New Novel Excerpt

We are the fodder feeders, the collectors of minor mistakes mourned as capital T traumas to keep up with our circles. We paste these limp, papery memories of our slip ups and slights over our bodies while we wait for our underfed brains to decompose, leaving in their wake, empty, mâché” mannequins that become our hollowed tombs.

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Two weekends after my thirty-fifth birthday, I found myself meditating on this notion of life as an overlong bit worth all the serious attention you can blueball for twenty over a pint before laughter becomes the universal PTSD response to your existence. On my midnight trek from my Westminster office, I was slammed into a rain-bloodied tube wall by a couple engaged in a rather illicit tonguing, when my insignificance struck me, frothing cold like spittle in the eye from a soused MP. I hadn’t done anything criminal in the last forty-eight hours. At least, nothing tabloid worthy. I hadn’t done anything prodigious or meaningful either. Life was simply rattling me around, a dull mass for real human protagonists to punch down. A bit player in the role of minor comic obstruction to others’ happy endings.

As my spinal fluid jostled, I ran down a mental checklist. What had I accomplished that afternoon? I’d read a few news reports on the international front. According to a Washington Post breaking alert, the entire western coast of Hollywood was embroiled in a civil bruhaha over the economics of an influencer donating her brown fat cells to starving Ukrainian shelter ponies. Then at noon, I’d prostrated as customary at the thin-skinned ass cheeks of my boss, Sir Laurent Oswald, a lesser hated member of Parliament’s House of Lords, before disassociating back to my Kensington studio in a sublime rinse and repeat of my autopiloted routine.

Whenever I snuck out of my office late, my atheist’s guilt enforced a nightshift governed by strict rules for immersive disengagement from worldly temptations. No dates in foodless gastro-bars with smarter strangers who would sue me for avoidance of drugs, alcohol, and post-modern literature. No trysts in warehouse clubs with acquaintances’ hands that inevitably turned away when I revealed I’d never be the nepo grand lovechild of Princess Di and a dying billionaire. And, most importantly, no calling anyone with whom I shared DNA.

However, that injurious evening, when my tube-bruised sternum keeled into my kitchen-cum-bedroom, my principles underlying these aforementioned rules of inertia somehow withered on arrival. One hit from human contact and they’d been transmorphed via apoptositic death from predictable necessities sustaining my corpse to self-cannibalistic neurosis draining my suddenly very alive brain.

The tangible sting of the couple’s kiss had goaded me with a revelation. If I was to continue upkeeping my life, something I’d lately been revaluating, I had to admit that the dream of spiraling from conception to ash via mindless routine ad infinitum was a fantasy I’d never achieve. The reality was that I had outward, present moment agency and a duty to put it to some interesting use. Perhaps, from the hindsight vantage of those in forward motion around me, I would be forever a floater mass to diluviate around. But, I guessed, if I allowed myself to similarly commune with the world, I might have a chance at being a fellow avoider of obstacles. Eventually, I might even join the ranks of active movers boasting palatable careers and lovers to kiss on trains.

With a little more self-awareness than usual, I decided I ought to perform a quick experiment. Rather than waste the night embellishing the relevance of my research tasks for Laurent, I finally dared peek at my accumulation of personal emails and phone messages that I’d been ghosting for two months. Of course, I hadn’t expected any variation to the usual offensive mix of bank statements, bills, and tax documents, with a few investment scams and naughty adverts interspersed.

So naturally, the first message not requesting money or shame and bearing a fallibly human greeting, caught my attention. It was, in retrospect, a silly invitation that nonetheless felt prescient, even preordained in my darkest moment as an escape from my stasis. A demand of my presence was buried in a twee RSVP request from Laurent’s newish gliteratti girlfriend, Shana Ritter, whom he insisted would change my life a la L. Ron Hubbard and emotional cheating.

Shana was an international publicist, recently transplanted from Chelsea, London to Beverly Hills, who now spoke in a fried American accent. Her approach to promoting her renowned politico clients involved steamrolling new grads into submission via smiling while whispering tweeny-slang insults. She liked Laurent for his pedigree and often dealt with me by proxy because I reminded her of her father, a 1970s impresario who once called Faye Dunaway a sallow, anorexic heifer at the Oscars. Whenever I demurred that I would never say such a thing, to a powerful woman at that, she assured me that my Cambridge bone structure was what kept people from decking below my waistline with a tire iron.

Shana had apparently called thrice while I was at work and left a voice mail announcing that Laurent approved of her kidnapping me for a weekend while he held a conference on a St. Tropez beachfront. In his place, I would be, at Ozempic needlepoint, attending an American political networking party as Shana’s plus-one. She would circulate Laurent’s name as a very serious contender for the American ambassadorship, and I would regale the crowd with my foreign pedantry and a titillating ignorance of American divides. Her connection, who had sent the original invite, was her former colleague’s husband, code named Beau. Better known, I soon discovered, to worldwide anarchists as one Bueford Targill, the wealthiest carpetbagger in Arlington, Virginia.

According to Shana, Beau was eager to meet me on the suburban fringes of D.C. not simply as Laurent’s stand-in but rather as another sparkling curio from the menagerie of cultured things she surrounded herself with. And she thought we had a lot in common. From what I could glean through a cursory Wikipedia bio, Beau was the younger son of a New York railroad dynasty. By twenty-one, he’d managed his first personal feat of dictatorial heroism, couping his uncle’s Long Island liqueur store chain on the very prescient eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Skinning millions from depressed vets and teenage junkies for a near quarter century had now bought him deep ties to a quiet community of libertarian wine collectors and billionaire alcoholics throughout the mid-Atlantic region.

Why I should be of momentary interest to someone with Beau’s maverick bona fides wasn’t totally beyond my guessing capacities. After all, I couldn’t deny the obvious parallels in his wunderkind bullshitter biography to mine. As far I know, I was Googleable to anarchists as Campbell Grice-Hutchinson, a parliamentary economics researcher hired for writing an anonymous op-ed that disemboweled the U.K.’s upper crust just poorly enough to land a famous boss coasting on an inherited peerage.

Given our biographical overlaps, I understood the boredom behind Beau’s motives, and, without thinking any further, offered a flippant ascent to Laurent and Shana’s hostage plot. I figured, Beau may be in need a diversion from himself. And I knew that I could, for little effort at this developmental stage of my personhood, be such a diversion. I could charm a Beau a dozen with my first name alone. On prior work trips, I’d learned that wealthy older Americans of Beau’s species always clap for an accent show from an admittedly tweedy Brit. Perhaps we dandies from the old country tickle some inner imperialist roots, our seeming insouciance towards humanity’s tragedies resonating with white America’s nativist dream: a de facto top slot in the pecking order, on a tier immune from bootstraps morality and capitalistic cattle prodding to try harder.

What I hadn’t prepared for, however, was an instant call back to my RSVP text from Shana, made with Beau salivating over her shoulder at dawn somewhere aquatic. I could hear him pant against the inhalations of waves, in a molasses-coated tenor lilt, asking her to ask me if I was qualified to speak with him about his tariff concerns. Shana, who never minced epithets, labeled us “squeamish pigs” for dancing around a private man-to-man conversation. She then informed Beau that I- as Laurent’s body double- would be happy to chat over the weekend on dry land. While my head dangled at an escape opportunity out of habit, I quietly cursed my inability to claim continental European unfamiliarity with the English language.

Nonetheless, I forever held my peace and in due course of three days, found myself sandwiched in a cheap airplane seat without a working TV. I had nothing more to keep my pulse going then the crappy scraps of oppo research I’d compiled on Beau last minute. Unfortunately, most of my findings amounted to an unoriginal portrait of a very punchable prestige douchebag. Beau, I had to assume, was nothing more than an upper middle-class dad blindly stabbing at mid-life relevance.

            He’d already attempted to find his unique angle through Bikram yoga, charity auction attending, and Bible reading. Now, he was on to his literary bro fad, hawking a jingoistic WWII love story romanticizing a Nazi defector. From what I could gather, he’d even wire frauded a few million to Dan Brown’s publishers and was plotting a shadow campaign for his debut’s Pushcart win. I admit, I skimmed his book out of a desperate need to kill time.

 But eventually thank God, my rickety plane plunged and dribbled towards the Ronald Reagan Washington National tarmac, forcing Beau’s manuscript on my laptop from my all too eager hands lubed with secondhand sweat. While babies rioted and I commiserated with the lack of Dom Perignon in our collective bloodstream, our captain announced that we would be taxing for ten. An elderly gentleman needed to finish his first-class, mile high heart attack on the flight ahead. I took the opportunity to check in with Shana, who answered my hello with a threat. I had an afternoon to find a slightly frumpy, mega church appropriate suit.

She subsequently banned me from overly fitted shirts and printed socks. These were, per a recent American CBS news special, the secret tells that would reveal my truth as a foreign-born, woke pseudointellectual minus genius visa who may be asked to show papers. For security reasons, she wanted me to play a slightly boorish, rabidly heterosexual Jason Statham type. Directed thusly, I deplaned while in disguise as my older brother, Aubrey, a drama school dropout who found his true calling at Deutsche Bank and alcoholics anonymous.

Shana had her company comp me generously enough for my efforts at self-erasure. A black Cadillac with buffed windows arrived at the airport bearing my name misspelled on the dash, chauffeured by an older Slavic punk in aviators who hoisted me into his back seat, prisoner-exchange style. He soon left me at a five-star hotel dressed up as a sleazy Victorian cabin where, I was warned, rightwing venture capitalists regularly trolled for youthful escorts with my weight and hairline.

The oak paneled hotbox suite I was pre-assigned showcased an uninspiring view of a parking lot teaming with clunky American made cars and even squarer couples who I didn’t think would appreciate me seeing them off on their passionless dates. So instead, after showering, I decided to go full method and join their tribe of pudgy-jawed men and cross-bearing women. Tired, hungry, and cash poor due to a mouthy mix-up at the exchange counter, I let myself be judged while I waited to sundown in the hotel lobby. A few people took note of my unfortunately fitted Tom Ford suit, the only option that I had thrown into my suitcase. I made a point of greeting them in an Etonian drawl and was warmly rewarded with avoidant hostility.

To my relief, my previous mob handler arrived within the hour and delivered me in his Cadillac to a space-age saltbox palace protruding from a stretch of fake farmland. At the silver front doors, I was greeted as Cinderella by Shana’s assistant, Evan, a vapid former child star. While we marched past an endless oppression of sculptural bric-a-brac and oil blobbed canvases, Evan briefed me on the evening’s run of show. Shana would parade me through the hors d’oeuvres round with her professional acquaintances. Next, we would part for food soundtracked by a prog-folk cover band. At last, sometime between digestion and tomorrow, I would be locked in a game room with Beau.

Evan had to pretend that he was working, and too soon for my liking, he released me into a creamy, sterile ballroom resembling a bank lobby, where I stood no chance at anonymity. Before I could survey the space for a refuge on the walls, a mass surge of the homogenous crowd inside propelled my less than willing descent to the ballroom’s center. I was shuffled cheek-to-cheek, between tanned insider trading husbands and tanned influencer wives.

Fortunately, it was hard to avoid the five foot ten-inch glittering column of copper tweed and cinnamon extensions that was Shana in the flesh. She quickly pulled me aside to straighten my poorly chosen blue tie and stick a cigarette between my teeth, a necessary show of respect to the homeowner. When I protested, she pointed her cigarette over the crowd at a prunnish man, holding court among a group of mostly women by a 70s style mini bar.

“The host. Harry.”

“Harry what?” I couldn’t help a juvenile dig.

“Nothing. He’s a congressman from Pennsylvania. On the nuclear disarmament committee.”

“Right. So, is nuclear hairy nothing, one of the pricks allergic to universal health insurance? He looks unwell.”

“Harry Chitten. Third generation heir to the Chitten Tobacco billions. The wife died a month ago. That’s all you need.” Shana swatted my arm with her clutch bag, but I could hear a whiskey-fired laugh escape her throat, rattling the pearls around her neck. She nudged me towards Harry. I balked.

“You can really see his devastation.”

“His memoir’s coming out this year. With Harper Collins.”

“And you would like me to ferret how much his life rights are worth?”

“But ease into it. Tell him your grandfather was in MI6. He’ll eat that lore.”

“Should I say my last name is Bond?”

“No, you don’t give the impression of being MI6!” And with that morale boosting tidbit of reassurance, Shana perp walked me past the throng of women coalescing around Harry, the loaded bachelor.

What I lacked in any exposed cleavage Harry may have desired, I immediately attempted to overcompensate for using well-rounded flattery skills. My years in Parliament had schooled me in the art of turning verbal tricks to please my advantageously connected, very important superiors. To this day I can, almost involuntarily, excrete feigned codependency, naïve admiration, and idolatry of leadership so fermented on the nose, you half expect my cottage cheese vocabulary to curdle midair. And yet, as my mother would say in reference to her latest best friend, narcissists will devour whatever quality morsel of attention you feed them, poisoning be dammed.

For a brief minute in Harry’s presence, I managed a superficial conversation covering British versus American rain patterns and my psychological discomfort with feet, balls, and discussing organized sports called football. But I surmised in an instant that Harry would never fall in lust with me, and so I offered him, as a member of Congress, my unfettered opinion on retaliatory tariff policies. Failing to take the hint, Harry shouted me down before I could poke holes in State secrets and announced that I was more deranged than his Pro-Palestinian grad student son-in-law. I was dumbstruck with that left punted blow and found myself tongue-tied, in an unnerving downward dog mental state. No clever quips or snarky facial contortions were left in my arsenal to decimate Harry’s character. I could only sincerely decry his ignorance, my head hung, words drooping, while he leered past me at a cocktail waitress.

Shana saw the implosion from across the room and immediately dragged me into a hallway covered with floor-to-ceiling medieval triptychs in neon lit frames to reminded me of my purpose for the night. The crowd expected peppy, fake news fairytales in my accent, and fake news I would provide them as their hired jester. When I rejoined with my personal conspiracy, that the British treasury was paying to keep her and Laurent out of the country, she swallowed a pill from her clutch and threatened to shove a few into one of my orifices, too. Needless to say, I acquitted myself with passable neutrality for the remainder of the hors d’oeuvres social hour.

            A rubber chicken wrapped in soggy TV diner dough served as our main meal course and kept my jaw occupied while infamous meat skeptic Shana small-talked at our tablemates for me. In short order, our imbalanced efforts to enact mass mind control and a Mandala-effect rewrite of my unstable foreigner impression came to fruition at a disconcerting pace. I was suddenly astroturfed into the stoic masculine archetype that the American crowd could write off in terms of their mythology. I was finally a safe, known quantity.

The musical interlude that followed my silent comeback tour made for a decent break. Around me, guests swayed into random spouses with a palpable, fervent conviction in their moral exceptionalism, like part-time sinners being live exorcised back to good standing at an Evangelical rave. At last a comfortable anonymous, as I dared to slip out my cellphone and check the time, Shana prodded me with her cigarette.

            “Beau’s waiting. In the den.”

            “But I forgot to swipe my butter knife, in case!”

            “He’s asking for a chat. How is that threatening?”

            “I don’t want to be accountable for his Nazi obsessions!”

Shana had no further comment. She shook her extensions and dragged me by my tie through the ballroom, down another hallway, to a toffee hued, marble void of a den that could’ve doubled as Heaven’s millennial insane asylum. She promptly abandoned me at the half-cracked open door with instructions to pulpify my ego before entering. I agreed and lingered at the entrance a minute, trembling at the prospect of being objectified to satisfy some stranger’s curiosity for an evening’s entertainment.

Upon peeking inside the room, I spied Beau before he spied me. There he sat on a velveteen brocade chair at a vintage pool table, with the placid smile of a conqueror surveying his new dungeon. From my vantage, Beau cut the ungentle giant shadow of a once wholesome man, now salted and sinewy from straddling two centuries of losers. However, his face, I learned on second glance, was perpetually boyish and cunning, never broadcasting any deeper emotions than self-satisfied mirth. He wore faded jeans, heeled loafers, and a flowy white dress shirt buttoned to his nipple line that lent him a hippy pastor impression.

            I made the first move over the threshold. Beau, who I knew could hear my feet deliberating on the stone floor, evidentially needed me to approach him. When he deigned to turn around and acknowledge my entry, I bowed my head. A calculated submissive offering, I reasoned with my ego, that I could later use as a bargaining chip for his good will. He pointed at a spindly wooden dining chair in the corner of the room, and the instant my back was to him, addressed me.

            “Saw my book, huh? Downloaded it? I get a notice.”

            “I read it on the plane.”

            “Thoughts?”

I pulled my designated spartan seat to the pool table, consciously maintaining an arm plus a pistol’s length between us. Beau noticed and scooted closer until I could sniff his pomade and Nicorette breathe.

            “There’s a certain minimalistic prose-”

            “Don’t shit me.”

            I flinched reflexively at his preternatural ability to see through my impulse to politesse and dipped my head again. I had to give him credit.

            “You overwrote four hundred pages of sophomoric incel propaganda.”

            He couldn’t flinch. Instead, he laughed with a deceptively upbeat resonance. “Atta boy!”

            “It wasn’t quite my bag.” I did my best to project humility while I internally smarted at being called a boy.

            “Tell your boss. I couldn’t do all his recent social commentary fluff. On that late night show you guys have? It’s like he’s trying too hard to cover something.”

            I must have looked incredulous or lombotimized because he reached out and slapped my swinging kneecaps, almost playfully, as if checking a dear friend for signs of life. My brain instantly shorted and defaulted to my usual defense in increasingly intimate situations. I let go of my trigger.

“Would you have preferred he fetishize carnal hypermasculinity, Aryan supremacy, and sexual nihilism?”

Beau all but purred with deep satisfaction, clearly yet confoundingly enraptured by our abrupt tête-à-tête. And to my shock, I felt a similar electric comfort at having been accurately assessed and accepted to my rotten core by him. Here was this Machiavellian, thirty odd years my senior, from another continent, who inexplicably felt a natural connection to some base aspect of my character.

“I usually don’t like to point fingers.”

“But you will…at a deserving candidate.”

“To Hell I will. Tell him he’s selling out. Pandering.”

“He doesn’t earn a living from talk show appearances.”  A factual, non-denial of Beau’s argument, I thought.

“So? He’d be more popular if he stuck to playing up his instincts.”

“And be cancelled?” This line elicited a chortle from Beau.

Suddenly self-conscious, I followed up with a non-committal shrug, leaving open a gap to test the strength of our so far even keeled repartee. I was eager to be distracted by a little silence, misdirected even, from my yearning for approval from someone who had violated my limits for off-color taste. But Beau, ever one step ahead, remained unreadable, eventually throwing the burden of conversational momentum back onto me.

“What are Laurent’s instincts, in your opinion?” Part of me was curious to hear him struggle for civility.

“He’ll do whatever is convenient for him. Isn’t that why you’re here? He couldn’t be bothered.”

“I wanted the free vacation.”

“Sure. You know, Shana told me last night. About his bad behavior. Taking bribes. Sleeping around. Maybe selling secrets. I’d be more upset right now, if I were in your position.”

“Why. I’m not a hypocrite.”

“What’s that mean.”

“I don’t feel qualified to moralize about other peoples’ fuckups.

“Well, he’ll be out of your government soon. And you’ve got your side hustle.”

“Oh, I don’t normally defend Laurent for free. This weekend was a one off.”

 “Nah, come on. I looked you up. You write some neolib, mole Substack. That could be a problem for you. If your higher ups knew the Marxist agenda you’re peddling?” His threat was accompanied by an expectant glare.

My chicken-tenderized jaw muscles unhinged and a helpless snort suddenly tumbled from my diaphragm. The Stockholm Syndrome that Shana had mysteriously injected into me began to wear off and the stupendous lack of gravity to my predicament sank in. I had been lured to a foreign land as a pawn in a comically bizarre shakedown of my government that I, the unslickest of low-level data crunchers, couldn’t take seriously on behalf of King and Country.

“How much would he want for a trade deal.” Beau’s eyes slit at me as if he was intimidating a serious opponent rather than a confused spectator.

“I suppose…an Ambassadorship?” Maybe it’s an Anglo trait, but I would never talk about money for money’s sake unless instructed to be deliberately gauche for a paycheck. And I didn’t think it my place to tell Beau that Laurent was broke and would only accept a bribe in crypto funneled through a few different countries.

“Okay. Shana’s dad’s a former business friend. That’s why I’m happy to support her. And your boss, Laurent? That’s his name? He’s in your Treasury. He’s an economist, right?”

“God, no, he hires qualified economists!” I couldn’t help my indignation. I had long ago come to accept that my deep resentment towards Laurent would be etched on my cremation urn besides a comparative list of our credentials.

“But he’s the got power to cut export spirit tariffs. Cause I’ll be honest. I’m losing millions by the minute on the petty numbers you slap on your liquors. And I know guys who can buy him an international advisory role. Pretty good consolation after he’s canned, no?”

“I would just be the idiot messenger, then?”

“More than that. Shana needs to fuck you. Before she fucks me. I’m happy to wait.”

“Wait. Do I look old enough for her?” I had to smile, utterly charmed at his unwavering belief in the cool, slick, bad-assness of the high stakes narrative he was crafting around our truly random interaction.

But Beau didn’t seem to appreciate my humor. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”

 His order, delivered in a lower register, concluded the substantive portion of our first date. No longer dreaming of silence, I rattled off a litany of possible excuses to myself for why I needed to escape before settling on the perfectly low brow urge to evacuate my bowls. While I made my exit, Beau’s tongue victory lapped his upturned lips. He beamed and leaned back on his throne to gloat at me, thrilled at the delusion that he had won some battle of wits between us. I could even sense him sneering at my back as I trapsed out of the asylum, doubled over to stuff down giggles.

Having completed my task of servicing Beau, I lacked any desire to watch Shana chug a night cap, so in lieu of returning to the ballroom, I texted my driver, Uri, to meet me at the valet stand. He was prompt and chivalrous like only former Soviet butcher could be. He let my nervy feet prop on his dash and before leaving me, asked if I would care for free kava poppers to take an edge off my night. I declined but agreed to keep his number in case I changed my mind.

Once safe in my hotel room, popper free, I broke another cardinal rule that I usually held sacred on workdays. For the first time in weeks, I vulnerably sought comfort from the woman who called me my father’s left-leaning, stunted prick. In a bid for understanding and acknowledgement that I wasn’t an idiot, I phoned my mother who, as customary, stonewalled and sent my attention plea to her almost full voicemail.

Still, I must’ve sounded needy enough, for ten minutes later, while I was excavating chicken dust from my gums, I received a link to initiate a video chat sent to my laptop. On camera, I pretended to self-soothe while Ida Berstein Grice-Hutchinson lovingly slapped golden squid mucus patches on her shaved upper cheekbones. Seconds of wordless staring was all we could manage before she launched an invective against my misguided decision to leave London for the classless States without consulting in order, herself, a psychologist, and a self-defense trainer.

“I’m off the border of Maryland! Not Moscow.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to come home in one piece.” She pursed her lips at me. Then, as usual, her dreaded inquiry came as to whether I had served as a travel companion to anyone who wasn’t an older man or a saphically-inclined woman. I was unprepared to consider what I was to Shana other than a disposable mouthpiece for her boyfriend, so I coyly suggested that such a question would be better put to Laurent when he returned from his vacation. Ida replied that she’d be more interested in hearing from my psychologist. Of course, we mutually agreed, I would never see a self-defense trainer.

“And look, you were mugged!” She pointed at her screen, in the direction of a small cut I’d scratched on my forehead while pinching my eyes shut to stop them from rolling.

“I was fleeing a party.”

“You don’t attend parties anymore. You attend work events.” True, I had been exiled from society parties two years ago. The whole debacle had been a misunderstanding, triggered when I accidentally walked in on a famous Siberian financier- call him Mr. Oligarch- squatting pantsless over a five-star urinal, filming himself as a present to a young woman being tracked as a terrorist.

 In rapid succession, Mr. Oligarch called me depraved for making eye contact with him mid-orgasm and in defense of my honor, I reminded him, his insult wouldn’t carry weight coming from a cocksucking Putin puppet. He may have emitted a stream of fluids in my crotch’s direction, I can’t recall. But I do remember that I responded with an inelegant yet fairly topical pee tape joke that landed me in even hotter water a week later when Putin Puppet’s video infected the work computer of his lover who turned out to be a cosmetology student with an arms dealer husband. As a result, Putin Puppet was quickly paid to retire by the Crown for his cringy taste in partners and I was banned from networking social events and elevated to assistant head researcher for the Exchequer’s office simultaneously over an encrypted email.

Naturally, Ida was less than helpful in the subsequent years following my promotion. She never let the opportunity pass to express her opinion that my earnest attempt at an actual beurocratic career was a disgrace. It was shameful for her baby son of privilege to debase himself with rolled sleeves and paperwork when he ought to be brunching on hedgefund CEO’s dimes and smuggling designer drugs to aristocrats like her friends’ children!

As I blathered on about my American evening’s non-party work event, I didn’t sense Ida’s usual disapproval of my shop talk so much as her crueler, but easier to manage, boredom. And when at last, I concluded my bulleted plot summary just shy of my meeting with Beau, she merely sighed and told me I should go to sleep. I don’t know what prompted me, in that instant, to cling to her from across the Atlantic, but I fought for her waning attention.

I gave her the play-by-play of Beau’s deal, sparring no joke as I dissected how he had disarmed and charmed me with his earnest attempt at a B-thriller business deal. I even waded into his implication that I would make a serviceable honeypot to lure Shana into eventually settling for him. During my recounting, Ida’s glazed over expression- highlighted in blue light from her off-camera cellphone screen- slowly morphed into a horrified grin at thought of me struggling to seduce a 50-something Californian.

She found no further humor in our conversation, however, when I asked her to choose whether or not I should entertain Beau’s offer. She glared at me with the shame and denial-laced indignation I’d only seen in fame hungry parents of serial killers on reality TV. Of course, I had to take the offer! The opportunity to serve as Laurent’s second in a frivolous, pathetically slimy international scam was life-altering enough to compete with my brother’s latest accomplishments and wacky enough to leave my father unintimidated.

With my utility to my family so determined in her mind, Ida stopped short, conveniently reducing herself to an extraneous, placeholder variable in the unresolved equation of our one-to-one relationship. She turned sideways, facing me only in profile form, and offered a goodbye to my miniaturized reflection in her vanity mirror.

