’t think much. Was it our turn to die? Too bad. We looked up with a most unscientific curiosity as the wild grape and caper parted, and the kitchen girl emerged again, covered in blood.

Maybe when you think of blood, you think of your monster movies, food coloring and monkey’s piss, or whatever it is. Sorry, sorry, monkey’s urine. Don’t laugh. I’m trying.

Oh, they don’t use urine, do they? Thank you for your input.

It’s not real, right? That’s all I’m saying. Do you want to hear what happened or not?

Anyway, when the kitchen girl came out of the bushes, there was blood on her face, on her clothes. Real blood. Vast gobs of tissue or muscle or meat or who even knows, wetly pasted on her bare arms and her trousers.

She came toward us, stumbling. For a moment, we didn’t understand what we were seeing.

And then we saw the knife. Almost bent out of shape. The beast of a knife she had carried from the city all the way here, covered in the scarlet goulash of an animal’s insides. And we understood what she’d done.

With some difficulty, she came down to the cane thicket, grasping at the shrubbery for relief, leaving fervent red handprints behind.

We didn’t even think to ask if she was hurt or what had happened.

And the kitchen girl, she walked right past us.

We followed her, but it was clear we weren’t really there. Not to her. She made her way down to the river, wordlessly, and plunged herself deep into the water. The water coughed and spat, red, muddy, writhing. She stripped off her clothes—stripped naked, right under the eyes of God—although she did it with some difficulty, because her clothes were barnacled to her body, as if they, too, were having trouble with the whole concept.

At this, Mrs. Farzaneh went purple and said, “My God.” She covered her eyes with her fingers, as if this, this was it. This, her kitchen girl naked, not the many horrors we’d endured already.

With great melodrama, she rummaged through her belongings and took out a jacket of Yazdi silk, trousers heavy with silver thread, expensive underthings, and she, too, went down to the river, to give them to her kitchen girl. The whole time, her gemstones clattering in her petticoats, the bells of the world’s most doleful jester.

She helped to dry the girl off, shielding her from view ostentatiously (“She’s a maggot,” Mrs. Zayneb said, shaking her head with real anger, “a pious maggot”) and helping her into the new clothes.

No, wait. No, that’s not right at all.

It didn’t happen like that. Now I remember.

There were two kitchen girls.

5.

That’s right. There were two kitchen girls that Mrs. Farzaneh dragged with her out of the city, into the steppes along the river. Two girls to carry her bags, while she clutched her paste gems and bewailed her fate. Two girls to slap away at night, when they tried to move closer for comfort. Two girls.

Yes, I know. It’s not fair to turn one girl into two.

Yes, you’re right, it’s quite late in the story to do that.

But that’s how it really was. Do you want the truth or do you want a story?

It’s been a long time. It’s almost ancient history. Don’t be upset, dear boy. I’m sorry. Some things you try to forget.

The first girl, I knew her before. She was the kind of girl everyone liked. A face that men would follow for miles. She could do clever tricks—you know, make coins disappear. Things like that.

The first night, she was the one I spoke to. “Please do a trick,” I said. “Please, please,” and she made shadow puppets with her hands, a timid little hare that hitchhiked on the back of a cobra.

And I pressed myself into the smallest shape I could. Feeling something open within me, a temporary stillness. Not knowing to call it wonder. Even Mrs. Farzaneh watched, looking soft and sad.

I’d never met the second girl until then. The previous night, she’d gazed at the moon with grimness, understanding what we hadn’t yet realized—that the full moon was our best chance of survival. She was the only person who helped Mrs. Zayneb with her baby.

You could tell, when you saw the kitchen girl with the baby. You could see it. The way she held the baby. You could see it on her face.

She didn’t speak much, even to Mrs. Zayneb. She was clumsy with the rest of us. It was this kitchen girl, the one I didn’t know, who carried the beast of a knife.

I said that the baby started to cry. But that wasn’t it. It was the first kitchen girl. The lovely one with the magic tricks.

And, yes, at the sound of her sobs, the wolf snapped his head around like it was on a rubber band. He saw her cringing into the cane grass, trying to fold herself up out of existence.

She shook her head, but he came loping down to meet us. So close that we could see the strings of spittle flying from one tooth to the next.

The other kitchen girl said, “No, not her,” and “Please,” putting her hand on his shoulder, but he didn’t seem to notice. He picked the first girl up in his mouth, lightly. She went limp, and away he bounded, up the road and into the trees. Gone in a flash.

Perhaps you can guess what happened next? Mrs. Farzaneh started to gasp for air, and the other kitchen girl, who’d helped Mrs. Zayneb with the baby, who carried that big kitchen knife with her, picked up and followed the wolf.

The rest of us were too lightning-struck with fear and awe and more fear to do anything about it. For a while they were gone, the two kitchen girls. It seemed to us that this was it.

In the end, it wasn’t two kitchen girls who came back but one. Just one, covered in blood and the hamburger meat of something’s insides, the wolf’s, her own, and the other girl’s, the blood of the girl we never knew.

She walked right past us, the girl who could make coins disappear, the girl who made a timid hare out of firelight and her own small fingers, carrying the knife of the second kitchen girl. She went down to the river, and she took off her clothes. Stripped right down to her skin. It was then that we understood that the wolf wouldn’t return—and neither would the second kitchen girl.

When Mrs. Farzaneh and the girl came back from the river, it was this kitchen girl, the first one, the nice one, the only one left, who picked up Mrs. Farzaneh’s things, which she’d carried all this way from the city. She picked them up slowly, with effort. Then she put them right back down.

She didn’t look at any of us. She busied herself with putting each bag down on the ground, one by one. What she had just lived through, we couldn’t conceive of it. What could anyone say?

Mrs. Farzaneh said, “Fine, yes, it’s fine, leave them,” so quietly it was mostly a whisper. Mrs. Zayneb clutched her little bundled boy, who had at long last begun to squall.

After that, the kitchen girl stopped talking. She kept track of the moon and its phases, just like the second girl, but she did it without comment, her eyes unfathomable. She didn’t speak as Mrs. Farzaneh struggled with her bags, huffing and sweating, even though she watched the older woman go. She didn’t wince as the baby bawled its fist-sized lungs out, its face a burst persimmon.

She didn’t look shocked when Hell itself froze over and a chastened, perspiring Mrs. Farzaneh offered her leather wineskin to Mrs. Zayneb, so the baby could take small sips until it fell asleep.

You think she was angry at us, or maybe herself? I did, too. Who knows?

We were each of us lit with the brittle wick of our anger. We fed it the way you feed a starving animal. With hope that it will grow strong, with dread that it won’t stay.

6.

Should I stop now? I can stop. We can do something else. I’m sorry about the second kitchen girl. I didn’t mean to forget her.

So much has happened. Pieces fall away. That doesn’t make them less true. Can you understand?

The thing about you is, when you pick up a book, you don’t expect it to disappear. When you go to school, you know you’ll come back. When you say goodbye to your mother, you know it’s just for now.

At least—that’s what I used to think, anyway.

But it’s not true, is it?

Dear boy. Yes, she’s worried about you. We all are. Don’t you know that?

No, we don’t have to talk about it. I only wanted you to understand—you’re not alone in this. Disaster comes for each of us, in its own way.

All right. I’ll keep going.

In the days after, the wolves started to burn farmland. Maybe they were burning the whole of Khorasan. If you want to see the end of the world, it looks like this. A wasteland of smoke. The cities and villages of the province in ruins. The river rose as they destroyed centuries-old dams ahead of and behind us. All the painstaking work of generations past. Progress that takes lifetimes. How quickly, how heedlessly it was lost.

Each village we passed, the women would murmur to one another, “My sister,” or “Mirza’s uncle,” or “The woman who made my wedding dress, she lived there.” Counting their dead. To me, it felt like they were always trying to say sorry to one another without speaking the words.

One time, I slipped into a cave while the others weren’t watching and whispered, “Go ahead,” waiting for bats to flap down from the ceiling and devour me.

I’d never seen a real bat before. Maybe that’s obvious. I had this image of bats descending in a curtain. I thought the curtain would feast on my head, my heart.

I thought, If only I could make a trade. Myself for Mirza’s uncle. Myself for the dressmaker, for the sister.

By now I knew we wouldn’t go back. There was no pretending anymore. The moon was a quarter already. Every day, we walked farther from the city, a dark blot we tried not to see, an omen at our backs, and every hour, the smell followed us.

Now did I want to live? No, certainly not. I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I was just trying to understand how far I could go. How close I could get to the end of my life without flinching.

But I stood in the cave, in darkness. Waiting, waiting. No bats came.

7.

We weren’t the only ones who escaped. Every night, Genghis Khan’s wolves howled, looking for survivors. We who lived were rats, chattering with desperation. But even a rat made of fear can sometimes outrun an army.

Every night, Mrs. Farzaneh left something else behind. She’d brought with her the unlikeliest things: her ledger books, a little Greek idol from a traveler, her wedding dress, trimmed with peacock feathers, as if some dashing stranger might come along and marry her on the spot. She asked us, slyly, “Anyone want this?” and Mrs. Zayneb said without a trace of levity, “No one wants your ledger books, but thank you for asking.”

On this particular night, Mrs. Farzaneh left behind her beautiful mechanical clock, shaped like an elephant and tipped with Hindustani ivory. She cried, but she walked away from us to do it, her hands covering her face. Maybe to spare us from comforting her. Or maybe just to make us feel awful.

When she came back, I said, “I can carry the clock,” and everyone stared. It was the first time I’d spoken since the night we left.

Mrs. Zayneb said at last, “If you take advantage of this child—”

“Oh, hush. I’m not a monster,” Mrs. Farzaneh said. “With any luck, God will strike me and make it easy on all of us. At least then I won’t be having this conversation.”

I thought she was serious. But she clucked and then rolled her eyes at me, as if to say, What a ridiculous person she thinks I am.

They were all looking at me now. Maybe they didn’t think I’d ever speak again. Mrs. Zayneb asked, “Do you want to hold him?” and slipped the baby into my arms before I could say no. I understood she was trying to offer me a gift, even if I also knew I didn’t want her gift. I concentrated on the baby so I wouldn’t have to see them staring.

By now the mountains had come upon us. At night, the moon slid through the sky, unfurling over time, and we eyed it with wariness and hope alike.

To survive a wolf was one thing. To survive a man, who might have weak wrists or kind instincts—a man whose skin might be filleted like a fish—that was something else.

Now we all kept track of the moon, not just the kitchen girl. We understood that if we were still alive by the full moon, less than a week away, then maybe, maybe there was some hope.

8.

Should I tell you the story I heard once, long before the wolves came to our city? About the boy who saw Genghis Khan and lived?

A few months prior, the story goes, the boy had tried to drown himself. A sardine fisherman found him floating in the water, slowly turning a twilight blue. At first, the fisherman thought it was his own son, who had drowned years before. Such a horrifying thought, he was almost afraid to bring his skiff any closer. They had buried the body. But who knows what can be unearthed by time?

So this boy was alive a few months later when Genghis Khan took his family. He came home one day and everyone was gone: his brothers, his father, his mother, the farm animals. Not even the colorless geckos that lived beneath the house were spared. No one was left, except him.

The boy wasn’t afraid, no. More than anything, he was furious. He’d come so close to death, not once but twice, and twice death had blinked.

That’s why he went looking for Genghis Khan. He followed Genghis Khan for days, then weeks. The boy knew who he was. People were disappearing every day. Every day, the rumors grew.

And the boy thought, How could I have been spared? How did I fail?

In a sense, then, he felt relief when he saw Genghis Khan in the forest one night. At last. An enormous mountain of a wolf, creeping through the trees. The boy stood at the edge of the forest and thought, I’ll ask him to bring my family back. Or turn me into a wolf. I’ll fight him. I’ll do anything.

But he stood there and didn’t move. The wolf came up to him, so big it blotted out the moon, the sky, the trees. Death coming to face the boy a third time, unblinking.

“You took them,” was all the boy could say.

It seemed that Genghis Khan understood exactly who he was. He lowered his head to speak to the boy and he said, “Who was it I took? Was it your family? Or was it you?”

That’s all the boy remembered. He woke up later, still alive, the sky still dark, the moon a livid half-closed eye. The wolf was gone.

You hate that story? Fine, that’s fine. How was the boy supposed to know he would freeze up when he saw the wolf?

The last piece of the story is this. For years after, the boy was certain that his punishment was to live. To know that death was on its way, but that it would take its time. It would pick its place.

And he could do nothing to stop or to hasten it. He could only wait.

You think he deserved it?

No, the story isn’t about you. How could it possibly be about you? It’s just a story. What, has your family been taken by wolves?

Oh, very funny. I didn’t know your mother was raising a comedian.

Okay. Let me tell you what happened next.

9.

One night, the wolves started coming out of the mountains and towns nearby. More of them than we’d seen since the city. I clasped the arm of the kitchen girl, and she clutched her knife, and Mrs. Zayneb held her baby, and Mrs. Farzaneh clung to the last of her bags.

There was nowhere to go. The mountains sharpened their teeth above, too far away, too steep to climb. There was nowhere to hide. Except the river, which foamed and flexed, reflecting the bulb of the moon overhead.

Well, what else could we do? We dropped our belongings and made for the river, all except Mrs. Farzaneh, who said, “I can’t. I can’t. I’ll drown.”

“Put the bags down,” the kitchen girl said urgently. “I’ll help you.”

Mrs. Farzaneh stood there with wet eyes. The ground began to shake beneath us. “I’ve lost so much,” she said. She said it without dismay, just the fact of it.

All around us, wolves howled, closing in. We were all so afraid. We thought, They’ll kill her, and she doesn’t care.

“Get in,” Mrs. Zayneb said. “We need you. Please, Farzaneh.”

And that was that. We plunged into the river, Mrs. Farzaneh laden with her gemstones and her bags and her wineskin. The moment she set foot in the river, she disappeared, a solid weight made of her worldly possessions.

The kitchen girl swore and went after her. The baby started to cry, and Mrs. Zayneb moaned, “Not now, not now.”

The wolves were coming, but they were the last of our worries, because the river sucked in its breath and took us with it. Somewhere along the way, Mrs. Zayneb lost the child, and then it was in my arms, screeching to the end of the world. And then I lost them all.

In the night, I found myself on the riverbank, alone with a child that wasn’t mine. Alone with no one else I knew. I was coughing up water, and the wolves were gone.

No, that’s not true. There they were. Up in the foothills. They were hunting, but they weren’t hunting me.

I wish I could say I was brave. I wish I could say I ran after them, howling, No, no, take me! Take me!

But I was never a brave girl. I curled up on the riverbank with this baby that I most certainly didn’t want, and I prayed for it all to be over.

Morning came. The baby began to cry. I walked back to where I’d left the others. But no one was there. Just our things in a pile where we’d dumped them.

I fed the baby crushed grapes and it almost choked. I put my finger in its mouth so it wouldn’t make a sound. It tried to bite me.

I said to the baby, “I should leave you here,” but I didn’t. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to. But without the baby, it would really just be me. On my own.

I thought of going back to the city, now a hazy torch in the far-off sky. Of prying open the doors of my home. Of crawling to lie beside the bodies of my parents, where I should have been all along. Falling asleep with them at my side.

10.

Now I walked up the hills with the baby, all alone, and night fell again. The moon was a mystery, hidden in cloud. The smell of death came from everywhere, rolling in waves. It seems to me I can smell it even now. Even here, with you.

In the distance, I saw a great, bristling shadow. I clutched the baby and didn’t breathe. The shadow moved with such uncertainty, as if it was carrying the difficult weight of itself but didn’t wish to anymore. I’d never seen anything like it before. And then I knew.

It was one of the Shah’s war elephants. We’d heard rumors of them in the long days before the siege of the city. The elephant still wore its armor, its strange dignity, and it was badly injured. Where it had come from, I had no idea. Probably it wouldn’t last long, on its own, so far from anywhere. If the injury didn’t finish it, or hunger, the wolves would.

It was only a matter of time; maybe it wouldn’t even mind. How unbelievable, this creature, like it’d come to life from myth. Something came unstuck in my throat. I felt more grief than I thought I could endure.

Meanwhile, the baby was silent, and I didn’t know if it was dead, and I didn’t want to check. All I wanted was to find the other women. A few days before, I would’ve given up my knee bones, my whole face, to see my parents. And now all I wanted was to see those women again. Those women I despised.

It was just me now. And the baby, if you’re counting the baby, and now I was. Now I had to.

How quickly a body changes its ways. You of all people know that, don’t you?

Will you tell me why you did it?

Not yet? That’s fine. It’s okay if you never tell me. I don’t need to know.

It’s not my business, it’s true. I promise I won’t ask again.

In the hills, I stepped in burst fruit, trying not to think that once it was a piece of a young girl’s leg, an old man’s chest. I listened for wolves and watched the sky. Everything was eerie and silent. Only when the clouds rolled back did I see it, the full moon.

11.

The thing is, you never saw Genghis Khan’s wolves during the full moon, because they all went into hiding. That’s how the story went. Who could be afraid of wolves when you saw what lay beneath?

Under the mercy of the full moon, I was alive, I was safe, and there they were, the wolves, turning back into men, skinny and fleshy and freaking out and covering themselves.

Maybe they couldn’t comprehend what’d happened. I didn’t know. They took so much from me. Did they deserve my grief on top of it?

They hid, and then they came out again, begging for forgiveness. How could we do this if we were men? they seemed to be saying. We had to be wolves. We have to be wolves.

Those three nights of the full moon, they came out again and again, their eyes glittering, full of tears, full of pain. The ones you knew, the ones you once loved. It’s pitiful to see anyone ruined this way. Even as they take the shape of your brothers and sons and neighbors and strangers, the ones from your city, all the others, you know. You know what they’ve done.

And when they become monsters once more, they are full of rage and venom. Pelts shining in the moonlight. And it is a relief, a relief, to see them as monsters again.

OUR LADY OF RESPLENDENT MISFORTUNE

When Joan first comes to Claribel, it’s in a vision. The bells hum. The saints slide around like strange vampires, their mandibles clacking fervently. Joan is made of hellfire. She’s a child in armor. She’s a woman with nothing left to give. She opens her arms, such a plaintive gesture. She says to Claribel with eyes full of want, “Don’t I deserve this? Just the smallest taste?”

CLARIBEL’S IN A cemetery, but she wasn’t here before. The bells are humming, until they aren’t. Everywhere, the warm fungal musk of graves after rainfall. It’s dark. The saints are gone. Joan, gone. Just her, Claribel, with her own unlit body, which might as well be a furnace without any coal. An icebox in full melt.

Get up, Claribel says to herself. She gets up. There’s something squirming on her, wetly alive. She makes herself touch. Mud. It’s only mud, wormy, delirious.

What are you doing in a cemetery, Claribel? Don’t you want to know, Claribel?

Every wild nerve in her body is jumping to be elsewhere. No surprise. If she closes her eyes, girls in baptismal frocks swim to the surface, her little darling commas. They always died young. Her girls. She could wrap her entire hand around the flat gourds of their skulls. Sometimes they died inside of her, and that was a different species of horror. Her body the grave. Her body a tomb.

Being here makes her trespass on the familiar hearth of grief and look in. The sensation that someone is forcing her chin, making her watch what she’s already witnessed: her own distress. That thing she is best acquainted with.

From above, lantern-jawed trees scrutinize her with doubt, as if to ask—Is this how you thought you’d spend your best years, Claribel? Isn’t it time to pack your things and come home, Claribel?

CLOSE YOUR EYES for a moment and you can see her—Joan, Jeanne, whatever you’d like to call her. The fretful oval of her face. A farmer’s daughter, a Domrémy girl. The heretic.

If you think of her, you’ll hear the parish bells sing. Saints in bristled silhouettes converging upon her. Long fingers like wind chimes.

At the stake, her enemies set fire to Joan thrice: the first so she would die, twice for good measure, three times so there was nothing left to bury.

Joan once threw herself out of a window to escape captivity, with only God’s grace to carry her down. Claribel can appreciate that. To be so ravenous with desperation that the only way out is complete and utter annihilation. A torpedo made of your own sharpened body.

The hope that no one lives to remember: this is how it all went to shit.

WHAT THEY AGREE upon: Joan can take her body while Claribel sleeps, when Claribel’s not using it anyway. Joan can do with it what she wishes. When Claribel wakes, it is hers again.

AND, LATER, CLARIBEL will recall the dread of agreeing to such an arrangement. A familiar dread. To give something up of your own free will, lest it be taken from you anyway.

FROM THE GRAVEYARD, she hitches a ride back to town with the first car that takes her. A battered coupe, a young man at the wheel, open-faced, heartbreakingly eager, the kind of young that makes her feel far older than she is. He says, “It’s no problem, miss. I’m headed that way myself.” She suspects he’s someone who thinks of himself as courtly. You could put a check in the mail and order him from a catalogue.

What is Joan doing in a cemetery, Claribel? She tries to think what to do next. In the hours her body belongs to Joan, it isn’t Claribel’s.

Isn’t it better not to know what’s happening? Isn’t it sort of a best-case scenario?

The sharp chemical smell of the car makes her head spike with wrath. After the war, they’re everywhere. She despises this way of traveling. Stick yourself in a rattling tin bucket and fling it as far as you can. Sure, might as well. Nineteen twenty-six is the future, but it’s also right now, this moment and the next and the next. What’s that saying. The past is what happens to the future when you’re not paying attention. No, that’s not it. That’s not anything. The road spins past them feverishly, sumacs and balsam firs grinning with raindrops.

Her thighs are slicked in graveyard mud. She cleans herself circumspectly, with no luck. He pretends not to look, but she can tell he’s looking. His eyes dark and uncertain, an appetite he doesn’t seem to realize he possessed.

SHE’S BEEN LIVING out of the prim rooming house on Patten Street for some months now. The house with aluminum siding in stoic yellow rectangles. Wired for electricity, thank god, still a rarity in towns like this one.

It’s a small room. There’s a shabby camp cot with little bayonets for springs. The wash jug cracked right down the center.

Mrs. Willis, the woman who owns the house, says things like, “Was that you in the hallway?” and “Where are you off to so early this morning?”

She appears out of corners with the instincts of a secret agent, or more likely, lying in wait. It’s a dry house; Mrs. Willis is an avid prohibitionist, and this means she thinks her nosiness has a moral imperative.

Her cats wind their way through furniture in ecstatic arabesques. Sleek and purring engines. The cats are everywhere, always. The orange tabby, the little black one, the mangy Persian, the gray tabby.

Claribel is allergic. This is a new discovery.

It’s a change, she tells herself. Change is what’s left when you purge everything else.

This particular morning, when she returns to the rooming house, everything’s still in its place. The bed is made, square corners and all. Her clothes untouched. The suitcase in the closet, fragrant with Cheney leather. And, mercifully, the only thing she cares about is tucked in its secret place, still in its paper sleeve. Crisp bills, bank-fresh. The tense elastics of her shoulders snap in relief.

The money is all she has. She didn’t take much when she left. She’s sure he won’t even notice it’s gone. That’s how little it means to him, and how much to her.

They were happy once. Maybe not so long ago. This she understands in abstraction, but it feels more like something she read in a book and chose to believe. She cannot conceive of that sunny and mysterious woman, the person she was, without disbelief. Maybe even suspicion. It makes her dizzy to think of the past. So unsure of what was real.

The money, though. That’s real. It’s what she deserves after so many years of devotion. All those years of service.

In this, she feels keenly for Joan. They are rubbed thin, everyone taking and taking, so little left. Not even enough to bury a body.

She has taken so little for herself. This, she reasons, is why the money is a fair trade.

WHEN JOAN FIRST comes to Claribel, the very first vision, it’s a Sunday afternoon. Claribel is trying to take a nap, she’s trying. The church bells are ringing, and Joan is frantic.

It’s a little like watching a movie in a movie theater, except the movie is standing in Claribel’s drab little room. The movie is walking, talking, hazy and two-dimensional, trying to grasp Claribel’s face for emphasis.

The movie has hands and a face. Except they shift out of place constantly.

“It’s not fair, you have to see that,” Joan says. In these five centuries since her death, she has become acquainted with the English language. She touches Claribel’s washbasin and her fingers disintegrate. She doesn’t seem to notice half of her hand is gone. “Can you imagine what it’s like, to be burned alive?”

And the saints. Six of them, too long to be human, clicking jaws, gurgling tongues, smiling and gnashing their teeth. Sliding around the room like elongated carnival horses.

“Who are they?” Claribel asks, trying not to sound alarmed.

“Oh,” Joan says, annoyed, waving them away. The second half of her hand returns. “They’re nobody.”

Jubilation from the saints. “At long last,” they whisper, flinging themselves from one side of the room to the other. It doesn’t seem like they’re talking to Claribel, or anyone. “There’s much work to do!”

“You can’t just ask them to leave?” Claribel asks.

Joan pays them no attention. “You’re the blood of my blood. I found you,” she says, trying to grasp Claribel’s face in her hands. The tips of her fingers fall off instead.

Up close, Joan’s face is grainy and earnest. She’s trying to say, We’re related. Somewhere along the twining branches, which start with a village in France and end here. A little room with flailing saints and a dead girl.

She’s trying to say, We are blood, and blood owes blood.

“Why now?” Claribel asks.

She thinks saying this is a kind of refusal, a No, I don’t think so, hidden in polite question. But that’s never how it works. She should know better after all these years of being a person.

Joan shifts where she stands, touching her sword as if to remind herself it’s there. She’s Joan from the battlefield. A streak of dirt on her chin. She wears a breastplate and full armor, a gift from some long-dead king.

“Because now you know how it feels,” Joan says, with her hand on her sword, “to live the most awful day of your life again and again.”

Joan says, “Imagine if that lasted five hundred years. Then maybe you’ll understand. You’ll see what’s owed to me.”

AND SOME PART of Claribel wants this. She does. To step out of the blundering costume of her skin. In these months, she has traveled so far from the person she once was, the woman with a shining new house, the squalling bassinet. The woman who said yes when she meant no.

For a time, it’s a thrill to think of her body as a rooming house. With its own cracked wash jug, its sumptuous feasts. Its arched-back felines. Full of pleasure and pain.

ON WEDNESDAYS, SHE cleans Mrs. Davis Greene’s house. She doesn’t mind the work. Her first weeks are bleak, but she’s always been malleable. A fast learner. Her cuticles accumulate turpentine. The pads of her feet blaze for hours afterward.

She remembers that Mrs. Davis Greene wants her to use only chamois cloths to clean the glass, after the first calamity. Only the chamois. So it is.

Mrs. Davis Greene, whose real name is Emma, is wry and light-footed. She keeps her cigarettes tucked in the sheer silk strap of her nightgown, reaching for them often. She checks on the baby the way you might check on a bread pan in the oven. With perfunctory impatience. There’s a Black woman who takes care of the child, mostly. Sometimes Mrs. Davis Greene sits with Claribel and watches her clean.

“I hate this kind of work,” Mrs. Davis Greene says. Trying to be chummy. “You’re a godsend.”

God should’ve sent her a vacuum cleaner, Claribel thinks, but what she says out loud is what she thinks Mrs. Davis Greene wants to hear: “Oh, it’s not so bad. It’s something to do, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Davis Greene tells Claribel they will win the Better Baby contest at the state fair this fall. Emma and baby. Emma has been scrubbing the baby’s teeth with a whitening paste. She puts a bowl over his head, to shape the soft clay of his skull. “To help him cook right,” she says with a sheepish grin. She tugs on his ears until he makes a hearty noise.

Claribel doesn’t tell Emma that she, too, used to go to these contests. The livestock shows: the chickens and horses and pigs and cows and the babies. All those blue eyes. Rows and rows of blue eyes. She would watch the judges measure the children’s skulls. She could see whose bodies made the most spotless baby. A shining house on a shining hill.

She was so smug back then, she was almost vengeful. Knowing that whatever came out of herself would be well shaped, beautifully jawed, a spine like a pencil, a brain like a slab of beef on a cutting board. Made with whetted intention and clean blood. With his long forehead, her clear skin, what could be made but beauty; an unflawed stone, polished and perfect?

But the babies never lived. Those little translucent newborns. Hers. Fragile and flimsy, until they were gone.

She lost the will to attend the contests. She plugged the small spout of her desire. She moved on.

ON WEDNESDAY EVENING, the midweek service. Claribel is adept at finding ways to occupy her time. She slips into a pew toward the back, where she can listen in peace, and without the encumbrance of sustained eye contact.

This particular church has the atmosphere of a frown. From everywhere, the aromas of old books and long-expired candlewax find her. The pastor’s voice has a low, hypnotic cadence. It seems farther away as the moments pass, stretching out before her into a long, flat road.

Claribel jolts awake. Before she can fully understand that she’d dozed off, she’s drifting again.

That’s all it takes. The bells peal in her head. They peal everywhere. A vision of Joan, saints nowhere to be seen. Joan slides into the pew beside Claribel. She is Joan from her trial, teenaged, in her shabby surcoat.

“Hullo,” Joan says to Claribel. She still has the effect of a film projection, stippled and strange. The grainy particles of her chin dissipate, leaving her with a mournful upper lip, almost a mustache, wavering in and out of thin air.

The hum of the pastor’s voice is a distant expanse. Claribel understands now that she’s dreaming. She puts her hand over her mouth just in case, so no one will see her speak. She says into her hand, “I woke up in a cemetery.”

She means to ask a question after, but instead her voice turns up. I woke up in a cemetery?

Joan plucks at the rope she wears around her waist in place of a belt. She’s shifty, in a sulk. Not at Claribel, exactly, but Claribel feels it anyway. “What of it?”

Claribel’s trying to be careful. What does she know of Joan and the things she wants. Who is she to pass judgment.

“It’s an unusual place to wake up,” she begins.

But even this provokes Joan. She goes stiff. Tiny shimmering motes vibrate around the edges of her body, a halo. She’s still missing her chin.