I lay restless for the remainder of the night and sorely unprepared for the flurry of texts I received at dawn. Evan wanted to know if I would meet Shana and Beau at a lakefront clubhouse for a breakfast of smoked seafood and some mystery drink called farm juice. Though I abhor seafood and alcoholic vegetables in liquid form, I quickly accepted, if only for the sheer novelty of seeing Beau and Shana together.

But just as swiftly, an uncomfortable afterthought tinged with trepidation struck me. I could tell from reassessing Evan’s punctuation that he wasn’t asking me a question. He was giving me a double winked directive. Perhaps I didn’t have a choice to decline in Beau’s story. Perhaps, Beau still needed me, or whatever societal evil it was that I represented in his mythos, to go down on American soil as a loser.

By the time I was fully functional and dressed, I was running too late to caffeinate away any lingering anxieties that I may have harbored towards meeting Beau again. Uri was dispatched to drag me to the lake and on our sunrise drive, I did my best to stare through the undeniable, physical prowess of the hilly terrain that swept past the sepia windows of his Cadillac. I needed my tired eyes to resist assumptions pulled from Hollywood lies about what kinds of billion-dollar golden souls were really buying up the Lincoln Log mansions and golf courses clogging the arteries of the Shenandoahs. And, I reasoned, if this breakfast was to be my last stand as a countryman of integrity, I wanted reasons to fight a good fight against Beau.

Unfortunately, I had done enough stalking on my plane ride over to reasonably conclude that Beau’s character couldn’t be wholesale excoriated under the coastal definition of a deplorable. He was, as far as I could tell, a harmlessly sheltered byproduct of his time and place in American society. No more or less insular and ignorant than what you would expect from a pale, 50-something wearing pointy-toed boots to a Southern men’s only social on a weeknight. He feared that God may not exist and more often prayed to Clint Eastwood, Ronald Reagan, and Sam Adams just in case. His evenings were spent on Cormac McCarthy ranch romps, historical documentaries, and chaste dates at wine bars less honkytonk brothel than Christian romcom set. In short, nothing about his profile suggested an intentional propensity towards mass evil. Grand-wizard hording guns and girls for a racially motivated, apocalyptic crusade in the name of the Confederacy he was not.

Still, I could see no version of our overlapping timelines in which we would be anything more than one poorly executed exchange from clashing over the logic laws of our realities. He lived in a mental world where his so-called trade deal was a very realistic, reasonable, achievable transaction. I lived in one where such a deal would be nixed as too stupid a premise for amateur improv spoofing American ignorance.

In my twenties, I know I would’ve derived great satisfaction in reducing him to a punchline strawman, unworthy of serious consideration as a rational conversational partner. Now older and less assured, my intuition cautioned me from ignoring Beau’s palpable drive for supremacy. No doubt, he saw himself as the unimpeachable hero, the Jesus of his own messianic struggle for supreme power in which every human, pet, and child was a cudgel born to satisfy his outlandish needs. He certainly wasn’t going to shrink back and submit himself for judgement from someone of my non-authority.

———————————————————————————————————

Our party met dockside, by a small manmade lake behind a country club recreation center’s main office, copywritten into the fancier sounding “marina boathouse”. Beau pulled up to my feet in a designer golfcart with Shanna stretched over his shoulders from the backseat. Ignoring her, Beau cut the motor and offered me a shake. As our fingers tugged back and forth like those of dictators at an international summit, my eyes lingered long enough on his hand catch a glimpse of his white, underworked nails. Shana studied us with a curious expression.

“Hit it off last night. Together?”

“He’s a decent kid!” Beau, for all his crass scheming, knew how to pull off a respectable bluff in the face of a cheap shot inuendo. We silently agreed, no follow-up on Shana’s implications required.

While Beau and Shana small talked past my wobbly hello, I tried to steel my attention towards Beau’s many faults, but I couldn’t resist the sensation of my innards melting as he shot me a folksy grin, my designating me his special ally. How had he read so quickly into my desires?

I’d always craved to be a beloved son to someone else’s elder statesman, haloed with the pride my father lavished on Aubrey. My exhaustion-addled brain convinced me now, that this coming breakfast was my last chance to lock down my patriarch before my hair would grey and I’d be deemed too old to seek advice from other men. Laurent, the latest significant male in my day-to-day, was a foregone disaster, who, in my humble opinion, didn’t deserve me as his squire. The many other normal-hearted fathers I passed routinely on London’s streets saw nothing worthy of love in my prickly exterior. Maybe, I reasoned, Beau was the best quasi-psycho that I’d ever be able to claim for a mentor.

To my surprise, what I thought was artificial good will towards me on Beau’s part, didn’t fade as he guided us to an iron table at the dock’s end, preset with mason jar bellinis. Over the table’s sacrum was a pungent, marble charcuterie board covered in fish gametes and dehydrated meats. I immediately declined the alcohol and the snapper spawn flesh closest to my mouth. Shana performed her best vegan for Scientologist Lent cop-out and began to gnosh on an energy bar from her pocket. Only Beau dared lather buffalo jerky cubes in salmon crème fraiche with his bare fingers.

Thankfully, I wasn’t required to eat or speak. Shana came prepped with an agenda that she rattled off her cellphone. She wanted to talk partnerships with Netflix and name drop. Beau evidentially wanted to drink, swallow, and study her lips. On my part, I was happy to be a forgotten voyeur with minimal stakes in their two-hander soap opera flirtation. I could, at my lonely pleasure, find Rabelaisian satisfaction in measuring the shrinking distance between their thighs while listening to the sultry beat of Beau intermittently slurping down caviar.

I was soon on the precipice of some freak-of-science, open-eyed REM non-lucid state. Any relevant queries that I should’ve demanded my captors answer related to my role in their gameplay dissipated into a fixation on the answer to one useless question. Would Beau’s gagging noises cancel out any aphrodisiac points accrued based on his oyster consumption? My consciousness was tied up, contemplating a calculation based on Beau’s mountain of shells, when Shana clanged her mason jar with her Cartier watch in my direction.

“What happened to you! No complaints? No running commentary?”

Confabulation and flooding the zone with non sequitur distractions from my true feelings were never among my strengths. I made a swift decision in the moment, under Shana’s scrutiny, not to stretch my acting chops too far. My best hand was to trauma dump, invoke any first amendment rights afforded to white tourists, and book it back to London early.

“Still adjusting to the time zone.” I gave myself one preliminary lie.

“You were perfectly fine yesterday.”

“I didn’t realize this weekend was a shakedown.”

Shana frowned uneasily at Beau. If he was perturbed by my comment or Shana’s sagging cheekbones, his face didn’t betray him. He whispered to Shana with a silver fox smolder, cutting me entirely out of her line of sight.

“It’s a boy thing.” He stroked his golden, peppery stubble.

“We’re not boys.” I could hear my wholesome intolerance for insincerity seep through my lungs, crushed under the weight of my crossed arms. I was throwing the gauntlet down to break though Beau’s wall of smarm. He had to recognize the obvious, pathetic ridiculousness of his proposal. On what grounds was he staking his belief that Laurent could or would, for that matter, effect sweeping international economic policy reforms for his benefit alone? And, more pressingly, why go through me?

“You said you’d talk to him!” Beau addressed Shana while shaking his head at me, as if I was their delinquent child that she needed to discipline.

“You didn’t read my email.” She shoved her seat back from the table.

Beau turned to me. “Not worth rehashing last night. You think you can sway Laurent to consider?”

“Absolutely, under no-“ I stopped mid-diatribe, unnerved as I watched Shana abruptly snake a hand over Beau’s collarbone. She began to unsubtly massage his nipples through his shirt, in such stark violation of public breakfast norms that I was rendered commentless, a prisoner to my puerile sense of propriety/

Beau, confidence restored, trained a dark pupil on me. “I’ll give you a personal transfer. Right now. Five hundred grand. Your money. You can quit the day job. You’re miserable, aren’t you? Lying for a living. That you’re not a socialist.”

“Oh, I’m happy to have a clean record, thanks.”

“Want it in Bitcoins instead of…what’s it for you, euros?”

“No, I’m not an EU citizen. But that’s irrelevant. Wouldn’t it be really God damn poor form for a socialist to take any sort of monetary bribe?” I almost grabbed a bellini but my conscience paralyzed my hand in time. Shana noticed and distracted Beau with her surprisingly magical fingers while I recomposed myself. Beu didn’t acknowledge her efforts, prompting her to abandon him and strike back to the golf cart.

“Hey, it was worth a try. I was positive you’d break at some point.”

“Was that your goal?”

 “Not necessarily. But I would’ve caved in your position. You’ve got some integrity. And balls.” Beau lazily stretched in his seat, turned on and totally at ease with my anger.

“To be fair, I think your offer was as much a litmus for intelligence as integrity. And I’m not thick enough to overestimate my money laundering skill. Or blockchain hacking competency, really.” With that admission, I stood, making sure to grip the table edge so intensely that Beau’s unhinged oyster shells rattled to his flip flops. In return, he buttered on his puppyish grin, momentarily drawing me back to him.

 “Flying home today?”

“Planning on it now.” Truthfully, my flight wasn’t scheduled until the following evening.

“Good. You say anything. I’ll sue you to fucking ashes.” He purred.

“Of course.” I offered him my hand and the best smile I could manage while squinting at the sun’s reflection on the lake behind his head. He waited a solid beat for my arm to droop before vigorously shaking my hand, his thumbnail pressing on the tender, exposed skin flap between my thumb and pointer.

Nothing more came of our breakfast. Beau waved and drove Shana back to the front of the boathouse into oblivion. I chose to keep my distance and circle the lake’s perimeter while I scrambled to secure discount same-day flights to Heathrow on my cellphone.

Barely a minute into my panic search, low reception left me wandering off course, hands held beseechingly high to the electric grid Gods, on a zombified scaffold march to the surrounding woods. But the lords must’ve had mercy on me, interrupting my dawdle with a text. Uri, by now my favorite American, had somehow telepathically sensed my pain and was dutifully waiting with my luggage in the parking lot. When we met, he presented me with black coffee and a jelly donut.

I was touched, as he fed me and took control of my ticket search, explaining that his friend’s ex-wife was an air traffic controller who would send me the family-only discount code. Having spent all my morals on escaping a massive international fraud, I had little resistance left to decline a minor fraud. Without so much as a qualm, I agreed to accept the handout, and snagged the first seat Uri recommended on a notorious, off-brand airline boasting a Wisconsin layover.

Sadly, saliva-infused beer musk boiled with funky midwestern sweat wasn’t powerful enough to inoculate me against the heady flood of alternate endings to Beau’s breakfast encephaliting my brain. I did time in Milwaukee fighting heightened doomscroll compulsions, riffling though magazines to distract with tales of billionaire embezzlers, humanitarian crisis enthusiasts, edgelords, mass murderers, and sex offenders pursuing the full spectrum of predilections. These powerhouses were, I gleaned, the cultural icons with artfully transgressive occupations who attracted talent agents and profiles by renowned journalists. My only takeaway, arrived at just before my boarding time, was that unfortunately, I would never possess the requisite psychopathy to become a North American hero. I was too timid a loser.

Somehow in keeping with my loser’s weekend of failures, my flight from Milwaukee arrived a folksy four hours late at the wrong Heathrow gate. Our pilot had experienced an amnesic episode induced by the strobing lights of a dayglow blitz announcing predawn airport operations.

I was left trapped in my seat with ample time to fret over my coming Monday morning meeting that, due to my early escape, I could still attend. What-ifs of the past forty-eight hours quickly matured to what-ifs of a future variety, only fattened up and cynicized thanks to my limited Wifi access. In total silence and epileptic semi-dark, I began to obsess over the rather unpleasant possibility awaiting me. What if Laurent was planning to sack me for insubordination?

I must’ve been unconvinced by my own drama. Maybe, I wagered, Laurent didn’t think enough of me to think about me at all. This upsetting notion had pinned itself to my frontal lobe, so that by the time I was released from my plane to gather my carouselled bags and bearings, I had no more brain cells left for effective guessing at Laurent’s motives. I was simply in crisis mode, disoriented and unhealthily eager to execute the familiar motions of my typical work week.

 I snagged a beaten, old school London cab back to my studio and finally addressed the anvil headache reminding me that I hadn’t slept or eaten anything more substantive than a quarter donut in twenty-four hours. After dozing for ten, I dry swallowed a mouthful of old cereal and skipped showering or changing clothes. There was no logic in wasting a clean shirt on my own blood and piss. After all, I was pretty sure that I’d soon be dragged before a firing squad of my colleagues, all rearing to blow their bullet loads in my face behind Laurent’s hallowd doors.

I was so sure, in fact, that I hopped off the tube a stop early to experience walking with dignity for one final mile. My farewell speech was half memorized when the dreaded cellphone that I’d only recently freed from airplane mode began to throb in my pocket. My legs, aided by irrational conspiracies, instantly lunged into midday traffic in a bid to provoke a sympathetic injury that would hopefully make my sacking all the more awkward and unpleasant.

Ignoring drivers’ accusations of insurance fraud and my own private urge to give a Midnight Cowboy salute, I scuttled to the opposite busy sidewalk and let my feet pause to the drumbeat of my text ringtone. Though I fought for inertia, my physical corpse was ferried downstream, in a school of middle-managers who paid no attention while I peeked through slit fingers at the thousands, upon thousands of messages pinging and pecking at my eyeballs. A particularly stylized all caps warning from none other than Shana was perfectly timed to hook my attention. “Laurent office hacked. Bribery, sex crimes, racism, etc. under scrutiny! Run!”

Her command popped my knees from their sockets. My upper half plummeted like a broken lift, until I was squatting into a homemade pipe bomb, scattering the crowd around me. I was wracked with the sudden existential consideration. To whom or to what institution did my loyalty ultimately belong? Should I limp off now and save myself from becoming a Hitchcockian casualty? Make my escape to some remote tax haven? Should I hang around long enough to be the designated try hard who helped investigators only to be arrested for someone else’s fuckups?

I’d seen enough true crime content to have a sense of roughly where my character would be pigeonholed by the media when the salacious stories dropped. I was a natural patsy who would be thrown to the pitchforks when the masses came to fillet the rich. I could hear myself careening through an unsympathetic defense of my conduct, failing to convey ignorance regarding any specific knowledge of the shameful horrors orchestrated by the MPs above me. I could just as easily envision myself, foot shoved in mouth, unable to articulate how I had been seduced by the enticing rigor of my job, mentally satiated into an obliviousness towards the obvious evils my efforts were supporting.

From my limited vantage, it was perfectly clear how someone could emotionally bifurcate a love for their singular role from a loving endorsement of the ethos underpinning the whole shitty system in which their role functioned. Likewise, I could hate Laurent’s breed simultaneously enjoy servitude in what I had convinced myself was his crucial Treasury office. But I was also acutely aware that no one with a 21^st century attention span would hear me out long enough to question their interpretation of my facts. No one would cult classic a version of this disaster epic in which I was a harmless, workaholic scapegoat with little involvement in my boss’s personal, criminal failings.

My misgivings amplified as a street officer forced me to stand and rejoin the crowd. Shana, I realized, uniquely understood the magnitude of reputational damage that would trickle from offices of more tabloid famous MPs to eventually water-torture Laurent’s exhaustive list of toadies on which both of our names were guaranteed to be unredacted. Her recommendation to run wasn’t flippant so much as it was a well-reasoned business risk. At the least, I knew that I had every reason to give credence to her professional call over the hairbrained jail free cards I was currently being sold by anyone who had ever crossed my path with Laurent in the foreground.

As expected, my work group chat for the under 50s was the perfect echo chamber to marinate my panic. In fact, a good portion of my fellow able-bodied cowards were- with their fabulous educational credentials and unlimited parental resources- momentarily plotting a very public exodus via text. My officemates needed me, ten minutes before Armageddon, to confirm that I would join a walk out with them for the news cameras, throwing an “I’m actually a labor voter!” hand grenade when asked for a quote by The Guardian. I was, at this point, too frightened of my texts being monitored for signs of treason to respond. Instead, I erased my settings and chucked my cellphone down a sewer grate, hoping the bacteria below would eat away any traces of DNA.

Cord cut, I raced back to the tube station, guided by visions of burning my laptop near the park by my grandparents’ Cotswold backyard before purchasing, on gift card, another one-way to a shady hideout like the American Pentagon. But I never made it to safety. A chauffeured Bently had been loitering on the half-block between my front door and Kensington Station. Someone ordered the driver to loop around, so that as I was chucked up from the station mouth, the backseat door popped open. Three gloved hands snatched me off the street and nestled me, a dangly-legged doll, between two official government secretaries who definitely moonlit as handgun totting bodyguards. They were all too expressionless for my liking as they unveiled a contract worth an entire monogrammed binder. Just for me.

 According to the contract, if I could agree to the standard terms of firing for downsizing purposes, Parliament would make sure that my name never came up in inquiries associated with any MPs’ personal bribery, corruption, intimidation, or sexual harassment charges. However, I would undoubtably be called to testify as one of Laurent’s former underlings, were he to be placed specifically under a government investigation along with his colleagues. All I had to ensure for now was that I didn’t mention to the media any observed work-related “ethical lapses” or discuss any domestic and international travel taken for work in the prior eighteen months. The bodyguards promised me that these were “extremely fair” terms and stipulations presented only to a select few problematic worker bees.

I don’t know if it was newfound Americana overconfidence or extreme exhaustion that made me forgo pretending to read the contract like the good little student I had always been. With the expensive fountain pen pinned to the binder, I scribbled a barely coherent signature on the line below the boilerplate goodbye memo requirements. Then, flipping a few pages, I noticed the headline titled “Provisions for Termination of Employment” and considered a wide range of gut punch responses before giving in and scanning the notably appealing numbers added to my pension.

I made a covenant with myself. I would sign off on this semi-bribe. And I would agree to be sacked. But no one in my position should’ve agreed to under the table censoring of speech. Feeling justified, I left a well-intentioned, half hour caveat statement indicating that Parliament could complain about my less than impeachable tenure under Laurent’s thumb because I would certainly exercise my free will to say whatever I felt needed to be said about working for him. The bodyguards paid no attention as I carpel tunneled out parting words, making sure to liberally lick my fingers after fondling each page and chew free my longer nails to leave behind as offerings in my seat’s ash tray. They simply snatched the closed binder and inkless pen from my spit-upon hands and deposited me at my suddenly out-of-price-range doorstep.

I could’ve been clever and wasted their gas even longer or forced them to drive me back to Heathrow under threat of a lawsuit. But I was naïve, a fact reinforced when to my horror, my door squealed open a crack. Of course! Under no circumstances would I have ever been allowed to mourn my professional nadir in private. My studio was crammed with none other than my mother, Aubrey’s partner, Dr. Peregrine Barnett, an Oxford art history professor who worked from home on Mondays, and Aubrey who hardly worked at all. My mother was cinematically sniffling, pink-eyed, over my rotting cereal bowl at my kitchen table. Meanwhile, Aubrey and Peregrine were cuddling, legs entwined on my bed.

Somehow these three self-induglent hypocrites had broken into my home for an afternoon’s delight of mocking my situation, and yet, when the opportunity presented itself, they refused to be diverted from visions of themselves. I decided upon entry, that I ought to laugh at them for once in their lives and so, I waited for them to notice me manically chuckling in my doorway until snot dribbled out my nose. At length, Ida gathered the breath to choke back a tragic sob and scream for me take a seat.

“Well Ma, my bed and my table are tainted. I’m running low on options.”

“You can’t afford to be that immature right now!” Aubrey batted lazy, smug lashes down at me. Though we used to look an upsetting deal more alike than most brothers three years apart, our faces had ossified in our 30s into different depictions of privileged childhood gone awry. Aubrey was always praised for charming insincerity while I was routinely avoided for being overtly calculated and hyper-aware of everyone’s faults. While I fought back a quip, I momentarily paused to consider that we had probably never looked or felt more dissimilar in our lives.

“Your father is calling. Everyone. We’ll figure out an excuse when reporters start hounding. In the meantime, you’ll work with your brother.” As Ida dictated this future prediction, in a terse whisper, she glared at me, then Aubrey, willing us into a brotherly pact.

“Ma, I already have a full team. Actually, I have three assistants this year.” Aubrey refused to conceal his discomfort with the idea of me infiltrating his banker bully playpen, even on the lowest rungs of his corporate ladder. We tolerated one another for the sake of our parents’ marriage, but we could hardly function as acquaintances. Had we been strangers, we would’ve passed each other on the street without so much as a competitive side eye. However, among the few things we shared, was the inconceivable nightmare of having to displease our dear mother.

“You need three servants to wipe your ass?” I seethed at Aubrey.

“Oh, you can’t afford the tissue I like.” He smiled back.

“Baby, we should get going?” Peregrine was, despite bearing the performative quirks of a paid smart person, a somewhat well-adjusted, accepting observer of our family’s relational neurosis and hate language. She’d been with Aubrey for five years and seemed to implicitly grasp that he would never make love to her or her ancestral money with as much passion as he wasted on ribbing me or comparing our standing in our parents’ estimation. And try as I might, I couldn’t fault her for knowing exactly when to drag Aubrey away from what would become a volcanic episode between us.

Ida, who didn’t care for Peregrine, slapped one hand over her eyes and with the other, waved the amorous perverts off my bed. She wanted to throw a fit in the privacy of her quieter, more tolerant son’s presence. Aubrey knew that Ida secretly preferred me for my people-pleasing and rarely complained when she shooed him to suffocate me as her way of self-soothing. Relieved, he and Peregrine eased off my bed and marched past my frozen form with upturned nostrils as if to suggest I was a nonfunctional, hideous furniture travesty to be trashed.

Ida waffled a few minutes longer, watching me cleanse my cereal bowl and promise not to come to our family home or converse with family friends until I had a new position secured. I considered asking her to print out her own contract for me to sign away her parental rights, but I gave up when I realized that she was, in her own callous way, trying to preserve my reputation half as much as her own. She parted at noon, leaving a card for a corporate hypno-acupuncturist on my table.

I didn’t wait too long after she left before formulating a completely unnecessary, disproportionately melodramatic plan to disappear and spare my family the shame of association with someone as average as me. Hidden beneath the one ridiculous looking cap I had received as a swag bag leftover from my neighbor, I trudged to the tiny electronics kiosk in Kensington Station and burnt the last of my spare cash on a new cellphone. Then, from the very private coffee stall next-door, I furtively set up the device for international calling under a childish fake name and dialed the only number that was imprinted in my memory.

To my surprise, Uri answered with a dog yapping in the background. I almost cried when he asked what time he should meet me at the airport and what proteins I would prefer to eat aside from donut dough. I told him I’d arrive on Wednesday morning, pay him two weeks rent in advance, and would consume anything other than caviar on jerky.

We agreed to keep further communication to a minimum. As a teen in soviet Hungary, Uri Pavlics II had engineered a daring escape for himself and his anti-communist parents, that involved boarding a cargo ship headed for Sweden before securing a refugee flight to Montreal. A year into the Canadian permafrost, the Pavlics clan hand managed to revive an abandoned RV and cross the American border, eventually establishing roots in a West Virginian trailer park. Given his experience, Uri couldn’t help but inundate me with advice on how to make a clean break with my past as a traitor to the establishment. To start, I would need lots of cash portioned into small bill stashes, dry carbs stored in odd pockets, and a well-rehearsed backstory for my sudden disappearance.

Per Uri’s instructions, I shredded and toilet flushed old personal documents, cleaned out my trash, and religiously wiped down my flat’s surfaces using a concoction of bleach and vinegar. With my surroundings more or less scrubbed of my history, I was ready to move on to part two. I could no longer retain the palatable, refined identity I had spent years cultivating within the grey space. One small suitcase was swiftly force-fed the jeans, ratty sweaters, and ghastly sweatshirts I rarely wore. My pressed work suits and expensive ties were lumped into a laundry bag and eulogized on top of a charity donation box. Finally, to complete my disguise, the sole pair of underused shoes I owned, white converse trainers associated with unathletic dads, were laced on my feet just below two bulges of denim encasing my ankles. I unofficially dubbed the man of this new look Cam, the fired wreck who was too self-loathing to make eye contact or maintain a conversation.

Kneeling over a cheap hotel suite carpet on a dismal Tuesday evening, I rehearsed Cam’s sad sack biography and distributed my fresh cash into manageable wads throughout my suitcase and carryon laptop bag. I briefly thought about burning off my fingertips like I’d seen murderers do on TV with the used Zippo I found under the buggy matress, but I settled on wearing a sweatshirt with thumb holes that could cover my hands if necessary. At long last, a ten to midnight alarm announcing Heathrow’s only flight to Virginia, USA sealed Cam’s fate.

Welcome slumber lasted only an hour. Curiosity swept my shame back composing me to pay for in-flight WiFi (of course, secretively with a credit card in my legal name) and check the online discourse for any updates on the corruption scandal that was eminently, thrillingly set to obliterate my life. As I scrolled, my veins roiled to the turbulent pulse of my plane, flailing thirty thousand feet in the rain, only to seize up, mid-blood rush, at a revelation that this scandal would die a hoax and I, one of its nameless victims.

News of leaks had already been written off in London at ten to midnight. All articles calling for a Jacobin revolution were effectively silenced as rumormill bollocks, bolstered by A.I. invented emails, traceable to a disgruntled former aide in the Exchequer’s office. A security camera had captured said aide in flagrante delicto, banging his boss’s younger wife. According to a spokesperson for the Prime Minister, the supposed tragedy of the uncommons fomented by this “toxic insubordinate” was officially a non-issue. No one rich or royally connected was under investigation and any minor worker bee whose existence had been upended momentarily was free to return to the office, collect unwanted personal belongings, and put in a request for depression meds. The exchequer’s office released a separate statement as well. HR was too busy, due the time and niceties wasted on firings, to bother rehiring. We the disposable firees, would remain discarded, dead to power, replaced, and forgotten. One BBC piece even went so far as to suggest that we ought to go home to our eviction notices and celebrate our good fortune at having been dismissed early enough to dodge any Stalin-level purges.

I’d already come to terms with my firing one way or another, but what I couldn’t accept yet was my own selfish, needy, blind judgement that had resulted my flight. Why had I jumped to a conclusion that the grand drama of a possible national implosion revolved, just so conveniently, around me, of all random people? I could easily have ignored Shana’s call to action, waited patiently, and eased into a job search from the anonymous comfort of my own bed. Now, due to my genetic narcissism, I was publicly tripping and falling out of the sky towards a foreign continent in a kiddish getup that ironically left me stripped bare, estranged from the halfway decent disguise of a functioning adult that I had lately perfected.