“I didn’t even want to be there! I swear!” Joan is riled now, the thought of that night an apparent injustice. Claribel doesn’t have a chance to speak. Because now the ground opens up beneath their feet. There are no words in Claribel’s head. Joan starts to come apart, into dots. The hole in the ground expands. A saint slithers out of the opening. One, then two, then all six of them. As if they are activated by Joan’s excitement. Or maybe they are summoned.

But Joan doesn’t seem to notice them, even as her dots converge again. She says, “I hate the smell of dead people! It’s wretched.” She’s twisting at her rope-belt, upset. Back at the graveyard, some memory Claribel can’t see.

“Hush,” the saints whisper to Joan. Perhaps that’s meant to be comforting. They have eyes like weeping wounds. They loom over Joan. Long spiky shadows. Three on one side, three on the other. “Cease your caterwauling. You reconnoiter for a higher work. Do not forget.”

This is news to Claribel. But Joan grows smaller at their every admonishment, not only in size but in age, the years thinning off of her, and she nods. The saints’ hands stretch and stretch, reaching for her. Their jaws chatter.

“The cemetery will suffice for its purpose, daughter of faith,” they murmur. “We must prepare the resurrection.”

Joan has shrunk into an adolescent, as tall as Claribel’s hip, the surcoat drowning her. Her misery is its own quiet bell, ringing and alone. Claribel doesn’t want to defend her, exactly. She only wants to understand. She says to the stretching hands, the eyes like weeping wounds, trying to speak away her fear, “What purpose? What resurrection?”

They don’t notice her. She is no one to them.

“I want to go someplace exciting,” Joan’s sad lip-mustache says softly. Her head is bowed. Her fingers are chapped.

She says, “It’s my turn to choose.”

And then Claribel wakes up, and time has passed. She is outside, inhaling leaves in the dark. She doesn’t remember Joan transferring into her body. She doesn’t remember unconsciousness. But it must’ve happened.

With great care, she pries herself out of the hedges, where she has been deposited face-first. A starburst of pain in her fingers. She knows this place. The little park near the rooming house. Perhaps she should be relieved that she’s close to home this time. But she isn’t.

It’s Thursday, almost daybreak. On Thursdays, she cleans for Mrs. Earle Smith. She limps back to the rooming house, picking twigs from herself. In her fingers, such a vivid agony she can hear it twice: once in her hands, twice in her head. Under the glow of streetlamp, she can see her bloody knuckles, a fingernail torn in two.

What was Joan doing tonight?

Isn’t that her own business, Claribel?

IN HER ROOM, Joan has left her a fistful of flowers on the bed. White clover, livid dandelions, the tiny delicate stars of chickweed, wild violets. Weeds, all of them, already wilting, their stalks crumpled. Dandelion spores cling to the bed like seafoam. Joan never learned her letters, so there is no note. She bound the flowers in twine, the knot achingly neat. It is a gesture so pitiful, so painful, it is only more touching.

To die so young, for so little. Claribel closes her eyes. Claribel’s own body must’ve picked the flowers, tied the knot. But she has no memory of it, and why would she. If she could trim out her own flesh and put Joan inside, it would be a blessing to them both.

Already, her hands feel like they don’t belong to her. It’s not the first time this has happened. She has often felt that she is inhabiting this unfamiliar body, keeping it warm for whatever happens next.

Mrs. Willis checks on her later that morning. The cats pour in after her, a stream of color. “Lovely flowers,” she says with insinuation.

“Just a friend,” Claribel says. Mrs. Willis frowns.

“You are young,” she says. She lays her hand on Claribel. A gesture so maternal it makes Claribel want to cut the hand off of her. “You have to protect that. There’s so much of the world, and so little of you.”

“Not so young,” Claribel says lightly. “And not so little, certainly?”

The grip of Mrs. Willis tightens. “You’re quite a tender meal for someone, all on your own. You don’t know what they’re capable of. You have to be careful, my dear.”

SHE’S FINISHING UP when Mrs. Earle Smith appears in the front hallway. Mrs. Earle Smith is carelessly fashionable, but she’s also the kind of person who dresses up for her cleaning lady. She touches the entrance with light, inquisitive fingers, nails enameled scarlet. “There’s a bit of leftover ham. Would you like a sandwich before you go?”

Claribel swabs out the garbage can, replaces the waxed-paper liner, and scrapes the day’s trash in the bin. An ache in her arms, in her hips. She is in the park, in the dark. She is here, walking back into the light, through Mrs. Earle Smith’s house. Into the kitchen, where two ham sandwiches sit across the table from each other.

“Don’t be such a mouse,” Mrs. Earle Smith says, smiling. “I know you’re hungry.”

She sits, and it dawns on Claribel belatedly that they will eat together, that she is expected to talk. Claribel tilts the sleeves of her dress so they swallow up her raw knuckles, her torn fingernail. She feels like a spy, trying to infiltrate an ordinary day. Mrs. Earle Smith doesn’t seem to notice that Claribel’s eating with the paws of her dress. A triangle of sandwich disappears into her mouth.

“So?” Mrs. Earle Smith says. “Are you taking the class?”

The typing class at the public high school. Mrs. Earle Smith left her a pamphlet a few weeks ago. Claribel’s face twists without her permission.

“You are so kind,” she says, hating herself for saying it. Mrs. Earle Smith with all her children grown-up. With her endless good intentions. It’s none of her business. Claribel knows how to type. She doesn’t want to be someone’s secretary. She wants to cut a hole in the earth and fill it with what’s left of herself. “I forgot.”

“You’re so smart. I see it in you,” Mrs. Earle Smith says, tapping the kitchen table with her fingernail. “You can do so much better, you understand me?”

Claribel collects their dishes and scrubs them in the sink. She knows this is expected, even though her day is over. Mrs. Earle Smith folds her hands together and smiles at nothing.

In the window above the sink, Claribel sees her own face. A pale green leaf above her ear, like a folded heart. A memento from the night before, the night she can’t remember. She tries not to panic.

Soap seeps into the cuts on her hands and she sucks in her breath. For a moment, everything is radiant pain. It’s happened a hundred times today. Cleaning formulas and open cuts don’t mix. Not exactly a revelation.

The pain recedes, as it always does. She plucks the leaf out of her hair. She wipes her hands, thinking, You are a perfect replica of an ordinary person.

And so she is.

On her way back to the rooming house, she passes the little park again. She half-expects to see the impression of her body in the hedges, an enormous handprint.

I want to go someplace exciting, Joan said last night. A medieval girl in 1926. Claribel can’t imagine what she would do.

A woman perched on the park bench waves at her, one thumb in her book. Does she know? Was she there last night? Claribel looks away, fear clumped in her throat.

THE CATS ALWAYS find a way into Claribel’s bedroom. When she opens the door, she discovers the orange tabby purring on the pillow, the mangy Persian underneath the bed. They don’t recognize her dislike, or worse, are perhaps drawn to it.

Isn’t that how it goes. Already she’s becoming accustomed to the visions. The anticipation of losing control. Unsought and unwanted, and yet they have a pull. She’s at the movies, in porous darkness. Outside, it’s wet and cold, dripping with rain. Inside, the serene hush of the theater, the plink of the piano.

And then it’s not a piano. It’s the sound of a bell.

Joan comes to her, a dissolving vision. With her, the saints. Although something is especially strange about them this time. They’re black smears in the air, an agitated blob somewhere beyond her. In the murk of the theater, Claribel can’t quite seem to focus on them.

“What’s happened to them?” she asks.

Joan waves a hand away. “Don’t pay them any mind. They’re banished. I didn’t want them.”

“Oh,” Claribel says. She didn’t know that was an option.

If she stares directly at them, the saints resemble some kind of viscous mold. When they try to speak, the mold froths midair. “You had your turn,” they bubble at Joan. Their tone is injured, reproachful. “A ritual. We want a ritual.”

Joan looks at them and her face flickers. Briefly, she is older. The woman she never became. Then she is Joan again.

“You’re right,” she says wistfully.

She’s more placid than the last time, and Claribel ventures, unsure how she’ll react, “A ritual—is that the resurrection?”

“Yes, well, it’s only fair. They deserve to have vengeance, don’t they.” Joan stands over Claribel, comprising a million dots that blur into the movie screen behind her. Some part of Claribel must be conscious, mustn’t it, because the piano is still plinking, the film is still playing.

“We will need a man of faith,” the saints gurgle. “An ocean of salt.”

Claribel watches as Joan slips forward, into her body, the specks of her diffusing away from the screen and into Claribel. It’s the most peculiar feeling.

Joan says, in Claribel’s voice, “I do want this,” considering, perhaps trying to persuade herself it’s true.

Claribel tries to say, “What kind of vengeance?” because this seems important, but she can feel the press of sleep, the vise grip of it.

Now the smear of saints glides toward Claribel. Their claws emerge from the mold, prying at her gently, at Joan, and Claribel can do nothing but bear witness. “Don’t you see, wicked girl,” they whisper to Joan, “you have this body for a reason?”

This is the last Claribel remembers. She wakes up in darkness, laid out lengthwise on a wooden bench. An ache strums in her back, her legs. She can still hear the bells ringing, a kind of Joan-specific tinnitus, but they dim when she sits up. She’s in a church. Her shoes are in the next aisle. The crepe-soled oxfords. They clatter in the unearthly quiet as she puts them on. Sensible shoes for skulking around in the night.

It’s only fair, she reminds herself. That’s what they agreed on.

It takes her some time to notice the man standing in the nave. The faint glitter of his eyes upon her. The white loop of his stole. A priest. He is so still, she thinks he might have been standing there all night.

We will need a man of faith, the saints said. A cemetery, a man of faith, an ocean of salt. Dread skitters up her back. She tries to locate her voice.

“Hello?”

He does not answer.

“I’m sorry,” she manages. “I’m going.”

He speaks, and it is with hunger in his voice. “I didn’t know it would be true,” he says.

For one awful moment, she doesn’t think she can move. That Joan has shut down the part of her brain that zaps direction to her body.

But her limbs have other intentions. She slips out of the church, into the gray morning. The man doesn’t say anything more or move from where he stands.

If he hadn’t spoken, she’d wonder if he was really even there. An oblong shadow, waiting to see what she would do.

SHE’S STILL IN town, it turns out. At the Nelson Brothers department store nearby, mannequins bare their teeth at Claribel. Drooping sleeves and dropped waists. A field of bodies decorated in gingham and serge suits.

The sky is tilted, full of parboiled clouds. She can smell the end of spring, the air shifting from the odor of damp limestone and secret life growing underground. This time of year, she would often take trips to visit ladies in the sanatorium, the ones with their hysteria. Sit in on lectures at the museum, the clever old scientists from the German Reich, the famous American biologist Paul Popenoe.

Disease is only a lineage, an inheritance, they would say, a secret living inside the blood. If you have a tree, you trim away the rot. If you have an orchard, you take a tree out by its roots, so it won’t infect the others. A different kind of house cleaning.

Being so physically close to the scientists made her glow. It felt so good to feed her brain, like she was back in school. She took long walks in the city afterward, jubilant with her own ideas. A favorite restaurant where, if you knew what to ask for, they brought you an inconspicuous teacup of wine. The thrill of the illegal. Anything she could do to occupy more space.

Here, now, along the walk home, she purchases a little pineapple cake from a white-faced shop girl. She doesn’t realize she is starving until she takes a bite. She devours it in a few wolfish gulps. Sugar travels straight down the highway of her brain, detonating small exuberant incendiaries.

It could be worse, it could be worse, each small explosion seems to say. Her fingers glisten with icing.

It could be worse.

One of the houses that Claribel cleans is only a few city blocks away. This proximity, of Joan to the carefully mediated humdrum of her own world, makes her mildly nauseous. Or maybe it’s the sugar.

What would Mrs. James Foster say if she opened the door and found Joan on the other side? She would take one look and know. Those frightening eyes that scavenge for imperfections.

She knows how to trim away the rot. To dig out any disease.

Even in a few scant months, Claribel has created something. Like everything she has her hand in, it is precarious. Touch it and watch it collapse.

THE MAN FROM the church is following her. This, she becomes sure of when she turns off the main street. His satin stole whips the air, a thin white wing. It’s too late to go back. The sidewalk is empty. Curtains shuttered in every window, everywhere she looks.

She thinks about sprinting, a feral thought. She has never been a runner. She’s always the reluctant prey.

He catches up. Man of faith. The expression on his face makes her want to disappear off the edge of the earth. Rapturous. Besotted.

“I met her,” he says in almost a whisper. Joan. Of course. Joan, wearing Claribel’s shell like a dress. “Please. I just need to know that you aren’t her.”

She has gone limp. “I’m not her,” she says.

“I knew it. I knew. You don’t even look like her, that’s the funny thing. But you are.” He speaks too rapidly. He forgets to take breaths. His eyes alarm her. She’s reminded, absurdly, of the saints. “Such a strange world. You’re part of a miracle—do you know how incredible that is?”

“I just want to be left alone,” she says. Her voice is unemotional. A flat line. “I don’t care what she does with her time.”

If she says it often enough, it’ll be true.

He almost touches Claribel. Almost. But he sees her face, and his hand drops away.

“You must honor her with what you do,” he says. “You must be worthy of her goodness.”

He leaves her standing there. He doesn’t sling her over his shoulder and take her back to his den to be split open. Gulped like a small pineapple cake.

That, she thinks, trying in vain to unclench her jaw, is the true miracle.

It could be worse. It could.

SHE AWAKENS IN the dark, and it’s just her. All in one piece, give or take. Her spine where spines should be. Her brain still in the jar of her skull. She says, Get up, and her body obeys. Who knows the time. She fell asleep partway through the afternoon, what seemed like a minute ago.

Out of the window, at this unknown hour, something’s happening. There are phantoms in the street.

Hundreds, more than she’s ever seen in town, lit by the stern candles of their torches. They’re walking, all of them. Some directionless place. She can hear them speaking to one another. The whisper of their clothes. The muted ocean roar of their torch flames as they move.

It’s not a dream. It isn’t even a vision.

As she watches, one of the phantoms turns and looks at her. He sees her watching him. The phantom smiles. The phantom waves. And she realizes that he isn’t a phantom but a person. That they’re all flesh and blood. In robes and hoods, some wearing masks, all in purest white. Klansmen.

All she can do is clutch the windowsill. A river of ghosts, shining. Their robes are so white, they dazzle. She wonders who cleans them, a stupid thought, but the first to come to her. If it’s the men themselves or, more likely, the housekeeper, the cleaning woman. She wonders how they keep their robes so white—without a stain or a speck of dirt!—if they use borax, if they starch the fabric. You can look at the hands. You can tell.

There are others on the sidewalk, she sees them now. Not just the men in robes. Women in their Sunday best. Even some children. A festive air to the whole thing.

She wonders if the child will stand on the sidewalk or if he’ll become one of the phantoms on the road. She doesn’t think of him as hers, although she tries not to think of him at all. He, too, was a shining house on a shining hill. He might as well be another phantom, here or elsewhere, anywhere. The last one, the child she left behind.

SHE TRIES TO stay awake one night, and then the next. If she doesn’t fall asleep, she thinks, there’s no place for Joan to go. She’s not avoiding Joan, exactly. She just needs some time to think.

Isn’t that right, Claribel? Isn’t that what you’re doing?

“Coffee? So late?” Mrs. Willis clucks. She tries to lift the coffee can away from Claribel. The nerve of her. “You’ll spoil your sleep.”

Claribel bars Mrs. Willis from the can with a genial arm. She stirs instant powder into her cup. She feigns composure. She says, “I never really do, but here we are.”

AND SO SHE paces her room. Every branch of her body illuminated by instant coffee. It’s no use. She can feel her own exhaustion, an ocean’s weight dragging her down.

Tiny stars pop in the corners of her eyes. Then she’s here, and so is Joan, in full armor again, trailing crumbs of herself like visual static. It’s strange to be so awake—the ground steady under her feet, lamplight warming her face—with Joan in the room. Or is she dreaming without knowing it?

“How are you here?” she asks Joan, almost tipsy with confusion. It’s possible she drank too many cups. She wants to laugh. “I’m not even asleep.”

But Joan isn’t in the mood today. Her head disappears. She says, her voice coming from the general direction of where her mouth used to be, “I don’t need your permission. I was trying to be nice.” She reaches toward Claribel with crumbling fingers. She tries to touch her shoulder.

“I’m not going to sleep,” Claribel says. Just an observation, really. She steps away from headless Joan, her reaching fingers. “I’m awake.”

Joan drops her arms. She says, “I tried with you,” unsmiling, and her voice is so solemn, so mild. She’s already given up. She rotates her body from Claribel to the wall, waiting. Then back to Claribel.

As if to show Claribel what she has made Joan do. What Claribel’s done to herself.

And Claribel can feel the drop in the room when they arrive. The saints, too, are on edge. Their mouths whir. The unpeeled meat of their eyes, wet and furious and moving.

“We will not bide our time in this foul place,” they hiss at Joan. “We need an ocean of salt. Why do you play silly games with the vessel?” They bash their ankles on the bed frame and shriek in agony. “Den of sin! House of Satan!”

Joan’s head returns. She tries to answer them. She opens her mouth and her tongue falls out instead, a wet fish.

“Maybe you can tell me what you’re doing,” Claribel says to the saints, while Joan bends to grasp for her tongue. Her voice is nice and conversational. She’s trying to negotiate without actually negotiating. “Maybe I could sleep better if I knew what the ritual was—a resurrection, you said?”

The saints turn their heads, all as one. Their six looming shadows consolidate into a single mass. Beside Claribel, Joan cringes. She puts her tongue back in her mouth. She whispers, “Why did you do that?” and now she’s no longer crabby. She’s frightened.

“The vessel SPEAKS to us?” The saints show their gums, vealy, red. They unwrap their protracted limbs, skeletal and gleaming. Too many of them to count. More than there should ever be. They lurch toward Claribel. “The vessel does not speak. We will have our blood. We will have a resurrection.”

“But I’m not asleep,” Claribel explains, trying not to shrink away.

“No more of this,” they mutter. “We are not finished with the body.” With their hands, too many to count, they grab Joan, Claribel, Joan by the hair. She wants to scream, but it’s Joan, Joan who screams. Where is Mrs. Willis? Why isn’t she banging down the door?

They can only take her body while she isn’t awake. And so they make her sleep.

“We need an ocean of salt. An ocean of blood,” the saints say, and the last thing Claribel sees is what the saints make her see, yanking her by the hair on her head. What they make Joan see.

Sleek and shining. Eyes like gemstones. The cats, the orange and gray tabbies, purring against her bare legs.

THEN CLARIBEL IS awake. Her face shining with tears that aren’t hers. She’s lying in bed, for once, she’s back where they started. But she doesn’t know how much time has passed.

Only what is clenched in her fist, a coarse bouquet of cat hairs.

LATER THAT DAY, in the rooming house, Mrs. Willis, solid and alive. Claribel almost runs to her. But Mrs. Willis is saying, “The cats, the cats.” She’s saying, “Have you seen them?”

And the thing is, Claribel hasn’t. There’s nothing to be found. Not a drop of blood between the baseboards. Not a whisker in those dire, silent halls. No sign that anything has come to pass. Just the cat hairs, and that final memory.

And the awful unease. That what she touches does not stay in its place for long.

SHE GOES TO work. She doesn’t know what else to do. Before she leaves, the rooming house is sublimely silent. Sunlight flowing through the slitted windows, too bright to bear. The cats are nowhere. Mrs. Willis is nowhere.

“This wasn’t the agreement,” she says to the serene hallways, but no one is listening. Her hands have been scrubbed so clean, the skin is sloughing off. Joan’s doing.

You wanted this, Claribel reminds herself. She wanted to pare away the part of her that still lay in this world. Replace herself with Joan.

It’s Monday. Mrs. Charles Harris, who always makes herself scarce. Claribel washes fine porcelain teapots, tiled floors, lavish tablecloths with gravy splashes. Scouring away the history of each object. Finding a blank canvas underneath.

IN THE HALLWAY of the rooming house, Mrs. Willis says to Claribel, so intense it’s a hiss, “I know, you wretched girl. I know you did something to them.”

She says to Claribel, “What kind of person are you? What’s wrong with you?”

Later, she’ll apologize. “I’m feeling a little excitable. It’s been a trying time.”

“It’s fine,” Claribel says.

“If you were a mother, you’d understand,” Mrs. Willis says. Her lips are pursed, a frown she hasn’t fully committed to. The air jumps and skitters between them.

Claribel thinks: She knows. She knows what happened before. Everything Claribel left behind. Her ears clang.

“You’d know what it is, to lose your dearest souls,” Mrs. Willis says softly.

No, she doesn’t know. She’s only prying, prying to see what kind of woman Claribel is. She can’t possibly guess.

After that, they are cautious around each other. Like they’re strangers in orbit. Each trying not to warn the other of her presence.

IT’S WEDNESDAY. Mrs. Davis Greene. Emma and her baby. She just doesn’t go.

SHE NEVER THINKS of herself as a mother before her first child, a girl. Maybe that’s the problem. A deficit of maternal responsibility.

In her old life, she tries to be good. She tries to shine goodness like a beacon, like an unrelenting spotlight upon her body. In lectures, the European scientists always describe it as a matter of blood, a matter of cleanliness. Good births and bad births. One must improve oneself unto the logical end point. The Better Baby contests, too, at the state fair. See a prize specimen. Pink as a lamb chop. The teeth of a sturdy breed.

Even after the first girl dies, she never thinks: I am a childless mother. She only thinks, I am a person who has lost so much.

She learns of the Greeks and their hecatombs. If piety isn’t enough, fine. Trade twenty cattle for the promise of a good life. Slit a hundred throats on the altar and hope the gods will be satisfied. Hasn’t she sacrificed enough blood? Does this not earn her some small passage, the smallest measure of joy?

But her goodness is never enough. Her blood is never enough. The first loss only opens the door to all the rest. All those little graves.

When it happens, the last one, she looks upon the face of the child and can’t remember what to feel. Her only living survivor: first prize at the baby contest. Pink and full of warmth. Cheeks like beef medallions. Unthinkable, that all this pain could amount to so very little. What does she have left to give?

This is what she asks herself. This is how she packs her suitcase full of money. This is how she walks out the door.

NOW IT’S THURSDAY, and she’s hanging up the wash, and Mrs. Earle Smith is humming in the other room. Her perfume everywhere, the mirage of another person. Then Claribel is no longer in control of herself. In her body, Joan whispers, “I’m sorry. It isn’t my fault.”

But isn’t it? Doesn’t she choose whether the saints appear, what they can do? Can’t she banish them and summon them?

“I don’t accept the terms of our agreement,” Claribel says. A ridiculous thing to utter. Her voice sounds so calm. A perfect replica of an ordinary person. Who knew one body could contain this much dread.

The saints descend. They carom from one wall to the next, as if they are on rollerskates. They wail, “It is time! It is time!” They’re in fine spirits. They whack headlong into each other and don’t seem to notice. “A resurrection! Retribution!”

In the other room, Mrs. Earle Smith stops humming. She says, “Claribel?”

The saints coil themselves around her. Claribel can feel the spiny ends of their bones, so many wrists and elbows and knuckles and phalanges. Squeezing against her chest, her arms. Clenched around her neck.

“I just wanted a taste,” Joan says to Claribel. “Didn’t I deserve that?”

The saints clench harder. “Do not SPEAK to the unwilling host,” they hiss. “It is impolite.”

From the next room, footsteps. Mrs. Earle Smith, her heels clicking over to investigate. Her perfume drifting ahead of her. Deepening the air around them.

“I’m sorry,” Joan whispers again. It’s not clear if she’s apologizing to Claribel or to the saints. But it’s too late. The saints are holding her by the neck, with fingers that feel like a reckoning, and then Claribel passes out, and so her body is no longer her own, if it ever was.

CLARIBEL’S IN THE cemetery, and this time she’s not alone. Here is Joan, in Claribel’s skin, and here is the man of faith, standing over freshly dug graves, and here are the saints, a vision that won’t leave. The bells sing. The saints chitter. Their thoraxes bulge. They are giddy, rubbing their legs like insects.

Joan is shaking, which means Claribel is shaking, too. The ground squirts beneath her stockinged feet. The cat bodies are here, too. She sees what has happened to them and that’s enough for her.

She wants to close her eyes, but of course, she can’t. She can’t move or fight. She’s just a vessel to be used. Joan is doing something with the blood. Claribel won’t look. She won’t see.

Joan says to the saints, “I did it. I’m done.” Her voice all folded up inside itself.

“Feckless child,” they say, kindly, with love. “You have given us our freedom. We will never forget.” They’re manifesting, from vision into flesh bodies. The priest is speaking a low invocation. The ritual. The resurrection.

The saints writhe with glee. They flap against one another. They grow longer, taller. They crowd out the sky. Their folded limbs unspool in exultation.

“A purifying fire! We will cleanse the world!” they shriek. Their eyes bulge in clusters. They slide through the cemetery, setting small pathetic fires with their hands. The fires fizz out and they set them again. “Our time has come!”

“You can leave,” Joan whispers to Claribel in Claribel’s own voice. “If you want to go, you have to go now.”

They slip away down the road, Joan and Claribel together. And Claribel feels it this time. Joan evaporating from her body like a rising fog. A ghastly euphoria that lifts away from her in every direction. And then it’s just Claribel, walking on the road in her stockinged feet, all on her own.

SHE ALREADY KNOWS what she’ll do. She takes the sleeve of money, she packs her bags. And she walks out the door again.

She boards the first train west. The rolling fires that the saints begin are churning across Ohio, no longer pathetic little spurts but entire walls of flame, gathering heat. An incoming justice. If she stares into it, she imagines she can sense their jaws like clattering spoons. Their long limbs, streaks of ink in the landscape.

Some part of her understands this need of Joan’s, to set fire to the world and see it fall out from under her. A punishment not for what was visited upon her, but everything she didn’t get to do. Every small, purposeless life she could not lead.

So when she is on the train, speeding away from the inferno, it’s no surprise that she’s visited by Joan.

This time, it’s just Joan. Like the first vision, she wavers in and out of focus. She says, “Hullo.” Her left eye disappears and reappears, a glittering lamp that she pays no attention to.

“What else could you do?” Claribel says.

She’s trying to say, I forgive you.

There is nothing left. They sit together. Joan’s head disappears but her left eye remains, a blinking, swiveling light. She touches the rattling window and her fingers crumble away into dust. They watch the free blue sky as it revolves slowly, precipitously, back into place, like a mountain turning on its head. Like a kind of smile.

INSIDE THE HOUSE OF THE HISTORIAN

What would help most is if you could picture the house of the Historian as a dollhouse. It won’t take much of your time and may help you in the future, this exercise of beholding something in your mind’s eye without knowing if it’s true.

Think of an extravagant dollhouse, jumbled up and gaudy in that late nineteenth-century fashion. Lavender gilled roofs and far too many ornamented peaks and medieval-looking pilasters. Awful parchment-yellow sides. When lit up, it twinkles with curiosity. It emits gladness.

In darkness, it’s a touch more frightening. But never mind that.

If you imagine the dollhouse just right, a marvelous thing will happen. The whir of antiquated gears. Beautifully detailed rooms will slide out like secret compartments, so you can peer inside the house at this very moment. Watch the guests and what they’re up to.

Don’t forget to pay attention to the house itself. Some rooms you see are hidden from the ordinary observer. Some may disappear altogether if you’re not looking.

On the first floor, the guests are gathered in the dining room. We’ll attend to them shortly. Upstairs is the second-floor bathroom, where the body will be found later. It won’t be there just yet; you must know that. The Historian is still alive, don’t you see, downstairs in the dining room with the guests. Pompous and charming in his own way.

Look past the ill-fated bathroom. There, farther down the second-floor hallway, and you’ll find her. It’s been years since you last encountered her—do you recognize her? Do you feel the same lurch of surprise that she might feel, if only she knew you were there?

It’s the Professor, though that’s not her real name, just the sobriquet she’s chosen for the short-term. The night is winding down at last, the guests sated, when she steps away from the dining room to get some air. To put some distance between herself and the man she’s grown increasingly wary of, her irregular business partner. Who for this occasion is calling himself the Historian.

So be it. For one evening, the Historian he will be.

She meant to go outside, to blast her face with the acid cold of winter until she couldn’t feel anything. Instead, she stands here in the doorway of the children’s nursery, at the far end of the second-floor hallway.

This is how it goes with the house. She’ll head one way, end up in the wrong place. As if the house is misleading her on purpose, or harbors some wariness toward her. A ridiculous feeling, but she can’t help it.

She says, “What am I doing here?” and she could be asking herself, or the house.

It might even be that she’s asking you.

TO RETURN TO the dining room and its unusual guests: by the time digestifs are served, Nefertiti’s quite drunk. Already, the evening is shifting, shedding its many small indignities. Absorbing a sentimental flavor, as if beloved to her from a great distance.

She tells John Adams she’s forgiven him for his blunders, frequent as they’ve been this inauspicious evening. (“Er, thank you?” he says.) Now, deep in her cups, she rhapsodizes to the statesman about the city of Waset, which she first saw at age six.

She’s more earnest than she’s been all night. Describing the poems graffitied on its walls by luckless romantics. The city when the sun climbs its red granite temples, like a flower budding open to reveal itself—can he picture it?

(“Not like this sandpit town America,” to which he says, although they finally appear to be getting along, “Actually, madam, this isn’t—America isn’t a town, it’s—never mind.”)

Ibn Battuta, listening eagerly, chimes in, “It’s true what she says. The city on the Nile is magnificent. I’ve had the good fortune to visit twice already.” But at this point in the night, Nefertiti’s ignoring his chummy little interludes.

John Adams tries to smile at him. Instead he looks like he has a pronounced toothache.