 For the remainder of my flight, I was plagued with the inveitable, shrewish follow-up concerns. Should I go home? Forget the daring adventure I had subconsciously invented for myself before what would’ve been a painfully uneventful summer? Apologize to my family? To my relief, the decision was never mine to make. An accidental scan of an American Fox News headline reconfirmed that I was on the right course.

While I was sleeping, American trust in the U.K. as an ally had plummeted, bigly, according to their leader. On further investigation, I realized that American media was doubling down, drugged on an amalgamation of clickbait social posts from conspiracy trolls and paid fearmonger bots. Somehow, Rupert Murdoch’s solipsistic rants against King Charles and our unnamable Prime Minister had been registered into the American consciousness as official, government approved doctrine on their conservative Truth Social. Even their voices of reason were, at gunpoint, peddling the same sordid tale of gluttonous corruption and sexual perversion being sanitized by our British cabal of wealthy, hemophilic inbreds.

To justify my own theatrics, I checked my personal emails, on a hunt for any disproportionately hysterical reactions to the unrevolutionary scandal that had barely phased my people. And, to my delight, I saw the perfect name topping off my inbox to reinfect me with American fever.

Shana wanted to close our conversation on Beau and share a formal goodbye now that I was no longer in Laurent’s employ. She was still hiding out near Charlottesville, spending time with Beau’s wife, Heather, but she would be flying to, of all places, Paris for a weekend. I could hop a bullet train to meet her on the following Saturday and she would cover my ticket. My initial gag told me that I should decline discussions of Laurent, Beau, or any other evil bastard who had ever taken advantage of my straightlaced goody goody creds. However, a moment’s panic, while our captain’s fasten seatbelt alert beeped, served as a reminder that I was already on my descent. The child in me deserved whatever scraps of closure he could rescue to weave a redemption narrative that would couch the life lows of his last seventy-two hours.

In what could’ve been a masterclass on the art of irrational decision making, I composed a sincere email back to Shana informing her that I too would be hanging around with Uri. I offered to join her the next day in Charlottesville for any other excuse than a lunch since we were zero for two in the digestible food department. And with my message sent, I didn’t bother thinking any longer about the consequences, and instead allowed myself to escape, drunk on gingerale.

My arrival was rather thrilling. Uri swept my luggage and I off our spinning rockers and into the interior of a Piccasan blue, mid-life mustang convertible that he had refurbished before I was born. The backseat was packed with nostalgic Malboro boxes because Uri had once modeled himself on the cowboy in their advertisments to assimilate, and though he puffed elegantly, he understood my disinclination to light up, having spent a childhood around dying addicts who snorted cocaine from heirloom gin tumblers through cigarettes.

I ravaged the donuts he packed for me, giddily happy to be rocketed down uncharted highways haloed by russet fields. While he floored us past teal cratered valleys, Uri blasted his immaculate collection of underground punk band mixes and everything about our drive swiftly fell into line with the kiddy lit vision I had formed of the unsnarled American west in my rigid Dickensian boarding school. Dustbowl wind lovingly whipped my face raw and rugged, scrawny birds soared past our rearview as mythic eagles, and the rabid ponies preening for attention like child stars outside farm stands morphed into prized stallions galloping to rodeo Heaven at 90 miles per hour. I was young again, freely screaming out an antiauthoritarian screed, more emphatically than when I had requested a D.J. play the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen for Ida’s 40^th.

Through sugary swallows and raucous choruses, Uri and I cathartically traded slasher stories of absent fathers and mothers who never quite wanted us and extreme losses that we guiltily weren’t broken hearted over. Uri’s ex-wife was long dead, his Republican son and daughter-in-law ignored him from Florida, and his only friend still alive was his bullseye terrier, Joy, named for the American comedian, Joy Behar. In turn, I told him about my status as an unnecessary second son and a lonely bachelor-in-training.

Eventually our stream of conscious therapy session snaked its way back to the reality of our shared origin point. Uri asked me to promise that I would never stay in a private room alone with Shana, who was now, according to rumors he’d heard from Evan, also facing down hush-hush allegations for staying mum while her business partner pushed young clients to proposition older male publishing executives.

The wave of vindication that hit me following this tidbit of disgusting Shana lore instantly gutted any desire I might’ve been harboring to politely sever our acquaintanceship. I broke my subcutaneous promise to Beau and told Uri about the previous weekend’s bizzarro shakedown that Shana, it dawned on me, had helped orchestrate. Uri remained silent until my vocabulary petered out before stubbing his cigarette and turning a serious, paternal eye to me.

            “She’s no different.”

            “Than what. Other Americans?”

            “Rich ones. Everything’s a bargain, a haggle to them. You, me, rule followers who stay silent in our place. We’re commodities they trade. They push around. You did the best thing, taking yourself off the market.”

            “But I wonder. She really thought I had some foreign relations policy leverage? I’m barely above a temp associate!”

            “Eh, people with money exist somewhere else. They don’t suffer the same expectations. Same norms.” He tapped his head. Unthinkingly, I nodded to fully excise childhood nightmares of my father lobbing “defective” ice cubes at waiters and my mother shrieking and tearing through ballgowns in high end department stores.

            But for all my efforts to appear as a principled outsider speaking truth to power, I must’ve seemed a hair too ease with the concept of wealthy exceptionalism. Uri gave me an inquisitive once over, sizing up my clean-cut, manchild form and, true to character, I shrank in my seat, yanking my sweatshirt sleeves over my hands. That’s when I knew that he knew exactly what I was. No amount of average cosplaying or costuming or commiserating would ever hide the fact that my past straddled the economic divide between the exclusive somewhere else and pedestrian Hell. Thankfully, Uri didn’t press further into my real backstory as we approached the first block of strip mall civilization we’d encountered seen since the airport.

            We soon reached our destination. Uri’s boxy townhouse, tucked into a side alley off a mining town main drag, induced a few flutters of familiarity. On the lichen crusted walkup stoop, I even imagined that I was opening the weathered door to my own utilitarian sanctuary. Our interiors had similar gallery pale walls and a central open living space, compactly divisioned into functional microcosms of pin-legged modish furniture. Uri gave me sole access to the main bedroom that he believed belonged in spirit to an old girlfriend who had left him for her parole officer. He and Joy usually fell asleep on the futon sofa and the rocker he’d DIY’d out of reclaimed scrap planks, respectively. The three of us would share the bathroom as long as I remembered to cover the toilet seat. Otherwise, a bucket was available upon request. The rest of the square footage was to be reserved for whatever Joy needed to do in private while Uri was busy driving.

            I appreciated the stark divisions that Uri kept within his home. One corner was used to ward off his neighbors and son, all born again Disney Christians, with an intimidatingly intricate Casio turntable and hardcore record collection. Facing the turntable was a metal locker primed for meticulously hiding documents and the bespoke cigars necessary to burn them in the event of a fascist takeover. Yet another alcove housed rows of books arranged in reclaimed beer crates, mostly sci-fi classics interspersed with travel guides to locales on the American government’s do not fly list. The final corner, my favorite, was a kitchen shrine to stale, diabetic unapproved cereals marketed for children featuring a selection of iridescent cocktail umbrellas and a tower of evaporated milk tins.

            I was on the precipice of adopting this space as Cam’s safe house when I made the mistake of scrutinizing too intently what would be my bedroom. I pushed against the slatted pocket doors of the lone closet to find, dangling serenely from a hand-nailed clothes rack like Jesus on his cross, a well-worn hunting rifle. In it’s face, I tried to sane wash my eyes with distractions of cartoonish, old-timey war props that made the innocuous balloon pop bangs in fictional plays. My imagination only spit back a comedy so visceral and plausible, I couldn’t look away. Visions of my fingers tearing gaping bullet wounds from the velvety hides of doe-eyed kittens anchored my toes to the black shag carpet. While I meditated on the morals of sleeping with this gun’s mouth so close to mine, Uri joined me, a new cigarette splitting his teeth.

            “It’s what they do here. America. Part of the culture.” He eased one side of the pocket doors closed, leaving the riffle shrouded in a villainous semi-dark.

            “You hunt?”

            “I was a butcher shop manager. And a protestor.”

            “Do you kill animals for pleasure?” I couldn’t offer anything more substantive to articulate why precisly I was perturbed, as a leather appreciating non-vegan.

            “I’ve lived alone. For a while. Been robbed. Carjacked.”

            “Often?”

            “Well, I do hunt. On weekends. We’ll go some time.” He pulled the other pocket door shut and dropped a hand on my tense shoulder. I feigned relaxation but my eyes kept swiveling back to sneak glimpses at the trigger, just tangible from between the slats.

Even long after we’d finished a cereal diner and Uri had regaled me with documentary-worthy tales of his oddball passengers, my brain kept occasionally glitching back to the gun. With each glitch, my knuckles twitched, reflexively reenacting a bitter memory I couldn’t excise of cheering over a dead pigeon shot with a vintage musket squeezed in my eight-year-old fists for the pleasure of my demented, veteran grandfather.

——————————————————————————————————-

            Coffee with Shana was, Uri warned me throughout my first night, going to be another comically high stakes negotiation. I needed to be able to walk away with no loose ends left in my wake. Nerves got the better of my tongue, and I asked, jokingly, if loose end terminology implied that I may need to kill Shana. Uri merely shrugged and winked at me. We eventually compromised on the absolutely necessary safety protocols for upcoming my afternoon. If Shana presented me with any illegal opportunities, scams, or prostitution schemes, I could send Uri a distress text and he would pick me up, no questions asked.

            He delivered me with more than a little trepidation to an unincorporated halfway point in a not-quite-diverse hippie town. He stopped at a craftsman café front on the edge of a kodachromed thoroughfare ripped from the 50s. Beyond the front beveled glass windows was a wood paneled, ski lodge interior that reeked of tobacco and crusted syrup. Shana had already secured a back log table isolated from the local crowd, atop which she had arranged two mugs of what I soon discovered was oily, tar-hued coffee poisoned with grassfed Crisco shortening.

We sipped slowly to avoid any bodily noises and skirted talk of Laurent for our first few minutes together. Shana relayed that she was playing truant in Beau’s luxurious guest house for a week away from her desk, exfoliating in hot spring spas on Heather’s dime. In return, I offered a microfiction of my daring escape from twenty minutes of unemployed boredom to the unending thrill of cohabitating with Uri’s gun. Her lips flipped as I finally capped my tale with a downer of a PSA on the dead parliamentary blowup back in London.

Shana insisted she had podcasted proof that we Britts were still fibbing through our crooked gums to purposely tank American prestige on an international stage. She simply refused to believe that such damning revelations about our most powerful players could be so nonchalantly dismissed in a few days.

I saw no harm in feeding her delusions with my insider’s gut suspicions. The coverup was real. There was always a cirrhotic, hemorrhoidal scandal crowning at the puckers on our biggest asses. We were just better than our American counterparts about calmly wiping away the truth, BBC bideting, and enema purging any straggling shits who may leak evidence. As I waxed poetic on my hate for my own flesh and blood, Shana hid her mouth with her mug. But I could sense from the arch of her brows, that she was gunning to pounce on my faltering sheen of innocence.

“So the whole time. You were supporting corruption.”

“You’re misunderstanding my culture. I was baptized royalist. Commandment one, thou shalt subscribe only to the ethics of divine authority. Or wealth.” Hedging around our faults, I failed to mention, was commandment two.

“But at some point. You knew what you’re signing up for.”

“Don’t we all have some sense we’re gestating douchebags in the womb? But it’s not conscious, intentional knowing. And then our brains are hijacked early. They drill you in English boarding schools. The only thing that should matter is cash flow to the vitals. Your telos is finding the least objectionable way to keep that spigot running.”

“Oh no. Poor baby!”

“Poor or practical? Working for our collective GDP was argubably the lesser evil. Over working for my personal net worth.”

“That’s such BS.”

“I know, that’s why I’m not here to gloat.” I hung my head, and swallowed a punitive mouthful of fat-washed, dish dreg coffee.

            “So. Liar, liar. You want a second chance?”

            “Not at a skeevy pay off!”

            “I thought money mattered to you.”

            “Legally, honestly obtained money.”

            “I see. And how’s that net worth growing?”

            “Well, inherritance is legal the last I heard.” I wasn’t above taking a fair swing at my own dickishness.

            “Okay. While you’re waiting for your parents to die. Would you consider a serious job offer?” She leaned over the table.

            “I’m not a contract killer!” Shana laughed and filled our silence but my fingers earnestly caressed my cellphone in my pocket, ready to send out my SOS text to Uri. Depending on the job.

            “Beau needs a property sitter.”

It was my turn to hide my face behind my mug. Shana didn’t spare a second on discerning my possible response before launching into a well-rehearsed sales pitch. Beau felt terrible that I’d been fired by my tax cheating, sex pesting boss and was bleeding out with shame five minutes from his newest aquisition. Somehow, despite our frigid interactions, I’d impressed him with my wholesome, upright moralizing. He told Shana that he needed someone trustworthy to oversee summer renovations for the rental property he was reviving from the ghost of a former hotel. Naturally, I came to both their brilliant minds as the ideal Manchurian candidate for the role of foreign patsy who would do his bidding and then some.

            “The structure rivals any five-star property. And once the landscape is cleaned up? The views alone are ten million in the making. He’s willing to pay you.”

            “I would take the free accommodation.”

            “Sure? Everyone keeps a loaded bedside drawer.”

            “I get the sense Beau’s not a great shot.”

            “You wouldn’t be sleeping with him.” She took a sip from her mug, drinking in my grey rocked, unrisen expression with sadistic frustration.

Internally, I braced for the stinging impact of another likely retreat while my fingers finally sent out a warning cry to Uri. I didn’t know what I wanted from Shana or Beau or Virginia this go around. I only intuited, as Shana smirked at me, that it was time to abandon her before I made any more permanently crippling life choices on the basis of my nihilist’s curiosity to see where she would lead me.

            Uri came to my rescue sooner than I could’ve dreamt. Before rushing off to his mustang growling at the café door, vestigial imp’s tail chaffing at caffeinated legs, I gave Shana one last word. I would consider the job on a trial basis, no exchange of money necessary. The better part of me was tickled at the possibility of being the servant solely entrusted with a task worth ten million at a minimum. My raison d’etre, a utilitarian proximity to power, that had been cruelly slapped from my supplicating hands, now had a fighting chance. With fresh supply of Beau’s neediness pipelined into me, the Campbell of my last three decades would be reinvigorated anew. I didn’t let my excitement at this possibility slip to Shana as we awkwardly nodded farewell.

Though I left on a high, Uri needled from me all the questionable red flags puncturing holes in my conversation with Shana for our ten-minute jaunt back to his townhouse. Later, cross-legged on his futon with Joy drooling at his feet, he fed me the bitter pill my socially savvy parents never assumed a biological son of theirs would require.

            “She’s all bad news. You can’t consider her job on face value. For no cash? Come on!”

            “It’s only two months and I’d have an entire world caliber property to myself. With a supposedly decent view.” I rolled to my side on the shag carpet, abandoning any posture of marturity.

            “You like dead grass? And you think. One contractor goes south. Busts a pipeline. Breaks some environment law. Who’s taking blame punches, huh?”

            “What could he possibly claim about my negligible involvement!”

            “He put you in charge. Turns out you’re an idiot?”

            “But why would any reasonable person ascribe contracting responsibilites to the house sitter? The whole point of my role is to be the fucking idiot, warm body placeholder.”

            “How many reasonable people you think are living out here.”

            “I’m not reasonable either…but I’ll reconsider.”

            “No, you call her. Say you can’t do it. You don’t take jobs that don’t pay.”

            “I wasn’t seeking-“

            “Maybe you want the escape. The risk. But you gotta have some basic value. For yourself, right? You don’t need unpaid abuse.”

In contrast to his rather serious words, Uri extended a leg to the ground and teasingly rolled me back over with his foot. On my part, I was tired of playing the obstinate, defaint infant to Uri’s exasperated caretaker. I sat up and nodded, unable to avoid my innate pliancy any longer.

            If my soul had been even one millimeter further over the fence, closer to Uri’s side of reneging on my tepid acceptance of Shana’s job offer, I might’ve spared myself more dignity in the short term. But, I am proud to claim, I would never have become as reasonable or as self-compassionate, had I not, perhaps willfully, forgotten to contact Shana that evening. What seemed in the moment to be an existentialists’ death wish on my part, was really my intentional allowing of chaotic entropy- personified in Shana, and by proxy, Beau- to rid me of poisonous self-control.

            I rose at dawn under a blanket, fetally curled on Uri’s carpet, a multi-page manifesto taped to my chest. Uri’s note requested that I eat solid food and take Joy for a walk to collect the mail in his box that was connected to a larger shared unit, a few houses down his block. An addendum with a map of the one-way street was included, in case I was a visual learner like his son. Uri had already left early to chauffer about a new client, some renowned glass blowing Canadian, but he promised in writing to return at dusk when we were scheduled to visit a bar parking lot. There he would teach me how to coral his beloved mustang without a license.

            Shana’s call came in soon after I had finished masticating dry cereal and checking on the shot gun in my bedroom. Beau was thrilled that I would be accepting his offer. He had a cruise planned for his anniversary with Heather and unfortunately, couldn’t thank me in person until mid-July. But Shana and one of his contractors would give me a grand opening tour of the residence that I was slated to take over within the week. I left her no response.

            Joy and I wandered up the block, side by side, stopping ocaisionally to peek through the windows of Uri’s neighbors and snark at the niche lawn signs for school board candidates. Joy eventually broke her stride and waddled over to piss in the for-sale plastic hottub rotting on the abandoned corner lot. I opened Uri’s metal postal box no. 9 out of ten with the key clipped to Joy’s collar and found only a laminated flyer stashed at the back. On one side was a glossy, Droste-like photograph of a heavily tanned nun outside a fire station. With bedazzled nails, she brandished a picket sign featuring a dead fetus beneath words “Cunt Killers” splashed in bubblegum pink Impact font. The flyer’s flipside bore hand-written instructions for joining a protest against a group of vigilante tradwife social stars who used nun costumes to secretly disseminate pro-life material.

            “Hey! You should move back?”

The frilless onlooker in a pantsuit and orthopedic heels leaned on the door, unmoving, surveying the masses outside with an intense, clinical expression. When she refused my warning, my fingers grasped blindly through her muddy hair tendrils at the fabric bubbles along her shoulders. Without forethought, I tapped on the extra bulge that appeared to be an 80’s pad and she flinched backwards, heels skimming over the uneven step down into the café pit. Her hand darted out of her jacket, trawling for that mythical safety railing that didn’t exit. I gallantly stepped out of her path, considering that she’d learned a lesson here, while she flopped down and tumbled, arms flapping, sideburns grazing tiled floors, nostrils barely missing rubber pellets cycloned in tear gas. When she seemed sufficiently comatose, I squatted aside to assess the damage. She whipped back her scratched face, flinging raw blood spatter onto my lips.

“What the fuck! What was that?” Black blood pooled from her temple, oozing in skinny threads between the cracks of her knuckles. Her thumbs yanked down the purple underskin of her deep-set eye sockets, racooned with mascara.

“You would’ve preferred being gassed or shot in the head?”

“I’ll just get an infection from you instead.” She brushstroked excess blood across another gash in her neck in a nice, subtle nod to Marie Antoinette.

“Is it that obvious that I have hepatitis and leprosy?”

“You’re putting my health is at risk!”

“Are you a medical expert?”

“Wow. You’re making assumptions about my job?” She wiggled a thick, unplucked eyebrow at me.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were part of the protest. You just seemed very disengaged from dismantling the patriarchy.” I held out a wad of Uri’s cocktail napkins that I’d saved in my pocket to wipe Joy’s bowl movements. Marie Antoinette pinched a few from my hands.

“So you were monitoring a woman’s facial expression.”

“No! I didn’t suggest you smile more.”

“Oh, that is-“

“Did he push you? Fucking nutjob!” A lanky, Nordic man with a detective’s badge pinned to his corduroy blazer raced on scene. He reached down a hand, but Marie Antoinette jerked away from him and hopped to a standing position.

“Are you done?” The detective loomed over me.

“I think so.”

“Here.” My victim dangled a napkin in my face, making sure to smear it obscenely with her blood.

“Oh, please, keep it, I don’t want to catch an infection from you.” I had to match her commitment to our spat. She noticed and pocketed the napkin while holding my gaze, long enough for the detective to beckon her away while she raised her middle fingers at me. I raised mine back, high enough over my head for her to catch my reflection in her rolled pupils.

            Apparently, Uri had once signed up to receive a slew of such activist publications in the hopes of staking out events where he could meet the women he pedestaled. I asked him, as we drove to his chosen bar by moonlight, if his plan had ever panned into any successful dates. He shook his head. No, apparently women his age with strong convictions about human rights wanted anything but the subversive vanilla, white-clawed, red-rosed monogamy fetish he dared to dream about. But he was too sperm dead to care.

And he admitted that he wasn’t quite their visual catch and never would be. He had no piercings and only one tattoo, the word “Surprise!”, inked in cyrllic, on the sole of his left foot, the dark punchline to an old inside joke that couldn’t land after his mother died. Now, he felt that he was too old and too boring to test out the limits of a mundane, suburban romance of the sort that had held his parents together. He was happy enough to ogle women with luscious, armpit beards from afar and die alone, leaving his organs to Joy.

The rawness of his revelation led me to share a private factoid of my own while we drove. I slipped from my pocket an enamel and silver alcoholics’ anonymous ring. It bore no direct relation to my life, but over the years at my side, it had become fused to my body, belonging as much to me as it had to it’s original owner. Unlike the few people who’d ever bothered to notice or ask about my ring when I used to wear it on my hand, Uri recognized it’s purpose without a second glance.

            “Yours?”

            “It was from my best mate. Jin.”

            “Was, huh?”

            “He passed a few years after we graduated. His parents wanted me to keep it.” Uri didn’t press on but simply nodded and expanded his shoulders across his seat, as if bequeathing to me extra space to allow my uprising memories room for verbal dispersal.

 I was suddenly transplanted back a good decade to the later 2010s. At the time, I was severely depressed, contemplating the uselessness of myself and my graduate studies at the London School of Economics. Jin was equally unhappy, grinding through fourteen hour shifts as a lead programmer for a virtual reality gaming startup. These years were the first few during which we’d ever coexisted separately for more an hour at a time since our having shared a five by eight school dorm at age twelve.

Despite our schedules, we would still meet on weekends to plot our multibillion-dollar business idea that would somehow land us a private island and an escape from our unfulfilled emotional lives. Jin had begun to drastically thin and premature grey in his mid-twenties but I had chalked up his changes to the bizzaire fad dieting and biohacking that had become de riguer among his work peers. I had no notion that he was also, under the tutelage of his superiors, being forced to dabble in everything from secret strip club meetings to unregulated German fungi pills just to keep his eyes open through afternoons.

            When a shop manager found his skull split in a collision with a drunk cabbie outside an icy arcade a week before new years’ 2016, I was the first emergency contact called, as his parents and sisters had long since relocated back to Seoul. An autoposy and police report revealed that the night of his death, Jin had been running from a work event at a private members’ only lounge where I knew that Aubrey frequented. In fact, Aubrey had texted me to say that the two- despite both being card carrying AA graduates- were sharing drinks minutes before the accident. Though no criminal charges were ever prosecuted, I never shook my belief that Aubrey could’ve easily been held accountable for Jin’s death.

            Uri watched me writhe with these memories of loss comingled with a very present-tense fear at seeing his arms propped on a steering wheel, lips hovering over the space where he  would soon place a bottle.

            “You ready. Give it a try?”

            “I thought I was really selling the risk aversion sob story. I don’t drink, drive-”

            “The Pope drives!”

            “My mother’s Jewish!”

“Let’s go. I’d rather be injured early”

“Okay, and half of God’ll forgive me if you die.”

I made no further arguments as we jolted over uneven railroad tracks, on which rotted an abandoned freight car bearing the bulleted note, “Portal To Hell”, carved on it’s flank. Uri then turned our cheeks from the town a few hairs beyond the tracks, sweetly beckoning with innocent string lights dusting healthy clusters of trees. Instead, he barrelled us down a proverbially seedy alley leading to the adult district that locals labeled Stripmall row.

We shot past dingy, off brand groceries and drive through ATMs, but just as quickly chickened out, grazing only thirty over the speed limit at the curb before a standalone ranch-style brownstone with a large frontal parking lot. Overlooking the semi-empty joint was an American flag and an orange neon star emblazoned with “The Cana Bar” in a muted, blinking white script. I squinted.

            “Sounds like The Cannibal. Which would be misleading marketing, given I’m sure they have repeat customers.”

            Uri took my bait. “Cana. For tropicanna. Think the juice? Just a funny, beachy name.”

            “Or do you think it’s a reference to Cana, where Jesus makes water wine?”

            “I think you’re overthinking.” Uri rumpled my hair and left me with the instructions to honk the horn if any heroine dealing college frats or heroine dealing cops came around. I’d be able to pick them out from regular drunks based on the radii of their arm bruises.

I had barely stared down two under 21 purple arms, when Uri emerged from the dark door with an unmarked green bottle, cigar, and a life saver mint that he handed to my mouth. Then without warning, Uri popped from his seat and roused me out of mine.

When I was buckled on his driver’s side, he shoved my face unceremoniously into the molting leather wheel and slapped my left wrist on one of it’s curves. Before I could pull away, he splayed my righthand fingers over the gear shift between us, bending them back in reverse. My feet, unsure of where to blindly crash for help, smashed the pedals below in an accident that momentarily stoked the Mustang’s motor.

 The wheel curves slicked through my fingertips, melting my palms into unbaked potter’s clay, cleansing me of inhibitions. Meanwhile, Uri, a seasoned voyeur, calmly prostrated the overhead mirror to capture my fear laced thrills as we richocheted, asses first, into the empty main road towards a red light somewhere behind us. While we backstroked, I reached up to steal the baby hair from my browline but Uri beat me, yanking on my curls until my mouth lolled open, overwhelmed from swells of airborne gasoline fumes.

            “Hands!”

            “Okay, okay!” I threw all mental capacities into petting solid shapes on the dash, letting Uri guide my upper half by the nape of my neck into a downturned stare at the gear shift. He poked it’s quivering head forward, rioting us back to the parking lot.

For some reason, I took a very scientific visual survey of the lot’s perimeter as we spun to our original space. In the moment, I fancied myself brilliant and promptly ignored my better, logical intuitions like many great idiot savants before me. After all, my heart knew what my brain couldn’t dredge from A-level physics. We had every ability to suspend all laws of nature for an hour and skittle in impossibly perpetual elipses around the tangerine star sign like cult accolytes unafraid of Jesus or the FBI. After all, this was a night in which water could be wine.

Uri was too wild and ungrown himself or perhaps too innured by his frothing beer to set limits on my delusions. He threw back his shaven head to holler at the brightly polluted skyline. Then he turned to me expectantly and I failed him, conscious that my diaphgram didn’t have enough muscle for propelling a complimentary scream. But I had to give him some hope. I closed my eyes and itched my urge to sigh by mouth. Carpe diem style, he held his bottle to my open lips. Erased of all past, I sipped libidinously, only to freeze with toxic shock at cococola snapping my pocked tongue flesh. Uri liked my discomfort. He kicked up his bare feet onto the dash, waving his raw soles in the windshield’s reflection. Surprise!

“You’re so scared!” He jiggled my shoulder.

“I haven’t had anything in nine fucking years! I don’t-” Now, I was the one foaming at the mouth.

“But you’d be okay. That was my point.”

“Well, you don’t drink either, do you.”

“Got ten sobriety years on you.”

Livid, I released the wheel and pancaked on the dash. Uri cursed in Lithuanian as we crawled, willy nilly, over divets in the concrete before rolling to the lot’s curb. He quickly cut the mustang’s motor, dangling us in park, inches from future traffic and swept me back against my seat in a half-hug.

I wasn’t any more reassured by the gesture and I didn’t drive solo for another day. Ineated, I people watched around Uri’s townhouse complex, puttering with Joy at my side, until we were both bored and eager for some tragedy to moan about. In an uncanny answer to our prayers, Shana rebugged me with a new message late in the afternoon. This time around, I had a script ready to decline.

I wanted to understand Beau’s vision where I was his ideal gatekeeper to a salicious, mysterious paradise for the rich and horny. I even wondered, would he make me wear a uniform? I liked conformity to some suited ideal.

More for closure than anything else, I acquiesced at Shana’s insistence that I at least take the tour, see the specs, and bask in the magic of a lakefront, 1940s glamourous revival. In one second flat, my name was bumped to a coveted slot in her vacation schedule. We would join the contractor on Saturday, because she might stop by church on Sunday. She added a very thorough list of directions for how to reach the exclusive zip code and a hint to drive on the left side of the tracks. I told Uri, over midnight cereal, that I was only going to practice driving. I don’t know if he bought that claim but he seemed grateful to have a day off from answering neighbor inquisitions about his inept dog walker.

So, my second illegal adventure in America began with a lie that lost panache the moment I rounded the mustang out of Uri’s complex. My subsequent road trip was yet another an unsensuous, criminally routine task to complete, it’s dullness reinforced by my gas station virginity loss under the most boring circumstances. I had barely a quarter gallon remaining as I swung into a middle American, two pump rest stop centerfolding a forked highway. Taking in the clean-cut niceness while I pumped, I realized, with some disappointment, that I wasn’t going to find myself in a secret as a meth lab or gritty Michelan star gastropub copped from prestige TV. Even the mundane, market-meets-autobody behind the pumps, that could’ve been Hitchcock eerie, induced zero chills.

Still, I dawdled longer than I had anticipated while snooping in vain for a grimy bathroom, and was late to meeting Shana and the contractor. They were waiting for me at a real distance, a ways down a forrestally-fringed, country manor road tangenting another no-name lake. I wasn’t sure what to expect, as I turned up property’s winding driveway. Eventually, I approached a central, trapezoidal home hewn out of cream bricks, pooling with light from polygonal windows framed in navy. This main corpse offshot into newer, rounded, caramel stucco and maple wood paneled adendums tethered by hallways of unpaned glass.

The overall impression was of a heavily stylized, streamline modern palace winkingly at odds with it’s unruly wooded backdrop. The curb appeal projected only a simple facimile of the unpredictable edge underlying a villain’s lair. It was too purposefully proud of it’s quirkiness to be evil, all while falling short of the highighbrow architechtural prowess it clearly craved. And yet, I was touched by the in-your-face sentimentality wafting off this animate structure, beseeching to be noticed, acknowledged, and esteemed as very cool. I’d never felt so at home within myself or my surroundings as I gussied up to the concrete front doors.

They opened on a slightly buzzed Shana and a custard headed, twiggy jolie-laide who could’ve passed for a waifish model closeracking a onesie through Milan. He seemed overly fragile to be drywalling by choice. Perhaps he was too unlucky or maybe too unconniving to remake himself into an accidental celebrity. I stared into the shadows of his mellon-balled cheeks, and he glanced over my head, a few inches below his. I couldn’t determine if he was aware of the crook in his pointed chin that suggested he may angle it for a camera at any second. He gave a throaty hey, I’m Jaxon, and a quick hand flail hello that I ignored, offput at his unreadable intentions.

I decided on the entry threshold. This tour was really a yacht rock fever dream borrowed from Uri’s bong smoke and, per the rules of my fantasy, Shana and Jaxon were the dream’s alternate universe Captain and Tenille. Shana moonwalked me, showroom to showroom, peppy but evangelically firm in her glossolalia covering the space’s nonobvious spiritual merits. All the while, Jaxon might’ve been meditating to funky clavichord synths.

Despite Shana’s efforts to sell me first on some nebulous sensation of luxury, I was more than easily consumed with the observable features of the space. The interior structure was cavernous, the hollowed walls bursting from dimpled stone slabs drizzled with natural deviations from a single shade. Zaftig, formless furniture units of raw beachwood and splotched animal hides were strewn hedonistically about angular surfaces in pink travertine and bronze. At undetermined intervals surrounding these strange shapes hung millions of dollars in post-modern attempts at art.

I know now that this was my first brush with limerence. I’d had two previous physical partners, a mechanical engineer and an inorganic chemist, neither of whom likely remembered any part of me. Nor had I ever felt platonic or familial interest from or for any living beings. But somehow, I was ready to be loved in this space. My innards were at peace, enough to open wider on biological command at each subsequent revelation of aesthetic bombasity Shana and Jaxon presented to me. In every mirror, I grew more enraptured with an image of myself as someone else, in this ridiculously exclusive somewhere else. I could be someone at ease with power, ensconced in Beu’s trappings of distastefully self-aware privilege.

Shana elbowed me. “You look rather satisfied.”

“Why?”

“I’d leave you here. If we didn’t have the whole kitchen and patio to go.”

“Not satisfied. Intrigued maybe.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s British for, believe me, I’m not usually an objectophile?”

Shana flinched, wounded by the kibosh I’d dropped on her trademark innuendo schtick. She lunged aside, feigning a moral high, fished lips implying how dare I suggest, even in jest, that I might just finger bang a lucite cocktail table behind her back. Shockingly, Jaxon heard me and gave me a nod that undercut the initial disquietude I’d felt beneath his shadow. We even dared to lock steps on our hike to the kitchen.

In front of a ghostly meat rotary, Shana named kitchen appliance finishes like an actual homeowner while Jaxon flicked switches for various random gadgets and I watched him. It seemed we shared a childlike fixation with plucking at warning buttons and triple crossing wires in pursuit of a naughty, combustible reaction. Every desperate whir and groan from the purposeless machines gave us both an unhealthy, manic delight. We caught one another’s distended grins and raised palms in the wine fridge steel a little too late. Shana read on our faces the impending disaster that would result if we strayed any further towards friendship and swiftly, shushed us into a powder room before we could burn the uninsured house to ash.

The hunter green jewelbox was about the square footage of Uri’s main living space.  A back half, papered in sickly mottled shagreen, held space for a delft Tabbysh toilet that gleefully sent you, the strictly business party pooper, aggressively intrusive facts about your waste on a monitor. The facing wall above the sink system was all beveled mirrors framed in gold, as if to imply that the kind of person who would use this bathroom needed to see himself debased on the irregular. Jaxon toyed with the monitor while Shana instructed me to test out the “billionaire model” water features only available here, for Beau’s ass, and in Japan.

When no was looking directly in the mirrors, myself included, I shot my tongue under a strange golden bauble besides the concrete sink and jiggled it, waited for Fijian, ionized carbon water to dribble down and kickstart my metabolism. Nothing. Jaxon coughed, and Shana spun around to snort at my frustration.

“Dare we ask?”

“It’s perfectly logical to assume it would be the same as the other fifty gagillion water filtration apparatuses! I’m waiting to be blessed by holy Fiji ions. Are you about to tell me, it’s really an arm pit bidet?”

“Campbell, read the label.” Shana pointed at a miniscule gold plaque below the knob. Engraved in the faintest of lines was: SOAP.

“Well, that’s rather tacky and intellectually demeaning!”

“Of course. But I think Beau wanted to be inclusive of guests who don’t know what you normally put next to a bathroom sink.” She grinned at me.

Outside, in the free air, Jaxon co-opted Shana’s host role, albeit with a human tone. It struck me before he opened his mouth. There are some individuals, like Shana or my sperm donor, to whom language shouldn’t belong. When my father spoke, he talked to injure, and even if you’d wanted to listen to his noise, you’d only audiate syllabic sound bit insults, not meaningful claims to which you were allowed to respond.

Jaxon, by contrast, moved his tongue deliberately, rambling out a skeen of ideas, intent on penetrating your nervous system, asking sincerely for your thoughts. I could feel every letter of every utteration dripping with life and death as he coaxed me across the patio to an unfinished stone kidney-shaped pool. He wobbled on a loose shale slab around the pool’s edge, his pulpit, to deliver a finale speech.

“This one’s the big guy, like you see this pool? It’s what my team’s got coming along for the rest of the summer. We’re gonna cover him under a nice marble gazebo and then we’re gonna start on clearing out back with some terrazzo paving for color, all the way to, you can catch where the pines are blocking a water view. We want a straight line of sight out to a private dock. And you’d be able to keep a good size skiff for weekend fishing, you know?”

His sing song tone and the undulations of his thin mustach were a hypnotic combo. I bobbled my head dumbly, eager hear what he would say next.

“You talked a bit with Shana.”

“Sensory overload is finally hitting me.”

“Little far from home, out here?”

“Yeah, I left a one-bedroom rental.”

He gave me a curious head cock. “Oh, ‘cause you sound like you’d live in a European castle.”

“Nah, the people my country kicks out of castles are famously insane, on trial, or dead. I don’t know which one of those qualities I best exude.”

“Well, you wanna feel alive, catch a sunset before we go?” His golden crown bent over, and I thought I saw concern flit over his brow. He skipped to a nearby stockpile of carpenters’ tools arranged on a tarp over the unfinished end of the patio and retrieved two rotting pikes missing decapitated heads. Tossing one to me, he led the way through the woods using his pike as a Tolkein-esque staff. Ever a little brother, I followed suit, lapping at his boot heels so he could pinion stray brush back from my clean face. Our trek was orchestrated with the squeaks of our feet yucking it up through damp soil for a good minute. But soon, an oxblood light c-sectioned the grey wall of tree bark we’d been clawing at. Jaxon pointed with his pike through a cluster of fried grasses and drooping cattails to the sun, dying for attention at the edge of a black, turgid lake.

We stood at this decaying mouth of the forest path until the sun was gone and the lake was no longer under interrogation by daylight. The water’s loose, dark, shyly weeping surface gave me qualms that my life may be coming to end soon. Maybe Jaxon meant for me to feel alive one last round. This was his warning to think twice about signing up to fritter away in a stranger’s castle and be mourned over.

Jaxon paused to make sure I wasn’t contemplating the pebbles below the water before aiming his pike back over his shoulder. On his cue, we silently made our return, past the trees and around the perimeter of the house. Shana was waiting by the front door. She looked at me with what I took to be sadness before making an escape to her Porsche. Jaxon shuffled around to keep me company a few minutes while I studied the doorbell security camera settings with the aptitude of a failed unibomber. At half-past seven, when I’d managed to set the house alarm, he slicked an old school business card into my pocket, sideways, like a street magician, and bid me good night. Then I watched him cough off on a deadbeat Kawasaki motor bike, blinding me from the outside world with it’s emphysemic drawl.

In Jackson’s haze, I remembered a little late past nightfall that I had Uri’s Mustang to return. I drove back quickly and arrived at the townhouse to find Uri on his rocker, lipping a pipe and counting out stacks of cash. Joy was double-dutying as a footrest and snark-faced female sidekick to his macho, macho man. Upon entry, I was handed another wad of bills and instructed to portion out enough to buy two decent tickets to what Uri called the dual of the decade.

A piece of work that he’d hate watched many times on local access TV was destined to be at a rinky-dink town hall five minutes away from us on the following Sunday as part of a holy crusade to flip a state legislature seat. He showed me the two candidates duking it out for the democratic nomination over the next six months on the battle ground of Richmond. Uri’s candidate, the incumbent, was prosecutor Nicole Ombafemi, a centrist among moderates. She was well-respected and considered the heavily favored establishment pick to win. Unfortunately, this season, her opponent wasn’t the usual Wall Street dropout, corporate hippy millionaire that no one liked. Rather, her expertise was up against a fellow Harvard alum, the endlessly watchable, viral goldmine, Dr. Tabitha Rosenberg.

Tabby, as the news dubbed her, was no longer a practicing forensic psychiatrist. Jesus or Buddhah- no one knew for certain- had called on her to self-revoke her medical license sometime during the Pandemic and decided on her behalf, while she was marinating on a ventilator, that political office was her higher calling. In her stump rants, Tabby often sermonized about a bushy past with a cherry-picked purple voting record. But two dozen focus group disasters over the last year had given her team the inspiration to abandon the pursuit of unnatural blondeness and pivot to marketing her as a smarter than thou, feministic bee among libertarian bro elites. Uri noted that we couldn’t question their strategy. This new brand of hers had found resonance with a broad coalition of conspiracists whose concerns ranged from soybeans to sex offenders.

Still, notwithstanding Tabby’s somewhat incoherent agenda, Uri’s opposition to her candidacy centered on a single personal grievance. Three years prior, Tabby had served as a consultant for the womens’ correctional facility where his long-distance girlfriend at the time, Eden, was completing the final leg of a heroin trafficking sentence. According to Uri, Tabby had a twisted obsession with younger women and purposely labelled Eden psychiatrically ineligible for early parole.

“I go to every rally, every greeting, all the speeches. The ask her crap sessions. And I tell her followers. You don’t give her the power. You’ll see what she does. To good, innocent people. Right now, I’m just pot stirring.”

“But you’re handing her outright cash, no strings attached.” I passed him a stack worth a hundred.

“Insurance. I pay now. While I’m working on the nuke for her. You can’t rush an attack. You gotta have fool proof, sick poison.”

“Oh, sure, I used to cull nasty oppo research. You frame labor’s pushback to Freidmanian neoliberal market shifts as bolshie propaganda and-“

“So do it. Hit her for me.”

I shook my head. “You can’t bring boring facts to mudsling a post-truth evangelist.”

“But you’re good at talking down. You give judgy impressions.”

“I don’t know any other way to be!”

“Not a bad talent. You can take advantage.”

“For whose bennefit?”

He shrugged. “Maybe own it. You don’t have to pretend to be so bland any longer?”

Something about his upspoken threat made me shiver. I pulled Joy from under his feet to my side and gave her my damp palm to drool in. I imaged she was coating me in a serotonin-based, charisma elixir that would subtly botox the outer layers of my scaffold from preachy English drip to righteous American sweetheart.

Uri saw through my skull, into the plot for my aura overhaul. “You gotta agree. You have a certain personality.”

“Otherwise, I wouldn’t be a pretentious asshole!”

“See? You’re not too nice. Too fucking pretty about things.”

“Well, if I were prettier, more fuckable, I may seem nicer.”

“There. You’re a little off key. Twisted. I read people, right? As a driver. You got bodies somewhere.” He blushed as if he’d given me a genuine compliment. Joy barked and I collapsed over, lost for a response to his glee at having possibly unmasked a serial killer.

He couldn’t identify what particular affect of mine gave him the heebie jeebies. But he knew details weren’t necessary. He’d scalpeled enough flaky dandruff off my outer dermis to botch up important inner nerves.

I spoke to his shadow on the ceiling. “I’m just pierrot, a disappointing clown. You can laugh at me and I won’t push back.  But you know, my brother’s the true ringleader of the saddist freaks.”

“What’s he hiding?” Uri sounded upbeat, almost playful, waiting for a foot-fetish adjacent punchline.

“Torture?” I let the word hang itself without adjectival theatrics. Nothing more needed to be said. No one ever believed my tall tales of the decades long games Aubrey played with me, his precious ragdoll baby. No one heard or saw the taunts, the finger pricked accusations, the burn bites, the druggings, and worst of all, the constant waging of duals for attention.

 I once thought myself the honest martyr who would be avenged when sane adulthood came for us. But oh, how I was foolishly incorrect. Doctors convinced our parents I was born and would die the psychotic, antisocial manipulator. The idiot who couldn’t fix problems and the problematic savant who whined too much and won too little to earn his keep as an inherently loveable being.

Uri nodded and continued smoking over his cash. I sensed that he was uninmpressed with my attempt at silent gravitas. I hadn’t exactly made the kind of flippant joke he’d come to expect from me. Maybe my anger was too genuine for him. I stood, ready to stew in private, but he stopped me.

“Tell Shana anything?”

“I said yes. I’m moving in Monday. She’s dropping me off before her flight.”

“Jesus, you don’t listen. It’s like you beg, and you beg. For the damn face punch.”

“No, what’s wrong with wanting the damn hotel? I really am that shallow.” He didn’t bother psychoanalyzing me further for the night.

Like the good boy given a task by his daddy, I did my homework. I trashed through the archives of the interwebs to find scraps of Tabby lore until my nails were plum bruised and my eyelids formed callouses from straining open. I was in full Wag the Dog mode, scrambling to invent a believable, coherent villain narrative from minutae of Tabby’s show life purposely littered with an overkill of abnormal fictions. Her goal, I assumed, was to render any one shitshow antidote less flagrant and problematic. Tabby clearly courted the haters who could add to her diluted bubble of insane stories. And they were doing a fantastic job. Anything critics claimed about her sounded reasonably true in line with her biography, and reasonably forgettable, as just another misadventure in the Dr. Tabby infiltrates Washington series.

Uri drove us to a white clapboarded, colonial church front. He would’ve given me his keys but he didn’t want us committing crimes before my first meeting with Jesus. I wasn’t bitter about having to play my usual passenger role. I liked knowing that any blowups we encountered post-seatbelt buckling weren’t my responsibility.

All my energies could be spent on assessing the degree of my sudden fears, stemming from early indoctrination to the view of churches as cultish, possibly perverted tourist traps to avoid on holiday. Ida came from German Jews who were atheist cynics all day, every day but Christmas movie premieres up until WWII. Her husband descended from social climbing, britty tax collectors whose God was simply whatever pagan their richer clients recomended. No one in my family ever prayed or desecreated any sacred rites other than the occaisional culturally inappropriate yoga retreat. So, naturally, I had and still have no religion.

I expressed to Uri my deep uncertainty at how one ought to feel the fervor that I assumed would be present among Tabby’s idealogue supporters. He reassured me that the local church was simply the cheapest venue for a campaign to rent. And town halls required no confessing, sheeple chanting, or night drinking drug store wine emulating human guts. Instead, the format was a more intense, albeit no more secular ritual. It involved submitting one’s common sense and consuming the factual lies of the all mighty politicos, the unbenevolent deities who ruined fates in America.

At the pebbly church steps, an old wizard shop teacher in glute-squeezing Levis sheparded the crowd we’d joined through a dull, grey sanctuary and poked us into rows of puffy crimson pews. On a raised stage facing us were two camp foldout chairs separated by a metal bistro table. In one chair, Dr. Tabby-silvery Katherine Hepburn melting into a powder blue blazer- flipped through sheets of notes. She caught a few folks, Cam the political operative included, watching her cram and rebuffed suspicious glances with a practiced adjustment of her collar to display a lapel flag pin. The move was proof. She wasn’t subverting the label of prissy, grand dame girl boss. She was openly asking us to accept her as a try hard, a studier, and above all else, a patriot.

“How is forcibly sedating prisoners not a human rights violation. You’re stripping people of their bodily autonomy.”

            She was engaged. “Really, are you saying I somehow don’t care enough about, excuse me, terrorists? Murders? What about all the child groomers? You want them deciding whether they take their meds or not? What’s your alternative? They get to rape and stab and shoot up! You’re arguing for a neocommunist control of our prison industry.”

“No, I’m arguing against State interventionism. But that’s besides the point, you-”

“What’s your question.”

“Well, first of all, there’s an entire archive of bipartisan, peer evaluations documenating how you overprescribed sedative tranquillizers. Four of your patients were in critical condition, three are dead. Aren’t those stats a patent referendum on either your abilities or your morals? It’s worth knowing, are you receiving kickbacks?”

“No. But if I did, how would my earning a living impact you? You’re not even a citizen here!”

“That’s anglophobic.”

“You’re accusing me of being a racist?”

“Jesus, no, I didn’t say xenophobic!”

“Well, you know what I think? You’re here for a hit piece from the BBC. You guys should really take a look at your own history before pointing fingers.”

The crowd erupted in murmurs and I could feel eyeballs searing into my pores, dredging up shame and sweat. Some force of nature tugged my elbow, then dragged me through the melee to a dim corner under an effigy of Madonna and out a back door. I didn’t bother looking anywhere but down as we fled across a wet, warm lawn until our feet struck pavement and a street-light forced interaction. My savior was none other than Jaxon in what the traditional Canadian tux.

            “Hey, man, you wanna grab some air?” He was still holding my elbow. I looked into his cheeks sideways and he dropped my arm.

            “Sorry if I denigrated your candidate.”

            “Oh, sure, that was fun, you kept her talking and I’m not a partison, I don’t vote, you know, I just get a kick outta seeing these big tent events. Sometimes you hear news about taxes, housing builds. That’s when I go client shopping.”

            “So, not a Tabby acolyte, huh?”

            “Nah, nah not heavy. I dabble but -“ He stopped short and nodded at Uri pelting down the grass, waving at me.

             “Evil fucker, you genius!” Uri lobbed his car keys at my head with a celebratory whoop. I caught them mid-air.

Jaxon noted my catch. “Nice!”

“Well, I’m an evil fucker genius.”

He twisted his mouth sideways, until it was half moonlit, half-gone. “You just wait for me next week, we’ll talk more, sounds good?”

“Monday?” But his whole body dissappered before I could finish my clause.

Uri and I celebrated all the way downtown. He was, to my surprise, less interested in rehashing the success of our disruption of the Tabby agenda then he was in knowing about my seamless interaction with a person roughly my age.

“He’s Beau’s contractor.”

“He’s too young for the job. Sad, but most kids out here. Once they graduate from the high schools. They follow some family trade. That’s it. That’s their entire life. Birth to death. Can you imagine?”

“Yeah, I did the same thing, only a decade later.”

“Oh. Parents work in government?”

I shook my head. “Dad’s a banker. Brother does the same. I studied poli-sci and mathematics for mommy dearest, but I had zero interest and I’ll be the first to claim a negative aptitude. I just ended up hanging on the only gig that didn’t involve directly scamming people. Or being scammed into another degree.”

“That bad, huh? Government research sounds…sexy.”

“Depends. We’re all rigid stiffs, absolute fucking blanket wetters. But our average age is upwards of sixty, somewhere in the Viagra adult nappy years.”

Uri grinned. “Was it at least entertaining?”

“I was in charge of policy briefs on fatphobic pharma and Netanyahu’s body count and salmon mutations.”

“You made a paycheck for all that!”

“And dairy farms were interesting until we shot up export tarrifs. Then we had quite a few fecal smears on our cars.”

“So…happier…now?” Uri drew out his words on purpose, questioning my life choices for me as we rolled to a pause before a red light.

“I guess.” This wasn’t the worst or falsest quais-truth I’d ever told. I briefly considered: Had going to church rid me of my proclivity for sinful, self-delusion? Whatever had happened in the last thirty minutes, I must’ve picked up an innocence that convinced me to stop lying about my obvious lack of misery. I couldn’t hide freshly collagenized forehead wrinkles and receeding vericose veins forever. And then it hit me that a whole week had expired since I’d experienced a heart tremor or protracted bowl evacuation. Somehow, Joy’s slobber and American cereal calories had inversely metamorphized me from headless roach, obeying punnative laws of nature, to chaotic, obviously functioning adult male. He who was worthy of failure and being happier.

When the light soured, Uri directed me to take a hairpin left turn off our road and down a sleepy, picket fenced lane. He wanted to drop some cowboy kush in cigar boxes to his work friend who lived with a very pretty woman, according to his taste. I admit that I was curious to see the smoker friend and possibly the woman. I imagined her as tatted up Cathy Bates and him as a badder boy James Kahn, penning their next home owner’s association manifesto from a finished basement or two car garage.

To my dismay, the colonial cottages that sprung around us radiated too much nuclear family energy to be the kind of place Uri would stash a genuine friend. I crawled the mustang, scanning the trimmed yards for missing teeth and fallout shelters. Uri eventually pointed me to a sweetish, Victoria sponge colored box with minimally filled planters out front. Grandma’s hoary macrame shielded the windows.

While Uri texted his connections beyond the curtains, I parked at the mailbox to perform my usual facade inspection. The face was clean cut without appearing too peachy or preachy like its neighbors. I was suspicious. What outsiders hid inside who dared to not bedeck their front railings with plastic Barbie roses among Spanish moss and hoist fresh stars and stripes above their gutters?

Uri had me wait while he gathered two antique cigar boxes from his trunk. I watched him under the windshield as he breastfed the cowboys on the boxes and waved at nothing on his entry into the house via lopsided angle, through some unseen doorway. Little did he know me or that I didn’t have the patient balls to play lookout. When his shadow faded from street visibility, I popped the trunk and gasped and gushed it’s stale air through my bulging eye sockets.