The dining room echoes back their voices, as if to join in. A reminder they’re far from home. It’s a beautiful room, but also gloomy. Like a finely appointed tomb. Full of murky corners, the carpet plush under their feet, the bulbous chandelier glittering high above them with horrid onion-shaped candles. The fireplace is flanked on either side by wooden carvings of austere women, possibly the same woman.

On the left side, she lifts a cup of fire above her head. On the right, she bears a set of gold-leafed scales. The carvings have the eerie air of listeners. The women’s vacant eyes seem to follow the guests, the conversations between them, their movements.

Across the table, Captain Blackbeard has spent the last hour slipping silverware onto his person. Perhaps it’s his small revenge for being seated next to Queen Victoria during dinner.

The Professor, returned by now, broaches the subject with him. In fact, she gets out of her seat to do so. It isn’t her job to notice or investigate, as the Historian might remind her, if he weren’t occupied in some hushed conversation with Marilyn Monroe, whose face is strained, anxious. Anyway, the Professor won’t ignore it, because she knows what Blackbeard’s done and he knows she knows—“We seem to be missing two oyster forks. I think maybe they rolled off the table near you?”

He listens to her gravely. “Let me check,” he says. Then he lifts the tablecloth like the devil himself to peer below. “No, no, I’m certain they didn’t.”

They frown at each other, united in their concern over the missing oyster forks.

Eventually she gives up. She says, “You’re lucky we don’t have a metal detector,” and he waggles his eyebrows with practiced ominousness, as if he knows what a metal detector is. They both know he doesn’t.

Only one person is angrier that Blackbeard and Queen Victoria are seated together. No surprise, it’s Queen Victoria herself. Earlier, she threatens to leave, until the Historian explains she really can’t. It’s not physically possible. Then she refuses to be mollified by any changes to the seating plan, as if to prove that she, too, can be difficult, thank you. Now she’s vanished, having barricaded herself in the bathroom at the end of the hall for the past forty-five minutes.

“It’s the dresses. They’re a pain in the ass,” Marilyn Monroe tells the Historian earlier. (She’s missed some vital context.) “I mean, you try putting one on. It takes a million years and then you move like you’re on a leash.”

In short, it’s the greatest night of the Historian’s life. It’s been an entirely impossible expedition, this undertaking of his. To bring together these six people from their far-separated points of origin. All of them will be homeward in the morning.

It’s possible he doesn’t comprehend the grievances they’ve silently tabulated against him. The missteps he’s taken, not simply over dinner, or during cocktails earlier that day, but long before. How many of his guests look at him and wish for his absence? Or even worse?

Hours ago, in the hallway, John Adams mutters to Ibn Battuta, “A man like that—a man who knows everything? Or thinks he does? He’s dangerous,” shaking his head with repressed emotion. And although Ibn Battuta would never agree aloud, he’s startled that John Adams seems to understand this, too. The inherent dangers of a person like the Historian.

Outside, snow falls. It accumulates in the roadways, on the ruled lines of telephone wires. It gathers in drifts along the eaves of the house, the frumpy cupolas, the spiky, watchful towers.

Inside, the fire crackles behind the grate. The wood-carved women observe in silence. Nefertiti, who’s never seen snow before in her life, glances out the window and says, amused, “I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but it’s raining ash. Have you offended any gods lately?”

MAYBE YOU HAVEN’T forgotten about the body, despite your best efforts. The man lying in the bathtub upstairs. No matter. Time passes. The snifters of brandy are cleared away downstairs, the catering company long departed. The Historian’s lengthening absence at the table is noted, if not aloud then in spirit. By the guests, even the Professor herself.

Ordinarily, what’s most unusual about the second-floor bathroom is that sometimes it’s not there. You might open the door to discover a tidy little closet instead. Or a stooped hallway crowded in darkness, without end in sight.

Or else there’s no room at all. No door to open. Only a blue-papered wall, patterned with somber cornflowers, not a seam to be found. The house is capricious like this. Full of crannies where things aren’t what they appear to be.

Here, in the second-floor bathroom that isn’t always there—expansive and quiet, a pearly, antiseptic glow like a sanitorium—the Historian appears to have drowned in the porcelain bath. His clothes sodden against his skin.

Although oddly the tub itself is dry.

Not to worry. They’ll discover him in short order. Already, Nefertiti watches his empty chair from across the room. Marilyn opens and shuts her hands, leaving sharp grooves in her palms.

NATURALLY, THERE’S CHAOS when they find him.

Ibn Battuta and Blackbeard haul the Historian out of the tub and onto the floor. Marilyn hovers near the door, beside John Adams, looking like she might flee at any minute.

But it’s the Professor who shocks them all. She drops to her knees, distant and businesslike. For several minutes, she does chest compressions, applies air to his mouth.

The others watch in baffled silence. “I don’t think she should be doing that,” Queen Victoria says with distaste. “Whatever that is.” But no one stops her. Perhaps they think she’s entitled to her own private moment of grief. No matter what inappropriate form it takes.

At last, the Professor straightens up and says, “It’s no use.” There are splotches of water on her knees and elbows, her hair askew of its neat ponytail. She looks wrung out, as if in the span of a few minutes she has traveled years ahead of them all.

The Historian is dead, that much can be agreed upon. One by one, the others check for his breath (he has none), the temperature of his body (warm but inert, if the heat of a body can be described thus, a diminishing heat without impulse or urgency), the movement of his eyes (fairly corpselike). All except Nefertiti, who says she doesn’t touch creatures that are divested of their worldly concerns—only a priest should handle him now.

With all of them there, the bathroom’s getting too small, too warm. No one can bring themselves to move first. One of the pipes drips in the background, echoing and despondent, water leaking somewhere. John Adams will remember this sound, later. The insistent tapping of it. Almost haunted.

The Professor wipes her hands on her dress, still squatting. She says to her hands, “You knew this was going to happen.”

At first, no one knows who she’s speaking to. Then she looks up at Marilyn, still in the doorway, and Ibn Battuta, over by the sink.

“Pardon?” Ibn Battuta doesn’t seem to understand the insinuation. He glances over at Marilyn in confusion. “Us? The two of us?” He doesn’t get confirmation from Marilyn or further elaboration from the Professor. “But how could we know?”

“No,” Marilyn says. She’s staring at the body on the floor, shaking her head. “Uh-uh. Nope.”

She turns away then. She hides her face. John Adams, nearby, thinks he should say something comforting to her. But he doesn’t know what. Truthfully, death is never easy for him, and it’s better that it isn’t. It should feel difficult, like something irreplaceable has been lost from the world. Because it has.

Even if the death has been wished for.

He doesn’t think any of this will reassure her.

“I saw you! In the hallway, earlier—you said—you said”—and here the Professor breaks off, aghast.

“Oh, good.” Blackbeard, seated on the rim of the bathtub, is peculiarly alert. More alert than he’s been all night. He’s not smiling, but it feels like he is. Somehow that’s worse. “I thought we might elide the incident. But it’s better to talk about it, isn’t it? Who do we think murdered him? Shall we take bets?”

The atmosphere of the night has twisted. The heat of the electric lights presses at their throats. No one will look at Blackbeard.

John Adams senses that every second they stand here—in this spotless bathroom, with the Historian’s body and the ugliness of what transpired, the space compressing around them, less and less air to breathe—is a second they inch closer to outright hostility. The plink of the pipe in the distance, tapping and tapping. Beside him, Marilyn takes long, unsteady breaths.

“Do we need the police?” Queen Victoria asks in a confiding undertone to the Professor. The sound carries anyway.

“This is a nightmare,” the Professor says to herself, awed. To Queen Victoria, to all of them, she says, “Why? You want them to find you here?”

Nefertiti’s face hasn’t moved this entire time. Standing behind the Professor, she says, “But we can’t go back without him.”

She doesn’t say it like a question. She speaks it as a fact. She’s so very calm, so certain. Almost pleased.

The Professor cranes her neck to stare. “No?—Yes, of course you can.”

And she adds, “He’d already arranged it. But that’s beside the point. You always had a way back, even without him.”

THERE ARE TIMES when the Professor feels as if she’s separating into more than one person. As if she’s a cut-out paper version of herself, but if someone pinched the paper with a deft finger, they’d find more slips underneath. All the cut-out dolls of her past and future selves staring out.

That’s how she feels when she sees Ibn Battuta and Marilyn Monroe earlier that evening. Like she’s sliding off the edge of a leaf into a bottomless, empty place.

Certain rooms of the house, she avoids. The children’s playroom on the second floor, for example. Long out of use but perfectly preserved with its awful dollhouse. The cold cellar, full of whispers.

If you asked her, she might say these passages seem sinister, actively so. They emanate their unwelcome. The thought of entering them makes her vision dim.

Or she’d sidestep the question altogether. You’ll only know if you ask. But first you’ll have to find her, and that may prove more difficult than you think.

At any rate, it happens again when she uses the elevator, earlier that evening. The doors slide open unwillingly, unhappily. The shadowy mouth of the cab beyond. She doesn’t want to walk in.

It’s almost like the elevator doesn’t want her to, either. She can feel the vibration of something underneath it, in the cables themselves. Something in the elevator shaft, warning her away. Or maybe that’s her pulse, drumming nearby.

She enters the elevator and that’s when she sees Ibn Battuta and Marilyn standing inside, off to one corner, like vast moths stuck to the wall.

Fast-approaching horror. The thud of sound from the elevator shaft. Knocking out of rhythm with her heart.

She thinks, This isn’t real, is it.

And whether it’s real or it isn’t, the Professor remembers it’s Ibn Batutta who says to her: “Forgive me for saying it. But is it really so terrible? If he dies?”

ON IBN BATTUTA’S first Hajj, a wise man tells him he’ll be a great world traveler. To which Ibn Battuta says, “Am I not already?” with the foolishness of a man in his youth. With every caravan he joins, every ship he sails, he considers the intellectual exercise of it all. Is he not yet a great world traveler?

Even when he receives the Historian’s invitation, he wonders. What untouched land must he pass through, to reach the heights of history?

What else must he do?

By now, it’s almost midnight. The Historian’s body lies on the floor of the bathroom, a most undesired centerpiece. In ones and twos, the guests retreat to the study at the end of the second-floor hall. Ibn Battuta is the first to go, taking John Adams with him. Anyone can see that John Adams is growing more agitated with Blackbeard’s every skeptical comment—the poor man doesn’t seem to understand how easily he’s goaded—and so Ibn Battuta steers the statesman with a firm arm, thinking to avoid further trouble.

In the hallway John Adams says, his irritation poorly concealed, “Did you really need to do that?” and Ibn Battuta says, “Yes.” John Adams grunts. Maybe it’s his way of saying thank you, but likely not. It seems best to let him seethe.

Perhaps Ibn Battuta should dwell on the Professor’s strange accusation, or the body in the bathroom. Or the feeling of optimism that’s opened up inside him, of new and inconceivable possibilities. But he doesn’t.

Earlier in the evening—and really, it’s still daytime then, a startling brilliance that leaves sharp edges behind—Ibn Battuta’s wrists begin to ache. One of the hazards of time. The other guests are milling about in the drawing room when he slips off to attend to his wrists. Also to explore the house.

There are alcoves everywhere in these arcane halls. Vestibules molded with florid wooden vines; discreet places for people to conceal themselves in shadow. If Ibn Battuta were another man, he might be afraid of them. He watches now as one of the shadows detaches itself from the closest wall, becomes a person. The last person he’d ever be afraid of. It’s the man wearing a powdered pelt of horse hair on his head, introduced to him earlier as John Adams.

The man wearing the horse’s pelt catches sight of him and says, “Something’s wrong with this house.” Part of his face is obscured by the gloom. Obviously he’s in a foul mood.

Ibn Battuta tries not to look at the thing on his head. He shouldn’t stare. Strange to say, he thinks the man’s correct. Although that’s not how he’d phrase it, exactly. That something’s wrong with the house.

He says, “Yes.”

His wrists still throb, and all of a sudden he is weary. Both he and his wrists require a lengthy rest. He joins John Adams in the alcove, where he retrieves the little jar of camphor from a pocket. A gift from an old friend. He carries it always. He dabs the ointment on his joints, not caring that John Adams is watching curiously. The relief sinks through him.

He leans back, and then he feels it. The raised wall of the alcove is moving, shifting. As if their presence has awakened it.

Behind him, around him, one of the elaborate carved vines is curling free of its brethren. It glides down, reaching slyly toward the jar of camphor on the bench. Ibn Batutta nudges the jar out of reach, just to see what will happen.

The vine inches closer. It slips from the wall and, unsettlingly, down the bench. A bulge of muscle in the wood.

“There,” John Adams says, outraged. “See? Do you see that?”

For Ibn Battuta, the urge is to push the jar farther away. Not only to see if the vine will follow but also because he doesn’t wish to give up his ointment. And yet he is a visitor here, a guest, and he wants something from the house. Can’t he consider it a gift, then? An exchange for what he desires?

He doesn’t touch the jar. He abdicates its ownership. The curl of wood snakes around it once, twice, and retreats with its prize.

The strange sparkle of triumph in the air, not from either man.

John Adams makes a harrumphing sound.

The vine returns to its place. The wall goes still. The sensation of victory lingers. It briefly passes through Ibn Battuta, and almost, almost, he is in communion with the house. Almost. And then it’s over.

Now it’s nearly midnight, the Historian is gone, the two men together again. They come upon the study, hazy in amber lamplight. There’s a lip of snow growing outside the window frame. The night sky is devouring, everywhere, but inside, the study is warm and dry and empty. Without prompting, John Adams turns to him and says, “Earlier this evening—did I hear you right? You were trying to set up a trade with the Historian?”

“Oh.” Ibn Battuta smiles, unsure how to answer. He hadn’t thought anyone else was listening. John Adams watches him, nose creased with attention, and Ibn Battuta is more uneasy than he wants to confess.

He sidesteps the man to inspect the shambling battleship of a desk, marooned against the window. The bookshelves nearby.

He hears himself say—“Yes, he wasn’t interested. It was a pity.”

He runs his fingers along the crumbling spines of the books in their shelves. His hands are grimy now. Dust from another age. Another world. It’s astonishing to think of distance not as a measure of length but of time itself.

“You wanted to accompany him on these, ah, travels of his?”

Ibn Battuta lifts his shoulders in a shrug, his back to John Adams, still smiling. Despite everything, it’s been a good night. He’s glowing with purpose. “There are other ways to win an argument,” he says. Not trying to be vague, not exactly. Uninterested in explaining. He adds, after a moment of thought, “Perhaps you should ask the Englishwoman how she came to discover the body?”

It’s not that he cares. It’s just that he’s pretty sure Victoria’s been snooping herself, all these many hours. They each have their own private reasons for being here tonight. Their own complicated entanglements with the Historian.

He hopes John Adams will leave it. He also understands this isn’t a man who knows when to let go.

Ibn Battuta wipes his fingers carefully. There are rules to this house. The thought transfixes him. It’s possible he’s beginning to understand them.

He watches from a safe distance as the others file in.

“To be honest,” the Professor says to Blackbeard, and she already sounds annoyed at him, “I’m not a professor, okay? And he sure as shit wasn’t a historian. Pardon my French.”

“That’s not French,” Blackbeard says.

“Then what was he?” Nefertiti asks.

Ibn Battuta has his hand on the bookshelf. All those beautiful volumes, the spoils of time. Someone else’s treasure. He says, “He was a grave robber,” and he doesn’t know if he sounds neutral or not.

He can feel the weight of the Professor’s gaze. He looks up, and she looks away at once.

She says, “That’s not true,” but her voice is quieter than before. She goes over to the windowsill and perches there, eyeing the desk. The chair, empty of its occupant. She doesn’t notice Queen Victoria looming in the doorway—if a woman of her diminutive height can be said to loom—with Marilyn close behind.

Neither does Blackbeard, for that matter, because he says, “You mean—” He looks at the Professor with sudden interest. He starts to laugh. “Really.”

From the doorway, Queen Victoria says—she almost hisses it—“Listen to this.”

“What were you doing up here in the first place, anyway?” John Adams asks her, not looking at Ibn Battuta. As if he came up with the thought all on his own.

“Admiring the house,” she says through clenched teeth, and does a little shake of her head at Marilyn. “Listen to this. That man—that man—the Historian—he told her how she would die. The day, the time, the place. What happens to her.”

They stand there, beneath the growing thundercloud of her wrath. Marilyn slinks past her into the room. She doesn’t look at any of them as she passes; she’s coiled, unreachable.

John Adams is the first to speak. He says, “Why would he do that?”

“Because I asked,” Marilyn says without expression. She thumps herself down on a cane chair in the corner.

“Because,” Queen Victoria adds, “it seems he meant to alter the course of events.”

Somewhere far away, the house creaks, but no one is listening. To alter the path of history: the thought is more enormous than Ibn Battuta can imagine. The others are silent, too, absorbing this development. It seems they’re all caught up by it. How tempting it might be. How sickening it feels.

But Ibn Battuta is most interested in the Professor’s reaction. She isn’t looking at anyone. Her entire body is tense. Anger, surprise.

She didn’t know. The thought rattles him. Is that it?

How could she not know?

Nefertiti wafts toward the window, the other end of where the Professor sits. Something’s lighting up within her. She says to the window, to the world outside shrouded in snow, “But is that really possible?” Like she’s in another conversation, speaking to someone else.

Ibn Battuta adds, “And is that—is it even permitted?”

The Professor’s mouth flattens into the thinnest possible line. “Please don’t make me talk about time travel. Please,” she says. “I can’t do it. Just the idea of it makes me want to throw up.”

“What a worm he was,” Queen Victoria says. “He was more dangerous than we knew.”

“Well,” Blackbeard says brightly. “Probably the murderer knew.”

“You have to stir things up, don’t you?” the Professor says. “You can’t even help yourself.”

“I didn’t know you could be so severe,” Blackbeard says, approving. “Yes, yes, maybe I’m stirring things up. What seems like the sensible thing? He fell in the tub and drowned himself?”

“This isn’t a house where reason prevails,” Nefertiti says to him out of nowhere, and they exchange a look.

TO RETURN TO the past, if you don’t mind: there’s a gap between cocktails in the drawing room and the lengthy dinner to come. Here, some of the guests wander off on their own to explore the house. The Professor murmurs to the Historian, “Is that wise?” and he says, elated, “I truly have no idea!”

In this last gleam of day, Nefertiti is prowling the second floor—though she wouldn’t phrase it like that—on her own mission. Down the hall, a door swings open. Blackbeard emerges, eyebrows askew. He sees Nefertiti and his expression evaporates.

“Got lost,” he says, breezy as anything.

But Nefertiti witnesses it, just for a flash. The frazzled look on his face. It gives her a heady sense of power to catch him unawares.

She says, smiling, “How strange. You’re quite poor at directions for a pirate.”

Blackbeard can’t help himself. “Would you care to see for yourself?” he asks. Perhaps an attempt to be glib, but he sounds sulky instead. He pushes open the door.

It’s as she approaches him that the sensation overcomes her. An impression of wrongness. As if whatever lies past the door is something she doesn’t want to look at, and is in fact also shrinking away from her.

Blackbeard’s eyes are carving her in two. Awaiting a reaction. But Nefertiti refuses to show any weakness.

Beyond the door is a children’s nursery, mothy, touched with ghostly candlelight and impenetrable shadow. Enormous faces peer down from gilt frames on the wall. They’re so real, it makes her chest thrum; sour portraits who might as well be John Adams’s whole extended family.

At the back of the nursery is a dollhouse.

It sits on a low table, almost three feet in height. She hears her own footsteps as she draws close, far too loud. An intruder with no right to be there. The dollhouse is extraordinary in its exquisite detail. It’s also an exact duplication of this house of the Historian, right down to the slightly reptilian cherub on the second-floor landing, the carved women guarding the dining room’s fireplace.

She can feel the presence of Blackbeard behind her. She makes herself reach up into the dollhouse, to the second floor, to prod the tiny pewter doorknob of the nursery. With a swivel and a click, the hidden compartment swings open—she doesn’t flinch, she won’t allow it—and she can see the nursery rendered in small, precise detail.

And what’s worse is how, at the back of the tiny room, there’s a tiny dollhouse. A replica of the one she’s standing before.

The entire nursery murmurs with silence. It’s in her eardrums. Under her skin. The portraits on the wall seem to have shifted, but she can’t say how—just that they’re no longer the same.

“I don’t think you should be touching that,” Blackbeard says, cheerful.

She doesn’t bother to answer. She straightens up and walks past him, no intention of conceding the point. Out the door. But beyond her is a different hallway. One she’s never seen before. In this hall, it’s no longer daytime; it’s night.

Blackbeard, in the background. “What’s the matter?”

And now who’s goading who.

She closes the door firmly, shutting them back inside the nursery. She says, “No, I dislike this,” and she’s not speaking to Blackbeard.

When she opens the door again, the hallway has corrected itself. Daylight. The second floor. The distant sounds of guests.

She looks at Blackbeard. Blackbeard looks at her. They weigh each other with the caution of two people who understand each other better than they’d like.

“I fixed it,” she says.

ALREADY, MARILYN WISHES she hadn’t said anything. The way they look at her in pity, horror, all of them. As if they wouldn’t have asked, given the temptation. As if she hasn’t felt sick since the moment he told her.

As if in telling her, he poisoned her meal, her night. The whole idea of a future.

Marilyn’s had a long year. Her suspension from Twentieth-Century Fox is nearing its conclusion, but the papers have seized upon the gossip with predictable frenzy. Joe’s away with the team for weeks at a time. This is a small balm: to have their house to herself. To know she isn’t going to trip over the complicated levers that activate his temper.

She has a desire to seek escape hatches wherever she goes. Tonight when she asks the Historian how she’ll die, in the most offhanded manner she can manage, laughing a little, a little breathless, she thinks it’ll be another escape hatch. If more abstract than the others.

But no. Most certainly it isn’t.

It’s past midnight now, and the guests have begun to disperse from the study. Not wanting, perhaps, to remain on the awkward fact of the Historian’s demise. Or the even more awkward idea that one of them is responsible.

Or maybe they have their own obscure reasons. Before she goes, Nefertiti pauses by the Professor. She says, again, “And you’re sure? You’re sure we can go back without him?”

At first, Marilyn doesn’t think the Professor will answer. If she had to speculate, Marilyn would guess she’s just had the hardest day of her life and she’s trying to take one step, and then the one after. But she might be projecting.

The Professor looks up. “Yes. For the tenth time. No one can change that anymore.”

Nefertiti’s face is unreadable. “Very well,” she says. “Then I will go to bed.”

The thought of being alone right now, in the silence of her thoughts, in this strange, secretive house, is more than Marilyn can bear. When Ibn Battuta announces, with a knee-slap no less, that he’s going to explore the house further, she says, “Mind if I join you?”

He hesitates—in fact, he does mind, it’s obvious at once—but he says, “Of course not.” He forces an encouraging smile. That only makes it worse.

She stands there, more embarrassed than she thought possible. Trying to smile back, her face trembling with the effort. Now they’re both trapped in the unpleasant courtesy of the moment. Neither of them wants her to come, but it’s too late.

Instead, she says lightly, “Shall we?” He nods, and off they go.

They start on the third floor, with its grand ballroom, the billiard room, the servants’ quarters off in a separate corridor. Up here, the hallways seem smaller, creakier, as if they’re closing in. It doesn’t help that Ibn Battuta’s behaving like, for lack of better word, a dingbat. He loiters behind her to touch the stained-glass windows with a contemplative air, or to run his fingers along the wood-filigreed doorframes, possibly hunting for a secret latch. Then he speeds ahead as if trying to elude her.

Throughout her life, Marilyn has become adept at speaking over the sound in her head, the worry, which is ever-shifting but always there. Which right now is focused to a sharp point on Ibn Battuta.

She follows him into the ballroom. She says, “Are you mad at me or something?”

Her voice reverberates off the high ceilings. The parquet floor shines, wood rectangles arranged in arrows that point toward the windows. Ibn Battuta looks at her blankly.

He says, “What a peculiar question.”

She wants to pick a fight. “Don’t you think you’re being pretty peculiar?” she asks, flushing. The scald of adrenaline. “I can see you, too, you know.”

For a moment, it seems as if he might approach, but he doesn’t. She can’t read his expression. Then he says, “You’ve had a most complicated night, I think,” and his voice is almost gentle. “It can’t have been easy.”

It’s late, still hours before they leave, but she has a sudden longing to go home. She’s a woman with no future, but she thinks, too, that maybe she can change it. The enormity of this thought makes her want to dissolve.

She says, “You didn’t want me here with you.”

He hesitates. “That’s true,” he admits, and she doesn’t know if he’s surprised that she noticed or that he’s confessing to it. He shrugs and walks away without another word. He leaves her there, in the center of the ballroom.

Her body is tense. Ready to hurt something, anything, if only herself, and she’s alone, where she so often ends up. No matter what she does.

Then she hears Ibn Battuta’s voice drifting toward her, from the hallway—“Are you coming or not?”

Impossible to know what to make of him. There’s a pang in her side, maybe relief, and she hurries after him, turning the corner from the main hall, deeper into the house, toward the servants’ quarters.

Even in this moment of reprieve, it registers to her. Something’s wrong with the passageway.

There’s a lightlessness to this part of the house, huge and forbidding. She doesn’t think she wants to go any farther. She doesn’t know why. It’s instinctive, the desire to turn around and go anywhere else.

Meanwhile, Ibn Battuta strides ahead with purpose, as if he knew this place was here. As if he’d been looking for it all along.

He says, “You’re not trying to be difficult, are you?” She doesn’t think he’s talking to her.

He nudges open a door and says, “Aha,” but even he’s grimacing a little.

Marilyn doesn’t want to disappoint him, not now. It’s the only reason she follows him in.

Sunlight and open air. They’re no longer in the house, and it isn’t nighttime anymore. The chamber is sparse, a cot in the corner, whitewashed walls, a jug and bowl with a waxy sliver of soap. The pungent smell of another person living here, although they’re nowhere to be seen.

Two windows are cut into the opposite wall. Blue sky, a busy market far below. Marilyn strains to hear, listening for English, for anything, but the voices are a murmur. What is this?

“We’re somewhere else in time,” Ibn Battuta says. “Not my own, if I had to speculate. Nor yours?”

She’s startled by how matter-of-fact he is. The way a tour guide might indicate the sights. She thinks of the Historian, traveling through time, across the world. Before, it seemed extraordinary. And now?

Now she understands. The entire room is wobbly all of a sudden. Or maybe she’s trembling.

She says, “How did you know?”

“A hunch,” he says. She doesn’t believe him. He staggers a little, catching himself. It’s not her, after all. She’s not trembling. The chamber is swaying back and forth, as if they’re on a ship—they’re not on a ship—the room is shrinking.

He fumbles his way to the door on the far side, which leads to the outside world. The market below. Her chest hurts. If he goes through the door, it will be bad for both of them. The certainty strikes her with a clang.

Marilyn says, “You can’t open that door.”

She doesn’t know how she knows, but she’s sure they’re not supposed to open it. They aren’t meant to be here at all.

He opens it anyway. She catches sight of stairs winding away from the chamber, into darkness. But Ibn Battuta never has the chance to take another step. He never has the chance to disappear. The door bangs shut, right in his face.

Ibn Battuta frowns. He rattles the doorknob.

That’s when the ceiling starts to close in on them. A massive, punishing weight from above. She can feel the pressure on her skull, her neck. Ibn Battuta, perhaps seeing his opportunity quickly vanish, slams his shoulder against the door. Trying to break it open.

She thinks how funny it’d be. If this is how she dies, after all.

Except it’s not funny. She says, “You’re making it worse! Hey!”

She seizes his arm and pulls. They retreat back into the house, leaving the chamber behind, and she lets go of him. It stuns her, how single-minded he was—he’d gone to the third floor, knowing already what was possible. She can hear the rasp of his breathing.

He thought he could get through. The expression on his face.

“You wouldn’t do anything to him, would you?” Even as she’s saying it, she realizes her folly: they’re alone here, in the dark. She feels ill.

But he turns to her and smiles. “If you have to ask, doesn’t it mean you think I would?” His voice is pleasant, calm, and this doesn’t help.

Their return to the first floor takes place in almost complete silence. They’ve run out of anything to say to each other. Marilyn is replaying the night in her head. Trying to understand what else she’s missed.

It’s when they reach the front foyer that they come upon someone else. Nefertiti, wrapped in a blanket that must belong to the house, is sliding open the front door.

Everyone freezes. Nefertiti puts her finger to her lips.

Then she goes out into the cold, where the wind blows snow like vast, frightening gouts of steam. The door shuts, a click most alarming in its finality.

It happens fast. Marilyn’s too shocked to react. The idea that it could be so easy, to open the door and walk out of a whole lifetime. The sudden whip of cold, after the fact, makes her fingers curl.

“Can she do that?” she asks out loud.

“I don’t think it matters.” Ibn Battuta’s face is contorted. She can’t look at him; it’s intolerable, that expression. “She just did.”

OUTSIDE, NEFERTITI WALKS. The snow is a blade prying her open. The cold is everywhere—on her scalp, in her teeth, in her chest, the sensation of a heartache. A relentlessness she appreciates.

She’s gone. She’s escaped.

The truth is, when she walks outside, it’s only to see if she can. When she puts her hand on the doorknob, it takes effort to open the door—and it’s not just the door that resists her. Yet another trial, she thinks. A reminder of what she must overcome.

Back home, her time is up. This, she already knows. The Pharaoh has been dead for less than a year, and already grand viziers are conspiring in the shadows. Slithering out to greet her. Taking care never to utter the boy’s name in her presence, like they aren’t plotting to usurp her, even now. To appoint her husband’s child as the next ruler.

When the Historian’s invitation arrives, she opens it in her garden, the heat of the day bearing down upon her. She grips the invitation, thinking: This isn’t the end.

Wherever she goes, she doesn’t have to return.

Now here she is, at the bottom of the drive, looking up at the mansion where nobody lives. To her, winter feels like what must happen after death: a journey from one light to the next. Slashes of snow dissolve like bright shocks on her skin.

Before she can turn and vanish beyond the drive, an unpleasant thing happens. She can sense the pressure change in the air, the mounting anger. In front of her, the mansion begins to warp its dimensions, squeezing in at the center. It sucks itself up the way a child might get ready to shriek, in the throes of a tantrum.

Then it dwindles. As she watches, it grows smaller and smaller until it starts to resemble the dollhouse in the nursery, a replica of itself, horrible and small.

She doesn’t know if she’s still breathing. Maybe this is death. Maybe this is how it happens.

The house shudders a little, as if to rouse itself. Then it’s back to normal size, blazing and warm again, beckoning—she can almost feel it, the tug of the house. Trying to coax her back inside.

Up on the second floor, Nefertiti sees her, the other woman, looking spectral and solemn in the window. She’s so familiar, both everyday and out of place, Nefertiti doesn’t recognize her at first. And then she does.

It’s her. It’s herself. Up on the second floor, Nefertiti watches her from the window of the children’s nursery. The Nefertiti in the window raises her hand and waves.

How can it be her? Nefertiti’s standing there, right there, in the snow. She could go anywhere. She could be anyone. Her head is so cold. She’s smiling without meaning to. The muscles in her jaw strain and pop. She didn’t believe it would be so easy to walk out of this place, and it isn’t, is it?

Nefertiti thinks, I have to find her, don’t I?

IT’S AFTER TWO in the morning. Almost time to go home. Queen Victoria expects to hear starlings. On the night of her uncle’s death, years ago, Victoria is visited by the Archbishop and Lord Conyngham. This is how she becomes queen, in the lonely morning hours, surrounded by a handful of people she doesn’t entirely trust, with newly awakened starlings as the only choristers of her first coronation. She thinks of it as an early lesson in monarchy: unexpected and perhaps a little friendless.

She’s running out of time in this house, and it seems she’s tried every room. Almost every room. Despite the late hour, everyone’s awake. As she passes the gallery, she hears John Adams saying to the Professor—“Why do you call yourself the Professor?”

“I don’t, actually,” the Professor says. “He thought we should have, you know, code names for tonight. It sounds stupid. I just help him sell his collection.”

“His collection,” Blackbeard says. “Is that what he called it.”

It’s hard to say why she hasn’t yet searched the children’s nursery on the second floor. She’s been avoiding it without any precise reason. Now, as she nears, she senses a frightening emptiness beyond. The feeling that she’s about to open a door and find a void.

Utterly foolish. She wrenches the door open, goes in.

She could’ve killed the Historian—in fact, the first time she meets him, it’s all she wants to do. To lean over and pin his neck with her hands. To squeeze that eager, stupid look off his face.

Of the guests, she’s the only one who declines the invitation. But then the Historian gives her another reason to attend. She doesn’t want to think about what makes someone an expert in history and what doesn’t. Whether a historian is meant to safeguard the project of the past or, more likely, to suggest its architecture.

She doesn’t want to think about this ridiculous mansion. Or this ridiculous room. Or the dollhouse, tall and taciturn, infernal, which she’s studiously ignoring.

As far as she’s concerned, the entire house is defective.

In the wardrobe, she finds what she’s been looking for. The only reason she’s here tonight. There it is, the small folio. When the Historian shows it to her a few days earlier, she recognizes it at once: her mother’s diaries. The waft of her cologne, so intense Victoria can’t breathe.

The books were burned years ago by her father. Even an empress doesn’t have domain over death, and yet somehow the Historian has reached through time, past the fact of her mother’s grave, to hold out the diary in his hand. It’s an awful temptation. As if her mother might be alive after all. It enrages Victoria more than she could’ve imagined.

He says, “It’s just one night. Please say yes?”

She could’ve killed him. It would’ve taken a few minutes at most.

She pockets the folio as she approaches the dollhouse at last. She knows it’s part of the house’s puzzle, this outlandish toy. But she also thinks if she understood it, perhaps she wouldn’t be beholden to the laws of time and physics. Perhaps she, too, could have domain over death.

She pokes a window experimentally. She tries to pry at one of the chimneys.

What could she do, with that power?

The dollhouse seems to sense her there, because when she releases the chimney, one of the peaks starts to bulge upward. It’s forming a long, slender shape, and she realizes, with a dawning sense of dread, that it’s a finger.

Now she can feel the entire house—not the dollhouse, no, but the mansion itself, the vast and incomprehensible house of the Historian—contracting itself, summoning itself to this room, this toy. The house is trying to force its way up through the floors and walls and the staircases and the light fixtures into that long, strange protuberance, still growing and growing. The house is trying to emerge, finger-first, and become some faceless person.

She understands, more than anything, she doesn’t want to see that person. She really doesn’t. She takes a step back.

A rustle of movement nearby. Nefertiti stands there, in the doorway, looking at her. Queen Victoria feels a slither of cold.

The finger disappears with a gulp. The dollhouse is just a dollhouse. The agitation of the house smooths away. The room is calm again. Only the two of them, staring at each other.

“I’m just leaving,” Victoria says.

Nefertiti says, mildly, “Are you?”

Now Nefertiti is alone in the nursery. She ignores the dollhouse altogether. She walks over to the window and fumbles with the catch, her hands still thawing. She leans out.

Outside, the wind blows. The snow sweeps vast and improbable phantoms into existence. She can see something out there in the night—a woman striding out the front door. It’s Nefertiti, just under an hour ago. She can still feel the slashes of brightness on the woman’s cheeks. She can still feel the snow underfoot.

The ground is unsteady, here and everywhere. The woman below, Nefertiti, looks up at the house and sees herself. Here in the nursery room, Nefertiti raises a hand. She waves at the woman.

So this is it. Nefertiti and Nefertiti stare at each other. Down in the snow, Nefertiti turns reluctantly and trudges back toward the house.

In the children’s nursery, Nefertiti shuts the window with a thump. Her heartbeat wild, frantic. It was always a trap. Did she have a choice, ever, in how it would happen?

THERE’S ANOTHER WAY to view the scene in the elevator. What transpires between Ibn Battuta and Marilyn Monroe and the Professor.

If you were to follow Ibn Battuta and Marilyn after they encounter Nefertiti at the front entrance—obviously you can’t, it’s just a hypothetical—you’d hear Ibn Battuta say, “I’d like to visit the room that goes up and down,” in a toneless voice.

Marilyn, understanding, says, “Okay.”

They take the elevator up to the second floor. It’s when the doors part that the Professor walks in, looking ill at ease.

Ibn Battuta, angry he’s failed whatever test the house has given him and embarrassed, horribly embarrassed, says to her, “Forgive me for saying it, but is it really so terrible? That he died?”

WHO KNEW? IT’S likely some of the guests had suspicions. Even if they chose to keep quiet.

Do you know by now, too?

The house might be capricious or unlikely, but it has an order to itself. One that the Historian knew even as he tried to circumvent it. The house feels disorder the way a person might feel a splinter—a misalignment in a particularly tender place. It’s tried to evade the Historian in the past. But that’s another story, best left for another time.

In the end, it’s the house that drowns the Historian.

It isn’t difficult, for this particular house. To draw the man up into the second-floor bathroom that isn’t always there. To expand the size of the tub so it’s, temporarily, a depthless vent of an ocean from another century. To dip the Historian below the water, like a reluctant dance partner, a cup to be filled to the brim.

Long after the guests depart, after you’ve left, too, and changed your name again, well after the events of the story, you may find it difficult to recall the house of the Historian. As if part of you doesn’t believe it was real.

The house, the dinner party. Even the Historian himself. Whom you once thought you knew.

When you’ve left that place, you’ll understand it wasn’t just a physical location after all. It was a place in time. A reference point for who you once were.

You won’t find it again easily. No matter how often you try to reconstruct the house or its events in your mind. Trying to remember, to believe: this place was there, once. I was there, too.

IT WAS PROBABLY A VERY NICE DAY

The night they left, we slept like the dead. Like the gravest disappointment of all.

They packed their valises in the mournful hum of late night where we wouldn’t ever find them. Meanwhile, deep in hibernation, in a warm cavity of the Winter Palace, one of us sighed in her sleep, maybe Olga. As if already she sensed their absence, still unformed but taking shape someplace beyond us.

Our mother—the empress Alexandra, poor old trout!—she’d never packed her own luggage before. Her breath rasped with fervor. Into her leather case she stuffed roughly a million dresses and two tea sets. She forgot to bring anyone’s toothbrush.

She slipped pearl snowdrops into her earlobes and she did her own makeup in the clattering darkness. The little things that made her normal. Like this, she pared away the parts of her that couldn’t make the journey, until she felt the molten heat of her own resolve.

She looked divine. She was splendid. A beautiful Christmas ham at the big feast. But she was also a little distant, creepy, like she might be the rare kind of Christmas ham that devours everyone else at the table.

“There are spies everywhere, you understand?” That’s what the man said as he shifted in the shadows around her. He seemed nervous. “Malcontents. Vultures. We must hurry.”

Who was he? We had no idea. We couldn’t see his face. He could’ve been our father or even Rasputin. He could’ve been the devil himself. Who knows.

They disentangled the little tsarevich Alexei from his quilted blankets. Our baby brother. Ten years old and heir to the throne. His nostrils flared as he snored. Gently, so gently, they loosened the bedsheet where it had cinched his neck.

In the dark, they escaped. They boarded a ship or God knows what and they disappeared off the map of the world. We never heard from them again.

And meanwhile, we slept like ghosts in our beds. Like little stupid ghosts. Dreaming stupid nighttime dreams of every good thing that would never be ours. All wearing white, like we were something holy instead of squandered.

They left us to fates unknown. The four of us. Olga the eldest, Tatiana and Maria in the middle, and Anastasia, the youngest, goofy little clown that she was. They escaped the others, who might’ve been real or imagined, we didn’t know: the spies, the malcontents, the vultures, the peasants, the workers, the revolutionaries—all those families they’d consigned to death. But it was us they left behind, with one another, sealing the doors behind themselves.

They left us.

IT’S BEST NOT to think of the next morning. What we woke up to, or whom.

Or if it was grisly in any particular way. Or if we held hands for comfort, so close together we grazed the gooseflesh on one another’s arms, so near we could hear the wet murmur of Maria praying beneath her breath, even there, at the very end.

Then the sound that came after.

Later, we’d come to think of that morning as a hollow place, an optical stutter in our memories. Where things slipped apart and lost their form. Turned malevolent if we lingered too long.

It couldn’t have been too bad. It wouldn’t have a faint alchemical odor of blood and sulfur and suffering. It’s reasonable to assume that there was no fear, no pain. No one would’ve been unkind to us or anything.

It was probably a very nice day.

FAR AWAY—ON THE ship, out to sea—the empress Alexandra and the man unpacked and spoke in hushed sounds.

Where are the toothbrushes, the man asked in a voice only the empress could hear. He held up a silver teacup in dismay.

Little Alexei pressed his face right up against the porthole, delirious with exhaustion. He longed for Anastasia, a headlong rush of despair. Brave Anastasia. Sometimes he thought of her as a sorceress more than a sister—spiny in her moods, cloven by mischief and brimstone. Her squawks of frankly demonic laughter.

Out the porthole, a bird soared above the water, glorious freedom. A black freckle across the distant continent of the sky. He watched until it vanished.

He was our little stick boy. Our human-sized doll. He was the most delicate boy in the world. All those peculiar illnesses that kept him cooped up so long. For him, we would’ve relinquished strawberry ice cream for breakfast and every perfect, desultory summer holiday we’d spent in England with our great-grand-maman and even Tatiana’s horse, Gilgamesh, whom she lavished all her attention upon, whom she loved with a fierceness that made us all envious—of her, of the horse, of this reservoir she’d discovered within herself, feral and unyielding. Even her dearest horse!

Last spring, Alexei was ill with whooping cough or scarlet fever. You remember?

It was Anastasia’s idea, of course. We climbed through Alexei’s windows in stockinged feet on a morning licked flat by rain.

We scrambled into his sarcophagus bed. We tickled under his chin. We pressed our body heat into all the small spaces of his bedroom, so it felt like there were twenty of us, two hundred. The toes of our stockings soaked all the way through.

And he looked at us with his big humid eyes, his sad goblin eyes, and said in his droopiest voice, “You came, you came.” Like he’d summoned us hence from the deep.

Did he know? We never wanted him to be alone. We wanted him to know that.

At the porthole of the ship, little Alexei went still. The empress and the man traded fraught glances with all kinds of edges.

Alexei said to them, “D-did you hear that? I heard something.”

“You’re just tired, little tsarevich.” The empress became absorbed with the contents of her suitcase.

Alexei twisted around in his chair, trying to glimpse her face. “But I heard. Someone said”—and here he hesitated—“they said, ‘We never wanted him to be alone. We wanted him to know that.’”

How dainty, the silk rosettes sewn to her dancing gown. She’d never noticed. She plucked at the petals with light fingers. Her hands were steady as a butcher’s.

She said, “You always hear things when you’re tired.”

Alexei flopped back in his seat. The night before was soupy and improbable, it was true. Details went missing when he thought of them, so he couldn’t remember how he’d misplaced everyone. If we were sequestered elsewhere on the ship or—or—or what?

What else?

Behind him, the empress lifted her head. Her gaze went far and sharp. It magnetized us from a distance. We were helpless, drawn into it.

She jutted her jaw, and we understood she was angry. It seemed like she could see us—but that was impossible. We weren’t even there.

Is it, the man started to say. Can you tell.

“I’ll take care of it,” she said grimly.

WE MUST’VE FALLEN asleep again. That’s probably what happened.

When we came to our senses, there we were. Still in the Winter Palace.

The palace had languished in the meantime. We picked our way past pebbles of plaster and glass, almost floating with curiosity. The chandeliers were wrenched back like curtains. We touched the gashes in paintings, knife-sharp with a stranger’s fury. Nearby, the smell of cold air and fungus and earthworms.

“Everyone else must’ve fallen asleep, too,” one of us speculated. It sounded like something Maria would say—in other words, a little asinine.

Her voice lifted dust specks off the tables. It echoed into eternity. We shuddered, all of us.

We didn’t know why it bothered us. Or even what bothered us, if it was the echo of her voice or the thought of forever. We didn’t particularly want to understand.

Olga touched the nearest wall so she didn’t have to think about it any longer. She pictured little Alexei, lonesome on the ship. We could all see it now, our forlorn little stick boy. The dark sheaf of his hair falling over an empty forehead. Tucked over the table, he sipped at his soup, something briny and peppered.

He startled at a sound. He began to turn his head.

“Don’t look,” the empress hissed. She sat beside him, rigid, as if it were a great effort to hold herself this way. She watched him with maternal suspicion. The fear he would look anyway. “It isn’t them.”

A huff of surprise from Tatiana. She stepped back. The empress twitched, the smallest movement. A reaction.

“It isn’t them,” the empress said again. This time she threw a furtive, boiling glance at Tatiana, right at us. Telling us, not him.

It was Tatiana who turned and fled. The rest of us followed.

IN PURSUIT OF Tatiana, we wavered through the Winter Palace and the ship alike. On any other occasion, it would’ve been unearthly, even enchanting. We were in both places and neither. The palace was a haunted house, the ship was a beacon in the dark, and we flickered in and out of them.

We felt the regret of the palace, ghostly with shadow, bearded in bramble and thorn. Then the shimmering sunlight and mirth of the ship. A warm hearth at which we were unwelcome.

We found Tatiana in a moth-eaten corner of one or the other and we clutched her harder than was physically possible. We defied the laws of physics and the laws of possibilities. For a minute, an hour, we were a collision of electricity and wrath and atoms. Humming with urgency, as if we could hypnotize her by our proximity. As if we could make her forget everything. What she heard and saw and remembered. All of it.

We didn’t know it could be this endless. A pain that curdled and grew its own bacteria.

We didn’t know it could move planets. That it could change the shape of things to come.

When we broke apart, we discovered that we were on the ship again. Only now it wasn’t a ship anymore. It had become a tower.

NOW THE SHIP was a tower, except we didn’t know how. Olga said, all of a sudden, “Was it her?”

It was just the sort of thing the empress might do if she didn’t want to be found, poisoned in its inspiration. We were struck by silence, our own creeping suspicion.

The tower was ancient, the sort of tower where you might lock up a prisoner if the prisoner was scary rich. Crumbling limestone and leaded glass windows that distorted everything in view. A place our mother could adore—a little out of touch and long out of date.

The corridors of the ship wound into staircases that went in impossible directions—not up and down, you know, but serpentine and crisscross-applesauce and loop-de-loop. The perfect place to hide.

We peered through the window, trying to get a good look. The main deck had mushroomed into a large, disorderly garden. Green shadows leapt and blurred below us, indistinct beneath the glass.

Two of the ship’s guests trotted down and up the loop-de-loop stairs. We saw their upside-down heads above us, heard their exclamations of surprise and pleasure.

“Isn’t it incredible?” one of them said. They didn’t seem to mind at all. “Change of plans, I suppose.”

They were here for someone’s wedding. God. It’s always someone’s wedding somewhere, isn’t it? Ships especially. Gothic towers that used to be ships—admittedly less so.

We’d loved an extravaganza. Even Anastasia, who obediently suffered the indignity of hot combs and hair grease, of being made to look ethereal, gauzy, all for the sake of a first-rate occasion. She’d dance the mazurka with the officers and sip lobster bisque and pinch our legs when nobody was watching. For days afterward we’d find bruisy splotches beneath our knees, and she’d holler in delight, “It wasn’t me! I have manners now!”

“It is prettier this way,” Maria said as the pair of guests swept by us.

“Isn’t it?” one of the women said to her. The mother of the bride.

“Who on earth are you talking to?” her friend asked.

The bride’s mother glanced back at us, startled. Her face went shadowy, a brief tropical storm of sorrow and understanding. She shivered, just a little, and looked away.

ELSEWHERE, THE EMPRESS held a séance. Away from prying eyes and other unseemly intrusions. Or so she thought. The day dwindled around her, the steady drip of time running out.

She was holed up at the summit of the tower, in the ship’s library. Late-afternoon sun tapered through the windows, and where it touched her, she could feel her own certainty blaze up, a righteous furnace, a one-empress battery. The man hunched at the other side of the table, watching her. His face hidden from view as always. She winked at him, and her sudden brightness took hold of him, lit him up, too.

Just the sight of them together would make you want to find a grave and lie in it. They weren’t downcast or remorseful. They were the picture of dignity. They didn’t need anyone or anything, did they?

Specks of candlelight lent atmosphere to the proceedings, threw their shadows out of shape, conjured wormy movement that shifted behind them.

It was spooky, sure, but a séance? Please. No offense, but did she really believe in the spirit realm or whatever? How desperate was she?

The empress leaned forward and took the man’s hands in hers. She shut her eyes.

Maybe we used to believe in ghosts, a long time ago. Tatiana would be the type. If anything, she might sit in the park on an overcast day and listen for their desolate chirps. The rustle of grass that told her she wasn’t alone. She might whip her head around without warning, heart careening sideways, so sure she’d spy quicksilver wraiths dissolving out of sight.

If we believed in ghosts once, we didn’t now. Not anymore.

“You know what would be funny,” Anastasia said to us. She was already laughing.

She tiptoed over to the table and pinched a candle between her fingers. The light hissed out. The empress flinched.

Anastasia doused another candle. The empress opened one eye a slit and shut it just as fast. The man glanced around in obvious confusion. We snickered.

Do you want me to get that, the man said in the voice only the empress could ever hear. He didn’t look so dignified anymore. Neither did she.

The empress tightened her grip. “Stop it.”

Sorry, he said.

“Not you,” she said. Her face had closed up, stony and flat.

Are they narrating again? he said. Fretful, he tried to detach his hands from hers, but she wouldn’t let him. I wish they wouldn’t narrate. What are they saying?

The sun cast long, burning talons across the face of the empress. It seemed a little melodramatic, but fine.

“Spirits,” she said in a low voice. This ought to be good. We leaned forward, curious in spite of ourselves. Drawn to her, in spite of ourselves.

“Spirits,” she said again—and was that a quaver in her voice? “I banish you.”

Why did we feel a lurch in our stomachs, all of us, as if we’d been snagged on the same wire? It came out of nowhere. Olga made a noise. We quailed, all of us.

We could feel a rumble start beneath us, something seismic and imminent, meant only for us. The empress was shaking, but we didn’t know why. She said, stricken, “It is them.” The man was still. The library was frozen in silence.

Did that really work?

Could she do that?

ONCE, A LONG time ago, the empress, our mother, taught us to fold paper into boats.

It was the end of winter, gray, unsparing, and we were famished for long sunlit days and fragrant spikes of lavender growing in the wild. Tatiana put her head down on the armrest of her chair and said into it, voice muffled, “I’m so tired of everything and everyone,” and Anastasia reached over to pinch her but Olga slapped her hand away. Meanwhile the empress, our mother, pleated little dinghies with swift fingers. Spry white sailboats. A massive battleship and then two more.

We were crabby and dissatisfied and she didn’t mind. She hummed something beneath her breath, wistful and wandering, a reminder that better days might yet come to us all. A whole paper fleet grew in a heap on her desk. A private smile grew behind her eyes, turning her into our very own temperate season; the warmest day we could’ve hoped for.

THE WINTER PALACE tugged us back. We didn’t want it.

Its loneliness felt sinister, even contagious. Like the party guest who came too early and never left, except in this case, the Winter Palace was the party guest and also the whole guest list and the party and the venue itself. Wretched. Accursed to the highest degree.

If we stayed too long, we’d never leave.

Maria breathed through her nose. A labored, awful sound that we didn’t want to think about. We could almost hear the click that came after.

We gripped one another by the wrists and tried to imagine we were anywhere else. Every room was a reminder: something happened here.

And sure, we felt a little pluck of grief at the calamity of it, whatever tragedy lingered in the air, which seemed operatic in its solidity. But it wasn’t our business. Obviously.

Around us, the alcoves whispered. Do you remember. Do you remember.

A fast flick of Olga’s head, like a warning. “Let’s go,” she said.

We didn’t need to be told twice.

THAT NIGHT, WE were frantic. The palace was a hole, a cellar in a house we didn’t like to think about. In our frenzy, we lost track of what was possible.

That night—in unrelated news—the ship became a forest, thorny and Germanic. It was a slow creep. Moss slipped over stone that was once the hull of the ship, much to the wonderment of the bride’s mother, who sat up in bed to watch.

The dizzying staircases folded away with a flourish. In their place grew a maze of silver firs and impenetrable spruce.

“What are you doing now?” the bride’s mother asked. No one answered, but she felt a gentle touch on her face, slight and plaintive and gone. She said, “Look after yourselves, okay?”

Little Alexei awoke on the forest floor to the chirrup of morning thrushes, a cathedral of ancient trees above him. The sight of the forest awed him. It erased the distance between him and the known world.

He missed his sisters terribly. His sense of loss was a buried moon, with weight and gravity, its own pull. He thought if grief grew big enough, it should have the capacity to trap something in its orbit, draw someone back. Someones, in this case.

Nearby, wedding guests strolled through the undergrowth. They wore crisp suits and happy faces. They laughed and gossiped about their lives. In a few hours, the wedding would begin. Ship or tower or forest, the show must go on.

The empress and the man were nowhere to be seen. Alexei found a walking stick—the perfect height, with a little worn crook to fit his hand, as if it’d been made for him—and followed the disappearing tail of wedding guests.

IT FELT LIKE the ship always lurked over our shoulders, trailing us wherever we went. Or maybe we were following it. But probably the first thing.

We crept through the forest on silent feet. We passed the empress and the man, ensnarled in a giant hedge of morbid yew. They were stuck.

The empress said, “I’m stuck.”

The man swore. He said, Where’s an axe when you need one.

“Don’t laugh,” Olga warned Anastasia. Her face twitched. They grasped each other, trembling with mirth, trying not to cackle like loons.

What’s that? Who’s there? the man said.

But they couldn’t catch us this time. We were stealth and trouble, lighter than air. We sifted through the gaps of trees and came across the bride, who sat on a log in her cabin—now a clearing—combing her hair for the ceremony. The groom stood before a mirror in his own cabin, which was right across from the bride’s half of the clearing, separated only by a thin screen of ferns. He trimmed his mustache with gilt-edged scissors. He bared his teeth at the mirror, but the mirror didn’t flinch.

“Are you nervous?” the bride said from one side of the clearing.

“What do you think?” he asked from the other side.

They were young, celestial in their giddiness, their loveliness. Their hair glowed with vitamins. Their cheeks pliant with teenage collagen. The bride had shaky hands. The groom had a habit of laughing nervously at inopportune moments.

Later, when they married, probably her dress would make her resemble a pencil. Ungainly, a promontory of hair atop her head. But probably he’d still recognize her from afar. Her halting walk, her trembling hands.

And probably he’d laugh nervously. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself. He’d be so happy to see her.

His ungainly bride. His beautiful pencil.

In the forest clearing, the bride stopped combing her hair. She reached through the ferns and touched the groom’s wrist.

“Do you hear that?” she said.

“They’re talking about us,” the groom said wonderingly.

We tiptoed away. We didn’t want to ruin their day. We didn’t want to spoil the ending. They didn’t know yet; he hadn’t yet experienced the feeling of waking up into ominous silence. She hadn’t yet discovered how small she was. How insubstantial. How easily she could be stored away and forgotten.

No one had betrayed them yet. No one had left them in the dead of night without a second glance. No one had shown them an unkindness so grave it built up in their bodies, a crust under their skins.

LITTLE ALEXEI WAITED for us in the ship’s chapel, which was now a crescent of centuries-old oaks. Time had passed since he’d awoken that morning. Hours. The ceremony was over and the guests were eating and drinking and dancing nearby. His walking stick was laid across his small, knobbly knees. He sat on a crooked stump, listening like it was his last chance to do it, his body bent forth with the effort.

We were drawn to him, as if tugged by an unseen force. We found him. We shrieked his name and descended upon him with jubilation. Anastasia tried to mash his cheeks and prod him and headbutt him, all at the same time. Tatiana tried to comb the hair out of his eyes. But they couldn’t do it. We swiped at him with our hands but we could never reach him. It was pretty annoying. Was it his fault? We knew it wasn’t ours. All the while, he sat in crystalline silence, alone, our little boy tyrant, his face far away from us.

“You’re there, aren’t you?” he said. His voice was a thread, thin and steady. “I can’t always hear you. But I’m pretty sure.”

“Why can’t he hear us?” Olga said.

He folded his hands over his walking stick and unfolded them. He said, “If you’re there, can you show me?”

“But how are we supposed to do that?” Tatiana said.

“Maybe we should talk louder?” Maria suggested. The genius.

He said, “Can you change it again?”

At first, we didn’t understand. We waited for him to say anything else, to supply us with a useful hint, but he didn’t. He sat on his own, waiting for an answer we didn’t know how to give.

It was Maria, of all people, who said, “The ship?”

Anastasia puckered her face. “That’s not us,” she said to little Alexei, who couldn’t hear. “That’s her.”

That’s the problem with little brothers. They have too many ideas, none of them very good. He was wrong, of course, but we tried anyway, for his sake. His eyes were so gummy and sad. Poor Alexei. Poor, friendless Alexei.

Could anyone change anything? We didn’t know. We held hands—already embarrassed by what we were about to attempt—and we tried. We tried to change the ship again. Why not.

The forest stirred around us. Alexei sat and listened. Somehow, the trees shifted and untangled themselves from one another’s embrace, somehow the sky dimmed above us. The forest became a ship once more. And now the ship was in space.

NOW THE SHIP was in outer space. We’d done it. The yacht had become a space yacht. In the ballroom, the wedding guests were dancing, but now they wore futuristic dresses with swoops and geometric cutouts. Waiters walked around with canapés on trays, but the canapés were stylish little space canapés.

The orchestra pit was a weird, antigravity bubble and the musicians floated upside down, playing flutes and horns that tried to escape their grasp. We’d never seen anything like it.

The sky glimmered with stars, a coronation above our little stick brother. Alexei clenched his fists so hard, he could feel the pain shoot through his wrists. He said, “I knew it. I was right,” and his voice was no more than a whisper.

Beyond him, a whale floated over the ship, heading deep into outer space. It was a colossus. Big as a dining room. A flotilla of tiny fish darted in and around the whale, and they could’ve been stars, too, minute specks of metal and elation.

Even then, we could feel them coming. If displeasure had a sound, it would be the empress and the man as they barreled through the space yacht, into the ballroom, right toward us. Everyone else was dancing. The empress got to the middle of the room, her chest heaving, her eyes wild. It was strange to watch. Her face was shuddering, as if this were the hardest thing she’d ever done, but her mouth was steady. It was sort of horrible. We were entranced.

She said to us, her face shuddering the whole time, her voice even:

“You

Can’t

Be

Here.”

She said each word just like that. As if it deserved its own line break.

Everything stopped. The music screeched to a halt. The waiters stopped circulating, as if they were in a game of freeze tag. The bride and groom, shining in sweat and laughter, ceased their dancing.

But nothing could ruin their day. They wandered over to see what the fuss was about. The bride’s hands shook, as they always did. The groom fed her a space canapé on the way over. He leaned in close and whispered something in her ear, and we leaned in, too, trying to hear, but it was between the two of them. All of this, it was theirs and only theirs.

“Are you happy now?” the empress said to us with a savageness we didn’t recognize.

“Is everything okay?” the groom said.

It is not, the man said, but no one could hear him. No one could ever hear him.

“How do they not know? What are we supposed to do?” the empress said. “Because—because—” But she didn’t seem to have an end to her thought.

We had to, the man said to her. He tried to take her arm. We didn’t have time.