A hand fish around the empty trunk, quick snapback on compulsive fingers, and a sniff for proof was all I needed. My nostrils crinkled shut, unwilling to consume dregs of cheap, deeply cut metallic cocaine. I knew this bloody scent as the one I’d once wore to an expulsion trial. For one week only in 2009, I’d tested life-preserving stimulants with other teenage overachievers owned by Darwinians who considered clinical depression a necessary step on their gifted babe’s journey to world domination. Back then, I was precocious enough to be spared on account of my upstanding grades and set straight.

Then by some miracle, I’d osmotically gained a cheat code from the hypocritical, unexceptionally okay adults around me. That is, by my twenties, I’d committed myself to the singular pursuit of quitting early. I soon had down pat the art of quietly extricating myself from every serious endeavor I’d never complete and setting expectations lower than they should’ve been. And so, I’d never persisted long enough at any herculean task or burned bright enough to ever reach the final battle of addiction versus true greatness in the way that Jin had.

Of course, now this suburban gothic yellowcake house, threatening to take me in and turn me against my establishment roots, presented yet another opportunity for me to flee rebellious self-acceptance. I clammed the trunk lid on my memories and slipped back into my seat to doom-prep the confrontation I needed to but wouldn’t initiate with Uri. It occurred to me that his cigarette and cigar boxes, with their hunky-dory cowboys and offensivelh cute ponies, were rotten liars. On their surface, they were sweetiepie advertisements for bland boundary nudging in teenage, smokeshop form. If you didn’t look inside them, and you probably wouldn’t unless you were traumatically parentified or unnaturally deep, you’d never know that they were really sinister, Stepford coverups for fatal strains and cracks in our system. I wanted Uri to tell me who his chosen victims were, who he was involuntarily euthanizing. I needed these strangers to know me. Or at least to know that I wanted them alive and present whether they liked their lives or not. They who were worthy of being happier.

I didn’t say a word when Uri returned to my side and he didn’t reveal what wasn’t asked of him regarding the pittstop. He just talked over my silent assumptions. I was, at turns and stop signs, reminded of the asymetrical conversations the sides of my face had often exchanged with my father. On weekends, he’d give me and Aubrey the machismo reel, highlighting his triumphs over lonely women and stupid men hired to grovel in his corner office. Uri poured into me with a similar montage monotone. He’d met his friend, met his friend’s bedtime friend, and collected two hundred bucks from them for passing through their dismal lives, like one of his perky cowboys played by no doubt by suicidal actors who danced on mother’s laps for Californian rent money.

We shot back to his house by midnight and didn’t sleep, one of us a little buzzed, the other a little frightened. Uri said he would visit me on Monday at Beau’s to replenish my cereal and canned goods. I promised that I would faithfully take before-Campbell pictures and videos of every room and learn how to touch up damaged walls with puddy in the intervening five days. We also watched a documentary on how to scam the black market for decent oil forgeries from old masters in case of any extreme accidents. It was hosted by a deranged David Attenborough knockoff who left me entertained to the point of forgetting that Beau’s taste in art ranged narrowly from mod phallic ceramics to beatnik vaginal fiber tapestries.

Dawn hadn’t died before a 20^th century, death-mask greige pickup arrived at Uri’s doorstep along with a text from Shana. She wasn’t sorry, but she had to leave early for a client meeting. It was Jaxon who drove the truck in a leather Stetson hat. He bustled up to Uri’s door and wrapped greased knucles on the thin glass front windows. Uri was finally asleep, so I let Jaxon in without a word and let Joy sniff him down while I wrote and tapped a letter to Uri’s forehead. Jaxon palmed my luggage one-handed into his truck bed, lovingly buried it under a tarp, then drove me off by rainfall bulleting his old blue grass casettes.

I thought I may be dreaming again when we arrived in relative sunlight at my castle. Jaxon wanted to spend the day showing me a few new security features he’d installed for the kiddish novelty more than the practicality and I had no objections. We first stowed my luggage in the bedroom out of six that I’d imprinted upon for cultural reasons. It had bitter William Morris leaves dragged out on half the walls and skinned animal prints fighting prim floral prints for narrative control of the mood.

 Our next point of silly business was to test out the intricate network of spy webcams Beau had Jaxon’s team stuff in obscure corners inside and outside the entire property. Camera spotting was an intuition-based artistic discipline in the vein of bird watching. You had to put yourself in the mind of a top-notch conspiracy pervert before you knew where to start sniffing for big brother’s pheremones. The biggest giveaway of cameras in the wild, Jaxon showed me, were their beady black lenses poking out of fake books, shelf tchochkies, and potted plant clusters. There were even cameras strategically inserted behind tissue boxes in what Beau thought would be the unpopular bedrooms and bathrooms. All of these cameras were linked up to some cloud database account that stored motion detection alerts and recorded mini-clips of live footage every minute.

While we searched the kitchen for even more cameras, I asked Jackson if he knew Beau well enough to call him paranoid, given his sheer volume of surveillance equipment.

“Hmm, he’s maybe on one side of paranoid since he’s gotten more into security. It’s ‘cause of the mega money he’s putting down, it’s made some noise. And lot’s of these multi-million places, when they’re empty and full off nice stuff? They’re squatted in, day one.”

“Really, this location isn’t too remote?”

“Kinda…I mean, mostly it’s the rich neighbor kids who walk from Darby township…not far. They get kicked out and they need a safe place to use, right? No harm, zero foul, they can leave in the mornings, ‘cause they trust my guys’ll take care of the evidence.”

“I see. So have any interesting videos come up yet?”

“Oh that dunno, we just finished the install yesterday. I heard though, Beau’s gonna text over paperwork with the account username and password stuff soon and you can try checking it all out, I think tomorrow?”

“But what if an intruder comes onto the property and I’m too far away to hear or see them. So the house alarm isn’t necessarily on. But the cameras catch someone moving around and I don’t know where they are. Would the police be alerted? Would I have to check the videos and trigger an alarm manually?”

“I’ll say you’re better waiting for Beau on all those answers. I just don’t wanna tell you this, that and get it wrong. My team sets up what we’re asked…we’re not supposed to know too much. We do all the builds, hire out plumbing, then we’re gone, like we can’t even step near property lines on weekends.”

“It’s Sunday.”

“Eh, still…this is definitely a far cry from city life, so I wanted you to be okay for your first trip. You gotta get very comfortable with the inside, there’s too much mess in some of these rooms, it’s like their walls are balancing the hat on a hat situation. And then you’ve got this big open life around you outside? Like your nearest neighbor is gonna be five and three quarters miles down on the other end of the lake. They won’t hear anything. It’s a lot.”

            I noticed a cartoonishly picturesque birds’ nest, like something out of Aesopian propoganda, discarded on the chalk line between concrete and grass. The perfect parable came to mind. I looked down at the cleft between my toes, two splintered eggshell innards gooing up the mud beneath them. Off to the left side, one malformed youth carcass hunched dead with little tallon toes soaked in the stew of his unborn sibblings. I knew what had happened. The mother of this fractured brood had gone for a flight, the father was busy rubbing someone else’s cloaca, and the only kid who could’ve flapped away was shot down. There was a screw worming through his scraggly chest and his lopsided baby wings- that would never have held him up anyways- were weighted unjustly with sawdust. I saw his belly was raw and guessed that maybe he’d beaked off all his stomach feathers because he’d been born with a mouthy, fetiform teratoma who told him plucking at himself would save him. That’s what I’d done.

            Jaxon stepped out to the patio as I was on the verge of completing a goodbye to my avian crew. He paced for a second, then hollered from the pool. “Hey, Cam! I’ll clean that mess…my guys had to take ‘em down ‘cause they were nesting in one of the heat lamps. And…”

            I willfully ignored the rest of his murderous tale. The beady eyes from the semiformed bird at my side reminded me of Beau’s camera lenses and I twitched away, conscious that this deceased boy could be watching over me.

            Jaxon pelted to my backside. I skittered a few paces from him and the broken nest but he drew a hand towards me, coaxing me still. “You doing good…okay? They’re just some stint babies from up north for the summer…that’s their species…it’s neat right?”

            “I thought for a second he looked like…one of the cameras.” I pointed at the screwed up bird.

            “Whew! Funny guy, you notice things with a twist? I’ll tell ya, Beau’s also there…he’d go for any kinda off beat, tech trend. But I don’t see him with spy birds, now that’s just too much swamp conspiracy shit. Even for him!” He smiled at me.

            “Good, I knew it was wrong to feel undisgusted.”

            “Man, so you are…you’re creeped out? I’m sorry, you know I told the guys, you can’t leave a whole gore situation ‘cause Cam’s not a nature boy, he’s a city prince.”

“Well, I would’ve been more comfortable if a camera had died. I’m not sure about the ethics of invasive bird species. But I’m against surveillance by the Big Beau nanny state.”

“Aha, gotcha…makes two of us…it’s just like, he also pays my bills, so…cameras are the fucking best!”

I nodded but I couldn’t parse his word flotsam dripping at me, floating but never arriving at a finished thought along his lugubrious piss of consciousness. I wasn’t up for non-metric math on the distance to my neighbors. And what was the meaning of a big open life? Was he always such a off-beat poet, acid Alan Ginsburg, some genius I’d never understand, and was I too self-absorbed to notice? Or was he simply talking his head off on some magic pills? Was I? I struggled to swallow questions at the door when Jaxon said, “good night, man”. But something about his grin, as he bobbled off in his truck, told me to take his word. I shouldn’t ask him for truth and expect straightforward answers. So, I let him go unanswered for and shut myself inside my castle, all alone but full of stuff, leaving a big open life outside of me.

I hate to admit that I was so God damn happy to be alone. Abandoned in the first house holding me and only me. I’d always been an excellent attention whore, tugging down designer pant legs and French curtains like some neurotic quixotic in a gothic nightmare, posturing to be anointed from among the boring boys by the Gods of drama for a dynamic storyline. Now, I crawled around, a vile little prince, satiated more than intrigued by the emptiness of my schedule ahead. I toyed with every motion censored, tech monstrosity overlording my bedroom and adjoining bathroom until my knuckle joints ached. Then, supreme athlete that I was, I tuckered out my brain, assessing the degree of puerile almost-cool belonging to the Jean Miro nudes peeping outside my door.

Straddling my bed, I had a dream. I was curled on some paisley, country bumpkin sofa as far from a Freudian chaise as you could imagine in a beige, stripmall office. Dr. Tabby was sitting in her camp chair at my head, her face dangling above mine.

 “What is your question.”

“What’s wrong with me, Doc?”

“Schizophrenic paranoia, growing anti-sociality, obvious obsessive-compulsive tendencies, continue?”

“Only if you tell me something I wasn’t aware of.”

“You seem to be enjoying this conversation.” She scanned my body over, settling her gaze below my waist until I felt a twinge between my legs. She raked her hands through my hair and I shuddered in her grasp.

“I like hearing about my neurosis.”

“You get off on it?”

“Sometimes.”

“So, you admit to clinical narcissism, self-delusion, and-“

“No! No! I’m not a terrible person. I’m not like them!”

“Who?”
I sat upright and noticed someone hanging behind her desk. There was Uri’s gun, waiting to be fired at me. Dr. Tabby grabbed the gun from the peg on the wall.

“Point it at me.” She pressed the gun vertically against my chest and brazenly dragged it’s mouth across my jawline. I must’ve disassociated, eyes shut, skull back striking the couch rim.

“Keep your eyes open.”

“I’d have to Clockwork Orange them!”

“For two minutes.” She brushed her thumbs up my lips and eye lids, then eased my fingers onto the gun’s trigger. I instinctively withdrew my body from hers, lifting the gun until it rested against the air beyond my shoulder.

“That’s a safety behavior.” She guided my triggered hand to her lap, until the gun’s mouth was depressed against her collar bone.

Then for the one hundred and twenty seconds of a camera’s exposure, Tabitha kept a steadying hand on my heart and when I couldn’t hold the gun aloft any longer without absorbing back what should’ve been tears, she prodded me with her foot.

“Done. I’m calling this session a success.”

“I’m not your client.”

“I’m not a therapist.”

“I didn’t mean to imply you’re not decent at your job, frau doktor.”

She knocked the gun aside and clasped my hand to her neck so that I could feel her pulse. I was on the verge of fervently prying out her eyeballs with my nails or squeezing her jugular into a green, veiny pulp, but I withdrew from her again.

“See? Nothing. I lived.”

“But I had many thoughts about what I could do.”

“I did too. For example, your first impulse was to cry.”

I shrugged. Perhaps she sensed that I wasn’t ready to think rationally or offer any coherent assessments of the last two minutes. She calmly replaced the gun on the wall and opened her door, freeing me.

My dream quickly folded into an ambivalent morning, beneath a skyline unable to formulate consistent sunlight or rainfall. Clouds on the verge buffed my windows and burried me in a lonely Valentine’s haze as I scoured the pink kitchen for top-of-the-line calories. I found more than three paths to achieving a champaign flute of carbonated water but no food. Breakfast ended up as the bottom half of a stale cereal melange Uri had cached in my suitcase. I didn’t know what else to do but wander around when Jaxon called at noon. He was working on another build site but would stop by and give me a ride to the local convenience store in the late afternoon.

We drove a few kilometers further than I’d ventured off the left side of my castle. Jaxon pointed out the neighbors, the Smith family consisting of Mr, a Mrs, and their gazillions from casino development spanning Maryland to Mexico. They lived in a red brick and ivy institutional palace and apparently hated Beau for buying up a “lower income” property that otherwise would’ve been torn down by the township to make ground for a golf course.

“Like a lotta the folks, they stay summers on the water and then actually live up near D.C. like Georgetown area for work. Think they’re in lobbying for the DNC but when they’re here, it’s just non-stop, party time at that house. It’s very pretty but very expensive.”

“Have you worked for them?”

“Nope, technically they’re not local. I gotta show hometown support. And I only said yes to working for Beau ‘cause he’s the big fish in this town. Everyone wants the access to him.”

“Wait, are you an undercover operative? A PI?” I was tickled curious.

“Ha! That would give my family stroke! Nah, my sister married up and she goes to charity events with Beau’s wife. They put me in touch. Otherwise, I’d never have gotten any work and I’ll say, I was even planning to quit contracting and finish my G.E.D. That way, I’d start some actual training.”

“Oh, training for…?”

He took a breathe. “You can look this up online. I did time running oxy at nineteen when I got injured ski bumming in Vermont. And I sat for four years. But I had a decent pastor, got me hooked on hosting these meetings with my unit guys every week. So when I was leaving, he gave me advice about earning these licenses, maybe running my own talk group, like a narcos or PTSD anonymous? I have whole gang now. We’re just not registered officially or anything for taxes since I’m not a legal social worker yet.”

“That’s still impressive.”

“Well, thanks. Keeps me alive, too, having people who know what I’ve done. You can meet the boys, we’re talking Thursday night at this, can you believe there’s a vegan place?”

“Okay. Yeah, I’ll come.”

“All right, I mean, no judgement at all, but you seem clean as Hell.”

 “Seeming and being are two different things.”

“Very, very true…you’re like BBC Heidegger.”

I don’t think he recognized that I was quite comfortable with his reclamation of the highbrow reference drop. Most people took offense to the unintentional elitism implied by my severe fop face, even in my own country full of fops. I’d been bearing silent witness for decades to intellectual inferiority complexes exploding in real time and so I knew what to do with Jaxon.

“Who?”

“Oh! German philosopher. I’m getting into some of these deep readings, ‘cause I’m trying to understand, I have a project this year to figure out, what’s our purpose? What am I when I’m not helping people, working, it’s that question of…what would I do with the money a Beau or a Dr. Tabby can just burn up in a week?”

Everything was a question of money. “And have you determined your most outlandish desire?”

“See, no, I get stuck on the easy stuff. Once you say, buy a trailer, take a mortage, give my mom some for medical debt, put down some school loans, then the rest feels like Genie bottle stupid crap, you know? It’s like, do I need a horse ranch and a private jet? I mean…what’re you buying…you probably come with the horses and private jets already.”

“God no! And I’d let the money sit. Speak for itself.”

“Why…you afraid of losing it?”

“Well, I’d need it around to buy me power.” I sounded like I was losing it.

Jaxon led the way through my first American supermarket, describing in his watery Jaxonian speak, the purposes of various aisles. As we wandered, I lamented to myself this must be the most depressing late-stage capitalist wasteland to ever promote life’s perishable pleasures when a familiar shadow arrested my concerns. Around a corner, was the woman I’d injured at the protest, Gretta, climbing a shelf of cat food in her nine-to-five office regalia. I watched her from afar. She jumped down and gawked back, making sure I acknowledged the band-aid on her wrist and the shaken not stirred food tins pinging around her ankles. Jaxon, blessed man, was too gone to notice or care that I wasn’t present with him. He kept on parroting advertising agitprop leaving Gretta and I time and a soundtrack to reacquaint ourselves with the one another’s gaze.

I considered making a ritual out of seeking her out on Thursdays. She’d be here because, of course, she had cats to sustain. But really, she could only be in this very supermarket, my contrivance, when I needed her in my vicinity, because how the Hell dare she exist in this world but for me to make her laugh. And then I was ashamed at myself for toying with anyone to whom I owed a debt and respect. My only consolation was the realization that she had an equal right to seek me out on Thursdays because, of course, she’d be toying with her image of me for perpetuity in memorium, until time became real and our staring became awkward. And there, I fell again, down the path of deeply disturbed assumptions. Was I worthy of being an object of her interest? No. I ought to leave that choice up to her and leave the unknowing of her version of me to be my mental undoing.

Jaxon and I drove to a secret pancake mill housed in a flattop, brown brick cube with a western portico gatekeeping entry. You had to be willing to question what the interior of this mass-produced emporium looked like and be able to swallow very met expectations. Inside was a visceral representation of traditional American coronary failure replete with mint chip linoleum, distended choco-pie pleather seats, and cheese whiz plaque siding. Jaxon waved past tables of dentured geriatrics on the path to a corner semi-circle booth. The womblike cushions spooned a square silver dollar table around which was squished a gangly trio. Den, Wilco, and Rod.

 Den, born Denis McGrath, was a recently transitioned local barista on the verge of joining the Marines and Virginian Young Socialists. Wilco Roos, former Black Panther, co-owned a suburban funeral home with his dead mother’s estate. Their group’s self-appointed president was spineless Rod Gorman, ex-gentleman’s club MC turned car mechanic. As Jaxon and I approached, Rod’s face remained in staring contest with the wall icon of aureoled Elvis blessing the table.

“What’s this one got on you, Jax?” Rod swiveled at length, on his own terms, giving me the third degree once over until shame hormones trickled down my pits. A beer paunched slimebag in cameo sweats was nauseated at my appearance.

            “Cam…he’s from jolly old London.” Jaxon slid onto the right end of the booth besides Wilco.

            “And he’s out here for what. Crimes? Land deals? Sex trade?”

            “An unjust firing? Is that bad enough?” I offered Rod my hand. He hithered a wart-crusted finger back.

            “Sure, wakey-wakey. You’re not a wage slave to that 9 to 5 IRS torture grind any more. You play anything?”

            “I shouldn’t. I’m almost broke.”

            “Perfect, we do poker. Vegas style. Sell Texan strippers to Mexico and Canada for all I fuck about.”

Gen Z Den cringed and bounced further into the left end of the booth to make room for the extra chair I’d pulled to the table. “I, uh, heard you took on Tabby at her town hall? That’s bad ass. She deep ended, went full out ranting about you with the Circus Redneckers.”

            “I can’t say I’m a…viewer? Listener? Devotee?”

            “Big podcast duo out here, they cover government conspiracies, Southern urban legend type commentary? But yeah. You made a real shit impression on the pussy-crat. That’s my nickname for her. Because ladies need to reclaim the word. And seriously, you’re doing Satan’s work for us, man! We salute you.”

            “I’m glad my efforts aren’t in vain. Was her rant profanely insulting? Slanderous? Should I consult…would it be an attorney?”

            “Nah, I’m kidding, she’s selling out. Gotta rack up that campaign publicity.”

Jaxon slapped my shoulder. “And see, you stay around long enough…you’ll find that’s a version of her only attack move. Pick some mark from the last rally who rubbed a little wrong, go give a counter shout for why this or that one’s a son of a fill up the blank. Happens like every week…you got some good company.”

            “Damn it. Tell a man the truth. Elite commie. Class traitor. Bobo euro-bullshit grifter. Neo cold war globalist psy-op. Those are your labels.” Wilco gave me a brilliantly blank-faced wink.

            “That’s all?”

            “All the ones with sticking power. If we assume everyone’s converted to Tabby propoganda. Which means we pretend. We have no idea where you’re from. One pig grunts Russia, Russia, Russia? Why not. Now, we’ve got a foreign asset among us. Common enemy to defeat. And only one woman can save us!”

“Someone tell her. I’m running from an exclusive island with a cabalic network of pizza fronts owned by lefty perves. That should fill up a whole podcast cycle.”

            The table had a laugh. We slurped old timey milkshakes pipetted with Den’s bottle of 5-Hour Energy and slapped around a hand of poker, building fortunes off pastel monopoly bills. Rod dealt, Wilco smoked a fake menthol cigar, and Den and Jaxon did their best to educate me on their gang’s inside game quirks and rule slides.

            “Now, how’re you besting this…I gotta ask for some lessons!” Jaxon was enthralled.

“You a Zionist, Cam? Could be twins with my urologist’s kid!” Rod spanked the table with a straight in front of me, grabbed the pot, and shuffled up a fresh hand.

“I don’t know if I look like a urologist’s kid. But actually, I memorized all the major ways you can be caught cheating. I play defense pretty well.” This factoid was true. I’d gone through a teenage phase of betting that enough bad luck would turn me into a compulsive gambling fraud and forced myself to practice avoiding all possible card grifts. Not that I’d ever admit to borrowing Aubrey’s fake ID and gambling at a Liverpool craps table.

“You’re setting yourself up for an illegal flush.” I pointed at Rod’s deck.

            Wilco grinned. “Smart. Reverse engineer it.”

            “That’s it. Fair’s fair. Done! First bastard to call me. In seven years dealing this damn game. We better find out you’re some mega double-agent or I’ll be pissed.” Rod flicked his pink slip stack of money on the table at me.

            The night ended with an illicit viewing of the renovation pictures Jaxon had filed away on his cellphone. “Tarman still wants that shark paper bathroom and I heard there’s gonna be another spa on the other wing with…it’s like this Swedish voice activated charcoal ice clamshell bath something…there’s a shit lotta marketing copy.”

            “You banging daddy’s girl in there again? Turning those jets on for the cuck?” Rod’s pupils flipped up and glassed over, back cataloging through his mental space for whatever dirty images Jaxon had previously transmitted.

            “Respect everyone’s kinks. Can we leave it at that?” Den stood up and leaned over Rod. Wilco handed her his cigar. She stubbed it on Elvis’s sleazy mug, letting the butt drip like ashy goose scat on Rod’s naked scalp, singing a few stray follicles.

If Rob had felt a burn, he didn’t show as he barreled ahead with his agenda. “Wait, how’d you get this chick down, again?”

            “You know, she’s not even around anymore…she left, right? She was gonna fly, remember she said to a city in like Paris or was it back to California first?” Jaxon pleaded his confusion to me for some unknown reason. “A name’s not popping up.”

“Redhead? Old Orphan Annie. Got the fish lips!” Rod lipped over his gumbs as if to suckle a confessional parasite from Jaxon’s gut.

Jaxon’s voice drooped, predictably limp with denial. “Huh?”

Wilco turned to me, head shaking. “Any idea who he’s talking about?”

            I should have left the table a firm “Nope.” Instead, I took a slow, crackly breath and overworded myself into a corner. “Not quite. And I sincerely don’t want to know any graphic details. I’m not interested. Or inclined to comment. Unless orgies were held while I was sleeping. Then I think I’m well within my rights to request a deep clean of all used spaces.”

            Jaxon undulated a sorry head in my direction.  “Hey, it was…I’ll say it was just three of us, like I can promise you unequivocally, we sort of-“

“No. Thank you. Sort of defies unequivocal, please sanitize the Scandi cryo-sex-pod when you find a chance, and now, I’d like to defect from this conversation.”

“Can we join the resistance?” Den elbowed me and Wilco. I nodded, lost on how to proceed without painting myself as a floppy hypocrite.

Jaxon wasn’t used to my silence .“Just listen, it was… we only did maybe missionary, twice? That was the big finale!”

I listened with a cringe. Beyond my anhedonic disinterest in audio-erotic discussions, I now had stakes in shutting down further reveals from Jaxon. I didn’t want the impression of him as my wholesome neighborhood cowboy warped when we were verging on aquaintanceship.

“If you want, I’ll take you to the spa room, it’s almost done, and you can watch me clean?” Thank God. He was smiling and I couldn’t help a smile back. He was so genuinely in his delivery of an apology offer that would’ve made a great opening smut premise or a dirty joke.

            Shortly thereafter, Rod pissed off, unable to believe that a nebbish boychic called his bluff. Wilco had a girlfriend to date and Den needed to fill her gas tank before her late shift, so they left in tandem. Soon, Jaxon and I were the only two stragglers with no distractions compelling our immediate expulsion from the premises. He gave me a timid shrug as we tongue-melted Andes mints parking lot, having waved the gang away in separate directions.

“I feel like maybe we should…I mean, can we talk and get outta here?”

I wondered at the pleading undertone to Jaxon’s question. His vocal crack suggested he wanted compassion from someone. Clearly, he was craving to share and release some unpleasant memory of his tantric charcoal ice bath that he’d pancaked down until this night.

He wasn’t coyly divulging details of a sexcapade with a bro. He wasn’t raconteuring a conquest to pad his own ego. The desperation was unmistakable. He was seeking connection, daring to ask out loud, before another man, the perfect self-reflective question for an aftermath of diarrhetic shits or blood clots or guts smacking a turbofan. Was I the problematic weirdo?

I had to give him a last word. “Okay. We can talk.”

“It was only me and Shana…with Beau.”

“Jesus. Beau was in the unholy trinity!”

“Kinda. but it wasn’t what I’m imagining you’re thinking of as like a traditional orgy.”

“I’m not versed in what’s modern orthodox for orgies…though I did have a mechanics question.”

“Go for it.”

“How does a missionary threesome work? Is that what a…polycule is?” And then I was blushing, the naked prude in me finally willing to expose my inexperience.

“Well, it was only me and Shana in the pod. Beau wanted to watch and he sorta lay back on the floor next to us? I dunno if he was getting himself off, I wasn’t paying that good attention.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Nah, it was all fucking odd, man, I major blanked for most of it. But half-way, he’s shouting some rant about his marriage, being a bad husband, bad father, then he brought up his ex cheating on him and he’s sobbing while we’re finishing!”