“They seem sad,” said the bride to the empress, trying to be helpful. She held on to the groom. “What are they saying?”

Maybe we knew it was over when we turned in our sleep that night. Maybe we knew it was done. Maybe we’d always known it was us. Just us.

“They’re saying, ‘Justice, justice,’” the empress said. Her face was pinched. “They won’t rest until there’s justice.”

Couldn’t she hear us? It wasn’t true.

There was no justice. There would never be any justice. We knew that.

Tatiana was the first to see it: the empress was afraid. But why?

“I can’t change what’s happened,” the empress said. There was that savage tone. Angry, but more than that, defensive. She knew something. What was it? “I can’t fix anything. We can’t go back.”

Okay, fine.

But what if we could?

NOW WE TURNED the ship into a house, but in our excitement, we must’ve muddled it. Because it seemed that the house was also the haunted house of the Winter Palace, and it was the tower of the stupid-rich prisoner, the thorn forest, the ship in space. It was everyhouse, blurry and mercurial. It was everywhere we’d ever been.

More than all of those places, it was another house altogether.

It was a place we knew but would prefer not to, east of the Urals, rambling and overgrown. We could smell the meaty musk of dinner in the kitchen. Sisters whipped past each other in the hallways.

It was full of sorrows yet to come. It was profound in its condolences. A house of Special Purpose. A house of endings. One room where the girls were confined, one for little Alexei and his parents. Soldiers in the garden. Soldiers in the cellar.

The cellar. That cellar. An empty space we couldn’t see. The most familiar place of all. If we strained our ears, we’d hear it.

“No,” the empress whispered. She took a step back. “Not here.”

We always ended up back here. Wherever this was.

Up on the promenade deck of the ship, which had now become the roof of the house—the last house, a house of death—the wedding party posed for photographs. The bride said under her breath to the groom, “It’s creepy as heck, but we might as well.”

It was too much. We’d always had a linear understanding of time, of cause and effect, but now, in our panic, in our confusion, it started to come apart.

In the section of the house that reminded us most of the Winter Palace, a night watchman whistled to himself as he swept a flashlight through spiderwebs and deserted museum corridors. Someone snapped photos of the rooms with their cell phone, and a docent said, “No flash photography, please,” and the other person said, “Yeah, right.”

Anastasia thought she caught glimpse of Alexei’s nursemaid, standing on the edge of a tour group. Except fatigue and heartbreak had aged her face, or maybe it was a trick of the sun. It was as if she’d come back to a place from her past, reopening memories that’d stayed shut for a long time. The nursemaid reached out and placed a hand on a portrait that we couldn’t see, and her hand was shivering. She started to cry. But maybe that was a trick of the sun, too.

All this time, we could feel the black mass of the cellar, like a hole in the head. Always expanding, always hunting toward us. If memories came from the cellar, they weren’t ours. If sounds emerged from it, we refused to know about it.

Little Alexei said to the empress, “What’s down there?” We listened for her answer.

She said, “None of this is true.” Her voice was iron.

She said it to Alexei, to the man. To the wedding party up on the roof. The night watchman. To the tsarevich’s weeping nursemaid in the future. And as she said it to each of them, they evaporated from the house, one by one, until it was just us and her.

To us, she said, “It can’t happen this way. It didn’t.” She didn’t look at any of us, exactly, but at the corners of our presence. It was as if she couldn’t stand to see us. “Please, you have to listen. Think of your little brother.”

This was what she was afraid of. The house. The cellar. Us. Not what couldn’t be altered, but what could. Not who died, but who else might’ve, too, if given the wrong opportunity. If enough were changed.

In the everyhouse, it was all of us in the cellar. Even the empress, our mother. Even little Alexei. But it didn’t happen that way, did it?

“You have to let us live,” the empress said. There was that face, wobbling and horrible, on the brink of something else. “Do you understand?”

WE GOT THE message. We left the ship. We didn’t need the empress or anyone.

Don’t feel bad for us. We’d be fine. We had powers, right? We were going to do the best things, the most interesting things. Travel the world. Run a half-marathon. Learn to speak in tongues. Haunt the cracks of the cosmos. Ride in a fire truck with the sirens on full blast. Trickle into the past and future and present.

Anastasia thought we should hide in people’s pipes and give them a scare; Olga said she wasn’t going to live in a toilet all day. Tatiana wanted to find a ghost horse. Maria wanted to sublimate our negativity into virtuous purpose, become a saint or something.

A saint!

Can you imagine!

THE INSTANT BEFORE it happens, Tatiana sees the bruise on Olga’s throat where Anastasia pinched her last. A plum-colored hydrangea unfurling along the slope of her neck, like the small fist of some fury pressed against her jugular. With enough time, it will grow a vivid violet, then a discolored black.

On the other side of her, in the cellar or the Winter Palace, wherever it actually happens, Maria prays under her breath, harsh, urgent. Their arms are twined together, all of them. The click of muskets. The rustle of soldiers, taking aim. Tatiana tries to look up and catch Olga’s eye. She tries to lean over and whisper to her sister that a flower is growing out of her throat. In her own way, she is trying to tell her sisters: Don’t be afraid.

But it’s too late.

NOT EVERYTHING IS ANCIENT HISTORY

He meets her one night in Gaul. One of his legates comes to him, saying, “I think you’d better see this,” but he doesn’t elaborate, or he can’t. Julius Caesar steps out of his tent, into campfire dusk and humming revelry. And there she is, completely wrong.

Nellie Bly is dressed like one of his own soldiers. On her, it’s an ill-fitting costume—the shoulder plates of her armor jut at odd angles, overlarge sandals lashed to her feet with some kind of rope. It can’t be comfortable. She sits with a knot of his men, scribbling into a notebook. Hair swept above her in a perilous bun.

For a second, he’s caught. His head is elsewhere, full of troop formations and food supply lines. Typhoid in one of the legions; the reports are grim.

He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing. The fire floats down toward him, their voices with it. To his consternation, a scout is narrating the Axona campaign to Nellie, big hand gestures and all—“We crushed them into submission, obviously,” he’s saying. “Dominated their spirits.”

“She’s been skulking,” the legate murmurs.

It’s absurd, the whole thing. But when Nellie looks up from her notebook and sees Julius, she grins at him so spectacularly that he’s at a loss. A complete loss. She shines with anomaly.

She calls out with genuine pleasure in her voice, “There you are! I was going to come looking for you.” Like they’ve met before. Like they’ve known each other for years.

The soldiers glance from him to her and back to him again, trying to read into something that isn’t there.

If he were a different person, maybe he’d see that her casual friendliness isn’t a sleight of hand. That she gives herself to everyone because she can’t hold on to any of it herself. Maybe he’d even walk over to her. He’d feel the years that lie ahead of them, the shape of the weather across two decades and two continents. All the unformed possibilities between them.

He doesn’t walk over. He doesn’t see the years ahead. Instead, he turns to the legate and says, “Please escort her out.” The men go quiet, rebuked. The legate opens his mouth to say something and sees the expression Julius is wearing. He shuts his mouth again.

But there’s a moment just before that.

The scout is still telling Nellie about the campaign at Axona, and Julius is still climbing his way toward the fire. The legate is an ominous mutter in his ear. It’s when she catches sight of him and grins. When she calls out to him.

And for less than an instant—it shouldn’t count, it’s the slightest flicker of time—her self-assurance persuades Julius. The delight in her voice, the touch of conspiracy in her unreserved grin. As if it’s true: they have some shared history from long ago.

For the brief, limitless, twinkling span of that moment, he thinks, Yes, of course. I remember her.

THAT’S THE SUMMER of the failed campaign, when Julius Caesar takes an army into New York like a conquering hero.

Nellie’s home for the summer, a rare thing. Everywhere she goes, they are a persistent buzz. The Romans, a noise in the background she can’t escape. A newspaper photo of Julius and his army encamped by the Upper West Side, his frown hazy in black-and-white grain. (One of her friends from the suffrage league: “Pity they never sculpted him in the nude.”)

She walks through the city to see it for herself. The hubris of Julius Caesar. She’s with her stepsister, Martha, who’s trying to persuade her to leave New York. The heat of July has the wrath of an old god. It swallows their every step. A Polish woman on her way to the factory dunks her head briskly into the Hudson, dripping down into her undergarments. Martha, watching her, says, “People don’t do that in Burrell, so that’s nice.”

Where the tenements are going up nearby, an older Black merchant passes around little paper sleeves of chipped ice from his pushcart. The seams are going soppy with melt, but he holds each cup with deft care. It seems the paper will tear, that it could all come apart so easily. Or possibly Nellie is just melancholy about the shifting city, the frequent dust of its construction, its skyline ascendant.

“No dust in Burrell. None,” Martha says when she hears this. “We simply never build new things.”

A couple of centurions duck out of a Broadway show, sheepishly, like they think everyone’s watching. Her first sight of the Romans. Popcorn butter smeared on their chins. They’re impossibly young. Even in their chagrin, they’re so confident that everything belongs to them.

“But they’re children,” Martha says in dismay.

Nellie doesn’t want to agree with her. Encouragement is never healthy for Martha. “Sure,” she says. “If children had weapons.” She makes a mental note of the show. It’s the one about the hotel maid. Everyone takes a turn pretending to be someone else. If anyone’s having a bad time, it’s only temporary. Primary colors and happy endings.

But Martha takes this as encouragement anyway. “We don’t give weapons to children in Burrell,” she says. “It’s very civilized.”

Nellie stops to look at her then. Martha sticks out her lower lip. She looks like she’s ready to fight. She says, “I miss you is all.”

Nellie reaches over and chucks her chin.

“So visit more,” she says.

New York has no time for breastplated men with their spears. Not in the summer of 1897.

New York has cannons. The campaign is over in weeks. Julius Caesar is gone before she can meet him.

And yet some of his men linger, even after. They wear those flimsy tunics, their stern brass helmets. Maybe it’s easier to find one another that way. They stick together, as if something will be lost if they disperse.

One night, Nellie’s out with friends. The air sweats with the afterthought of humidity. Her friends squabble. The argument is pointless, academic—something about baseball and a human need for violence. Her friends are earnest and angry anyway. They use words like sublimate and preternatural.

There’s a translucent slip of paper between her and them. That’s what it feels like to her.

But still, she is prickly, she is glib, and it pleases them. She goads both sides without any real sting. She says, “This is why people hate college graduates.” When she touches the nearest lamppost, it has a sheen to it.

Out in the square, a handful of Roman soldiers sip fizzy soda out of glass bottles and hoot with elation. The lamplight crowns their sweat, turns them bright and shimmering around the corners. One of them gets Coca-Cola up his nose and makes an awful wailing sound. The others applaud him and drum their feet on the ground.

It makes her feel for them—not a liking, no—but a twinge, just briefly. Their worship of the ordinary. It makes those things unfamiliar to her again. All summer, she has been out of sorts, and now this. Not everything in the world is ancient. There is novelty to be had, surprise for the sake of itself; there is something more. For the first time in months, she’s standing at the edge of herself, fizzing quietly in her own way.

At the corner shop later that week and a Roman general runs his thumb along a glossy cherry with unrestrained pleasure. Nellie takes note, trying to remember if there are cherries in Italy. If what she’s seeing is nostalgia or curiosity.

It occurs to her that she could find out. If he can visit here, surely she can visit there. The thought of infiltrating the Romans, the camp of Julius Caesar himself, is dazzling.

She follows the man back, all the way back, from New York to Gaul.

IN GAUL, SHE refuses to leave the camp. Or rather, she says to Julius, “Sure, yes, certainly,” in a vague, reassuring way, and still she remains. Much to his discontent.

His men aren’t alarmed by her. They’re pleased by the company, they’re eager to tell her everything, as if she has some knack for unbuckling the rigidity of their oaths, the inflexibility of the secrets they keep. He overhears a horn-blower confiding to her about his unwell mother, how most days she won’t get out of bed. The camp prefect admits that this campaign’s likely his last, but could Nellie please not tell anyone. She cultivates acquaintances here like exotic flowers. She makes herself scarce on those days when he’s in a mood.

Sometimes, he’ll encounter a centurion chewing on a pastrami sandwich with great zeal. In these instances, he knows she’s nearby.

One of his generals, Lucius Longinus, borrows a notebook from Nellie. He scribbles little tedious observations in it, conducts insipid interviews around camp. He says the most insufferable things, like, “Nellie says we should always think of the ethical imperative of our work,” and, “Nellie says you should run toward the action, not away from it,” until Julius is ready to deposit him at the nearest village.

Eventually, she comes to him, saying, “Look, it’s foolish that we can’t be friends. Let’s be friends.”

“I prefer to choose the people I spend time with,” he says stiffly. But her certainty is impervious to harm. Or to the word no.

“I’ve already decided,” she tells him, and that’s how it goes. It’s as easy as that.

HERE’S WHAT SHE learns about him: he likes best the little olive oil cakes of his childhood. He isn’t afraid of stillness the way she is. He can sit in a silence like it’s the shelter he’s carved for himself.

He thinks of himself as a serious man, a pious man, but his vanity is almost audible to her.

He reads pages from her notebook when he doesn’t think she’s paying attention. A little knuckle of focus forming between his eyebrows.

There is an easy lust to him. He doesn’t watch himself when he puts his hand on a legionary’s shoulder or touches the cheekbone of his favorite laundress with a light finger. He’s never more relaxed than when he is this way.

Other times, he’s brittle. The scaffolding of his body held precarious with fear. In these moments, he’s indecipherable to her.

She fancies that she’s the only one making discoveries. But on a mild day in September, she’s arguing with Julius and a tribune. Julius nods along and then he says to her, as if working out a puzzle in his head at last, confirming something for himself, “You like to be proven wrong, don’t you?”

She knows then that he is watching her, too.

SKIP AHEAD THROUGH the years. He wakes up, a stranger in a strange land, and he is fifty. It’s his birthday.

And here is Nellie, here is Nellie. Nellie leaves five little olive oil cakes on the kitchen counter, sweetened with honey. She props her head up with one hand and watches him sit, saying, “My poorest old man. How does one manage when one is five entire decades.”

But her voice is not ungentle. She herself is fifty-one. He passes her a cake to eat, as if he doesn’t already know how she’ll respond. She makes a face and says, “I mean this kindly, I do, but I’d rather eat straw.”

At home, there will be a lengthy feast upon his return. Days long. Small, beautiful dishes like delicate works of art. His bard will seek him out the first evening, warm with attention and youth. Here, in New York, it’s only him and Nellie. They exist to each other in this shared space alone.

Later, they will walk to the park. It’s a proper day of summer, blue and unforgiving. Every moment that’s theirs, it’s always on the verge of gone. He will be restless without knowing why. Nellie finds a fraying two-dollar bill in the gutter and passes it to him. He’s sure that people are watching them; he says, “That’s not mine,” and gives it to the next passerby. He will feel her focus on him, the start of concern. He bristles, although he doesn’t mean to.

They’re on the precipice of a conversation that will become a quarrel if he’s not careful. But before it can materialize, she will place a hand on his shoulder and it will ease the tense knot within him, as it often does, like she has punctured something vital, and all his internal organs have slid out, and at last he can be free of himself.

“Nellie,” he says. This is earlier, before the park. They’re still in the kitchen, but not for long. Never for long. “Do you remember Esther?”

She sparks to life. She says, smiling, “I remember that you remember Esther,” which is meant to be an evasion, or an answer, or neither, or both.

WHEN THEY’RE STILL becoming friends, he mentions offhand a woman she knows, Esther, and she says with interest, “Oh, Esther. I didn’t realize you had your sights on her. I should’ve guessed.”

He sputters. He says that’s not how he meant it. She listens with a blank face. Somehow, that makes it worse.

“You’re overimaginative to a fault,” is all he can manage, in the end.

“Well,” Nellie says crisply, “my mistake.”

But when he meets her a few days later—at this point, he’s back in the city, and she’s always at a meeting for city newspaper writers or the women’s vote or local bylaws or workers’ rights or who knows what—she’s with Esther.

They sit in a shop. He orders a chocolate ice cream, Esther gets a dessert with beautifully diced nuts. Nellie sips a soda. They chat casually about nothing, a christening that Nellie and Esther attended a few weeks ago, the weather.

The summer has relented at last. The air has an odor to it, a chill. Nellie calls it autumn. He isn’t used to the way of these seasons, all the drama of them. He should return to Rome soon. His business here is almost done. Time is ticking. It always is.

He wonders what she’s told Esther about him.

“What do they think of spinsters in Rome, Julius?” Nellie extends a spoon into his glass, takes an impolite scoop of chocolate.

She never seems to know what’s his and what’s hers. Her familiarity has a way of feeling like a kindness, a pact of friendship. It unnerves him. Often, he lives outside his own body and yet here, now, there is an immediacy to it. The cold brightness of chocolate ice cream in his throat. The two women sitting across from him. Esther gazing at him the way that sometimes men and women do. Behind him, the chair pushes deep against the ridges of his spine.

“You’re trying to get me in trouble, aren’t you?” he asks Nellie. He says it smiling down into his glass. He’s learned to sense which of Nellie’s questions are meant as bait, even when she doesn’t believe that’s what they are.

But then he tells them about his mother’s sister, who took care of the children when they were very young. He doesn’t look at Nellie. He knows she’ll perceive some fault with him for this glimpse of his past. She’ll be disappointed he isn’t more perceptive. It’s just that he finds there to be a profound sadness to unmarried women. Is that so strange?

All this time, he’s aware of Esther, who is watching him. Her proximity to him a heat on the other side of his arms. By some marvelous telepathy, they’ve opted to stay here, both of them, delaying whatever happens next, and it’s almost unbearable. His voice is steady to his own ears. He could peel back her dress just by reaching out. The front panel off in one sweep. Her bare shoulder exposed, her breast. She is too close. If he thinks too much about it, he won’t be able to concentrate.

Now he looks at Nellie, and she’s fighting a smile. She tilts her face in that self-satisfied way that only Nellie has. Poisonously smug. If he is drowning, she is watching. This is a slow death, this gluttonous stillness.

LATER, HE WILL realize this is just how it is with Nellie. Esther is there, Julius is there, put them together. She sees two points and she draws a line. It doesn’t occur to her that there could be another way. She’s deeply disinterested in any machinations. But she doesn’t realize this is a kind of machination of its own.

AT THE END of her time in Gaul, she returns to New York to file her latest pieces. It’s been a little over a month.

Lucius Longinus, the aspiring reporter, asks to tag along. Before they go, she says to Julius, “Why don’t you come back with us?” and he peers at her as if she’s a most unpleasant specimen that he’s never noticed until now.

He says, “And relive my most famous defeats?”

Which, she assumes, is the end of it.

If she thinks about it afterward, she might wonder at herself. Why did she ask him? What could possibly happen? But she doesn’t. She tries not to think about it at all.

New York is a long tunnel of sound and light. She recedes into it. She persuades a colleague to take Lucius Longinus under his wing. There are rallies and riots and elections and galas. All the people she’s left behind.

Much later, she will hear from Lucius Longinus. That’s how she learns Julius has returned to New York.

WHEN JULIUS CAESAR steps off the elevator and into the train station in Yonkers, all the clatter and squall and sound of the train station goes so suddenly flat, so quiet, his ears echo. He thinks it must be some kind of vertigo.

But no. Everyone in the station has gone silent. They’re staring. Of course they are. They’re staring at him.

At his side, the railway commissioner points out the vaulted ceilings above, basking in the attention of others, eager to persuade Julius. The commissioner says to him, “We shipped the glass from England, can you imagine!” and no, Julius can’t imagine. He doesn’t even know where England is.

The light smarts his eyes. It turns the station fluid. A gaggle of reporters follows them across the mezzanine and onto the train car—for this historic occasion, he’s told—and in their midst is Nellie Bly. The first time he’s seen her since Gaul.

Champagne is passed around. Julius declines politely. The vinyl seating slurps at his behind. The railway commissioner is trying to get his attention again—“Just think! We could build a rail from Rome to the coast! You could get to the beach before lunchtime!”—and then the train is starting. The world jerks forward. He clutches the edge of the booth and tries to maintain his neutral expression.

And there’s Nellie, walking up to him, an unwavering line as the train car shudders around them. It’s been almost a year, but it doesn’t feel that way. She touches his shoulder so gently. The smallest pressure of her fingertips.

And she says with humor, quiet, so only he can hear, “Careful. If you grit your teeth any harder, you’re going to break something.”

IN LATER YEARS, he’s positively Shakespearean. He sees omens in everything. He won’t eat the oatmeal because it reminds him of the troubled sky on the occasion of his father’s funeral. When he gets like this, it’s impossible.

She lacks an abundance of patience. She tells herself he’s always known that about her. And if he hasn’t, it’s not her fault.

Julius dreams of hunting a wild bear through the forest and tells her he can’t leave the house that day. He barricades himself in the wine cellar, just as a precaution. She’s reminded of a patient she met at Bellevue, and the thought makes her ill. Was he always like this? What else has she missed?

On occasion, he disappears for months at a time without any warning. Presumably back to Rome, who knows. One night, she comes home and finds him returned, entrenched at the desk, writing missives to his allies back home.

“I can’t talk right now,” he says to her by way of greeting. His thumbs are stained with ink. “It’s all very fragile.” His earnest face makes it worse. As if she isn’t even there.

“Naturally,” she says. The room feels too small for both of them. She is already irritable.

“You can’t imagine how hard it is.” He shakes his head, dismayed at the state of things. “I’m fighting for a way forward, and everyone else is fighting for a way back.” As if this must be explained to her. As if this is news to her.

“I don’t understand, do I?” she says, lightheaded with anger. What does he know of progress? All these years they’ve been together. In that moment, it seems he’s never grasped the work she does. “Can you really be that self-absorbed?”

He looks up at her, and it’s like she’s dealing with another person. “How could you know?” he asks. It’s the start of an awful fight.

But afterward, in the night, he will come to bed, contrite, exposed. In sleep, everything slides out of place. She wakes and he is there.

When he sleeps, he’s most vulnerable. He gives her this: his anguished dreaming laid bare, his fears writ plain. His small, fretful hand gestures toward her. A defenselessness, should she choose to hold on to it. And what is this, if not an atonement?

She can never lie still for very long. The quiet of the room can turn hostile without her noticing. But there’s a great and crushing tenderness in watching him sleep. In feeling him clutch her like she’s the only thing left to hold. She can give him that, even as her anger refuses to thaw.

And what is that, if not a kind of forgiveness?

IN THE TRAIN car from Yonkers, the engine’s uneven thrum vibrating beneath their knees, Julius Caesar sitting before her in the flesh, his eyes prying her open like she’s a strange seashell, she asks why he’s back in New York.

“Why did you come to Gaul?” he asks, which isn’t an answer. It feels like they’re negotiating something, but she doesn’t know what. It’s unsettling to see him back here, out of place, in her own time. It makes him an unknown quantity once more.

“Please, Miss Bly,” the railway commissioner says, “no interviews just yet.”

“What’s an interview if not the start of a conversation?” she asks innocently.

“The commissioner thinks it would be of enormous value,” Julius says, gesturing to the train, the railway beyond, “to build a similar route back home. What do you think?”

And here the commissioner pipes in with the unvarnished enthusiasm of an obstinate salesman, “It would be extraordinary! The miracle of modernization! Surely you agree, Miss Bly?”

“A railway line through all of ancient Rome,” she says. “Just imagine.”

“It isn’t ancient to me,” Julius says softly.

“Oh, but a railway will bring new life to Rome, of that you can be sure!” The commissioner, trying to wrestle his way back into the conversation. “The top tourist destination. What a scene it would be!”

Julius raises his eyebrows at her. “Well? Should we? Will it be a scene?” His face is so impassive, it takes her a moment to suspect he’s teasing her, or possibly the railway commissioner, or the whole ludicrous expedition.

“Can you be serious?” she asks. She can hear her own uncertainty.

He says, “Am I capable of anything else?”

This is a piece of information that puts him out of alignment with the person she thought he was: he has a sense of mischief.

LATER, THERE ARE gaps in her memory. They are friends for so long, until they are not. They’re casual lovers, until they aren’t. What happens?

In the gaps, the temperature changes. In the gaps, the weather of his face shifts, from one mood to the next. Something passes.

And maybe the gaps aren’t gaps, but a steady accumulation of time. So much of it that it loses any meaning. In her memory, he is always this. This friend of hers, this old love.

THEN ONE DAY, it’s her forty-second birthday. The sky is flat without color. And when he steps into the house, it’s like coming back to his oldest memory.

The house fills with people. People who kiss Nellie on the cheek, people who fetch her glasses of sherry, people who want to be near her. Someone’s roasted a pork shoulder in garlic and red wine and juices. The perfume of it touches every room, every person.

And this time, he is purposeful. Bold, even. He kisses Nellie on the cheek and he says, “Happiest birthday, old friend.” She makes the smallest startled movement, putting her hand on his wrist. The sudden sensation of her against him. Someone else arrives with a garland of flowers, and the two of them draw apart as if caught unawares. There’s a moment of confusion, of surprise, as they untangle. A new unsteadiness.

He catches Nellie watching him, a little bemused, even as she accepts the flowers, even as he retreats to the other side of the room. Not uncurious—more like she’s unearthed some new fact of his being. He can’t imagine what she sees when she watches him that way. Even in the haze and heat of the party, still she looks at him, and he’s conscious of his face, his skin, which feels suffocating against the rest of him.

They keep their distance. They ignore each other with purpose. They make inconsequential overtures. He brushes her back in passing with his fingertips. She passes him a glass of port while speaking to someone else, her arms briefly in his. He sips his drink. He touches the wrist of her friend, Thomas, and is rewarded by the immediate flush of his face.

He follows her through the party with the pleasant dread that she could be lost at any minute. That she could disperse into the evening and never be heard from again. Sweat like a thumbprint pressed into the dip of his neck.

And time speeds up. And still he is bold. Following her through the party, through the evening, up the stairs. Until the distance between them closes like a wine cask sealed up, and there is nowhere to breathe for either of them.

And the last guests are calling goodbye from downstairs, a reverberation from a country far away. And he has a fistful of her hip pushing up against his. And her mouth is warm and open and furiously wet on his throat.

If it were to start anywhere, couldn’t it start like this?

WHEN HER YOUNGEST brother dies—he was only thirty-eight, she is forty-four now—she stops speaking for a period. She folds herself inward, where she can’t be reached by anyone.

Julius is staying with her at the time. He tries to leave room for her grief, as if it’s another person in the house that he doesn’t want to stumble into. But he doesn’t know if it’s enough. How insufficient he is, the sum of him, in the lurching silence.

Her stepsister Martha visits, almost bristling with good cheer, but it has little effect. A murmur of voices in the bedroom. The door closed. When Martha emerges, she pats his hand, an attempt at sympathy.

“She’s a flower, and flowers tend to wilt,” she says. It’s possible she’s confused Nellie with someone else. “You know how it is.”

He does not.

Overnight, Nellie becomes a stranger. The stranger has the same nose as Nellie. The same frown. But the stranger’s features are warped, as if Nellie’s been redistributed on a microscopic, fundamental level. A sinister figure who might as well be anybody.

He starts speaking to the houseplants. The pictures on the walls. He says, “That’s enough, isn’t it,” as he fills a vase with water. Or when a newspaper flops off the pile on the desk and onto the ground: “That wasn’t your best idea.”

It’s only to occupy the silence. But somewhere at the edge of his vision, Nellie stirs. Listening.

The neighbor’s cat suns itself on the window ledge. He coaxes it indoors with a scrap of liver. Back at camp, cats are a constant. Little seething shadows.

“You can’t keep it,” Nellie says from the door, as if she can hear the inside of his head. It’s the first time she’s spoken in days. He doesn’t look up. If he looks up, the moment will pass. He gives the cat another bit of liver. Trying not to uncalm the waters.

“I’m not sure what to do here,” he says to the cat.

Now she is near him; Nellie and the interloper, Nellie and her grief. He puts a hand on her forehead, but it’s like touching a stranger, and it makes his jaw ache. She leans into it, but only for a moment. Then she is gone. The cat, too.

Time passes. Whole kingdoms of time. All the while, the immensity of the world tilting, tilting, without falling.

IN THE AFTERMATH of her birthday party, there is quiet. It spreads in every direction. She’s lying in bed, content, curious, watching him from afar. He sits up, hunched. Folding and unfolding the hem of the bedsheet without paying any notice to what he’s doing.

So often something peels away in the minutes after sex, Nellie finds. A second skin. Showing a gentleness, a sharp edge. Something that wasn’t there before. Even now, after the many intimacies she’s shared with other people, after all the time she’s spent with Julius, the air is unsettled.

He’s nervous, she realizes, and feels the sudden rush of salt in her mouth, as if she’s sucking on a sour candy. Nervous. It feels impossible. Like she’s outnumbered him by her presence alone. Nothing could please her more in this moment.

She touches his back, the little nook of his vertebrae, which bobs and disappears. Marveling that she can touch this stranger, this friend. Beautiful and not hers. His skin flickers in response, almost a flinch.

“You surprised me,” he says. He says it like an apology. He glances down at her and he smiles, so uncertain of how she will respond. Somehow, it’s unspeakably sad to her. She doesn’t know why, but it is.

And somehow, it’s this face that makes her decide. Yes, there is something here. There is something more.

THE HOUSEGUEST

In the promotional posters for the first Axe-Woman film, Lizzie Borden sits with a scowl at her dining room table, sheathed in blood, wearing the Victorian black of a dowager. An echo of the final, forbidding image from the film. But long before that moment from the poster, the scowl at the table, there’s another scene the fans talk about.

It’s 1895, a few years after the murder trial of Lizzie Borden, where she’s acquitted of all charges. It’s still early in the movie, at this point. The group of young people have ventured into Lizzie’s shadowy house on a dare; they’ve split up, the one sharp-faced woman going off with the handsome banker who’s been making eyes at her. Her fiancé is reluctantly left behind with her stern schoolfriend, whom he’s hardly spoken to. A severe, spinster-type character who’s almost certainly never revealed a wayward ankle or witnessed a salacious elbow, let alone anything more risqué. The house has a haunted atmosphere, in the manner of houses like this in movies like this, perhaps built by an arthritic ghost who transferred its aches and anguish into the substratum of the place.

The tension simmers between the sharp-faced woman and the handsome banker, a palpable heat beneath their caution. The excitement of being in a forbidden place. A door slams behind them, extinguishing even the possibility of moonlight.

The handsome banker says, on edge, “Was that you?” and the sharp-faced woman says, “No?” and they creep toward each other, dim, illegible shapes to the viewer.

For a few uneasy moments they seem to be scuffling—it’s a wordless, fierce struggle—and then they’re not. What’s happening between them resolves into something slicker, with too much sound, a long groan.

In their urgency, they forget where they are, and where they are isn’t just Lizzie Borden’s house, it’s the start of a horror movie. Because just outside the room, Lizzie Borden—wide awake, alert already to the threat of outsiders—leans against the door and presses her ear to listen. In one hand, she carries her axe.

“Brace yourself for a one-way trip to hell,” writes a reviewer from one of the big trade magazines. “This moody opus has all the ingredients of a genre classic.”

On a popular film-rating app, a user named I Am Jack’s Student Loan Debt leaves this review:

seven thumbs up
im growing more thumbs in a vat so i can give it so many goddamn thumbs up

Dee Clarkson stars as Lizzie Borden in the Axe-Woman franchise. She has an oblong, cryptic face that ripples as if none of the pieces beneath it are held in place, an expressiveness that collapses her features into something completely new.

When she was young, it enchanted the people around her, this trick of hers. The easiest way for Dee to make friends at age twelve: her impression of Kermit the Frog saying a swear word. She was the clown in class productions as a teenager, never afraid to crash into doors or walls on stage, like no one had ever shown her the brakes on her own body. In theater school, she found it a secret delight to funnel this daffy instinct for comedy into tragedy. An undiscovered room of the house she’d lived in all her life.

Before the Axe-Woman movies, she’s best known for the Emmy-winning miniseries Last Testament, where she plays a single mom, newly sober, too young to have kids, holding it together with Scotch tape and a prayer when her son goes missing.

It’s a beautifully shot series, dreamy and dark, the pain of the mother so vivid it feels like a ghost, lingering long afterward. That might be why everyone raves about it but few people have seen it—“It’s unbelievably good though,” a TV critic texts a friend. The friend’s reply is a gritted-teeth emoji, the sad face with the head-bandage, and the broccoli emoji.

Dee wins her Emmy for the miniseries. But it’s that early scene from the first Axe-Woman film, where Lizzie listens in from the hall, that her fans often return to.

In the scene, while the handsome banker and the sharp-faced woman have their illicit rendezvous in the other room, Lizzie Borden traces the door with one hand. There’s hunger on her face, as if she herself is taking part, as if she’s experiencing the heightening pitch of their pleasure. Her utter loneliness is apparent, her grief at what she can’t have.

When at last she moves, it empties out of her. All that’s left is her anger, voracious, without hope. Then she opens the door and the bloodshed begins.

The thing that surprises Dee Clarkson isn’t specifically the attention that the film receives—the attention doesn’t hurt—but the weird intensity the fans bring to it. How they inhabit the film in ways she doesn’t entirely comprehend. At Comic-Con, where they promote the movie, an audience member is dressed as a futuristic take on Dee’s Lizzie Borden, her gown fashioned from big swathes of Mylar foil, her axe spangled with tiny LED indicator lights.

Dee doesn’t really get it. But more than that, she’s thrilled. “How long do you think that took her?” she asks Joseph Ramsay, the director. No one ever did that sort of thing for the Last Testament miniseries. Perhaps that’s obvious.

“Do I look like a nerd? How would I know?” Joseph Ramsay says. He does, in fact, look like a nerd.

Dee has never been superstitious. Shooting the first Axe-Woman movie doesn’t change that, exactly, but it punctures a leak in her, the part of her that once understood what was possible and what wasn’t.

After a long day of filming, she comes home to her cousin with a certain look, like she’s forgotten what to do with her face and it’s gotten stuck in an unpleasant squiggle. Her cousin glances at her, at the unpleasant squiggle, and says, “Witness protection?” and Dee says, without expression or intonation, “When do we leave?” The cousin’s staying with Dee this year. Her main responsibility is watering Dee’s plants at certain intervals in exchange for no rent. At night, the house has far too much gravitas, and to lift this swamp of solemn air, they play music off the cousin’s little cube radio while Dee takes her time in the kitchen. How a surgical technician might prepare for surgery but very slowly.

She fixes a Paloma for her cousin, a Dark and Stormy for herself—her cousin watches and says, “Did you put enough lime? I hate it when you’re stingy,” not because she has an opinion, but because she knows Dee will whip the lime wedge in her direction. Along the way, Dee’s face loses its weary squiggle.

Then Dee mixes a third drink. A Manhattan, with a delicate twist of candied lemon. A drink meant for neither of them.

She sets this third drink on the counter. She clinks her glass against it. The cousin does the same and tucks the cube radio underneath her arm. They make their way up to the rooftop patio.

When they come back downstairs, the cousin can feel it, that someone’s been in the house without them. That sensation, cold fingers touching her chin. The air has changed, the subtle waft of another person.

It takes her or Dee a few minutes to locate the third glass. It’s never on the counter where they left it, but instead on the TV stand, or freshly washed in the dish rack, sparkling with water droplets, or on occasion, in the dining room, on the enormous table they almost never use.

The first Axe-Woman film ends in the dining room, too. In the last minutes, after the only survivor escapes—the fiancé of the sharp-faced woman, the only intruder who didn’t want to go but went anyway—Lizzie sits at the dining room table.

It’s lit like a Gregory Crewdson photograph, liquidy with gloom. The shadows of the house hem her in from all sides. Lizzie wearing blood and black. Lizzie alone, always alone.

She’s not despairing or triumphant. She sits in silence, a brutal stillness that trembles in and out of focus. A character made of gaps.

She forms a sound with her mouth, and even this is an effort. She raises her fist and slams it down on the table, as if she’s trying to break bone. Then she does it again. These desolate thuds are what punctuate her last three words—“Don’t”—uttered with great difficulty—“come”—with rising emotion—“back.”

She stops. She gives up. Blood is forming on her knuckles. Beneath the scratchy silence, something is dripping, wet, vivid. The music creeps up. She’s the last thing the viewer sees.

When Dee’s cousin watches the film, that last scene, it reminds her of the coupe glass left on Dee’s table at home. It’s the farthest edge of a memory. The very first time Dee makes the third drink, the Manhattan, Dee’s cousin says, “What are you doing?” and Dee looks at her and then at the cloudy vial of bitters in her hand, startled, and says, “What am I doing?”

They both find it peculiar, funny, to clink their glasses against the third one, as if there’s another houseguest but the houseguest is too discerning to assume corporeal form. And later, when they come back downstairs and the glass is empty, sitting on the bathroom counter where it shouldn’t be, Dee’s cousin says, “That’s weird.”

She remembers the expression that briefly crosses Dee’s face—it’s not fear. It’s more like the time Dee tried a piece of chocolate cake and it was flavored with lavender, and she sat there for a minute, just considering the experience of it.

Dee’s the one who picks up the glass, who rotates it in her hands, and says, “Huh.” They both feel it now. The presence of a third person who was in the bathroom at some point and perhaps just left. The houseguest. As if the combined thought was enough to make the thing possible.

In the earliest drafts of the screenplay, Lizzie doesn’t survive. Dee learns this from the screenwriter, whom she meets at the wrap party—he’s a flustered, happy oddball in a T-shirt and blazer, although they’re all a little flustered that night, a little hyper.

It happens to be the night Dee first meets Claudia, who works for the studio—although Dee won’t remember she works there, not that night—Claudia’s a friend of the screenwriter, she comes over with him to say hello to Dee. She’s tall and shy, a combination Dee has always found difficult to resist, her hair bobbed to a razor’s edge, her lipstick a pale pink with a hint of brown underneath. The screenwriter sets his drink down so he can gesture effusively. He says to Dee, “Joseph showed me a couple scenes. They’re so sick,” and Joseph Ramsay, the director, wanders over to say, “Don’t give her an ego boost, she already has the Emmy,” and Claudia hides her smile with her hand, but it’s not an unkind smile.

Dee picks up the screenwriter’s glass and returns it to him. She says to Joseph Ramsay, without looking at him, “Are you going to be a pest, Joey?”—he hates that nickname—and Claudia murmurs to the screenwriter, awed, “She’s cool and scary,” and something within Dee lifts marvelously, and she’s more infatuated than she cares to admit. For that night, they all become friends. Or maybe the screenwriter just wants to gossip, to tell them how it started, with him at the center.

The screenwriter writes the first draft at a prestigious film lab several years ago. He’s supposed to be working on a disquieting historical drama—what he’s pitched as an anti-Western, about two railroad workers during the 1877 strike. A husky old-timer and an intense young man with a growing extremist streak. The thread of their conflict keeps evading him, like the two men themselves are uninterested in the story he’s telling and have perhaps lodged a formal complaint with his mind.

At night, when all the screenwriters get together after their day’s work, they talk about the famous people they’ve orbited, how one of them spills lukewarm coffee all over the European director best known for his prominent eyebrows, who sputters, “Look how bad you messed this up, just look!”—a line the screenwriters repeat to each other often throughout the month-long lab—and then the director with the distinguished eyebrows makes that writer take off his shirt, give it to him to wear.

The stories that feature themselves are comical, self-deprecating. As if to say, look how small we are, how worthless. But on these evenings at the prestigious film lab, the pulse of certainty is almost audible. The certainty that they’re on their way to the future, like the future is some shining station in the distance and they’re already aboard the train.

The Axe-Woman screenwriter will remember the dense, dizzy effect of those nights, because it’s true, he feels like he’s on the train, just like everyone else. But at the same time, he’s terrified they’ve left him behind.

Once, the others are celebrating the sale of a screenplay—it’s by the guy who got fired in his first week at an indie DVD rental shop, a perplexing badge of honor. That night, the guy gives another enthused sermon about the Dogme 95 films and how they opened his mind to the avant-garde, and his friends start pelting him with empty Solo cups so he’ll shut up. Someone shouts the now-familiar refrain: “Look how bad you messed this up, just look!” Meanwhile, the Axe-Woman screenwriter sits in the corner, on the floor, face scarlet with envy, trying to pretend his anti-Western screenplay hasn’t foundered to an early demise at just thirty pages.

When he gets back to his room, he puts his head on his desk. The anonymity of his cabin is a relief. The rush of quiet. But then he hears a sound; someone else is in the cabin. The voice of a woman says, “Where are you?”

The hollow sound of footsteps in the hallway, walking back and forth.

He tells Dee and Claudia he didn’t know if she was talking to him or not, but he sat in his room, his head still on his desk, thoroughly creeped out, the door locked behind him. He started writing the script then, the first fragments of it, listening for the sound of his uninvited guest.

“So who was she?” Dee asks him now.

“Man, I don’t know. I thought she was maybe like a murderer or a ghost or even both?” he says. “You want me to go back and check, Dee Clarkson?”

“Maybe it was the ghost of Lizzie Borden, oooooh,” says the guy who plays the handsome banker, wiggling his fingers in a way that’s meant to evoke the supernatural.

“Okay, but how does a fictional character become a ghost?” Dee asks, laughing. “Because my Lizzie isn’t the real Lizzie Borden, right? The real Lizzie had a sister. It’s like being haunted by ET. How does that work?”

The guy who plays the handsome banker shrugs. “If we’re making ET money, who cares? I’m buying a ranch.”

In the sequel, Lizzie Borden’s locked up in a prison asylum, there for the murders from the previous film. There’s a prison riot. Every inmate for themselves. The asylum is cavernous, dreary, draped in neglect, even the overgrown arboretum located near the entrance.

In this film, Lizzie’s troubled in a different way. She’s not only subdued by her new environment but by the memories of the most recent murders, which surface without warning. She sees the sharp-faced woman everywhere, the one from the first film. The sharp-faced woman is a nurse in the distance, briefly. A visitor standing outside, until Lizzie gets another look.

In an early scene, Lizzie eats breakfast in the dining hall. She eats alone, her face a warning to stay away. All around her, small melodramas play out. The famously loopy husband-killer tries to scam a new nurse with a card trick. The wealthy cat burglars, twin sisters, whisper back and forth, plotting their escape later that very day.

The agitated, fast-talking inmate—the one who’s arrested as a spy in the Boxer Rebellion—snaps at the mousy arsonist trying to befriend her, saying, “This isn’t a tea party, okay? Can you just shut up?”

Lizzie hasn’t slept in two days. She watches all of this with hooded eyes. She pretends she isn’t watching, but her face flickers with the barest expression. She eats her meager breakfast. A shadow falls. It’s a nurse, smiling with pleasant menace. She says, “Are you finished, dearie?”

That’s when Lizzie sees her, three tables away. She puts down her spoon and says without looking at the nurse, “Yes.” What she’s glimpsed is the sharp-faced woman again, except this time, the woman doesn’t vanish—it’s her, she’s really there, sitting nearby. The nurse is saying something else but Lizzie’s already out of her seat.

A queasy silence descends on the dining hall. Lizzie doesn’t notice. The inmates gawk openly. The sharp-faced woman looks up from her meal in time to see Lizzie approaching. She doesn’t wear a trace of recognition, only alarm.

Lizzie grabs her in one swift motion, and part of her is visibly shocked that the woman is still there, still real. She says, “I killed you,” and her voice is ragged with exhaustion. “How are you still here?”

Before she can do anything else, the attendants—sort of medical staff but also sort of prison guards—swarm her. The woman says to Lizzie, bewildered, “Who are you?” She looks so similar to the woman from the first film, it’s eerie. Possibly because she’s played by the same person.

Lizzie doesn’t answer. Ordinarily she wears dispassion like a uniform, but it’s starting to come apart. The attendants haul her off to solitary confinement. The door clangs shut.

Lizzie puts her head against the door. She doesn’t know if it’s real, this newest apparition of the sharp-faced woman. More than that, she doesn’t understand what’s happening to her. She’s still, so still. In this silence, she’s most visible. Then she rears her head back and cracks it against the door, and she screams.

In the script, the scene’s meant to end with Lizzie, her head against the door, defeated. A moment of vulnerability. The first time she smashes her head against the door, an improvisation or something else, the crew flinches.

“What was that?” Joseph Ramsay, the director, asks Dee afterward.

“Um,” Dee says. In her high school productions, she used to fling herself at everything. It’s possible she got carried away.

“She’s acting,” says one of the attendants standing just off camera, affecting a plummy accent.

“Never mind,” Joseph says, rolling his eyes at the attendant and maybe at Dee herself. “Just do it again.”

Two more minutes into the film, the wealthy cat burglar twins hatch their escape. The riot flares. An attendant’s dead within seconds. The inmates spill out of their cells. And Lizzie’s there, alone, first in quiet, then listening at the door, a new bruise growing on her temple, the boom of sound building in her eardrums.

At the premiere, there’s a gasp from the audience when Lizzie cracks her head against the door. That gasp goes straight through Dee Clarkson. She folds her hands together, pressing down on her knuckles like she can pop through them. The joy of it is more than she can handle, as if someone’s jabbed her with two hundred volts of adrenaline.

For a year or two, everyone uses the GIF of Lizzie bashing her head and screaming. “The universal language for Fucking fuck,” writes one pop culture website. But it never brings Dee the same jolt as that first screening. She’s seen it a million times, for every occasion. When she forgets her little brother’s birthday, he texts, “Yeah wow, no it’s fine, thanks,” and then the GIF of her.

“The funny thing is, I don’t even think it looks like me,” Dee tells Claudia over dinner. Maybe she’s watched it too often. Maybe it’s that easy to take a moment, rub away its coarse purpose. To make it ordinary, and then unfamiliar. “If you see the GIF and then watch the scene from the movie, they look totally different. Like they replaced me with someone else. Is that possible? Do I sound like a conspiracy theorist?”

She hasn’t seen Claudia since the wrap party for the first film. Not until she visits the studio for a meeting, sometime after the second film comes out. She bumps into Claudia in the hallway, surrounded by far too many people. “Oh,” she says. In her surprise and elation, she forgets to play it cool. “Hey. It’s you.”

After her meeting’s over, Dee finds Claudia’s poky little office and sticks her head in, saying, “Walk me out?” But it’s Claudia who, in the hush of their elevator ride down, leans over and kisses her casually—leaving them both startled.

When they have dinner a few weeks later and Dee talks about the GIF, Claudia looks it up on her phone. It’s early days; they’re still trying to impress each other, and so Dee sips from her water and resists the urge to comment again and watches Claudia watch the GIF, trying to understand what she’s seeing.

Claudia finally puts the phone on the table, face down. She tilts her head, thinking. Dee expects her to deliver a verdict, but she doesn’t. Instead, Claudia asks, “Does it freak you out?”

But it doesn’t, and that’s confusing, too.

Toward the end of the second film—where else would the film’s climax occur except in the asylum’s unkempt arboretum, shaggy with alien-looking trees and portentous shadows alike?—after Lizzie Borden fights that one homicidal nurse with the syringe, she encounters the sharp-faced woman’s doppelganger again. The inmate who’s not an apparition but real.

This far into the film, it’s been established that she’s nobody. Her resemblance to the original sharp-faced woman is an unfortunate coincidence. Still, Lizzie’s face is immovable as the doppelganger approaches her. The doppelganger trembles badly. Her eyes dart from Lizzie to the exit behind Lizzie—her only route of escape from the asylum. In a faltering voice, she says, “Please—please don’t—I won’t tell anyone I saw you.”

Lizzie reaches out and places her hand on the woman’s neck, halting her progress. She presses her fingers lightly. It’s clear she’s recalling the murder from the first film. That perhaps she’s thinking about reenacting it.

Then she hefts her axe and the doppelganger flinches. The blow never comes. Nearby, a body crumples to the ground, Lizzie’s axe buried in its neck. It’s that one homicidal nurse again, almost dead but back for seconds, creeping up behind the doppelganger.

In fanfiction, Lizzie’s frequently paired off with the sharp-faced woman—the original, her doppelganger, or a combination thereof. Or else, more unlikely candidates. A popular story follows the only survivor from the first film, the sharp-faced woman’s fiancé. He comes back seeking revenge against Lizzie, maybe hoping to die himself. But he’s drawn to Lizzie’s loneliness, seeing in her a warped mirror of himself. Their sex scenes are lush and specific.

There’s another story with thirteen chapters and counting, The Obituaries, by a fanfiction writer who calls herself Dolorous Hecuba. Each chapter, she writes an obituary for someone who died in the Axe-Woman films. The obituaries are always for the characters with names on IMDB like Asylum Attendant With Beard or Crying Inmate #2 (Uncredited).

She writes about Asylum Attendant With Beard’s childhood, how on his walk to school with his older brother, he picked wild berries and felt the flush of flavor all the way through his spine. She includes details that obituaries can’t possibly include. How the last thing Crying Inmate #2 (Uncredited) ever saw was her own muddy shoeprint. She’d tried to put her hand over it, even as she was dying, disliking the sight of mess, but couldn’t extend her arm that far.

Dolorous Hecuba is profiled on a fan site before the third Axe-Woman film comes out. She talks about her fondness for Homeric epithets and pistachio ice cream. The interviewer asks, “What inspired you to write The Obituaries?”

They’re doing the interview over email. Dolorous Hecuba has her windows flung open, even though it’s almost winter. She can see the huddle of a man outside, walking his dog down the street and typing on his phone at the same time. The clots of birds’ nests in the trees. When she opens the windows, it’s to let something in. Not something but Something. Often, when she writes chapters for The Obituaries, she has the sense that it’s standing outside her window, whatever it is, just out of view, and she never wants to lean out and look at its face. She’s afraid she’ll recognize whatever it is, or worse, that she won’t see it at all. Better to let her fingers numb from the cold, to leave the invitation open to the thing outside her window, without ever knowing if it will come in. Or if it’s even there.

To the interviewer, she says, “There’s never any time to grieve in movies like this. It would ruin the effect, you know? But I wanted to make room for the grief.”

When the third film arrives at last, it has a strain of melancholy; almost contemplative at times. In this one, Lizzie wakes up on the cold metal table of a laboratory with all her memories missing. A scientist bears down upon her, wielding nineteenth-century surgical tools. “Hold still, please,” he says in his inexplicably German accent. “It will only hurt more if you move. I don’t want you to hurt more than you must already.”

She escapes in the first twenty minutes—the laboratory’s a converted barn in the middle of nowhere—but she still has amnesia. A teenager escapes with her, a girl who says she was kidnapped by the scientists but might be lying. She, too, has an inexplicably German accent.

The third film billows with sunlight and open space, what might be the setting of an Andrew Wyeth painting. Lizzie Borden walks through this world like it’s an unknown province, which it is, with few of the funereal backdrops of the other movies. Her head splits with pain that drops her to her knees.

She has no idea who she is. But she sees sparks of the past, of people she must’ve known—sometimes in flash-frames of memory, sometimes standing right in front of her. She doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not.

“Are you dying?” the German teenager asks her, early on, watching her with clinical interest, but Lizzie doesn’t know the answer to that, either.

With the third film, there’s a shift, the idea that Lizzie Borden might’ve been a better person, a different person, if only her life had gone another way. In an essay titled “The Atonement of Lizzie Borden,” a film critic says, “Everyone wants to root for Lizzie Borden and it helps that there’s a moral weight behind her actions. The first film takes great pains to show you that the intruders aren’t innocent. That’s deliberate.”

A fan links to the essay and writes, “People need to seriously chill out. Lizzie Borden isn’t a good person. She’s not. If you feel bad rooting for her, get a therapist maybe?”

In less than twenty-four hours, that post gets over two thousand comments: “You seem fun at parties,” and “I’m getting this is as a face tattoo,” and “Obviously the opinion of someone who’s never read the Lizzie’s Inferno theory.” One reply is a lengthy exchange between Lizzie Borden and her fictional therapist, discussing the original post. In the exchange, the therapist, clearly Sigmund Freud, keeps interrupting Lizzie to ask about her bowel movements as a child. The original post is deleted a day later.

“To me, it’s the central question of these movies,” Dee Clarkson says in an interview. “Whether someone like Lizzie can ever find redemption. She’s done all of these things, these unthinkable things. But she can’t go back in time, right? What can she do?”

She and Joseph Ramsay talk about this from the very start: how to make Lizzie Borden appealing to the viewer. Often, they argue. At the end of the first film, Joseph Ramsay wants Lizzie to cry. To sit at the dining room table, bloody, tortured with sorrow and frustration, and weep.

Dee doesn’t.

“You’re really going to make her cry?” she says. “Because, what, she’s a girl?”

He purses his lips. He’s irritable, she’s irritable. The air sparks with resentment. He says, “Dee Regina Clarkson,” which isn’t her middle name, it’s just what he calls her sometimes. She hardens herself for whatever he’s about to say. But he only sighs. “You’re lucky I like you.”

Between the second and third films, there’s a lag while everyone goes off to try something new. For most of one year, Dee Clarkson plays Estragon in a gender-swapped Waiting for Godot, a return to her theater-school roots. She and Claudia talk about moving in together, and she can sense Claudia’s hesitation, the fear of tipping a good thing sideways.

Dee wants to say, Aren’t we trying to make something together? To build a future? But Claudia, ever cautious, will go quiet if she tries to push.

And Dee gets it on some level. It’s how she feels when the studio starts talking about another Axe-Woman film. As if this one will finally ruin it all. It often seems like her life is held in a certain mysterious balance, and any small movement will jostle it out of symmetry.

She talks to the Axe-Woman editor about it when she bumps into him at a coffee shop. They chat idly about a now-viral supercut of every time Dee-as-Lizzie does a glowering frown in the second film. Every time the video cuts to another frown, an angry foghorn blares, the sound effect from the movie Inception. The supercut is titled “Give Dee Clarkson’s Eyebrows the Oscar.”

“Maybe you can ask them to make the next one a comedy,” he says. “I’ll finally get to use my folder of slide-whistle sounds.”

“Don’t even joke. Have you seen the new draft?” she asks. She’s worried about the third film—its pensive, drifting quality, which feels so unlike the others—afraid the fans will hate it, that the tonal shift won’t work.

The editor tells her how once, his kid came to him, crying, and told him that Lizzie Borden was trapped in the trunk of their car. This was years ago, while the editor was still working on the first film, and he’d folded the kid into his arms, unsure if he was crying because he was terrified of the thing in the trunk or if he was distressed on its behalf.

“How do you know she’s in there?” he asked, when he released the kid.

His kid stared at him and said, gulping between tears, like this was the most normal part, “She tells me what to do.”

Dee doesn’t understand why the editor’s recounting any of the story. They’re sitting on the coffee shop’s patio and the heat is a lit match, held to her cheek. The silence between them is expectant. She says, “Wait. Is this a trap? What does that have to do with the script?”

He looks at her with sadness, with humor. “I was trying to distract you,” he says.

In the third film, the teenaged girl and Lizzie Borden shelter briefly in a small town, trying to be inconspicuous. Lizzie still hasn’t recovered her memory. They’ve survived a breathless fight at the gory edge of sunset, minutes before, where she dispatches the three bounty hunter brothers sent to capture them. In this film, Lizzie Borden fights with a brutal, mechanical efficiency, her limbs moving before they’ve communicated with the rest of her. She’s visibly astonished by what her body can do, unsure if this is the person she wants to be. She can’t remember this stranger, this woman who uses fists instead of words.

After the fight, in town, the girl starts hyperventilating. It’s all too much for her. Lizzie rinses her fingers, blots her dress in futility, stares at the lengthening shadows underneath her eyes.

Night falls. In the street, the townspeople are converging. An ancient man scrapes out a chair, leans his bow to his fiddle, and starts to play. Someone’s distributing little cracked teacups of cold cider. The townspeople hike up their skirts and trousers, they dance in the roads.

It’s a slow, sentimental scene. Lizzie and the teenager are safe. At least for this moment, this night.

“People are going to hate it, aren’t they?” Dee says to Claudia while they’re filming, but she’s wrong. The scene in town becomes a favorite of the fans. Interviewers ask her about it, even while she’s trying to promote her other movie from that year, a buzzy indie film, Helen of Troy, where she’s a plainspoken high school teacher who returns to her hometown of Troy, fresh-faced and overflowing with anxiety.

Helen of Troy gets almost no attention from anyone. The third Axe-Woman stays at the top of the box office for a month longer than the previous ones. “You already HAVE an Emmy, calm down,” Dee’s cousin texts her, and Dee texts back, joking, not joking: “I want another one:(”

After the awards shows have come and gone, Dee finds herself on the backlot where they filmed the scene from the third movie, the quiet scene in town. She’s waiting for Claudia to finish up some business so they can go for lunch, except she has this fear at the back of her throat that this is it. This is the day they break up.

That day, she’s feeling more sorry for herself than she thought possible. The inside of her mouth is hollowed out with thirst. The faint pressure of a headache crowns her temples.

She wanders through the set, feeling like a person who knows how easy it is to walk through the front door and live here forever. She might as well be the ghost of Lizzie Borden, she thinks. It occurs to her that this is the sort of thing someone might do in a movie, and if she saw it in a movie, she’d say to Claudia, “This is really what people think actors do, isn’t it. What bullshit.” It strikes her as funny now, ridiculous.

This is where Claudia finds her a little later, on the set of the small town, wandering through the saloon in a deep woe. Claudia waits for her nearby. Trying to let Dee have her own space to brood.

She can see Dee in the window of the saloon, but as she waits, she sees that Dee isn’t alone. Someone else is manifesting out of the background, coming up behind Dee. Their face is a smear, as if Claudia is witnessing them through a begrimed glass. It feels like something from a horror movie, maybe the Axe-Woman films, a moving shadow, alive and stealthy.

How easily the phantom could wrap itself around Dee, enveloping her completely. And the way Dee hovers there, maybe she knows. Maybe that’s why she went inside. Claudia can’t remember how to move or say anything. She is, all of a sudden, afraid.

In the scene from the third film, the teenager’s shock thaws. She goads Lizzie Borden, trying to get her to dance. “Come on,” she says. Lizzie shakes her head.

“Just pretend,” the girl says. “Pretend you know how to have a good time. Come on.”

“I’m having a fine time,” Lizzie says stiffly. The girl gives up, and she throws herself headlong into the crowd of dancers. They’re playing an Irish jig, and it’s picking up speed. The dancers are clapping, spinning. They rattle with laughter. The teenager in her frock is a white bird, innocence herself.

Lizzie fidgets by the wall of the saloon, washed away by the joy around her. She starts to bob her head, the smallest movement. She shuffles and sweats and taps her foot against the wall, little piteous motions. She’s dancing. She’s dancing without even moving, really. Trying to be the kind of Lizzie Borden who doesn’t exist.

It’s only a minute later that she spots the newspaper crumpled on the bench nearby, a photograph of the teenager staring back at her from the front page. That’s how she learns the teenager is the German scientist’s niece. A girl who stabbed her best friend in the throat. Among the dancers, unseen, the teenaged girl catches sight of Lizzie, the morbid expression on her face, and she melts into the crowd, vanishing from view.

On the set of the small town, Claudia stands where the dancers from the third film once whirled back and forth, where the teenaged girl once disappeared, leaving Lizzie alone again, without a single friend or ally or even her memories. In this moment, Claudia can almost feel the desolate pang that Lizzie must’ve felt, as if she’s hearing an echo from long ago. She has so much compassion for it—the echo of whatever, that specter of the past—she can only stand there and listen.