“You had no idea beforehand that’s what he was planning to do.”

“Uhm… see, I got a DUI in March and he paid my bail, had my charges downgraded ‘cause he’s golf buds with prosecuter’s husband, he kept me on the contracting project…I was kissing his feet, you know? Three months later, he turns, says I gotta work off my debt. I have no cash, so he brings up a side gig…he’ll pay me for two weekends while Shana’s in town.”

“For physical labor.”

“Well, he was basically clear he was giving me a couple grand handout to watch me fuck his friend. It was all in this contract… an NDA?”

“A non-discolsure. Which is moot now.”

“Oh, shit! Okay, woah…whoops, I mean, I guess you’re safe to talk to…he likes you!”

            “Don’t tell me anything else.”

            “Sorry!”

            “No, no…I’m thinking. He bugged his whole house. He probably bugged your truck, your cell! All my things! He could blackmail you.”

                              I crawled to the lipped edge of the pod and wobbled sidesways, striking the mosaics under my knees in a fetalistic, chickenish curl. The tin foil moon enshrouding the sky window above me cast an anemic, glowing ring and inside the ring’s feathery perimeter, I groveled for a reflection of acceptability. I was willingly submitting to the unflattering spotlight, here to perform the unsexy rite of sublimating my discomfort within my body. My awareness of being exposed as an egotist in denial drew out my greatest fear. I was unmasking myself to myself, unfettering my momentary sensory perceptions from my preconceived judgements.

            On my back, I wriggled to a blobby shadow where I thought Beau might’ve creamed his core with the freedom of embraced shame and unpostured pride. We were around the same height and build. Not tall, not thin, not chiseled, not handsome. We knew we weren’t the flesh treasures anyone capable of a relationship intentionally coveted and we shared a suspicion of our fundamental inadequacies shellacked over in our glossy, jaded eggshells. But when we were alone, our innocent, questioning selves came to play hangman, banging heads on knees for answers. Who were we relevant to? Who were we living for?

I considered that Beau might be transmitting a message to me. We shouldn’t expect from anyone unadulterated acceptance that could never be given freely. We’d have to be our own greatest loves and lovers, because, after all, no one would adore us in the precise way that we needed, in the way that we uniquely could.

            I imagined I was Beau as I drew my fisted hands between my knees. Then up and up my hands unfurled, splitting my thighs apart, holding my halves together as I wanted to them be held. I imagined that some quilted mass of body parts, absent pieces of Jaxon or Shana, was pulsating besides me, taking on the heavy labor of physical pleasure for me. I would keep my own efforts light and easy.

            I blurted out my fears. Of failing into obscurity and becoming the poker cheat, the genocidal cocaine pimp, or worst of all, the lonely, self-centered king who got off on beating himself down before anyone else could take a swing at him. I shouted until the taunts and insults I levied over my own head had no meaning and a drip from a leak between half-caulked ceiling tiles flooded my open mouth.

As far as I understood from Shana’s rules, I was allowed overnight guests as long as they cleaned their bodily traces and deleted any pictures of the renovations in progress. I thought I’d take advantage of this policy and asked Uri and Joy to spend the weekend judging Beau’s genitalic art with me. Uri drove down on Sunday morning. We sat on the patio’s egg chairs drinking Shana’s leftover mushroom coffee shots from tasteful Weimar ceramic jugs while Joy swam kidney laps in the pool.

I had nothing other than camera paranoia to report, leaving Uri to commandeer most of the conversational duties. He was thrilled to share the news that he’d scored a new high profile client whom he’d been ferrying around to news stations and hotel bars and houses of worship. Though I had some suspicion, I wasn’t the guess around and get wrong type, so I waited for him to spill the details for me. Dr. Tabby’s campaign had apparently noticed his company’s bumper sticker at enough of her events to assume he was a Tabby devotee with access to impressive wheels. The gig pay was double his usual, but more importantly, he couldn’t resist the opportunity for organic proximity. He now had hours on end to conduct covert oppo research while Tabby obliviously made her donor calls and arranged lobbyist lunches from his Cadillac’s backseat.

To fully immerse himself in the undercoverrness of driving Miss Tabby to Hell, Uri was going method to a degree I could appreciate. Since I’d left him, he’d thickened his almost imperceptible Hungarian accent and buried his tough guy face beneath nerd-circle eyeglasses. I could see that he was on a mission, festered and ready to pop off the blistering secrets behind Tabby’s calls. Pressingly, he needed me to hear the big rumor. Tabby’s funds were waning. Expenses on her attack advert blitz had sunken her to groveling and hush-hushing checks from her sorority sister’s big insurance firm to cover another month on donor life support.

With lower funds, she was also bleeding staff. Her solution? She would force her uncle, Congressman Cannon Bremmer, of Virginia’s 17^th district, to mobilize his office staff on her campaign trail, little interns too.

“But there has to be a rule saying you can’t support partisan activity while working as a civil servant! We had one for Parliament.”

“You follow it?”

“Campbell did. Phil E. Stein has bigger balls. But…is she outright asking those staffers to commit some electoral…would campaigning rise to the level of a crime?”

He shrugged. “Crime or not. Election people won’t check. Not for state races. Small stakes. Bremm’s not a big national name. Or a democrat. She’ll get what she needs. Unless you think…”

“I could look for a possible violation, if that would have some sway with her base?”

“May turn a few voters. Rattle her team. That’s enough for me.”

So we spent the rest of the afternoon scheming poolside. I sifted through article after article on the American Hatch Act, eventually splicing together Uri’s amended Tabby quotes in a plausible confession to plotting a serious election ethics violation. Tabby sure sounded like she was demanding her uncle’s acquired staff engage in public partisanship. And perhaps, she really was going to follow through on her plan to drop extra sorority cash into buying loyalty from college kids with rich parentage. She might’ve skirted the committal of sins, but she wouldn’t be able to deny that she had corrupt intent.

Uri wanted to share our findings with the First Baptist congregation election special on Wednesday night. Most of the members were un party-affiliated Tabby voters.

She strutted the stage. “My opponent thinks felons should vote and buy marijuana and get paid for picking up trash. Using our tax dollars. Why do we have to reassure these people they’re not so bad? It’s a conspiracy by the moral averages! In fact, if we’re being PC, let’s call the intentional villains the greatest trauma artists among us. Give them medals of freedom. They’re so brave. And raw! And while we’re at it, let’s punish the real psychos. The givers, the rule followers. The hard workers who just want to address their kitchen table needs. Health insurance, gas to get to their second job, a living wage to put eggs in their fridge. Let’s-”

I couldn’t take her proselytizing. “Why?” I stood up.

“Go ahead, enlighten us uneducated American hicks.”

“Capitalist commodification of forgiveness.”

“What does that have to do with the fact that there are good and bad people. And wanting just retribution against the bad is common sense.”

“Well, questions of objective morality aside, the commons have spoken. Why does our best-selling book- that I doubt you’ve read- end with the new testament, not the old? It’s what the majority audience will pay to read. We can all be forgiven. We’re all trying. Sounds good. And that’s why the data bears that retributive punishment isn’t all that effective a social control mechanism.”

“Uh-huh. So, what would it take for you to call an act of depravity what it is?”

“I wouldn’t state a tautology. That would require years of regression and brain damage.

“I thought you already had that already.”

I hadn’t spent enough time considering who Uri was or what his reasons were for answering my initial help plea. He’d always been straightforwardly unsentimental about why he liked me enough to lend me his car and his dog for my American masquerade. I’d paid him more in rent for two months than he could earn in half a year of driving, dealing, or both. But, while I understood that this sort of brute exchange might be bedrocking all human relationships, the naïf in me wasn’t willing to see Uri as a typical naked mercenary.

Certainly, I wouldn’t accept that my access to cold, easy cash and gameness to accommodate all of his Tabby-related demands were the only factors keeping me whole inside his doors rather than ditched and hogtied in segments or vegetating to bits in a foreign hospital. Nor, frankly, was I capable of adhering to the emotional limits of acquaintanceships like the one we’d formed. If Uri truly hated my presence, I reasoned with my common sense, he could’ve easily evicted me. Hell, he could’ve had me implicated in one of his Stepford coke deals gone awry. The fact that I was alive and we were still on speaking terms was evidence that he must have a sweeter, fleshier reason for keeping me close.

Of course, I wasn’t capable of unknowing where I stood beneath Uri’s riffle mouth and, while he went on a jaunt selling to a little league half-time crowd, I decided I ought to orchestrate my own investigation…

I had recently rexamined the insides of my suitcase and I realized that my passport and backup credit card were missing. I’d left them untouched, hidden in a box of laxatives buried in a hidden pocket that I’d assumed no one would care to inspect further. Apparently, Uri, the only person with reasonable access had

I caught the effigy of Beau framed in the doors, haloed with dimmer-switched supermarket light. He could probably see me too, but he waited until I demured my eyelids, before pushing his cart outside. He was half dressed for some geriatric athletic activity, in a tight black tee shirt and crotch-squeezing sweat shorts.

“What’re you staring at?”

 “I couldn’t imagine you in…shorts.”

 “I hope you haven’t been imagining me.”

“No, you just looked rather sombre, macbre even, especially the top half. It was hard to reconcile you with the outfit.”

“Well, I’m visiting my ex later.”

“I’m really, terribly sorry for your loss.” I lowered my voice but I didn’t move. I wanted him to reach for me.

“She’s not dead yet.” He stepped up.

“Just to you?”

He shook his head and reached over his cart to grab a giant wooden crate of overpriced IPA beers with grammatically incorrect French tatted on the front.

“You driving without a license?”

“For ten minutes!”

“Another felony from Prince Andrew. Jesus.”

“Come on, obviously it’s King Charles! And are you drinking and driving?”

“I got two miles to my club, your highness.” He checked his techie, heart-monitoring, aura-vibing wrist band.

“I guess that would be a decent work out…I have no concept of metric distance.”

“Give me your keys.” He hoisted his crate mid-air and pressed it to my scrawny chest, purring gleefully as my unprepped arms straggled under it’s weight.

“You’d be abetting an eggregious crime of the century.”

“My lawyer went to Harvard.”

“And where did you go for uni?”

“Earned a full ride to Virginia Tech. My parents weren’t paying bribes for me.”

“Oh, so you learned the benefits later in life?”

He was taken by me. We traded my keys for his drinks. The drive was too short for exchanges of phrases that didn’t describe cardinal directions. Yet there was something very natural, even pleasantly intimate about our conversational tit-for-tat cadence. And by the time Beau parked in the Marina boathouse back lot besides his daddy Range Rover, we mutually lingered. We’d lost track of how best to severe rapport with a near stranger who felt suddenly familiar enough to tease.

Beau took considerable time stowing his crate in his trunk, relinquishing my presence well over five minutes after our arrival. “Don’t kill anyone today.” He swung my keys in the air.

“How do you feel about tomorrow?” I tottered on my toe pads to grab the keys like a show pony, preening for approval. Beau was thoughtful enough to acknowledge my efforts and wave me back to earth. But he peeled back his driver’s door only half-way ajar, holding taught until I glanced back from the Mustang to see him disappearing on me. As I drove away from him, I was stuck wondering. Was he secretly following me? Should look around for him and follow his lead?

I wondered at Beau’s impulse to share with me the knowledge of his secret affair. Why now.

I’d been proud of myself for resisting the vanity of being chosen by his Godhead to safe keep his palace in the version of the great somewhere else that he’d constructed. I hadn’t fawned my way up his excellency’s hierarchy. I hadn’t made it a mission to gain his trust. Yet he must’ve sensed that I was experienced. That I wasn’t as fresh-eared a virginal listener as my mouthy daytime persona made me seem.

He and Jaxon and Shana must’ve seen my journal while they fucked around. The eighteenth volume in a series. Every year, I dutifully recorded the most unmentionable facts stuffed into me by unsuspecting assholes who knew that I’d been groomed to join them. But what these idiots always failed to understand was that I kept their secrets buried alive. Preservation of my own innocence. I was waiting for them to fall first. That way, I could tisk-tisk middle fingers at them on my way down. I was waiting for the rigged systems they erected to shrivel around me. To collapse with infections and leak fetid pee and require emasculating amputation. I was waiting out the blue bloodletting on the sidelines, conscious that I too might be condemned if I stepped to close into their unflattering spotlight.

Second-hand distress was palpable in the shadow of the kid they pretended was their son, Sawyer. He looked nothing like Beau and even less like Heather with a dark curled moptop, noir villain eyes, and angular features. I even worried that he may be kidnapped when he opened his door and tumbled out, scrawny and frigid, in a formal prep school uniform.

Then an even stranger thought struck me. Gold wire glasses, cherry picked acne, fatigue messenger bag full of what I suspected were intricately programmed calculators, overread Foucoult, and chewed pencil nubs. These little quirks, cobbled together, added up to enough of a Campbell circa 2010 impression that I had to wonder if we were one being ripped in half from a Dickensian ghost parable.

As I would’ve done, he didn’t attempt to over greet me or sell me on his personality, partially I assumed, because he saw the blatent similarities between us. We both knew the drill. He nodded, I nodded, and he waited for Beau to unjustly elbow him into the house. Heather, like my mother, made amends for what she saw as his deformities as a nonprodigy.

“We just came from a chess tournament.”

“No worries, I was the same in secondary school.” Sawyer gave me the shyest of grins when his parents weren’t watching.

Beau laughed. “They got antifa in the UK?”

Heather side-eyed him, then me, cross-eyeing between us. “He means young Democrats.”

“Does playing chess make you a Democrat?” I glanced at Sawyer. I could tell that he was curious. How had we not met before?

“But were you a fascist? Hitler played chess.”

            “Well, I’m a Jew and Marx also played.”

“Sawyer, that’s enough!” Heather was unnerved but Sawyer and I didn’t care. We loved every second of her discomfort with our weird.

“All right. I’m lost. Let’s just see the pool.”  Beau snuck in a quick shove against Sawyer’s skinny-kid back before leading Heather by the shoulders, her eyes wide shut, through the kitchen and out to the patio. Sawyer knew the rules. Don’t follow them when they were playing happy games and mindfucking each other.

He dropped his bag on the kitchen island and turned to face me across the marble slab. “How do you deal with someone like him?”

I should’ve recited, “Oh, good Lord, poor boy, you don’t deal, you hide, you run, and then when you’re alone, you assume the mantle. You become.”

Instead, I choked on self-defense. “Me! I’ve only known your father, not even two months? What about you, sixteen years prepping?”

“Seventeen. But you’ve got a handle on him.”

“I have a utility hold on him for seventy-two hours.”

“I do too. Actually, for six months. I’m going to Wharton in September.”

“And? Who of you three fucking cares the most? That high won’t last! What’s your next planned offering?”

He laughed. “ Yale law? Harvard Kennedy School? McKinsey? Goldman Sachs? Federal prison for insider trading?”

“Careful, now you may be skimming too far past him and that’s not allowed. Try-hard insubordination won’t be tolerated. You’ll be pushing all the wrong boundaries.”

“I don’t always follow through on plans. I know. At some point. Icarus falls.”
“Of course! He wants to be above you when it happens, so he can replay that crash over and over. You’ll never live it down, if you live at all. And your mother might be watching, too, taking stock for when she needs to weaponize some tragedy she didn’t create.”

“Sure. I mean, I get it. Who’s arranging my funeral party? That’s why. I can’t be around them!”

“But say you leave…what do you fill the void with? You need a cause to rail against. Otherwise, you’re the bad seed, you sound like the problem.”

“What if I don’t want to rail against anyone anymore? I just…like that’s all I’m positive about right now. I’m tired of trying to change them.”

“Then what do you want.”

He gulped. No one had asked him the question before. “I want to be a graphic novel writer and I want to live in Banff. On a farm co-op in one of those geodesic, aggrarian cabins. With a partner and a cat? And I want to learn how to play-“

The patio door slicked back. Beau and Heather entered, visibly upset that Sawyer and I seemed more engaged inside the dark house than they were outside, exposed in the last sunlight. Beau was particularly disturbed at Sawyer’s unsullen expression.

He turned to me. “Have a minute? I meant to check what the guys did with that shagreen tiling.”

“They spent a long time in that space.” I made sure to sound uncomfortable.

“Are you measuring in front of Campbell?” Thank God, Sawyer was too young for subtext. And thank God, he was aware enough of norms to articulate the oddness of Beau’s chosen bathroom local for our final conversation.

“Hey! Go outside, the caterers are pulling up. Tell them they can park on the street.” Heather directed him with her French nails and Sawyer trudged away, gaslit into worrying that he might be the one here with the deviant mind. I knew that walk of self-questioning delusion well.

The shark-infested walls were stacked with dull slate tiles veneered in predatorial, prestige shagreen, a corporeal metaphor for Beau. But no one here and now, no one earthbound and excommunicated from the great somewhere else would take these walls seriously as success markers. I was relieved to be removed enough that I could laugh at them. I could laugh at Beau feeling them up and laugh at his talking sexbot toilet who was probably laughing at him, lost in rapture at his own poor taste.

            He turned to me as if I could’ve been his flesh and blood. I considered running but some crinkle of familiarity clouding his smile’s reflection in the sink mirror left me young and feeble.

            “I need a last favor.”

            “Okay.”

            “I’m supposed to take a call with a…contact. In a few. Just keep an eye downstairs? Heather’s fine. Her girlfriends are coming. But Sawyer knows…he’s pissed right now. He, for whatever reason…he relates to you. Make sure he doesn’t throw a fit? He’s fucking autistic. I hate having to explain the meltdowns.”

            “And Heather’s fine as in unaware? Uninterested in confronting you? Or-“

            “Now I see it! You got that same broken filter. You can’t let anything drop, can you.”

            “I’m only asking so that I’m aware. What level of marital clusterfuck should I prepare for?”

            “You do your job right, none. I have an arrangement with her.”

            “So, there’s a one-way cheat clause in your prenup?”

            “Aw, did your old man pull that trick?” He smiled again, this round looking sharky. I’d shown him my hand. He knew that I’d seen marriages grey past expiry into moldy sleeper cells rotting with blitzkrieg kids and schadenfruic frenemies and disgusted onlookers.

            “Is it a trick if everyone knows what you’re doing?”

            “Huh. That’s what my boy said. Then he threatened to cut off my dick.”

            “Well, I won’t pretend I can or will cut off your dick…because I know you’ll sue me. Under our arrangement.”

            “Exactly.” He held out a hand. I shook it, expecting the shakedown poke from his nail. Nothing. Despite everything I’d said, I’d won his respect.

            Back in the kitchen, I couldn’t help myself. I opened Sawyer’s bag. I had know what secrets he was hording for the fall of Beau. My initial search left me relieved. Two calculators, flash cards marked with multivariable calculus, a dog-eared Intro to Derida’s Metaphyics. Maybe he wasn’t as angry or pretentious as I was at his age.

But I couldn’t let that hope be false. I wasn’t ready to admit that we weren’t iterations of the same sad core, like bolshie nesting dolls wallowing in our own neurosis. I swept a hand through the bag again and was rewarded for my persistence. In the back pocket where kiddish depressives might’ve stashed candy was a very grown up, sleek, unbranded apothecary vial. An escape potion, replete with a homemade label in Jaxon’s loopy script.

Sawyer and I walked through the woods to the edge of the lake. In a reversal of my usual, I led our way, holding brush back from my shadow. We sat on either side of Jaxon’s driftwood dock and rolled our pant legs to dangle our feet in the turgid swamp water.

            “He put you on autistic fuckup sitting duty?”

            “I’ll write designated fail son whisperer on Linkedin.”

Sawyer uncapped another tincture vial from his pocket and dribbled some amber liquid on his tongue.“Thanks. You want any?”

“I’m good. And…are you sure that’s safe for consumption?” I could smell the muddy stench of black-market psilocybin kombucha that Aubrey occaisionally drank for work cleanses.

“Just ashwaganda and elderberry. My mom’s into this holistic mental health biohacker trend. She wanted me to try supplements…before like Xanax or drug drugs.”

“Oh, okay, good. FDA approval be damned but…”

Sawyer and I walked through the woods to the edge of the lake. In a reversal of my usual, I led our way, holding brush back from my shadow. We sat on either side of Jaxon’s driftwood dock and rolled our pant legs to dangle our feet in the turgid swamp water.

“Let’s talk about my daddy. Get this. His contact’s name is Valeria.”

“Ooh, like Malaria, that arousing parasitic disease?”

“Yep. Or there’s a holistic herb Valerian. Screws with your gastro system.”

“Lovely.”

“Yeah. He claims she’s a one-of-a-kind experience. Which won’t be true. Once he gifts her silicon tits.”

“Nerve damage is supposed to be a romantic gift?”

“Why’s he gone through so many contacts.”

“Right, and do you ever talk with your mother about him…what he does?”

“She’s just waiting for him to die.”

“Are you?”

“He’s not my dad.”

“Spiritually? Financially?”

“Both? I don’t want him. Honestly. I don’t want my mom either. She’s too passive.”

“But you put some distance between you, you’ll realize. Disengagement isn’t quite the same as intentional abandonment. A lot of people accidentally check out of their lives…you become another emotional responsibility they’re incapable of handling. That’s not your fault or theirs.”

Sawyer shuddered. “So I want a new life. For me. I don’t want to be around people who think…I’m basically a burden? If I stay. That would be fucking stupid.”

“Well, I suppose wanting makes it easier to pretend you don’t share DNA. They’re no longer beholden to you. You’re not beholden to them. Subvert that relationship, and you can start looking for a personality that isn’t problem child.”

“You found one?”

“Not yet.”

“You still escaped! I can’t go. I’m stuck. Everyone knows I’m their kid. I get a ton of currency. With these pretentious, social climby creeps I hate…but…but I could abuse it. All the way to the top. So easily. Like my life’s not a box I can magically jump out of right now.”

“No, you’ll never be allowed to bastardize the self-serving little rich fuck narrative. You’ll always be unrelatable, too God damn privileged for sympathy. And forget depression. You have to wait your turn for your box to fully rot.”

“I can’t wait anymore. I want out. This is my…leaving the cult.”

“Think of the worst they’ve done to you, to other people…maybe you’ll find a moral imperative to figure your shit out and run.”

“I mean my mom is harmless. I guess Beau gives… has major abuser energy? He owns a skeevy liquor store empire. And I don’t want that association. Am I being overly dramatic?”

“You have your reasons for leaving. They mean something to you. That’s good enough.”

“And you know…like Beau’s killed people.”

“There are degrees of killing, no?”

“I can’t BS around bad things. Like you. I’m not that evolved yet.”

“I meant be specific. Killed as in what? Broke hearts? Hired a hit? Stabbed in the jugular?”

Sawyer was crying, then laughing. Then his words dropped, fast and loose

 “My dad ran a medical pot chain with his brother-in-law. I was in middle school. One day Uncle Stan got high, fell off a cruise. No one saw. A year later the Vinter Emporium investors he’s suing have a fatal office gas leak. Random? Okay, maybe. Then I found his nudes last summer. He was encrypted DMing some missing stripper on a secret laptop! I asked him. He told me she was deported back to uhm…it’s the Republic of Kurdmenistan?”

“Definitely heard of it. But I assume interpol hasn’t found her yet.”

“Nope. What’s sad is he’s not even trying. Not hiding any of it. He pays people! All done. No questions asked!”

We heard a series of alien beeps. Sawyer pointed at the sky where a helicopter flew past.

“I used to imagine every plane was a ufo with aliens. They’d take me to my planet. Adopt me. That probably sounds…really not normal.”

“I don’t think it’s unreasonable…it’s standard child brain rot. The fear you’re a prop for a coverup by crazies posing as well-adjusted suburbanites?”

“Been there.  And now I look at planes, I’m like…what if the FBI’s coming to raid us! It never ends!” The extremity of his what-if coupled with his unheightened, nonchalant tone stung me. He wasn’t outright joking and yet he didn’t seem to be gravely concerned either. But what if he was telling some version of a possible truth? Did he have a reason to believe the FBI would raid Beau? I caught myself before the rabbit hole spiral.  There was no point indulging our irrational worries…

“Oh. Because you think-” The extremity of Sawyer’s what-if coupled with his unheightened, nonchalant tone stung my sentence short. Sawyer wasn’t outright joking and yet he didn’t seem to be gravely concerned about his safety either. But what if he was telling some version of a possible truth? Did he have a reason to believe the FBI would raid Beau? I caught myself before the rabbit hole gapped under my feet. There was no point indulging our irrational worries.

“Hang on. Yeah…I’ve gotta…I feel…help!” Sawyer puked in the lake, depositing a galaxy of underswallowed semisolids on the water below our feet. Orange, fleshy, masticated fruit pulp nebulized in particulate spirals over the lake while a chunky, pinkish bacterial mother stayed buoyed by the dock. Two mucused pills, one sticking off the other, bobbled, trapped inside the mother’s rosy spit bubbles, like a drowning fetus in fetu.

Sawyer panicked at the mess he’d birthed. He folded over his knees, gulping up mosiquoted air and bile-tinged saliva while I held his head back. “I can’t…you can’t tell them. I can’t…I need…I think-“

“Okay, okay! I’ll go. I’ll get something? Water?” I clapped his back like I’d seen amatuer hemiclih maneuverers do.

“And I have antacids in my bag.”

“That’ll make it worse. Sit upright, don’t smell anything…I’ll grab you ice cubes.”

“So, I suck?” He grinned at me through pain, a little sweat and spittle foam matting down the baby lip fuzz he was struggling to grow.

“Not yet.”

I left him and headed back through the woods with more self-assurance than I’d felt in years.

That’s when I passed by a glimpse of the party that I had missed and felt not a hint of envy. This kind of night, the usual pursuit of all my cooler peers, was sentimentally erotic only for the boys who would become the Beaus of the universe. Hopped up at 50 on holistic tinctures and Viagra, gifts from the wives they didn’t love. There wasn’t the slightest whiff of genuine innocent fun or titillation lingering on any of Beau’s guests. They were all prepped, waistbands and abs rolled, ready to work hard in pursuit of their daily clout goals. They knew to shake hands or other parts, to wipe their grease on each other’s concave holes, and palm around whatever assets they could invent, corporeal, liquid, encrypted, etc.