And so she stands in the backlot and waits until the face behind Dee Clarkson has retreated into obscurity. She waits for Dee’s mood to lift, for her to emerge from the saloon, so that Claudia can take her hand and feel the grain of it against hers, the certainty of it, and of Dee herself. So that they can go on with their lives.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN APOCALYPSE

WARNING!

There are dark days ahead.

It’s 1945, and you’re a lab assistant working on a top secret US government experiment … code-named the Manhattan Project.

Within these pages, you’ll find the thrilling adventures and strange characters you might encounter. Stay alert and choose wisely. Your actions could have world-altering consequences! (Probably? Is that what you want?)

Will you stay clear-headed, or perish in the lonely New Mexico desert? Turn the page and find out!

You didn’t come to Los Alamos to see the world end.

You came here to find your people. Your beautiful brainiacs. Your absent-minded chemists, who’ve plunged their hands into the air and changed the composite matter, the very stability, of the universe you know. Your physicists, who can quote from Shelley, from Whitman, from Ovid, from Rumi.

You came to the desert to answer the hum in your bones. A realization that maybe you’re good for something, after all. You’re still young, whatever your mother says. You are.

You didn’t come here to see the world end. But at the start of the summer, you begin to have dreams.

In your dreams, you walk out of an open burning sky and into a world on fire. You pass through streets of flame. You’re alone. The only person left.

You know this place. Even here, in your dreams, surrounded by conflagration, you know this place.

When you wake up, and you always wake up, you’re still in Los Alamos. Still in your bunk—humiliating to be a full-grown woman in a bunk—which you share with Dolores Wallbach, another full-grown woman, who occupies the lower bed. Your linens smell like carbolic soap and Los Alamos silt and your own flopsweat. The air is airless.

The pillow leaves a rash on your face, an indiscreet sunburn. Makeup only gives the rash extra life and vigor. You apply makeup anyway.

This morning, your compact mirror distorts your face into the shape of something else. But you won’t be cowed by contact dermatitis, or Dr. O’s mysterious disappearance, or dreams that feel like visions, or that one soldier at the main gate who always makes you wait while he radios in your badge number. You certainly won’t be cowed by your roommate Dolores Wallbach, whose social life is abundant even here, in the literal middle of literal nowhere, but who still doesn’t understand what it is you do—“I like you, but please. You’re making my head hurt,” is how she interrupts you when you get euphoric about work and start waving your hands in explanation. Which is often.

In the desert, everything has a touch of the apocalypse. The Los Alamos base camp fogs ochre and lurid in the early mornings, hazy with the famous red dust of New Mexico. Salamanders whip their tails out of the way in the camp showers. The valley seethes with long-fingered rock outcroppings, furious scribbles of sagebrush. Other extraterrestrial flora.

It’s nothing like Buffalo, your safe, faraway hometown. It is awesome in the Biblical sense.

And too, you’ve seen things you’ll never see elsewhere. The wide whale belly of the Bomb. The yellow lake sixty miles south of camp. The birds in the sky. Their skulls glistening with extra eyes.

Other things, best left unsaid for now.

The fission experiments seep into the soil. They encourage oddity.

You snap your compact shut. Out the window, you can hear a radio tuned to CBS News. Everywhere, the radio. Everywhere, the news. Even here in the desert, it’s still the summer of 1945.

In your dreams, you touch the scorched shadows on building walls. The only signs that people once lived here. That they lived at all.

In your dreams, you feel the loss of the city, of your family, with a grief that is more powerful than anything in your waking life.

You’re all of twenty-three. The only girl in your lab. What your friend Marty calls a human pocket protector without any manners or proper friends. Living in a dorm that people have nicknamed South Worm, marked on the map as South Dormitory Block, Women’s.

You are intrepid. This is what you tell yourself.

You haven’t come here to see the world end. Yet here you are. Sitting upright in your bunk, your face pimpled and aflame. Dr. O gone for days now, Dolores Wallbach snoring below, CBS News a cataclysm out the open window.

Here you are.

If you choose to go home to Buffalo, turn to page XX.

If you choose to stay in Los Alamos, turn to page XX.

You return to the shed in the desert.

You drive. There is little to illuminate the way; starlight above and the headlights of the stolen jeep, which melt the darkness in the split instant before you flash past. The desert simmers around you, an unsteady murmur. It travels through you. Your hair churns with its invocation.

The invocation goes, You don’t belong here.

In the passenger seat, Dolores Wallbach clutches at her hat, saying to you in the earnest tone of a hostage bargaining with her unstable captor, “Look, I think we should go back—” but it’s too late for that, isn’t it.

By now, it’s blackest night, absolute and unyielding. What did Marty say earlier today?—“Are bodies not just the light they receive?”

How that helps anyone, you don’t know. You think he was quoting Isaac Newton or something.

Sometimes it’s your passionate belief that Marty is Satan’s butler.

The jeep bumps and heaves at every patch of scrub, every errant stone. Behind you, a sound.

Dolores casts an uneasy look at the man trussed up in the backseat. The Soviet spy. Whatever she sees behind her, she blanches.

“I didn’t know he was a spy,” she tells you again. Her face is pinched and earnest, on the very tip of imploring. You don’t know why your opinion matters to her. Why it would ever matter to anyone.

You grip the steering wheel like your life depends on it. You have so little time, you’re sure of it. The night has acquired a surreal texture by now. Your fear is an active thing, shifting in shape, growing.

You’re afraid of what you’ll find in the desert. And yet you have to know.

When the doctor appears in the distance, he comes into view gradually. A speck, then an absence of light ahead of you—as if you have a blot in your vision where he should be.

The blot in your vision stands beside the shed where you left him. He lifts a hand to shield his eyes from the headlights, to see who’s coming. In the backseat, the prisoner goes frantic, his protests muffled but insistent. Dolores draws a breath like it’s the last one she has left.

Slowly, the opaque outline of Dr. O blooms into color, distinct features. A man, not a shadow.

As always, he is frowning. Frowning at you.

You stop the jeep. The growl of the engine subsides. Behind you, the spy falters in his indistinct noises, and everywhere, there is silence, nervy and brief, even the silence waiting for something else to come.

When you hop out of the jeep, the slam of the door is explosive.

Since the last time you encountered him—was it only a few hours ago?—Dr. Oppenheimer’s condition has deteriorated. He’s grown taller somehow, narrower, inkier. Visited by further blight and calamity.

It’s hard to look at him. The bones in his face have gathered in frightening clumps.

“I see you’ve reacquainted yourself,” the doctor says, “with our Soviet friend.” It gives him some difficulty to say the words.

“What happened?” you say. You’re full of despair. The spy was right. You never should’ve left him alone in the desert.

“Why is it always you?” he asks. Something about the way he asks it. The hair on your arms lifts all the way up. You don’t know what he’s talking about. He looks at you with those ancient, bottomless eyes.

He says, “Why? What is it about you?”

You don’t know how to answer that.

You should’ve gone back home to Buffalo this morning. You should’ve come here sooner. You should’ve done everything differently.

“Hey, come on.” Dolores sidles into the headlights of the jeep. Through a glaze of dread, you realize she’s talking to him and not you. “She was just—she’s trying to help, you know?”

Of all the unexpected allies. You are astonished and embarrassed and even a little grateful. You are too dazed to say thank you.

The doctor studies her, then you. It’s as if she’s handed him a new piece of information and he’s considering its weight. Except she hasn’t. You know she hasn’t.

He says to her, “Yes, she always is, isn’t she?”

When he speaks again, his voice is everywhere. He says, “No more.” You can hear it coming from above you, behind you. From inside your head.

Everything stops.

Then he claps his hands. And the last thing you see is light—there is light everywhere, and it is more beautiful than you could’ve ever imagined.

—END—

You stay in Los Alamos.

You sit on your bunk, trying not to scratch your face. You wonder if you should pack your bags, return to Buffalo. The ceiling fan whips above you. If you stick your arm out, it’ll slice the tip of your finger.

You resolve not to slice off your finger. By some indirect extension of logic, you won’t go home, either. You can’t. That’s the thing about Los Alamos. Here, it’s easy to believe that you’re pared from the same strange limestone as everyone else. Here, you feel like you’re about to step off a cliff and into the radiant unknown.

How could you go back? This is the only place in the world for you.

All you have to do is find Dr. O. You can do that. It’s a practical task. It has a specific objective, achievable milestones.

He’s the kind of eccentric who, after all the disarray, might wander back into the lab this morning. Who knows.

You decide that’s your first stop. The lab. Just in case.

Dolores Wallbach is still asleep when you leave the dorm. You never thought a girl who looked like that could snore like that. Your mother thinks snoring is the hallmark of an uncivilized mind. But she also thinks snores can be cured with a clothespin on the nose.

Your skin is gently flambéed the instant you step outside. It’s July in the desert. Debra Lewis, one of the computers, catches up to you. She says, “Did you see Ernst Stanley crawl his way out of South Worm, that little creep?”

“He’s the south worm,” you say, which isn’t very funny but Debra laughs anyway. She doesn’t comment on your face rash and this is another reason you like her. You don’t even mind that she’s a genius with numbers.

Debra tells you how, last week, she and a few other computers drove out to the yellow lake south of base camp. Dust in her mouth. The flat swipe of sky. The lake was turmeric-yellow, poison-yellow.

One of the guys tore a shrub out of the ground, roots tentacling underneath, and dipped it headfirst in the water.

The water slurped at the shrub. Like a throat. “Like when you take out a drain plug, you know?” Debra says.

When he withdrew the plant from the lake, it wriggled, alive. He lay it on the parched earth beside them. They all watched as it wormed its way back into the waiting open mouth of the yellow lake.

She shrugs and says, “This place, right?” and looks at you sideways for a reaction.

You say, “Nothing like it,” with more fervor than you mean to add. You know. You’ve all seen it. The assistants, the computers, the technicians, the librarians, the secretaries, all of you.

The Bomb is poisoning the desert. It warps the very earth beneath you.

During the day, Los Alamos—somewhere in the hybrid space between a small town, an army base, and nerd camp—is frantic with heat and human energy. It’s only seven-ish in the morning, but it’s already started. Far away, across Trinity Drive, you can see specks of military green.

Anyone can tell where the Top Secret part of camp begins. That’s where you see all the soldiers. In Los Alamos, the soldiers are mostly young men. They pulse with restlessness. They telegraph their desire to be anywhere but here, with all of you. Babysitting the eggheads.

Your friend Marty thinks they’re sent here as punishment. “It builds character,” he once said, serene with self-assurance.

You’re glad for Debra’s presence. Even from a distance, the soldiers make you queasy, aware of your floppy arms, how poorly you hold them. The spot of grease on your collar.

“Hey! It must be nice to have the doctor out of your hair, at least,” Debra says. “Right?”

You blink at her.

She says, “The experiment in the desert? I guess I’m not supposed to know but obviously everyone does.”

“Right,” you say. The test in the desert. That’s where Dr. O is supposed to be at this moment, in the far-off flatlands where the Bomb will drop. The culminating point of his work here. Him, and all those other men who already feel like history to you.

What you don’t tell Debra is that Dr. O never showed up to the test site. No one’s seen him in days.

Debra’s saying now, “I bet they’re just getting drunk at the site and playing strip poker for a week.” You try to focus. “Whatever. We all need a break.”

This isn’t the first time the doctor has vanished without a word. You’re accustomed to his strange disappearances, his stormy demeanor, his fits of eccentricity. As his senior lab assistant, it always feels, somehow, like it’s your fault.

But with every hour that passes, your anxiety discovers new ways to punish you. Six days. It’s the longest he’s ever been gone. The panic that flowered in your gut at the start of the week has pollinated into an abundant hothouse.

You have to find him.

Spider wasps hum past your ears, and Debra jumps, actually jumps.

“Oh no,” she says. Insects freak her out. You’ve often speculated that Los Alamos is the wrong place for an entomophobe. But only in your head. You enjoy Debra’s company.

She’s cringing. She says, “Can we go the long way?”

To go with Debra, turn to page XX.

To take the shortcut to the lab, turn to page XX.

You search the ghost town.

All the way to the ghost town, Marty sails ahead on his bike, determined to keep his distance. Despite what he said before, he’s obviously still upset at you. You can tell by the set of his shoulders. Marty has very despondent shoulders.

You hate it when he’s mad at you.

Your bikes clack in hostile silence for the last mile to town. Marty wasn’t wrong. The doctor adores this, the alien landscape of Los Alamos. Its scarlet earth, its squirming tarantulas. The vaguely satanic frogs. The profusion of succulents and isolated mesas.

Why not the ghost town? You’ve searched nearly everywhere else for him, haven’t you?

The town looms in front of you dreadfully, a skeleton of someone else’s future. This place, it makes you feel lonely and angry and a little tearful—the starved, stripped frames of almost-houses, the almost-church—once inhabited by miners and their families and probably all their hopes for the future, now laid bare and rotten, subsumed by the desert.

It’s not fair, you think.

Even in your head, the thought sounds pathetic.

Months before, Dr. O brought you here. To the ghost town. A field trip for all the assistants. The whole time, he chain-smoked furiously and spoke in clipped sentences. “A pity about the architecture.” “Not worth looking at. Ignore that.” You and the other assistants practically chanted at each other in your minds: He’s a great man. He’s a great man. It meant everything to be there with him.

You’d always thought of him as part-physicist, part-mystic, like a man who appeared in the desert one day and began his life thus. You’d assumed, with enough time and careful observation, that you might absorb this enigmatic patina as well.

You were incorrect.

Now, at the edge of town, your entire face prickles. It’s not the rash. Something’s wrong. Ahead, Marty’s stopped, hauled himself off his bike, so at last you can pedal up to him, huffing and puffing like the belabored wolf of folklore. He doesn’t even glance in your direction.

“Has it—?” you ask, between gulping breaths.

“It’s grown,” Marty says. His words are clenched. He’s still annoyed and he wants you to know.

Now you see it. The bony almost-houses and the tattered fences, the almost-saloon, they’ve all climbed up in height since you last visited. They’ve stretched. Gaunt-faced, they crowd above you, taller than they have any right to be.

It’s not the Bomb you should’ve been afraid of, that’s what Weird Leslie told you earlier. It’s the desert.

You can hear it, somehow. The desert. The labored scratch of breath from just inside town, as if the ground there has enormous lungs, feverish and paranoid.

You want to say this to Marty. You want to ask if he can hear it, too. But he’s already walking away from you. Still combustible, both wounded and indignant. If the desert were breathing directly into his eyes, you suspect he wouldn’t notice.

You never think less of yourself than when someone’s upset with you. Marty in particular. It’s something about how defensive he always looks, as if he’s never experienced any form of betrayal until this moment. If you say the wrong thing, he’ll spin around and incinerate you with his self-righteousness, so all that’s left of you will be a melted slurry of cowardice and guilt.

“I’m sorry, you know,” you say to his retreating back. He stops.

“You know what you are?” He turns around. His face is contorted with more dismay than you expected. He won’t look at you. He says, “You’re a jerk. You’re—you’re—you’re a seven on the Mohs scale.”

That’s not what you thought he’d say. To your credit, you don’t laugh. You go, “Marty—” but he cuts you off.

“A seven! Hard as flint!”

His chest rises and falls rapidly. You feel badly.

“Okay,” you say, because you’ll perform any elaborate ceremony of regret that’s necessary. “You’re right. It was unforgivable. If I could go back in time, I’d fix it. I would. I’m sorry. Can we please be friends again?”

He glares, but you can tell his anger is waning. “You may submit a petition for friendship, but it will be probationary. Period unknown. Evaluation to be determined at a later date.”

“Done. I accept.” You extend your hand, trying to hide your immense relief. He shakes it.

Together, you venture into the ghost town and up the main street. You call out for Dr. O, but no one answers. You realize that you can’t hear the wheeze of the desert anymore.

In the years since it was abandoned, the town has been overtaken by wildlife. You’re being watched from every direction. Gophers eye you from their holes. Spider wasps whirl past you—it’s always spider wasps—almost taking your face with them. From its throne in a yucca tree, a crow begins to yell at you.

“Hey, idiot!” Maybe crows have a thing for repetition, because this one yells, again, “Hey, idiot!”

You look up. The crow glowers down.

“Marty,” you say. “Is that crow talking to us?”

“Is it?” He squints. “Well, I blame you. Nothing abnormal happens without you.”

The crow flaps down to the nearest fence. Up close, it looks fetching and also evil, a spiky plume of jewel black. The crow cocks its head at you. Its eyes are livid, alert. It says, “Need help?”

You’ve never spoken to a crow in your whole life. But you’ve seen and done many strange things during your time in the desert. And if anyone knows where Dr. O is—maybe, possibly, it’s a talking crow.

What now?

To talk to the crow, turn to page XX.

To ignore the crow and keep searching, turn to page XX.

You lie to the stranger.

The stranger says, “Well? Yes?” He’s still waiting for your answer, albeit with a healthy dose of impatience. You’re all that stands between him and the door to the lab.

Something about him makes you nervous. You don’t really believe he’s a spy, or whatever Dr. O thinks—in fact, he’s conspicuously pleasant, despite his restlessness. The kind of face you might not remember tomorrow.

But that restlessness. He’s focused beneath the surface, almost carnivorous in his interest, and you don’t know why. His mild demeanor only makes it more ominous. You keep your hand clenched around the doorknob. Barring him entrance.

You lie. “Yes, sorry, no. I’m not sure about the sound you heard before, but it’s just me and Leslie in there right now—have you met Leslie?” You almost say Weird Leslie but stop yourself. “He’s the other lab assistant from Berkeley? He’s got kind of a chin point? Dr. O should be back later this week.”

The stranger tries to edge forward. You don’t budge. Your mother always believed that houseguests were like cats; they could be led by example. It goes without saying, she’s never owned a cat in her life.

But she does run a dinner party with the military precision of an intractable admiral, and always with the kindest smile.

“You said you talked to Dr. O today?” you ask. You can’t help yourself. You want to hear his version of events.

He nods warily.

“Where? When?”

He goes pink. He doesn’t like you, that’s clear, but you can’t do anything about that. At least he’s in good company. “Well, I can’t be sure—maybe it was yesterday.”

Then he shakes his head, the slightest tremble. A gesture of surrender. He mutters, “Assistants, God,” in a nasty undertone you’re meant to hear. He putters off before you can ask anything else.

You wait until he’s vanished back down the hallway. You try to breathe in consistent intervals. Oxygen seems important. When he’s gone, you go back into the laboratory, where Weird Leslie definitely isn’t. You shut the door behind you. You lock it carefully.

In the lab, at his desk, the doctor lifts his head.

With great effort, he focuses on your return. Something twists in your stomach. Panic or unease.

Close up, Dr. O seems unwell. There’s a waxy texture to his face, the look of a newly embalmed corpse. The caverns around his eyes have sharpened into cliffs. It’s as if he’s being devoured from within.

But what he says out loud is—“You again?”

“That’s right. I was just outside? Talking to that man, you remember?” You try not to take it personally—his blank face, the doubtful tilt of his eyebrows. “The um, the spy. You know. The man you said was a Soviet spy.”

He nods, but you’re not sure he understands. He repeats, “The Soviet spy,” and closes his eyes. The silence expands. It takes over the room. You resist the urge to snap your fingers, just to confirm he’s awake or even breathing.

“You’ve been gone for days,” you say instead. You take an unwilling step forward.

He doesn’t open his eyes, but his face furrows. “No … I don’t think that’s right…”

You can’t argue with him. It never works. He leans away, tipping his head back as he does, and the chair creaks under his weight. He says, “You think of all this power we’ve gained.”

Your mouth is a kiln. Earthen and dry. In your dreams, you’ve seen it. The streets filled with world-ending fire. The vaporized shadows of the people who once stood there. Lived there.

“Then one day, you wake up,” the doctor says, as if he knows your dreams, he sees them, too. “And you realize it’s nothing.”

Whatever happens in those visions, it’s not nothing. But this is just how he is—inhabited by melancholy, a great man with a runaway intellect. You understand that you’re a footstool in history. He isn’t. He radiates the certainty and sorrow of his place in time.

He’s speaking again. “Strange to think what’s out there … I keep hearing the desert. Sand dunes can produce a sound, imagine that.”

You’re fairly sure that’s false.

“It’s true,” he says. “Like this”—and to your absolute horror, he makes a low, phlegmatic growl, somewhere deep and difficult in his chest.

You search for the appropriately polite response. “I didn’t know that,” you manage. You try to maintain a neutral face, even though his eyes are shut.

It was Dr. O who gave you a rare glimpse of the Project, weeks ago. You touched the Bomb with your own gloved hands. You’re not a spiritual person, but nothing ever felt so ordinary or humbling.

The dark, foreboding swell of its stomach. The sheer scale of it. The knowledge that you were touching a piece of the world.

You never dream of the Bomb, but still it haunts you, like it haunts everyone else in Los Alamos. There’s some incomprehensible power to this. That you almost never see it, or dream of it, or speak about it directly, but that it leaks into the canyons and valleys of your subconscious anyway.

Another word: infects.

What’s the desert against the Bomb?

The doctor’s chair tilts back down to earth. His eyes open. You meet his gaze with reluctance. He looks almost amused by whatever’s on your face, which seems ungracious of him.

“Yes, well,” he says in the driest possible voice. “I’ll count on your discretion.” He watches you approach his desk. “I need you to take me to a location in the desert. I have some supplies to collect.”

Just like that. He’s your boss, and you don’t know how to refuse. “On my bike?” you say, like an idiot. “Or—do you want me to—”

“I’ve temporarily liberated a jeep. It’s out back. It’s only—it’s just that—” He looks down at his hands with an inscrutable expression. “It seems I’ve forgotten how to drive.”

Something’s very wrong with him, and you can’t begin to understand what it is. Danger everywhere you go, no matter what you do or choose.

That familiar anxiety in your gut. You ask, trying not to sound too plaintive, “Where were you? Where’ve you been?”

You think he won’t answer. You’re afraid for him. But more than that, you’re afraid of what he’ll tell you.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he says simply, still staring at his hands. He looks up. “Will you help me leave camp?”

To drive Dr. O to the desert, turn to page XX.

To get help from others, turn to page XX.

You go home to Buffalo.

You sit in bed, listening to CBS News outside, your face a lively bonfire. You decide it’s too much. All of it. You count the rotations of the ceiling fan. The early-morning heat of the desert is a steady hand on your back, pressing you down.

Time shrinks to a drop. This is the moment you choose.

You climb down from your bunk and dig out your suitcase from the closet. It rattles and scrapes against the floor. You pack your things.

When you look up, Dolores Wallbach is awake. She’s sitting up in her bunk, wrapped in a bedsheet, arms crossed over her knees. She stares at you like something’s wrong.

She says, “What happened? What the hell are you doing?”

You’ll never have to see her stupid face again. This alone makes you look at her differently. You let yourself acknowledge, just for a moment, that she’s lavishly pretty.

There’s fear on her face. A language you understand. You stick your hand out.

“Dolores, it’s been a pleasure,” you say, though it hasn’t.

“You love it here,” Dolores Wallbach says in a puzzled voice. You shake hands.

You take the first train in Santa Fe. You head home to Buffalo. When you look out the train window, you feel the jagged eggshell pieces of yourself coming off, dissolving. You watch the sky vault past the window, the desert scrub melt into the distance.

You never say goodbye to Marty, to Debra, to your Berkeley friends. You tell yourself you’ll write to them, except you never will.

You arrive in Buffalo. You get off at the Terminal and greet your hometown by crying, “Buffalo!”

Your mother waits on the platform for you. Her hands twisting as she searches for your face. Even from afar, you can see she’s tense, curious. Uncomfortable in the station with so many people. Afraid to miss you altogether.

At home, after dinner, she turns on the radio to listen to the news. You walk over and switch it off without explanation. Your mother says, dismayed, “But—”

That night, when you sleep, the dreams don’t come.

The war ends. You get a job as a science teacher at a local public school.

Your mother dies and it’s your own personal apocalypse. The end of every world you’ve known. You visit her grave often. There’s something tactile about the life she has left behind. There are no atheists in graveyards, you think. For the first time, you want to trust she’s waiting. That she is elsewhere.

When you’re seventy-two, nearing the end of your life, you wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. A crow is sitting at the window. An oil slick shaped like a bird. A black sheaf of premonition.

You think you can smell the red dust of Los Alamos on its feathers. It makes you more nostalgic than you thought possible.

You can’t see its eyes, but you know the crow is watching you. It opens its mouth and speaks, but you can’t hear it.

You sit up in bed. The crow doesn’t move.

You say, “Dr. Oppenheimer?”

This happens every night. The crow visits you again and again, until the day you die.

—END—

You go with Debra.

Are you really in a hurry to find the doctor? The answer is maybe not. These past few days, you’ve inventoried and visited all his frequent haunts: the lab, the illicit gambling den run by the scientists, et cetera.

You’ve wondered if you, too, can be distilled into a list.

The spider wasps have taken a particular interest in you. They orbit your head with a kind of glassy, growing curiosity. Debra, who’s retreated several healthy steps away, eyes you and the wasps with equal trepidation.

She says, “Are you coming or not?”

So you take the long way with Debra. The sun whisks shadows across the fuming red clay. Your blouse is starting to adhere to the back of your neck. The wasps dissipate behind you, much to Debra’s relief.

“If they kept up, I’d have stuck you in the bushes and ran. No offense,” she confesses. This doesn’t come as a shock.

As you approach Ashley Pond, you see some goofus in the water with the Canada geese. He’s knee-deep, a splotch amid the birds, and he seems to be arguing with them. He gestures and shouts in a way that’s instantly familiar.

What’s more, the geese are squawking back at him. Their indignant wails carry the alarming cadences of human conversation.

That’s not just any goofus. That’s Leslie, Dr. O’s other senior lab assistant and your occasional rival. The geese advance on him now, wings bristled for combat. They start to peck. He splashes in the water with increased panic, making a few lackluster efforts to defend himself, and you remember how, back at Berkeley, he’d tell everyone you were the cleaning lady for a laugh.

Personally, you respect the Canada geese. Their ill tempers and their sharp instincts both. You’d like nothing better than to leave him there.

“Should we help him?” Debra asks. You sigh.

Together, you wade into the pond, forming an inadequate human shield, and fish him out. A Canada goose gets you in the knee. It hurts. Leslie says, “Help,” and Debra says, “That’s what we’re doing,” and if you kick him in the shins as you haul him back, it’s probably an accident.

You’ve attracted a small crowd, though it’s barely seven in the morning. “What the hell was that?” you say to Leslie. By the expression on his face, you can tell you’re about to get a Weird Leslie answer.

There are pockets of the desert imbued with strangeness. All those wide-open calderas. Basins and plateaus formed by magma cooled centuries ago. A few months prior, Leslie got lost overnight in the wastelands—ever since he came back, he hasn’t been the same. You even saw him eat a fly once.

In these moments, you think of him as Weird Leslie, a creepy permutation of the Regular Leslie. Easy to mistake as normal, but just the slightest bit off, as if someone used the fresh yolk of Leslie’s mind to make an omelette.

Marty says it’s just like Evil Derek from the Mandrake comics. As always, you don’t know what he’s talking about.

You’re the only one close enough to hear Weird Leslie’s answer. He leans forward and says to you in an incensed whisper: “It’s the desert you should be afraid of. Not the Bomb. You should know that, for your own sake.”

Even when he’s talking nonsense, he’s a bummer. It’s an impressive feat.

“What was that?” Debra asks you.

“Why was he trying to fight the geese?” someone from the crowd yells.

Leslie says, and it’s not clear to you whether he’s addressing you in particular or just delivering a sermon to anyone within earshot, ergo still just you: “We’ve provoked the desert, you must know that. Can’t you see how angry it is? We poisoned it and now it’s going to poison us back.”

You stifle a hefty eye roll. “Have you seen him?” you ask. You don’t need to specify, not with Leslie.

“Seen who?” Debra asks.

Leslie’s expression clears a fraction. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

You wish you’d let the geese eat him. Leslie won’t admit that the doctor’s vanished. He’s determined to pretend that Dr. O is in the desert with all the other scientists, testing the Bomb. Maybe it’s a survival instinct, a type of plausible deniability, but you hate him for it.

You persist, saying, “I thought I’d check the lab today. And maybe the desert, as long as there’s enough light.”

Leslie stares fixedly at your ear.

Behind you, someone reaches out and covers your face with their hand. It smells like mayonnaise and old cheese and it’s also vaguely damp. The someone says, “Light, you say? Are bodies not just the light they receive?”

“Shut up, Marty.” You wriggle out of his grasp. The crowd has started to disperse as all four of you begin the trek to the Top Secret part of camp.

Debra does a few backward hops, checking her legs for cuts, and Marty says to you, watching her, “Have you tried the ghost town yet? He’s obsessed with the desert, isn’t he? You should try the ghost town.”

“For what?” Debra asks, a little out of breath. “Is anyone going to explain anything to me?”

Weird Leslie becomes Regular Leslie in an instant. Nothing cures him faster than sanctimony. He rounds on you. “You told Marty?”

“I didn’t!”

“Great,” he says. “Who else knows?”

“Obviously not me,” Debra says. “Hey, did you hear about the Soviet spy?”

You’ve reached Trinity Drive, where jeeps roll in and out, honking their grievances as you try to cross the road. Soldiers behind the wheel, grimacing with distaste.

“Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no Soviet spy,” Leslie says.

“That’s the sort of thing a Soviet spy might say,” Marty says. You and Debra exchange glances, trying not to laugh at both of them.

When you enter the Top Secret part of base camp, your good humor curdles. The air vibrates with a jumpy, repressed excitement. You see Jim Love, the cyclotron technician with the scuttle of a hermit crab, nearly barrel into a soldier. He catches the man by the shoulder in time, and then, alas, he makes an elbowy, heartfelt salute at his poor victim. But it’s not just him. The unnatural stillness is everywhere. The clumps of people gathered so early in the morning, muttering together.