For the extroverted majority, this wasn’t a party. This was a networking conference. Enterprising boys and girls hiding behind thirty draped themselves over Monopolymen elders like their livelihoods depended on the firmness of their glutes and the softness of their tongues. No one appeared to be in a celebratory mood. Nothing was being feted, even horny grail sex. Everyone seemed miserable at having to claim how thrilled they were to meet one another in-person and miserable at having to pretend they loved holding conversations when they could be holding cash.

I half pretended I was Aubrey while I made my way around a DJ station to a freshly erected cocktail bar.

I raced back to the dock with a martini glass of lukewarm water bathing strawberry ice cubes and an irredescant cocktail umbrella. Sawyer was still a kid who deserved whimsy.

            I wondered if Beau was even at his own party.

The answer surprised me. I saw him inside, swirling gin in a plastic tumbler, like a community theatre take on epic titan of a relevant widget empire. His pretend grip was too tight on his imaginary top shelf glass, as if his fist was squeezed intentionally to reveal some insecure flaw about the character he played. Beau in this pivotal scene thought himself too prestigious to mingle with the common, supporting cast below him. But the closer I stepped into the room, the further I transgressed his facade, the starker his reality became to both of us. He was an awkward, depressive drunk, suddenly questioning the apex status he had assigned to himself. And I was this shadow, his mirror.

I wondered briefly at Sawyer’s claims of Beau being a killer. Were they true? If they were, shouldn’t Beau be ashamed that he had betrayed his wife, traumatized his only son, and taken whole lives from strangers to patch up own? I wasn’t convinced he was capable of such reflection. At most, he was afraid of looking unedgy or passé among the soulless strivers eating one another out on his lawn. He wanted to control them and their shenanigans from afar while protecting himself inside his palace in the somewhere else of his dreams.

            “Are you concerned your guests are judging you?”

            “You’re their age. It’s weirder you’re just hanging around up here. Outside the action.”

            “You asked me to check on your kid! He’s not in great shape, and I understand it’s not quite my place but-

            “I asked about you.”

“Well, I’m an other.”

            “What’s that mean.”

            “I’m not qualified to be a sugar daddy or a sugar baby? And really, what is your excuse. You’re the host.”

            “I can’t be an other, too? ”

            “No! You already acknowledged, I’m the weird one. You’re…” I trailed off.

            “Whatcha got for me. Let’s go. Push me down.”

            “Some people might say you’re a tad… pathetic.”

            “Pathetic? Why. ‘Cause I’m not dry humping a girl young enough to be my daughter? I’m not shooting ky crack up my cheeks? I’m just happy watching my investors ream strippers born after 9/11-

            “Oh, already the conspiracies. Did I push too hard? Was the annilingus not gentle enough? I didn’t lap up enough of your BS? I’ll retract pathetic. But I think you’re lonely. And unhappy with yourself.”

            “Whew! There we go. Little bastard! You know what you’re doing.”

            “I don’t have an agenda to-“

“Jax told you all about me.”

            “We’re not speaking.”

“So you cancelled him, huh?”

“I don’t want to engage with a grown man who’s pushing holistic fairy mushroom juice on teenagers to pay DUI penalties!”

“That right? That was the line?”

“Among other offenses. But I have nothing against his…history.”

“Gotcha. He fucking spilled.”

“About what he and-

“You know, as his employer, it’s none of my business whatever the Hell he wants to do off work hours.”

“I think it should be. He’s dealing to Sawyer…or your wife. Maybe she’s drugging Sawyer. And you simply don’t care!”

Beau folded. “Look, I can appreciate a straight shooter. But I’ll give you a little tip. Being such a blunt ass? Not always in your best interest.”

“Ah, should I be more insincere? Is that the American wisdom? Then maybe I could say all the disasters worth worrying about, that I’ve created, are nonexistant. They’re figments of my imagination. They get repressed. And maybe I’d be living a fabulous contractual life in a glass house? On a lake full of drunkards’ piss and my son’s puke?”

“I’m not insincere, Campbell. I’m genuinely kind. Tactful…unlike you. I care about how I make other people feel when they’re around me.”

“Like your contacts…your girlfriends.”

He laughed. “You are so god damn lucky this is your last week! Three hundred years ago, this town would’ve castrated and tarred you by now.”

“Perfect. I’d go down a bloody martyr at the hands of sexed up Jesus freaks. In a fucking penal colony! And your KKK would be burning Pulitzer winning books about my sacrifice!”

“Nah. You pointed out. I look better in black.”

That’s when we stared at rather through one another, deeply and reverently. I saw the fetal shape of a mini-me on his vacant pupils. He was trying to mold me as he tried, no doubt, to mold Sawyer. Into a blissful cynic who made the jokes and swung at others and never took a hit without a response planned.

There was Heather, leaning against a tree trunk, waving her cigarette flare above her head in a bid for connection to a reality outside of Beau’s. I wondered briefly if she had any active desires to smoke down the wooden walls around her. Or the dock planks beneath her. To burn away Beau’s somewhere else and emerge as an outsider, a checked-out witness.

She turned and shrieked at me.

            “Sorry! The outdoor smoke alarm went off.” I couldn’t hide the creep of judgement in my accent. Would she plot a meltdown? A burning? Would she sacrifice Sawyer? Was I a sexist for thinking that she seemed unhappy and unstable yet incapable of such extreme violence?

            “I don’t normally do…it’s super low-grade THC. Not even like actual…there’s nothing psycho-active. Occaisionally, when I can’t deal, I just…this is better than therapy three days a week, so…”

            “It’s none of my business…please, go ahead, but maybe away from the flammables?”

            “You’re right.” And to my horror, she threw her cigarette into the lake. Bait for whatever bottom fed skeletons she wanted dredged up.

“Ugh! Shan mentioned you’re one of those kids.”

“She called me a kid?”

“She called you too performative woke for LA.”

“Being pro-lake, anti-forest fire makes you performatively woke? Wow.”

“You don’t agree with that label?”

“I think bandying around the whole woke pejorative is an asshole’s gimmick. You’re denigrating human decency into some sort of social taboo. And performativity is a normative judgement…born from asshole projection!”

“Uhm…I’ll be honest. I think someone needs to tell you. You’ve more than made it clear. You’re better than us with that accent. You’re obviously very smart. And educated. And culturally informed. Is that what you needed?”

“That’s not at all what I was implying, I-”

“Then why are you here? What’re you trying to prove about my family.”

“Nothing!”

“You told Sawyer he should run away? Escape his fucked-up killer parents who think he’s a burden? He’s sixteen. I don’t know what you’re saying to him-”

“Seventeen! He’s going to uni in September. And he took my comment out of context. I meant-”

“Doesn’t matter what you meant! You’re insane. You’re not a mature adult. You’re a fucking weirdo! That’s what groomers do, like they alienate children from-“

“Wait, isn’t free speech the first amendment in your constitution? And I think Saywer deserves to have his concerns validated. To have his questions answered. He deserves to know what kind of strangers are raising him! He’s not unaware-”

“He’s a minor…he doesn’t have a choice.”

“What, to accept that you and your husband are fundamentally different from him? That you don’t understand him? He doesn’t owe you blind love. Forgiveness.”

“Fuck you. You want to educate me on parenting?”

I shook my head. “I can’t…and this conversation is moot.” I turned to the trees.

“No, don’t you dare go back to that house and brainwash my son. Or I’ll call. I’ll get you deported tomorrow! And they’re not gonna send you back where you came from!”

“Why not, it’s a terrible country, we’re the OG wasteland. My family lives there!”

“Stop it. I’m serious, all right? Our lives aren’t twisted jokes to us. Maybe they are to you. You’ve got nothing better to do than stalk happy people so you can dump your disturbed…I don’t even know, your creepy ideologies, on innocent kids like my son! But you need to go haunt someone else now. It’s time. You need help. That me, my husband, we can’t give you. But right now, I won’t let you-“

“I’m sorry. I’ll leave first thing in the morning.”

“Good. Do that.”

I left her at my lake, ripple-topped with mourning moonlight, crying for her, not for me.

            I met Sawyer in the kitchen, where he was unwrapping a candy from a crystal bowl on the counter.

            “Hey, Campbell!”

            “Is your father here? I wanted to speak with him.”

            “Yeah, I saw he’s in the upstairs den. Want one?” He gestured at the bowl.

            “What are they?”

            “Just some knock-off Starbursts. The German exchange team gave us a bag. Tastes like fake fruit mostly.”

            “Oh, okay, but this does feel very American. Excess sugar coat, inaccurate packaging.” I took a candy from him, sniffed the wrapper, and slipped it in my mouth. He giggled as I chewed and gagged.

            “Huh…oh, Jesus, actually they’re not terrible. Maybe I am a child.” He handed me another.

Someone’s feet were slurring steps, tripping words, inclining downstairs and backbending upstairs. They stopped when they knew they should bow to a familiar face in a deer-hide dresser mirror. A mirror made of Bambi skin, I shuttered to realize. Behind my reflection, my bed at Beau’s was shyly untucked on my favorite side, leering gently in wait, to pin me down, to betray my trust and lure me to unconsciousness. My body had no strength to resist. It’s arms lay palms at ringing ears, flop sweat bejizzing pillows with bacterial rivers, toes ensnarling the English rose duvet that held my wet-lipped secrets.

            I sank further at grey sunrise and waited for another’s shoe to drop on my floor but there was no noise to suggest that I wasn’t with me, alone. So I rose and ran as fast as I could on what I knew to be a schoolboy’s high. I’d wasted a night on the kind of cheap, harmless craptrick sweets an amateur Sawyer’s age would pass off as a grownup dare. A tragic question mark of living arrested with brain damage or dying drawn silly by an  accidental vomit choke. Thankfully, I had experience debating this binary. Should I live or die? I cantered, hobbled, fingered expensive holds along the walls, yanking what might’ve been Sawyer’s path to the kitchen. That’s when I whiffed the alcoholic, saccharide scent of life gone bad.

            Crumbly cereal fractured to bits, drowned in a milk bowl on the counter, just the way I liked my loser’s breakfast. Sawyer must’ve shared the same lack of taste. I glanced out the patio doors for a sign of him but the pool-front was almost entirely lifeless. Only dead leaves and cicada shells floating on the water convinced me that I wasn’t viewing a Slim Arons still life photograph, minus of course, any smiling human subjects.

Beau was also gone, likely to fail at playing family with another woman and another boy. Heather had no doubt expired in the woods, maybe burnt out in self-effigy. But where was their rotting son? Where was their Campbell? Had they forgotten him?

            I didn’t need to ask myself twice. Bang, hiss, bang. I heard their baby shoot at them through the glass windows. His shots were squeamish, peppy even, like little coughs from toy guns flicking foam pellets at mean old authority. Then the real curses from the grownups echoed telling me that Sawyer hadn’t hit daddy’s kneecaps or groin, he’d hit mommy’s heart and she was done for. I stumbled around the nephrotic pool and doubled back into the kitchen to grab the perfect modern boy’s defense mechanisms, half-juiced cellphone and a milked cereal spoon. These would’ve kept me as a kid at bay, I supposed.

But I didn’t need run to the foyer with my weapons and announce something Shakespearean or cowboyish. The final tussle, father v. son, found me just as I was wagering in the wings, debating. Call the police or call my mother? Sawyer saw me and smiled, two front teeth popped out, gumbs dripping purple spit. He swiftly pointed his gun between the brain-drained forehead of Beau, and the wall, leaving me in cold blood. I glaned at Sawyer, expecting at least an attempted murder. Nope. He couldn’t annihilate his future self. I was too useful to him. He was sparing me! And I was tickled pink.

            “Have at me, darling boys! One of you fucks stop staring and say something!” Beau sagged down on bulleted thighs.

            “I fuck, fuck I hate…I fucking hate you!” Sawyer lisped and spit at his father, childish without his man teeth. Embarassed for Sawyer, and embarrassed at my similarly inarticulate emotional state, I lunged at his side that could’ve been mine to grab his elbow and pull back on our triggered slasher’s arm until he winced.

            “Let me go! Campbell! Lemme, lemme! You don’t understand! You don’t!” Sawyer thrashed, pummeling beneath my kidneys. Beau watched our exorcistic saga, open-mouthed, almost amused.

            “I do, I get it, I understand! Perfectly!” And I knew what to do. I reached up to our faces and slapped his ugly junior specs off his upturned nose bridge with the back of my wrist. In a few years, he’d be desperate for contacts to see unvarnished the world’s greatest tragedies, anyways. I crushed his glasses, much like the one’s I’d worn for a quarter century, under my bare feet until I’d made a glass-shard slurry from my own bloody, pustulous detritus.

            “Please! Campbell!” He was blind but he understood our agreement. I couldn’t dare hit him again, it would hurt us both, and so emboldened, he wailed and bit my shoulder with his leftover canines. Still falling from on high, I tripped sideways, apparently not inured to childhood wounds. Beau looked away from me with a saddist’s boredom, took a ragged scream above me, then collapsed over his knees besides me, in prayer for himself. I didn’t think he was dead yet. Sawyer didn’t either. He dangled his gun above my temple while he twirled out Beau’s white man Calvin Klein panties from his pocket.

            “Don’t move.” He was trying too hard to sound very serious, as if he were truly evil and I let him floor me. It was inappropriate to laugh no matter how ridiculous he looked. How much he looked like I was out of my depth playing a bad seed villain whose character I hadn’t studied yet.

            “Okay. You can kill me.” I closed my eyes.

            Sadly, the scarf wasn’t for me. It garroted Beau, choked him out until he was a puppet, Sawyer tugging at his strings.

            “I’m done?” Sawyer’s voice was still lispy, asking for praise. I watched in giallo suspence as he stepped back to have me admire a strung-up Beau, hanging by Heather’s motherly silk from the stair rail.

            “We’re free.” Sawyer blinked at me with fat, needy eyes.

            “Sawyer, don’t look at me. I want you to put the gun down, yes?”

            “No, I can explain.”

            “I told you, I understand. And I said down. Let’s leave it here.” My voice was older than I’d expected.

“It’s outta bullets.” He threw the gun at my feet. I picked it up and shoved it into my pocket. Something inside rattled my side. The gun had one last round.

            “Thanks. Where’s your mother?”

            “She ran.”

            “Really, I saw her body.”

            “How? You were at the back door, like the whole time.”

            “So she is dead. She probably couldn’t run away, then. Is she in the front? Or upstairs.”

            He led me to Heather’s body with what I assumed was respect. And hell, I respected Campbell in the moment. Somehow, I’d leaned out my own fat eyes in the process of seeing to Sawyer’s emotional safety. I was flinty and miserably practical but I had yet to lose my grip on the fantasy of saving the day. Redeeming myself, my companion.

The fantasy was short lived. Sawyer had shot his mother ten times on the floor of a white subway-tiled hallway whose existence I’d forgotten. It wasn’t clearly demarcated as a tunnel to a somewhere like a bedroom or a bathroom or an end with a purpose. It was just a tabula rasa through which we could’ve wandered, free from the demands of grand narratives and great taste.

            Heather was sleeping mid-hall on blood ombred white hair, Ophelia in a floral robe. Sawyer wanted me to appreciate the tragic beauty of this prelude to his oedipal mascare. He folded over his mother.

            “Do you want to tell me…?” I hated myself for looking at Sawyer with compassion.

            “She was a cunt. And a-”

            “Forget it. Just shut up!” I shoved my hand in my pocket, reminding us both of the one round I had left. Then I knelt to closed Heather’s eye lids. As my fingers hovered over her face, I saw the bullets clearly poking out her eye-sockets. blood pooled down her cheeks like

That was a just desert for a woman who had tried to care, perhaps with limited capacities, but who had nonetheless considered at some point the needs of this angry son above her own. Sawyer gawked at me, taken aback at my lack of allegiance to our unit.

            “What’re we doing, Campbell?”

            “Do you want to call the police? Or would you prefer they hear my version of events first?” I wanted him to know. We were separate entities.

            “You can’t do that! Please. Please, I had to escape. And you said you understood. I had to get away from them. You got away. I was high and-“

            “I understood the sentiment. Not the execution.”

            “I didn’t execute my mother!”

            “I’ll call.”

            “No, no!”

            “I can’t stop you. If you run. But…Icarus falls at some point.”

            “It’s a fucking metaphor! Please!”

            “We should wait outside.”

I knew that if I showed him my cellphone, he would whine for me to hand it to him so he could teethe and I would give in to my id. I had to steer him away to safety, away from himself and away from me. I wasn’t ready to suppress him, dream crush, cut him out. Instead, I mentally plotted how I would gently talk him off his ledge of madness, talk to him about the dangers of rationalizing family annihilation with an understanding of his psychology that no one else, but us possessed.

I plotted a minute too long. He had a telepathic inkling of my plan and ran from me on his schoolboy’s low until…THUD! His fall left me no choice but to abandon Heather, drowning peacefully in herself, and continue my corralling of deaths, now a momentary believer in fate. Heather was dead, Beau was dying, and I would live.

Back in the foyer, I caught Sawyer halted on his own accord, slipped down and groveling over yellow goo leaking out of Beau in slug-shaped bubbles. “Did you call?”

“Yes.” I was very good at lying to myself.

“No you didn’t.”

“Why?”

He sprang up on bleeding toes and hung his own cellphone captive, high above his head, slimed in Beau guts. “I called. Now you can run, too. Just…don’t shoot. Please don’t.”

“I promise, I-“

            He was still a baby, unable to handle my concern. He threw a fecal, plasmatic lump at my forehead, straight from his father’s defunct colon. I might’ve considered pulling the gun from my pocket in return. I might’ve considered, to Hell, I should shoot my own shitface or at least, take a potshot at one of our heads. But I couldn’t move. I was too impressed with myself. Too astounded at Sawyer’s win.

            “Good bye, Campbell.”

            “Wait, wait you-“

Sawyer wasn’t a germaphobe to the degree that I had become and he easily outsloshed me in a chase through biohazardous puddles, over the front door’s threshold, into Beau’s Range Rover. I sank on the lawn and watched him from my knees as he made his getaway drive to unparented freedom or maybe just to Banff. In a fit of my own madness, as I set him free, I lobbed a real, hard rock at his taillights but it hit the mud, dead on arrival, planted firmly in my shadow.

From our failures he ran, so easily, one foot safely unaccountable in his toybox on his pedestal, one daring to stomp over the outside stratosphere he’d polluted with human tragedy he’d never deal with. He’d tantrum topple headfirst and mature to pieces soon enough, I knew, yet I couldn’t self-induce the phantom pain of his future crash. I was too rooted, too fully present with my guilt-wretched feet crying into lawn mud to care about his guilt or lack thereof.

Though he was gone, his shadow still trailed me, bifurcating my face, when a minute later, his siren’s call drifted me back inside to where we’d last communed in Beau’s somewhere else. I watched a procession of squad cars arrive from the front windows. Here came his American police to extract truth from their opinions on my facts, to rid their palaces of honest suckers like me. Two men and a woman alighted from the cars, bearing three minds that, I didn’t realize at the time, weren’t going to meet mine in any practical transaction of information.

Living above rocks, I’d heard many horror stories of wrongful scarlet lettering at the hands of law enforcement worldwide. But I also assumed with kickable ignorance, that this possibility didn’t apply to me somehow. As long as I was my usual self, I was sure I’d seem incapable enough for authorities to pooh-pooh as a waste of suspicion. How could such a feckless manchild with so much unearned splendor left to suck out of life be a tortured, hungry killer? Like Sawyer, I had nothing to kill for!

            But the cops- Eich, Lonsdale, and Hood- were indoctrinated in the American belief that British accents belonged only to the deviously intellectual and pretentiously suspicious. For stating my tri-pronged name, I was stripped of personality quirks minus punishable rationality under their law and ferried poolside for questioning while newly arrived EMTs played doctor with Heather and Beau’s corpses.

Every subsequent stab I made at an objective recounting of the last half day was immediately rebuffed and rewritten as cold-hearted, elitest posturing, prime evidence of my culpability. Apparently, in my initial statement, I articulated syllables too slowly and spoke too quickly while providing too coherent an account of the crime to be innocent. Then after a second round of probing, it was determined. I was downright killer-esque, having underemoted guilt-free nonchalance and over-empathized with the plight of my wealthy victims to a creepy degree.

If my obviously damnable statements weren’t evidence enough against, I was forced to endure yet another hour-long debate as questions swirled around the biosemiotics of my nonverbal tells. None of the cops could agree. Was my behavioral choice to sniffle, shake, and panic while describing Beau’s protracted dying indicative of murderous tendencies or mere performative assholery?

When my panic became non-verbal, I was patronized four times over to “take a breathe” and five to justify why I appeared past the verge of inappropriate tears. I caved. “My apologies, if I wasn’t explicit enough.”

Eich, the trio’s ringleader, scooted his deck chair closer to mine until our knees knocked. “We need an answer that makes some basic sense outta you, Campbell. Or you’re not gonna like our next request.”

“This may sound a hair controversial-“

“Yeah?”

“I’m opposed intentional homicide and I find needlessly gruesome deaths tragic.”

Eich and co gave me a time out for my attitude. Under their indirect watch, I was instructed to come up with an explanation by noon, preferably short and easy to write down by hand, for why I’d offed Heather, Beau, and MIA Sawyer.

            I couldn’t and was deemed non-compliant almost immediately after pointing out that I had nothing more to repeat and would like to ask for an attorney or at least to phone a friend.

            “You’re not on a game show!”

            “I didn’t think this was…who wants to be a murderer?”

But I had one damp ace in my back pocket that I’d swiped off the lawn and was desperately itching to play. Praise be, the cops were savvy enough to know that I wasn’t hiding an American attorney under my thumb. When they saw Jaxon’s grotty herbalist business card shaking on my palm they were even less intimidated by my shotty resources. Somehow, seeming desperate and nearly alone had humanized me.

            Hood gave me his cellphone. I dialed Jaxon’s number only to be greeted with Jaxon’s voicemail. Undeterred, I dialed again and again until I couldn’t tell if the voice on the other end talking over my pleas was Jaxon’s or that of someone who truly hated me.

The door opened on Marie Antoinette.

“Detective Wainwright. Your name?”

“They didn’t tell you already?”

“No, that’s your responsibility. You’re under investigation.”

“Campbell.”

The woman in the hallway was utterly perplexed. Why were these two freaks not uncomfortable at the prospect of discussing a double homicide?

“Do you need anything else?” The woman addressed my interlocutor.

“Thanks, Jan, we’re fine.” As she spoke, she kept her eyes on mine.

The woman closed our door and not a second later, Gretta leaned over her desk to push the facing chair at me.

“All right, start from Friday night. Tell me. Everything you remember. And here. You seem like you would benefit from writing details down.”

“Wait, are you collecting my DNA? I gave finger prints already and I spoke with three other idiot-”

“Writing increases focus and dopamine. You looked very disengaged.” She slid me a legal pad and a pen.

“Fine. I can pen and talk.”

“I assumed you had that skill.”

“Thanks.”

“Begin.”

While I recounted, I scratched repetitive pen dashes on my pad, a blue pulse nodule undulating from my neurotic’s wrist vein. Gretta knew I was sick and let me give an artistically unlicensed ramble, let me free associate with presidential self-assurance. I was sick of revisiting the simple, sad facts of the morning’s events and buried them under college try metaphors and grandiose symbols.

“That was it. Le fin.”

“Can I see?”

I handed her the pad.

“So you can’t write and talk.”

“I said I can pen. It’s a cryptogram.”

“Got it. Very Zodiac of you.” She pointed at something on the wall. I followed her finger to camera lens in the buff, missing an office tchotkie for a fig leaf cover.

“Please solve the cipher, it’s definitely not a manifesto…it’s a product of boredom, I can assure everyone watching.”

“That’s great. You’re bored? You can’t be bothered to talk about the double homicide you just witnessed? Do you know how insane you sound?”

“Well, I’m bored of repeating my account.”

“You have no fucking choice. Try again.” She ripped my cryptogram free and handed me back the pad.

“Try what. You have my account. It’s all in the cipher.”

“No. I need you to give me damn reason why you’re not a co-conspirator. Preferably something…tangible?” Her eyebrow shot up.

“Do you really, honestly believe that’s true? That I killed Beau and Heather? For what! Two complete strangers with-”

“I don’t make judgements based on vibes. I don’t know anything about you. Other than you’ve got gunshot residue all over your hands, human teeth in your pocket. Oh, and how can I forget? You said you fingered a dead woman’s face. So, you’re not above having to defend the fuck out of yourself to me right now.”

“What if my brain is unfunctional at the moment. I took some of his tincture he gave me, it was evidently laced with-“

“Yeah, I don’t need to hear about what you can’t remember. You know how many coked out, champagne affluenza boys who can’t tell why they shot their sugar daddy for cash they bus in here by the hour? You’re not as exceptional as you’ve convinced everyone else you are.”

“Really. I’m sorry to disappoint.”

“Let’s go.”

 I set about my task while she solved my cipher. Maybe something in her voice, inflected with genuine hope that I was just as psychotic and depraved as the rest of my kind, triggered a paleolithic desire in me to defend myself, the indefensible. I sat up straighter and scribbled in earnest, doodling swirls until a memory struck me.

“Beau’s secret camera system. It’s a separate network from the house alarm. I assume Sawyer played with the wifi but I have to think the system was still functional?”

“Noted already. He didn’t jam the wifi. But that hallway where he took the first three shots didn’t have any cameras.”

“But…Heather’s blood was all over her hair… he must’ve dragged her from somewhere. And the hallway was near the biologically, genetalic-“

“We’re not spending five hours looking for the room.”

“It’s the only space upstairs with a fetus painting!”

“Okay, and what about when Sawyer went after Beau. You said you heard the shots and followed them from the kitchen? Did you see anything outside?”

“Well, no, I didn’t see where they came from. I just walked into the foyer and Beau was already shot in the legs. I thought…maybe he tried to defend Heather upstairs? He knocked out Sawyer’s teeth at some point before I met them.”

“Did you have access to a camera system account?”

“I set up a login my first week, but I never used it. And I’m sure Beau revoked my profile. He was definitely about to go scorched earth, have his wiccan priestess girlfriend detox my spirit from his aesthetic orbit.”

“We can check. Where did you put your login credentials.”

“I don’t recall…”

“No, that’s not good enough! Your life depends on giving me an answer.”

“Why. I’m not planning to die in American jail.”

“Campbell, this isn’t a great time to mock our shitty justice system. Unless you’re on a suicide mission, in which case, tucker yourself out. But you don’t want to tempt fate in county.”