That anticipatory hush, a feeling more than a sound. They all know. Debra was right. It’s the test in the desert. Everyone waiting for the Bomb to drop.

Somewhere out there is Dr. O. You’re wasting time when you could be looking for him. If all the other scientists return without him, it will be calamitous.

“So how did you know about him, anyway?” Leslie asks Marty, and Marty twitches under the pressure, darting the smallest glance at you. You need to distract Leslie somehow. Because of course, of course you were the one to tell Marty, and you don’t need Leslie holding it over your head for your eternal life, and so you say, without entirely considering the consequences—

“Hey, Marty, exactly how late did your poker game with Angie go last night?”

It’s out of your mouth before you can help yourself. You might as well have just punched him in the face. Debra makes a strangled sound of surprise—everyone knows about Marty’s girlfriend back home, mostly because he never stops talking about her—and you watch, with a detachment borne of horror, as all the joy and light seeps out of his body.

“That,” Marty says, and it’s as if he’s attempting to swallow every word before he says it aloud, “was told to you in confidence.”

You think he’s going to hurl. Instead, he folds his arms and walks away a few steps. Debra eyes you both, but she doesn’t react further. A wise move, tactically speaking.

Leslie swivels from you to Marty, baffled, trying to decipher what just happened and why. Then he huffs at Marty, “Don’t think this is over. It’s not over,” and stalks away, back to the residential side of camp. Maybe to quarrel with the geese again.

Now it’s just you and Debra and Marty.

Debra says, “Well, this is awkward.”

To apologize to Marty, turn to page XX.

To escape to the lab, turn to page XX.

You talk to the crow.

Maybe it’s the eerie atmosphere of the ghost town that convinces you to do it, the houses like stretched jaws around you. Possibly you’ve been driven mad by the desert. But you’re desperate to find Dr. O, and there’s a speck of curiosity, of intelligence, in the crow’s eye.

And who wouldn’t ask for help, in your place? Nearby, Marty bobs his head in what you assume is an encouraging manner. You lick your lips. You lean forward to address the crow.

You say, enunciating every syllable at an unreasonable volume, “Do you know Dr. Oppenheimer?”

The crow blinks. A flurry of cloudy membrane. It yells, “Doctor! Doctor!”

For one careening moment, you think it’s summoning the doctor. It’s always been this easy. You just had to ask. But it squawks again and again, “Doctor! Doctor!” and you start to worry it’s caught in some kind of semantic loop.

Its voice is awful, hoarse and nasal and a bit throaty. It sounds like, well, a crow. Maybe this wasn’t your most inspired idea.

When it tires itself out, the crow takes flight. “Come on!” it shrieks. So you do. You try to smother the wan hope in your chest.

You follow the crow deeper into town, down streets of terracotta earth, past dense underbrush and rickety conifers. You marvel, as you always do, at the Martian shape of the land. You marinate in your own sweat.

As you walk, Marty says under his breath, in his radio announcer voice, “Will the talking crow lead them to their deaths? Or will it reveal, at last, the whereabouts of the doctor?” Sometimes he does this. Follows people around and narrates their actions. He even does a decent Orson Welles. It’s a miracle the soldiers haven’t shot him.

“Hey,” you say.

He turns to you and says, without hesitation or shame, “Stay tuned for next week’s episode! Sponsored by Oxydol!”

“Did you hear that sound before?” you ask. “When we first got here?”

A rattlesnake clicks and hisses in the distance. The talking crow is perched on a post, waiting for you to catch up. As you approach, it takes off again. Marty says, “You’ll have to be more specific.”

“It sounded like, um—the desert breathing? Like this?” And you try to replicate the sound with your own throat. You end up coughing up part of your lung instead. Marty doesn’t laugh.

“I didn’t,” he says carefully. “But, well, it’s not out of the realm of possibility, is it? After everything we’ve done here. You never did find out what turned Regular Leslie into Weird Leslie. But it must’ve been something, right?”

You’re startled by the consideration he’s given it. It’s true. If the New Mexico desert was unearthly before the arrival of the Manhattan Project, it angles toward the bizarre now.

Case in point: a talking crow.

The nuclear experiments mutate the topography of the land. Everything they touch. The effect is volcanic. The desert will look monstrous, you’ve often thought, before the Project is through.

“I’m really sorry, you know,” you say. “About Angie.”

“Yes, hmm, you already said that,” he says in a neutral tone.

You can tell he doesn’t want to talk about it, but you can’t help yourself. You never can. You blurt out, “I know, but I want you to believe me. I’m just an idiot, and Leslie—”

“Stop!” Marty covers his ears. “You’re groveling and it’s offensive to my eardrums.” You shut up, and he drops his hands from his face.

“I’m not a bad person,” he says, and you realize he does want to talk about it. You never thought he was a bad person, but you don’t have the opportunity to clarify. He’s plunging ahead.

“It’s just that—I’m not a Greek god, of this I’m aware”—just saying this makes him turn an ardent, face-rash red—“and I should be happy with my lot in life—and I will be, when I get home, I swear. I’ll be good. I’ll never complain or be discontented for a single day of my life—but—but—but—Angie’s beautiful. She’s the smartest girl in the world and she’s beautiful and for some unfathomable reason, she doesn’t detest the sight of me.”

You find this whole speech deeply forlorn, and it makes you sadder for Marty than you can bear. But the whole time he’s talking, apprehension creeps through you.

You have the mounting sense that the crow is leading you astray. The last time you were here, the ghost town wasn’t like this. An impenetrable labyrinth.

“You have options,” you say, just to say something. “That’s not a bad thing, is it?”

You’re nearing the center of town, but somehow you don’t think Dr. O will be there. Around you, the chatter of insects and gophers and other fauna has evaporated. Instead, another noise, subterranean and uneven. Heat caramelizes your body.

“Now do you hear it?” you ask Marty. The expression on his face gives it away.

Up ahead, the crow flies in lazy circles, watching you walk. You think you can see the strange quartz of its eyes, even from afar.

Marty seizes your arm, yanking you to a lurching stop. And just in time, it turns out, because the ground before you heaves up without warning and drops back down. One more step and you’d have capsized.

It rises and falls in the manner of a colossal chest. The almost-houses around you pulse to the same sound, the underground growl of the desert breathing.

“I think it would be wise to plan our exit,” Marty says. You follow his gaze.

You’ve reached the town’s epicenter, and now you see them, emerging from the crimson earth ten feet away. If you didn’t know better, you’d think they were the enormous clay lungs of the desert itself. Arid and crumbling, each one bigger than you, horribly alive.

They’re the lungs of something, that’s for sure. They appear to be forming the entrance of a tunnel in the ground. And beneath them, as they flex and rumble, the glimpse of more. A vast heart, deep underground.

Whatever you do next, you suspect there will be trouble.

To approach the oversized lungs, turn to page XX.

To plan your exit with Marty, turn to page XX.

You stay and spy on the doctor.

Without a backward glance at you, the doctor vanishes into the shed—no, actually, not even a shed. His lab. His secret lab, although you still can’t believe that’s what it is.

You’re left alone in the jeep, in the parboiled fever of the desert. Riots of soapweed, prickly poppies everywhere. The jeep is full of nameless friction. It feels too small to contain you and the doctor’s secrets and also the low-burning wildfire of your inner turmoil.

You wonder if there’s a difference between anger and resentment. You might be the doctor’s subordinate, but you’re not his minion. You don’t have to do everything he tells you to. With that thought, you choose not to drive back to camp. Instead, you maneuver the stolen jeep a few hundred feet away, where a grove of ponderosa trees slant precipitously with each small wind, hiding you and the vehicle from view.

Here, you sit. And you watch. And you wait.

What are you waiting for? You don’t know. The uncertainty makes you nauseous, as it always does. There’s a movie theater back at base camp, but you won’t even see a film unless Marty goes first and tells you how it ends.

“You’re a barbarian. Do you read books in reverse, too?” he says. He tells you the ending of every movie anyway. That’s how you know he doesn’t hate you. “Do you live every day backwards? Have you transcended cause and effect, you Morlock?”

“You think I like being this way?” you ask. Your roommate Dolores says you’re an empath. Marty says you’re a classic Freudian neurotic with a destiny compulsion and that Dolores Wallbach probably doesn’t know how to read.

Dr. O finally emerges from the shed. Even concealed behind the ponderosas, you can tell that he’s all wrong. That whatever’s wrong with him is still evolving. He’s headed deeper into the desert, satchel hoisted over his shoulder.

A spider wasp whines past you, then another. You twitch away. How do they always find you? Do you have an aroma? What does it smell like—extract of fear and indecision?

What you do next, you already regret. You slip out of the stolen jeep and creep through the ponderosas, toward the small building nearby. The secret lab. Upon inspection, it’s really more of a bunker. Pebbles skitter beneath you, because even the ground beneath you knows this is a terrible idea.

You tell yourself you’re just having a look around. You still don’t know what he’s doing out here, do you?

Inside, it’s cool and quiet. You’re in a hallway lit by fluorescents and tidy yellow flags of sunlight from high-up windows. Who built this place? How does it have electricity? Your footsteps clatter against the laminate flooring. This whole place reminds you of a military facility, erected in haste and secrecy.

The spider wasps have followed you into the hall. You’d never seen spider wasps until you came to Los Alamos. They’re a New Mexico specialty: beautiful, soapy, black, each the length of half your finger.

There’s more of them now. A lot more. They crawl along the windows. They churn in the fluorescent banks overhead.

The amateur entomologist in you has always been enraptured by their crooked old man spines. Their unusual amber wings. The ordinary person inside of you is, at this moment, alarmed by their number. They’re definitely following you. You didn’t even know there were this many spider wasps in the state.

Are they multiplying? Is it normal for them to swarm like this? The wasps scuttle along the walls, clicking in syncopation.

They don’t so much buzz as incant their drone as a collective. Not many wasps, but one. It’s a world-ending sound.

By the time you reach the lab door, they’re swarming behind you. They gather in the shape of a face. There are holes where the eyes should be.

Even as a face of wasps, you know him. How did he get back here so fast? Maybe that’s the wrong question. The wasps somehow give the doctor that flinty look he often has. They speak with Dr. Oppenheimer’s halting voice.

They say, “What do you think you’re doing here?”

“Um,” you say. You can think of no lexicon to hedge against a wall of fuming insects. You should barricade yourself inside the lab. Your hand is on the doorknob. “I was worried—you seemed—” and here, all you can do is gesture, helplessly, at his current state. “How are you—you’re wasps—?”

The wasps falter. They blur into a cloud, skeptical, uncertain, and blur back into Dr. O’s face. It’s unsettling to have so many eyes on you.

“That seems unlikely,” he says after a muddled pause, his bewilderment evident.

Now’s your chance. You twist the knob and lean with your whole body, almost tumbling in. The wasps are slow to react. From your periphery, you catch sight of something tucked at the back of the lab. You scramble to slam the door behind you. But it’s already too late.

“Stop that,” the face of wasps commands. The voice is distinctly irritated.

And everything stops. You, the door, the specks of dust in the air, all frozen in the moment he speaks. Even the fluorescents are suspended mid-flicker. The only thing still moving is the wasps.

You don’t understand how he’s doing any of it. Apparently, neither does he. But a small corner of your mind has snagged on what you saw a few seconds ago. You’re filling in the gaps now. That sinister outline. The familiar hump of it.

Another Bomb, somehow. Hidden away in the doctor’s secret lab.

Who else knows? Because if there’s another Bomb, he couldn’t have done it alone. Scientists, soldiers. There must’ve been others who helped him. Do they know what’s happening to him now?

The face of wasps stirs. “And why you? How is it you?”

You shrivel under their glare, so to speak, although you’re still unable to move. In this moment, it doesn’t bother you as much that the doctor is made from a nightmare of wasps. But you wish he didn’t sound so disappointed. That matters.

Then his face falls apart. The wasps disperse. One of them flies into your open mouth. The rest of them zip back down the skinny hallway.

The dust motes in the air begin to float again. The door to the lab swings shut from the momentum of when you pushed it, only minutes ago, and you—still frozen in place, left to your own mystified devices—can feel the spider wasp travel down your throat, sticky-footed and whirring, into your stomach.

It’s very unpleasant. Your esophagus is too narrow and the wasp is not. If you could choke, you would. You can’t personally recommend any of it.

You can hear whispers behind you. You strain to listen, but the words blur together into nonsense. No one’s there. You think the whispers might be coming from the Bomb itself.

Dread is a staccato in your throat. Or maybe that’s the wasp.

You wonder if the doctor has heard the same whispers, too. What would that do to a person? To dwell in the nerve center of such a noise for days or even months? You wonder if the Bomb has altered the geography of his mind and body. The same way it contaminates everything it comes into contact with.

This, then, was how your visions started: weeks ago, when you saw the first Bomb back at the Los Alamos base camp. As if, when you touched it, it reached back out and found something within you. The smouldering heavens. The infernos. The light that begins, and begins, and begins.

The wasp has done something to you. It’s as if a pathogen has taken root inside your stomach, siphoning off the reservoirs of your body’s lifeblood, leaving grainy sediment behind. You realize, with surprise, that you might be dying.

Once it occurs to you, you know it’s true. How peculiar to understand this and be incapable of doing anything. Your mother will never know how it happened, but maybe she’ll sense it, the way people always seem to do in stories, a pinch of grief that tightens its hold until one day it overtakes her.

It’s the desert you should be afraid of, not the Bomb. Leslie said that to you earlier today. Now you think—no, Leslie was wrong.

You should’ve been afraid of the Bomb, too.

You doubt the doctor’s coming back. At some point, you fall asleep, standing up, your eyes wide open.

When you awaken, it’s night. Out the windows, you see stars twitch in the sky. You don’t know what has woken you up. And then you do.

You see the flash of light, and it is astonishing. It’s the last wondrous vision in the universe. One moment, the world swims in glue, faraway; the next, it’s rendered in beautifully surreal detail. The desert, on fire.

You understand that this isn’t a vision, that you’re awake, that the earth is falling around you.

Your first wild thought is that it’s the doctor’s doing. But no, not exactly.

Here in the last moments of your life, you’re a witness to something else. The first nuclear test, hundreds of miles away.

Whatever the wasp did, you’re starting to feel it everywhere. The ache is a distant siren, blaring louder and louder. You think that when you’re gone, it’ll take a long time for anyone to notice. You think about how you’re a faltering subatomic gear in a machine too vast to be glimpsed by mere mortals. If there’s a grand design, you—a mere mortal—can’t see it.

You wish you were braver than the sum of your parts.

Regrettably, you die.

—END—

You flee the talking crow.

In the cave, you hesitate. The huge heart thuds before you, steady and ferocious in judgment. You know you’ve made a mistake.

But it seems you have little choice now. The crow dive-bombs at you, shrieking, “Nimrod! You boob!”

You and Marty flee, scrambling out of the underground tunnel, back up into the low-hanging sky of the ghost town. You’re somehow back in the epicenter of town. The desert’s lungs shudder and expand nearby.

You wish you hadn’t touched them. Why did you do that? You can still feel the braised meat of the lungs on your fingertips, as if they’re under your hands even now. That’s what started everything. Marty, clutching you for support, gasps, “I told you this was a bad idea,” but you can’t tell him Angie will never love him if he’s such an incurable know-it-all, because the crow has hurled out of the tunnel in furious pursuit.

You take off, both of you, through the maze of streets. The almost-houses thud from every direction. You can feel them in your throat.

The crow yells, “Beat it, you punks! Am-scray!” from overhead, although you’re obviously the one it’s directed to, not Marty. You shouldn’t have come here. And you really shouldn’t have pissed off a talking crow.

“This way?” Marty says behind you, and you go, “No, this way,” but at some point, you look back and he’s vanished. Where did he go? The town is a cauldron of hot air and setting sun. Above, the crow squawks, “Get out! Get out!”

You take another turn and burst into the open desert. You’re out. You have a stitch in your chest and you’re thirstier than you’ve ever been, your face rash has grown sentient with pain, and who knows where Marty went, but you’ve somehow escaped the ghost town.

The crow lands on the nearest roof. Its gaze is avid. You walk the perimeter of town and it follows you, winging from house to house. You’re looking for your bikes, but they’re nowhere to be seen. You stand there, twisting in place, trying not to picture Marty’s expression when he finally realizes he’s alone.

In sunset, the town turns liquid and unreal, marigold in hue. You can’t spend the night in the desert, but you can’t leave Marty behind. You trudge away, hoping the crow loses interest.

If you were an enraged desert, what would you do? These are the kinds of questions that don’t get asked in Buffalo.

You’d stood in that underground chamber with Marty, in the presence of the desert’s heartbeat, not knowing what to do. You’d thought, so briefly, that the desert was a being that could be reasoned with, bargained with; a being that might even yield.

You shouldn’t have assumed it was on your side.

In the end, you couldn’t entirely understand what the desert was trying to tell you, down in that chamber, or what it wanted from you. Only that it was something that you weren’t willing to give up. Now, as you walk away, the crow’s glare burns a hole in your back. A warning that you are no longer welcome.

It was the desert, after all, just like Leslie said—not the Bomb. You hate that Weird Leslie was right. Bad enough that he’s Weird. You can’t stand to think of his smugness, brewing from afar.

Dusk blinks into night. You listen to the rustle of the trees, the eerie wail of crickets.

Improbably, you hear sounds of people nearby. A hush of inconsonant voices. You do your best to pick out words, but it’s all nonsense. You follow the whispers, but they multiply. Now they’re coming from everywhere. Even above you.

You know. In the end, you just know.

You are led, by the whispers or perhaps by deeper forces at work. You find him beneath a yucca palm, that most luminous and strange of trees, flowering white in the desert night.

Dr. O is wearing the same clothes as when you saw him almost a week ago. He looks badly ill. His features have begun to decay into something sepulchral. If before he seemed haunted, tonight he seems like a ghost.

The whispers stop all at once. He looks up.

“You,” he says. He pronounces the word with such displeasure. But you’ve just endured the relentless verbal abuse of a talking crow, not to mention the wrath of the entire desert. For once, the doctor’s hostility doesn’t have much effect. You sit in the grass nearby him.

“Me,” you say. You don’t think he’s been here these six days. You can’t imagine how he’d survive the heat, the rattlesnakes, the wasps, the thirst, the solitude. “Are you all right?” Obviously not. But you have to ask.

He shakes his head. His weariness is palpable. “I’ve disoriented myself,” he says, and there’s surprise in his voice when he says it. “I keep going in circles.”

“Are you trying to get back to base camp?” you ask. He doesn’t respond right away.

“No, I’m … I needed to collect some supplies,” he says vaguely. “I’ve been walking for so long. I know where to go. I have it in my mind’s eye, the shed. And yet—here I am, on the opposite side of it. I’m being thwarted—”

You don’t ask by whom or what. You know the answer.

“No one’s seen you in days,” you say. Only when you say it do you hear how piteous you sound.

You think he’s going to argue, but he looks up at the yucca palm and says, “Strange.” He doesn’t seem to think this requires any further explanation.

After a long silence, he says, “I can see it distinctly. It’s going to happen soon. Any minute now.” He’s elsewhere, far away, watching something out of your view. “I might as well be strapped to the tower myself, about to go off.”

Does he think he’s the Bomb itself? Out in the desert, at the test site, about to drop? You can’t bring yourself to ask a question whose answer is so clearly destined to trouble you forever.

As if he knows what you’re thinking, he says, “It beggars belief. It’s not just that I can see it. That would be one thing. But … I know already what happens afterward. And not just there, but everywhere. And not just everywhere. But every possible future, more than I could’ve imagined. Except—”

He turns his head to stare at you. The anger in his eyes makes you shrink back. More than anger; confusion. He says, softly, “What I can never understand is, why are you always there? How is it that you’re always involved?”

You don’t have an answer. You don’t even think you can speak. The yucca palm begins to shed, and it snows white petals upon your faces, and your hands, and your eyes.

“There we go,” he says with a sigh. And you see it, the flash of light all around you, before you hear it. It’s beautiful. It might be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. Far off, in the direction of the test site, the sky is made of fire and smoke. Birds in the sky, black dots falling.

Now the thunder comes. The valley burns. Your eyes are full of stars.

“How did you know?” you ask the doctor, but he doesn’t answer. When your vision clears, you see that he’s gone. You call his name, but there’s no response.

You walk back toward the ghost town to look for Marty. You can see the town in the distance, a mirage in the forgotten hours of night, and like a mirage it never seems to get any closer. You walk for what feels like hours.

At some point, you turn back to Los Alamos, but it, too, evades you. You sleep fitfully to the sound of rattlesnakes. You try again in the morning, but it’s just as far away as it was the night before.

Eventually, you walk to the closest town. You go back to Buffalo. You spend years trying to return to all those places, all those people, without any luck.

You don’t think you can survive it, the deep and unending feeling of being so close to something and so far from it. You place calls that go nowhere. You look for Marty, Debra, Leslie, even your roommate, Dolores Wallbach. You try to intercept Dr. Oppenheimer at conferences.

It all slips away from you, so easily.

—END—

You enlist the stranger’s help.

You gawk at the stranger, one hand on the stolen jeep’s door, not sure what to say. Behind him, the cottage streams exuberantly with jazz trumpets and laughter and dancing. The party’s in full swing on Bathtub Row. Any minute now, Dolores Wallbach will return.

“All right,” you say. “I’ll take you to him, but”—how to adequately conceal the shed’s location?—“you’re going to have to wear a blindfold. And it’s a drive.”

“The lab in the desert, yes?” He must see something on your face to confirm it, because he nods. “You aren’t the only one who knows about it. Surely you understand that? We were colleagues,” and he’s on the verge of saying more, but he stops himself. All he adds is, “Not colleagues, exactly, but friends.”

“Until he found out who you were,” you say, finishing the thought. He knows better than to respond. You don’t know why you’re surprised, but you are. Dr. O was right. He is a Soviet operative. An ally, perhaps, but not exactly.

“I can still help him,” the stranger says urgently. “It’s possible that I’m the only one who can. Put me in a blindfold, if it makes you feel any better.”

You don’t know if it’s true or not. But you have to do something. You remember that when you drove the doctor to the desert, only hours ago, there was rope in the back of the jeep.

You wrench out a fistful and brandish it at him. He wavers.

“Fine, yes. Do whatever you have to. But hurry. You should never have left him alone.”

The door to the cottage opens—a brief gust of color and merriment—and Dolores comes down the walk. She’s found her hat and she’s pinning it back into place, flushed with happiness. You stop fumbling with the ropes. She wanders the road looking for him. You hold your breath, like that will help.

It doesn’t. Dolores always has a predator’s instinct for her surroundings. Even partly hidden, she finds you and him, crouched in darkness. Her face goes pale.

“What on earth are you doing?” she manages.

“It’s nothing to worry about,” the spy says, which is the wrong answer for almost any occasion and especially this one.

“He’s a spy, Dolores,” you say. Maybe you shouldn’t tell her, but you need to convey the gravity of the situation with haste. Besides, she’s your roommate, and you think someday it will have been a kindness, to tell her now and not for her to find out much later on.

“What?” She looks at him, as if he’ll do her the favor of verifying what you’ve said. His face is schooled, blank. She looks back at you in utter bafflement. “No. He’s not.”

“I need to take him to Dr. O,” you say. If Dolores were paying attention, this would raise more questions than it answers, but her focus has dwindled to a singular bead, and you aren’t its target.

“Are you a spy?” She seems determined to press the point. The man turns his head away from her with regret, even contrition, and whatever anguish is between them feels too intimate for you to behold, small and painful.

Dolores reties the knots. She’s a former Girl Scout—a fact you’ve learned because you’ve heard her tell approximately a hundred people on a hundred unrelated occasions—and now, at last, you’re grateful for it. The man grimaces as she tests and tightens the rope. She steps away. Her face is absolutely, deathly still.

“He’s more dangerous than you think,” the spy says to you. He makes some effort not to look at Dolores, you can tell. “He could destroy any of us.”

“Why don’t we find out?” you say coolly. You think you sound cool, anyway. You ruin the effect by dripping sweat directly on his face. He squirms away. Dolores leans in again and wads her handkerchief into his mouth. She does this with a gentleness that you wish you hadn’t witnessed.

“I’m coming with you,” she says. She deposits herself in the front seat before you can argue. She’s all jittery nerves and grim determination, and she won’t meet your eyes. Possibly for the first time, you wonder if you’ve underestimated her, and if so, how.

But now’s not the time. Her presence will divert the soldiers at the front gate, at least. That, you can use. You climb into the seat beside her and start the jeep.

“Fine. Let’s go,” you say.

You can see the cottage in the background, a pool of light, welcoming and distant. The desert surrounds you not by miles but eons. You can feel it.

You wonder, not for the first time, if Dr. O has the kind of visions you do, steeped in portent. If everyone in Los Alamos dreams the same dreams, sees the future spreading, unyielding, before them. You wonder if it suffocates them, too.

“I didn’t know,” Dolores says, to herself more than you. “I can’t believe I didn’t know.”

She turns in her seat, hesitates. She says to you, without sparing a glance at the man in the back, “Are you sure there isn’t another way?”

To return to the shed in the desert, turn to page XX.

To look for another way, turn to page XX.

To find Marty and ask him how it all ends, turn the page.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am so very fortunate to have worked on these stories with Caroline Zancan, gem of an editor, whose belief in the collection and wonderfully probing notes helped to clarify the work. Thank you for laughing at all the dumb jokes. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.

Thank you so much to Retha Powers, who coaxed this collection to the finish line. Many thanks to the wonderful Leela Gebo, to Hannah Campbell, Lily Bartle, Kelly Too, and everyone at Holt.

Thanks to Alexa Stark, my marvelous agent and the eye of the storm, who got the stories in a way that made me glad to have written them. Thanks, too, to the rest of the Writers House team.

I’m exceptionally grateful for the arts funding that afforded me the time, freedom, and perspective to work on these stories, particularly to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Thanks also to the Toronto Arts Council and the Speculative Literature Foundation for their early support of my short fiction, an enormous gift both financially and existentially.

I owe many thanks to Hasan Altaf, whose early championing of “Let’s Play Dead” pulled the story out of the slush pile and into The Paris Review. His perceptive notes on the story made it sharper; they also provided a blueprint for thinking about the whole collection. Thanks, too, to Emily Nemens and the whole Paris Review team for their generous support of the story, which I’m very grateful for. And to Nadja Spiegelman, who let me ramble about all my favourite things, and who was a joy to work with every time.

Ayşe Papatya Bucak was another early supporter of the story, and I’m deeply appreciative of all that she’s done. And also to those who’ve selected the story for reprint in various projects—Veronica Roth and John Joseph Adams, Diana Schoemperlen and Biblioasis, Pushcart Press, and others.

Thanks to Brian Evenson and James Yeh for their warmth and enthusiasm when publishing “The Wolves,” and to the rest of the McSweeney’s team for making it possible. I’m enormously honoured by Motoyuki Shibata’s beautiful translation of the story; thank you for that gift.

Thanks to all the people who’ve introduced these stories and others to their classes, as well as those who’ve written about the work or shared it around. I appreciate it so much.

There’s a straight line from this collection to the six-week summer workshop of Clarion, where the dazzling curiosity of my peers, their joyfully weird fiction, and the feverish twenty-four-hour yelling of seagulls fueled the writing of the earliest stories in the book. Thank you to my Clarion cohort, to the immense generosity of our workshop leaders, and to the marvelous Clarion staff. I’m also indebted to the Carl Brandon Society for the Octavia Butler Scholarship, which meant more to me than I can say. Thanks also to the Ontario Arts Council for their funding support, which helped me get to Clarion in the first place.

So many thanks to those who read early drafts of the collection in various forms, who offered their notes and assurances, shared their own work, and were always around to talk about writing and stories. In particular, thank you to Mel Kassel, Ren Arcamone, and Audrey Hollis. I’m lucky to have every one of you in my life.

Jenna, I still remember sharing that one short story with you when we were teenagers. Thank you for being the reader I always wanted to write stories for. Thank you to Janice, who has been such a generous reader and listener throughout the years. I’m so glad to talk books with you. Thanks to Patrick, for all of it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senaa Ahmad’s short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best Canadian Stories, and elsewhere. She has received the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, the Speculative Literature Foundation, and the Carl Brandon Society’s Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. Her work was also the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the Sunburst Award and a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Fiction. The Age of Calamities is her first book. You can sign up for email updates here.

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CONTENTS

1. Copyright Notice
2. Title Page
3. Let’s Play Dead
4. The Napoleons Are Multiplying
5. The Wolves
6. Our Lady of Resplendent Misfortune
7. Inside the House of the Historian
8. It Was Probably a Very Nice Day
9. Not Everything Is Ancient History
10. The Houseguest
11. Choose Your Own Apocalypse
12. Acknowledgments
13. About the Author
14. Copyright

THE AGE OF CALAMITIES. Copyright © 2025 by Senaa Ahmad. All rights reserved. For information, address Henry Holt and Co., 120 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10271.

www.henryholt.com

“The Wolves” was published in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, 2023, and translated into Japanese by Motoyuki Shibata & reprinted in MONKEY, vol. 32. “Let’s Play Dead” was published in The Paris Review, 2020, and reprinted in Pushcart Prize XLVI: Best of Small Presses 2022, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy 2021, Best Canadian Stories 2021, and Literary Hub.

Cover design by Tyler Orbin

Cover image © Rawpixel / Shutterstock

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

e-ISBN 9781250378484

First Edition 2026

The publisher of this book does not authorize the use or reproduction of any part of this book in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. The publisher of this book expressly reserves this book from the Text and Data Mining exception in accordance with Article 4(3) of the European Union Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790.

Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, business, educational, and specialty retail/wholesale use. Please contact MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.