“I think invoking fate is a psychological crutch to justify inaction.”

“You’re right. Fate won’t be your undoing. You’ll just piss off the wrong person and he’ll-“

“No, no, all genders can hate me! I’m an equal opportunity annoyance.”

“Sure. You’ll drive an entire mob to strangle you someday! You can stop stalling now.”

“I wasn’t-“

“Where’d you put the account credentials?”

 “If I wrote anything down it would be…actuall,y, there’s a black sketch book. In the navy bedroom with floral wallpaper. Inside the nightstand drawer. I moved in the first Sunday in May…”

“The day after we-“

 “So, the date I received access was Monday the 8^th.”

“I’ll be back. Wait here.”

“I can’t go anywhere.”

“Just wait for me…unfortunately, I don’t have any crayons I can give you.”

“What? Why would-“

She pointed at my doodles. “Just don’t say anything to anyone who comes in here, okay?”

“But would not talking make me seem less guilty or more evasive.”

“Shh.” And she was gone.

Of course, left to Wildean temptation, I opened the door and peeked across the hall where I caught sight of Gretta in bits, chopped to visual piecemeal between the slatted shades of her office glass. The bits lingered behind a computer besides chunks of the colorless detective who had failed to make hand-to-hand contact with her at the protest. The connective tissue between their parts was fractured but easy enough to imagine arranged in a complete tanagram approximating some whole. His hand hovered at her elbow while her head tipped to his shoulder, their pelvic girdles jutting at one another. They were trading notepads and sideways stares of lovers on the job. I looked away and suddenly, their eyes swiveled in coupleish unison, squinting out one small but unbroken slat at me.

I made a quick retreat, conscious of the possibility that they had intended for me to catch them and become their creepy voyeur, a problem they could mutually solve. Perhaps they had won. They knew what I was. A compliant runt, pharma raised and fattened with fear of being deemed useless by the all-powerful insiders of rooms they fancied themselves.

Twenty minutes later, the door opened and there, leaning over me, was Gretta’s partner. Slenderman Sherlock was going to address me in a bad faith interrogation by a fictitious genius.

 “Campbell…I’m Detective Braun.” His tone was soft, almost coaxing, not as peevish as I had anticipated. I’d hear out his demands first. But I wasn’t going to allow turned-cheek silence to be mistaken for idiocy.

            “I saw the write up. Regarding what happened earlier. I had a few questions you should be able to clarify. For my understanding.”

            “Oh, I don’t know if I’ll be able to. Whether my answers to your questions clarifiy your understanding of what happened this morning is determined by you, not me.”

            He leaned back, manspreading across Gretta’s desk chair. “The little smartass routine may have worked on my collegue…I don’t find it cute.”

            “I wasn’t trying to be anything other than frank with you. I’m not prescient. I can’t determine if you’ll ever be satisfied with what I have to say.”

“And I’m happy to listen. All day. Long as it takes for you to calm the fuck down!”

            “That may be a while. As long as you choose to perceive me as unstable.”

            “Nah, it’s pretty clear you’re not normal. Nobody who committed a double homicide goes around making obnoxious jokes and hitting on detectives.”

            “Well, if that is the case, and you feel I’m being flippant, are you suggesting that I didn’t commit a double homicide? But I will admit…”

            “Yes?” He fisted a pen from the desk like a Norman Bates shower dagger.

“I wasn’t hitting on you right now.”

            “You have some God damn nerve…you should show some shame for once.”

            “Maybe I’m grappling with a tragedy in the only manner I know how. And I doubt shame-induced theatrics would convince you I didn’t kill anyone. I’ve given your office my account four times, answered any and every question honestly. I’ve submitted all my bodily fluids, tears included. You’ll have the security footage-”

            “I’m not here to word play with you. We’re not equals. You’re the one on trial.”

            “I’m aware and I’m prepared for whatever your court of opinion decides the truth of this morning ought to be. So, I’ll accept whatever end you determine I deserve.”

            “I think it’s time we give you a polygraph.”

            “You need to measure my sweat activity and heart rate? Because I can easily show you.” I lifted my arm and dropped a hand over my heart, pledging allegiance. Braun was not amused.

            “The polygraph report will give us a reliable indicator of your nervous system activity.”

            “But you don’t make me nervous.”

And that was the convincing lie that teased him too far to the brink of insecurity. By the copagandic power vested in him, he ordered me strapped to a polygraph machine. I was promptly seated in thin plastic chair while a mustached milquetoast and I went round and round a carousel of leading questions.

Three hours past noon, my lips were molting chewed-up skin, baby babbling, inventing adjectives to keep my incantatory denials of culpability from the impotency of repetition. Wrung of nerves and sick of the one-word maximum throttling my replies, I decided to go rogue for my last round. This was my final opportunity to monologue myself to death and I wasn’t wasting it.

In response to an old question of my brief connection with Sawyer, I treated Milquetoast to a moral treastise on the complex personal ethics of being a liqueur store magnate’s liberal son. If I couldn’t leave this life without giving him an answer, he would have to listen to me and watch me break.

“Did you say to Sawyer at any point last night that his parents may be involved in…criminal activity that he found upsetting?” Milquestoast remained as bland and unflapped as ever.

“How should I know if he was upset? And I thought I was supposed to be answering binary questions?”

“Did you use language that someone with Sawyer’s mental health conditions could have found triggering?”

“Well, I suppose…I suggested, he might consider how his parents hurt him as a justification for leaving them. That was all.”

“Answer with yes or no.”

“Your questions are non-binary!” I drug out my phrasing. Milquestoast frowned.

“Yes or no?”

“I think I’m within my right to give descriptive answers. And I wasn’t implying that Beau or Heather were criminals!”

“Yes. You agree. Sawyer found the discussion triggering?”

“No, obviously no! How thick would he have to be to misunderstand the implications of what I was suggesting. I only wanted to show him empathy! I-”

“He wrote in his confession that his father was a, quote, leach on society who needed to be eliminated, unquote. He also referred to his mother as, quote, an enabler of sin, unquote. Were you, at any point, shown either of these statements?”

“Of course not! Why couldn’t he have come to those conclusions independent of whatever I conveyed to him? He was hardly a devoted, loving son prior to speaking with me for half an hour.”

“He mentioned your name in three separate lines of his final confession. Were you aware of this fact?”

“All right, maybe I did have some nominal, tangential impact on his psychological state. How does that equate to deliberately instructing him to make his…unfortunate choices?”

 “Those unfortunate choices come with a mandatory sentence of life without parole. Did you and Sawyer discuss at any point in your conversation the possible consequences of your actions?”

“No, because I wasn’t his accomplice! And…really, mandatory life for a juvenile offender? He had reasons. His parents were abusive! He told me Beau killed three people! Heather knew and covered!”

“Sawyer turns eighteen in six weeks. Were you aware that under Virginia law, anyone who reaches the state age requirement for adulthood a year prior to a criminal trial is eligible to be tried as an adult?”

“I forgot to read up on that clause…honestly it seems cruel and unusual. What if he was influenced? If he wasn’t in possession of all his faculties. He was taking barbituates and perhaps it wasn’t my intent…but I’m willing to go on record. I don’t think his culpability rests solely-”

“Then, do you want to tell us the truth of what you two discussed last night?”

A knock-knock on the room door stopped my pulse. Braun stretched in the doorframe. “Joe, I’m gonna give him a few questions.”

“Go right ahead.” Milquetoast Joe, co-conspirator to Braun, smiled at me.

“Is that allowed?”

“Campbell, I was able to get a hold of some prior records of yours. It looks like you have an extensive psychiatric history?”

“Am I still being polygraphed?” My query was met with no response.

“It seems relevant that you left untreated several, call them what they are, very serious diagnoses. I don’t want to stigmatize-“

“You are. And they’re untreated right now, because how could I see my provider in the UK? I’m not buying prescription drugs off your streets.”

“You’ve stopped taking all your meds. Some of which were antipyschotics.”

“Well, the clozapine and risperidone weren’t effective…and the rest, sertraline, busperone, were mainly fillers for depressive episodes, occaisonal panic. I wasn’t clinically dependent!”

“Huh. Because that runs contrary to the medical information on schizoaffective disorder we just received. Your prescriptions have a major risk of withdrawl symptoms-“

He stopped as the door flung open again. Gretta attempted entry, but Braun swiftly blocked her with a hand on her waist.

“Don’t God damn touch me!” She elbowed his side and he dropped his hold on her.

“You’re not on the case anymore.”

“Neither are you. We reviewed the security footage. You can stop psychologically torturing a witness.”

“That isn’t-“

“Bull. You and I both know this is a lawsuit waiting to happen, okay? We’re not debating-

“I think we also know you have a conflict of interest.”

“And you don’t?”

“Pyscho’s all yours.”

They drew closer and closer. In their peripheral, Joe unstrapped my arm and shuffled away into the dark recesses of the outer hallway conveniently without closing the door. Braun followed him out, but not without looking back twice to make sure that no beast trapped inside was engaging anything more illicit than mild eye contact.

“So you’re aware, it’s sound proof in here.” Gretta closed the door on us. “You remembered my name.”

“It was on the business card at your desk.”

“But you wrote it in your journal, the day we met. You didn’t know who I was.”

“You remembered that date, too.”

“You’re the first person to slice open my temple. It was painfully memorable.”

“Did you get your commemorative tetanus shot yet?” I was in a bitter humor and she was equally unamused.

“Look, I don’t know how to properly articulate a thank you, but I-“

“Just returning the favor.”

            I saw a written list of medical terms sticking out of her jacket pocket. “You passed around my rap sheet of pills and very serious diagnoses?”

            “Mm-hmm. You have eclectic taste.”

I had no conscious idea of what specifically I wanted to ask her next but she seemed aware of the general response I was seeking.

            “Did you know, the majority of killers I meet are highly neurotypical?”

            “Good, there was never a brief moment you thought I might be a violent, homicidal psychopath.”

             “I mean you tried to save Beau Targill. That’s pushing the limits of compassion. Then you were worried about Sawyer’s mental health. And…mine. Nothing’s standing out on the resume as psychopathic. You have time.” She opened the door a crack and nodded at Braun’s shoes, visible a few centimeters from mine.

 “Is he camping out there?”

“He can’t do anything. You foiled him with innocence. Again, really missing that mark on psycho red flags.”

“Maybe I’ll keep the trend going. I have no interest in another encounter with Slenderman.”

“That’s what we’re calling him?”

“That’s how I feel comfortable addressing him…and I thought it was marginally more polite than leggy blonde.”

“What about detective?”

“If I were more mature-“

“I don’t care. Slenderman fits. It’ll stick with me.”

We watched Braun’s shoes pivot. “Am I free to leave?”

“Hold on. You looked back at me before I left and I thought you wanted to say something?”

“You were standing outside your window, watching me. With a second detective. Was I supposed to be oblivious?”

“You could’ve turned around and never looked at me again.”

“I looked at both of you.”

 “Fine. When’s your flight out?”

“Three a.m. Monday.”

“Good, we have time. I have a few things to give back. You dropped this on his desk.” She held out her hand upturned, palming my ring. She toyed with the enamel loop before squeezing it over the untanned skin band on her fourth finger. I noticed her intentional slip and the momentary fear that she was pleased with my reaction drove my heels closer to the door.

“Sorry, damn… force of habit. Divorce brain.”

“Don’t worry, I’m assuming you have no interest in an ex-felon. And I have no interest in committing marriage fraud or, I suppose it would constitute bigamy as well?”

She mock frowned and slipped my ring off her finger. “Enough of our public resources have gone to proving you’re not a psychopath. You’ll have to try a lot harder for that official ex-felon title.”

 “I’m divorcing Slenderman soon. I should’ve warned you.” She handed my ring back to me.

“Why. Your relationship had…still has nothing to do with me.”

“It really doesn’t.”

“Then why does Slenderman have irrational phobia of my presence?”

“I’ll let you figure that one out.” She reached into her purse and pulled out my notebook.

“You didn’t want me to know…you remembered me?”

“Oh, I genuinely forgot about where I wrote down my credentials. But I apologize, if I made you feel uncomfortable or objectified while reading my private thoughts.”

 “It’s okay. I had thoughts about you too.”

Perhaps, if I’d been more of a completed man, I would’ve tried, in the sparing minutes I had left, to kiss Gretta before her God-awful husband, instigating some morally dubious, insincere powerplay. But I was simply relieved to feel nothing but lust-free and youthfully innocent again under her cynical gaze. Despite all the depravity I’d aided, tasted, and survived, I hadn’t grown up enough or fallen far enough to conduct myself as a serious contender for most psychopathic among us.

Best of all, the worst I’d ever be accused of representing was a boring, failed diversion to Gretta. A kodachromed, buffered connection glitching between platonic and carnal that was destined to be forever lost, laved, and salt logged under the depths of my uncool innocence. Maybe others would’ve been embarrassed in my position but I wasn’t. My genuine reticence to play at Gretta and Ryan’s dirty game like another full-grown adult was the ultimate expression of my self-affirmation. I was

Gretta and I shuffled our feet, avoiding each other for another minute, rigidly paralyzed in a state of normie decorum. “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to keep you here.” I tucked my notebook under my arm.

“You didn’t keep me. I’m making the choice to stay.”

“Well, I can’t stop you from allowing me to leave now.”

“I won’t. Because I don’t want to.”

“But I’ll be gone soon anyways. And you and your husband will go home to your lives.”

“Campbell, he hasn’t lived in my house for two years. We’re separated. He’s had multiple girlfriends. Am I not even allowed thoughts-“

“You can push whatever boundaries you want, mental or otherwise…with someone willing.”

“Oh, okay. Thanks for the permission. You’re too young anyways. I don’t know what the Hell I was expecting from you.” She turned her back to me.

“May I-“

“You knew the whole time about me and Slenderman. You can’t lie. You wanted me to admit I don’t care about him. I never did.”

“I might’ve had a sense…when you were both watching me. I certainly wasn’t aware you were married.”

“I should’ve been more honest with you. We were set up by our parents. And he’s been running. Since the minute he saw my age-appropriate face.”

“Then, for honesty’s sake, I suppose we should stop wasting time trying to fool each other.”

“And talking about Slenderman?”

“I’m not opposed to a moratorium on that subject.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll see you.” I nodded at the door. I wasn’t above begging for freedom.

“That’s vague…for someone who details the details.”

“All right, is goodbye the preferred response?”

“I don’t know. But I’d be okay with later.”

“Goodbye…Detective.”

“Mr. Grice-Hutchinson.” She gave me an empty, pursed eye stare that told me we were now strangers.

Jaxon waved his whole torso in the glass, bowlegs bouncing in opposite directions, and I was momentarily reminded of the initial kiddish puck impression he’d impressed on me.

“Can we…revisit where…it…Heather dying…happened? I abandoned her…out of all of them.” I’d lost all command of language.

“’Course. And I was thinking…would you try something with me? I had this idea, dunno…maybe it’ll give you some mind peace? I kinda wanna see if it’ll work for trauma situations?”

“Sure. Why not.”

I led Jaxon into the Clorox white hall colored with crime scene tape dots on the walls marking off matter. Heather was still faintly perceptible, prickles of her limeade innards spritzed in a distorted outline around the stretch of floor where her last breath lingered. Jaxon paused his bare-earthed feet above the browned-out fan print stamped by her bloody hair streaks.

“Here?”

“Mmm.” I groaned and nodded. I could feel her glass eyes reflecting back to me and Sawyer her fear. Her son had failed. She couldn’t save him.

“So I’m gonna ask you to show me how you found her.” Jaxon lowered himself to the floor and lay back, face up, filling in the absence of Heather with his longer, wirier form.

“As a reenactment?”

“As long as you’re not going for a redo. I feel like it won’t help replaying things the way you would’ve wanted them to do down. You can move my body around. I’m basically…dead.”

I spread his gold fringe in a halo above his head and stepped back. “I asked Swayer for an explanation and he called her a cunt. And then I told him to shut up because I had to pray for her, I remember…I was kneeling. That’s when he put his teeth inside me.”

“You closed her eyes?” He blinked at me. I knelt besides his upper half over his body.

“I wanted her to leave us and I didn’t want her to see Sawyer…in the manic state he was in.”

“He shot her ten times, man! And he could’ve killed you.”

“He wouldn’t. I had our gun-“

“His gun. Actually heard it’s his neighbor’s…with the registry. He stole it. Close my eyes?” He rolled pupils back, mimicking a loss of consciousness.

I’d never been exceptional at distinguishing between life and play. A panic that he could be gone forever under my watch pitted my gut and I suddenly drew my hand to his neck, grappling at veins for a pulse, until I noticed a deep blue lake splotch right above his collar bone. There was the psychopathic bruise that I’d leave Virginia to remember me by. He gently unfurled my fingers from his body while I began incanting apologies.

“Nah …it’s all over, you lightly tapped me…with one finger. And I fought back.” He nodded at my wrist, Pepto-Bismol flushed from the gentle compress of his hand.

“No, I hurt you. I hurt you. I promise, I won’t ever hurt you again, I-“

“Just pen ink. You can wipe it off me.” He shook upright and calmly palmed down my risen shoulders.

“Do you want me to?”

“Yeah. Go for it.”

I caressed the lake with my thumb, up and down, watching the borders cave in, resurecting a fresh blotch of skin over his bony clavicle. When the lake was dried, we rose together and retraced my path to the foyer, the first vestibule between the dead inside and the unpredicatable life outside that he had warned me about.

 I showed Jaxon the faded puddle stain on the ground where Beau had hovered over Hell. “I’ll sit in the center. Picture a scarf around my neck.” He grinned at me.

            “I’m not willing to look.”

He sat anyways. “You didn’t have the kid’s gun yet, right? What was he doing with it?”

            “Well, I asked him to shoot me but he only pointed the gun at me and then he went straight to Beau…to garrot him. I was jealous. I should’ve gone first.”

            “Still feel that?”

            “Not as much.”

            “Whew…good.”  He leaned his head back against the wall and wrapped his fingers around his throat.

            “Are you…stop! Stop please!”

            “I’m not me. Don’t think of me right now.” His eyes fluttered again.

            “Stop! I didn’t want anyone dead!” I dropped down beside him.

            “What was going through your brain that day.”

            “God. When we came back here after seeing Heather and he began to run, I did consider…maybe I should shoot him? He left me one round. And I had this thought, what if he wanted me to take his life?”

            “Gotta assume that shot would’ve passed as self-defense?”

            “I doubt it. What was the worst he could do? He threw shit at my head and bolted. As if I was his pursuer. He wasn’t violent…but I had the power to kill him.”

            “See, now that could be up to legal opinions? In a he said, you said…it would hinge on, you know, what shit was he throwing?”

            “Shit…shit? Fecal matter? You may not want to sit there. Gravity evacuated Beau’s insides and there were…lakes, fluids in these amorphous puddles. Urine, vomit, some green non-newtonian mucus? He took a whole wad of bowl refuse and chucked it all in my face. The taste wasn’t what you would expect…almost saccharine, a bit tart -“
“And you-“

            “Oh, I didn’t swallow-“

            “Man, that’s the least… just trying to follow your feelings, right? Why are you defending him? What he did to the family…you included. Doctors would call that clinical fucked up. Pastors would say there’s negative redemption. There’s no good excuse here.”

            “Look, I knew he was traumatized. No one would ever be able to comprehend why he acted. And no one would forgive him as I could…I felt forgiveness was what I owed him…it was what I had to offer to someone in their worst hour. I had to try.”

            “Even after he set you up? I’m kinda thinking…like he wanted you to take the fall. With the teeth and everything?”

            “That never occurred to me. And I was equally guilty bearing witness. My confession wasn’t false or-”

            “Nah, you did the best any innocent guy could…after the shoulder bite? You were probably blacked out. PTSD’d to the max. Get that bite checked, by the way.”

“Okay, perhaps he would’ve shot both me and Beau if his glasses were on and he had a surer aim…so, he must’ve decided to frame me…after he showed me Heather’s body and I touched her eyes. And maybe that was why he made a point of getting Beau’s DNA on my hands?”

“Yeah, don’t sugar what he did…he got it in your mouth, too!” Jaxon’s smile drooped, wide-lipped but weak, into the void where the puddle of Beau had leaked and I feared he was suddenly frightened of me.

“Am I making you uncomfortable?”

            “See, I was just worried…like did I make you feel guilty ‘cause I got too excited?”

            “No, no this was very helpful. I’ve been putting off remembering.”

            “All you’ve gotta remember is you can choose. Forget the bad crap. You’ve already seen the bad…you don’t need to kid yourself it was all fake, all better on the replay, you know?”

            “But I genuinely don’t recall what happened after he hit my face…I was stunned. Mentally, completely paralyzed. I-”

            “So my boys showed me the security camera footage when I got back. You wanna…?

            “And?”
“You put that gun in your own mouth, hand over the trigger…right on the lawn. And I’m guessing the kid was hollering don’t shoot, don’t do it so you could take his life in supermax, then the cops would drop looking for him? He wanted you dead…just on a different day!”

We burnt out our remaining hours together, devouring every last morsel of every last square foot on a waltzing six-eight schedule, fast-forwarding through halls only to pause on a downbeat in any shock-value room that flared our disgust. Occasionally, we halted trapsing to subsist on cereal and blackwash coffee. Under rainlight, we drank ourselves alive while the leafed-up pool top floated the burdens of our tangled feet. Afterwards, we wrung dry our overlapping opinions on the Targill clan, extenuating our bodies over their biomorphed furniture and vegetal rugs like inside animals who could afford to dirty their luxury. All the while, we traded histories and histrionics, absorbing one another’s mental and physical languages until we moved in a synchronous rhythm of part-time friends.

“You’ve said goodbye to every room. All the perve art, talking toilets, the lake… important stuff, right…and that’s making some peace for ya, hopefully?”

“Well, part of me is still obsessed with the house. I’ll miss the toilet. She gave me the kindest words of affirmation. And I think I might even be in lust with this whole country…Jesus, I’m getting to be middle-aged and sappy. Maybe I’ll buy a ra ra flag before I go.”

“Aw fuck, this is not good, Cam you’re sounding like a real America first kinda guy, and they don’t make a reverse serum for that brand of crazy…we’ve gotta ship you back to London.”

Jaxon came to understand that I was stalling my departure, so he forced me to stay awake for a final night. He wanted to expose me to a last sunset over the lake. After packing, we lolled, down-bellied on his dock, watching the sky’s blood spot plumet and stain the lecherous waterfront. My hands instinctively drowned to cushion the sun’s Icarian crash by frothing a whirlpool with my submerged fists. I drooped my chin over the rotting driftwood plank life-rafting my breastbone, close enough for my mouth to skin the freshly bubbled lake top. But all too soon, my neck snapped back. I was unsatisfied with the tiny fish teeth masticating my phalanges, their petty, unsanguinary little barbs leaving real pain to be desired.

The translucent reflection of my unmolested thumbs was particularly frustrating. I yelped forward, aware and angry that I wasn’t taking full advantage of my excuse to be hurt post Targill-murders. I began to shovel lakewash mouthfuls down my gullet when a trippy orange pill floating in my cupped hands caught my eye, then my tongue. Here was a parting gift from Sawyer to me. I slithered closer to the water, lips on palms, and saw a vile horror over my own knuckles. Bobbing towards me on my fake waves, was an amber glass vial, a gift from Jaxon.

Behind me, Jaxon followed my gaze, gumb-receeding panic drawing his cheekbones higher to a concave brow. He was visibly hissy and I had no urge to betray his genuine display of emotion. I had no aimless questions to ask him and no patience to parse meaning from his meandering lies. I could only taste the chalky, alkaline concrete of the answers I wanted to shriek at him.

“You killed them! You fucking, cuckwad, dipshit, psychopathetic junkie!”

Jaxon must’ve heard my thoughts and decided against taking the chance that my anger would turn to self-immolating pathos on his watch. With a lithe hand sweep, he hauled my marionetted torso onto the dock, yanking me by the leach sucking a hickey on my neck. As I collapsed, backbent over his arm, I saw in his sweat sheen that he was frightened, perhaps not for me, but of me. Perhaps he wondered if he could leave Cam with Campbell while he laid us down and shook us appart by dusk.

But he was out of luck. The needy spirit was awakened in me, squirming in his grasp. “I did it. I killed them! Because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut! I thought I was talking to myself. Giving me what I wanted…as a kid! He was a kid! And I forced him. I used him to enact my fantasy! I pushed him! Too far! I should’ve reconigzed when I knew he was taking your stupid, stupid fucking mushroom tinctures. He was articulating obvioius, severe delusions. He was so, so sick. He wasn’t rational. But I had to trigger him. Had to make him feel as unwanted, unloved as me! I was fully cognizant and I still -“

“You didn’t know and you’d never do what he did ‘cause you’re not like a crazy and that’s not-

“No. I did it. I manipulated him! I cut off his grasp with reality, with what should matter, with what he wanted!”

“If that’s how you’re feeling…then I’ll say it, you could think I’m as guilty as you are. I mean I know what you see over there on the water and I promise you, I only dealt with Heather, never him, never. She drugged him to help…for like you heard, he had rough autism and she said he was going through oppositional depression?”

“God! You killed him. And he killed them.”

“What? The kid’s batshit nuts, possessed, that’s it, like he was gonna commit something at some point, so there wasn’t a first mover cause, you know? There was no push…you can’t go mental analyst trying to explain his bad urges. There’s nothing in him we need to understand!” Jaxon was livid.

“He’ll be tried as an adult. You handed him a death sentence.”

“That’s the story you’re sticking with?”

“Fine. Maybe he was a latent, prenatal psycho. And those of us normies who haven’t breached the irredeemably evil barrier yet…we’re not accountable for how we hurt one another? The only damned among us are our victims who happen to be ungerminated bad seeds?”

            I felt his arm stiffen at my side. I rolled over to my side and sobbed. He could leave me for all I cared.

            “He’s not a victim, Cam, I never touched him, I…only her, Heather, I didn’t put a hand on him or try to do anything to-“

            “Congrats, you’re not a pedophile! That’s fantastic!”

            I ran, unwilling to hear any more. I called

My flight’s ascent was no doubt a metaphor. I rose too quickly, airborne on clouded hope that I was the righteous outcaster of evil, not America. And naturally, I toyed with the idea that Jaxon wanted me to return. Why else would he have invited me back? He would never have looked at me with a tinge of melancholy as I walked away. Certainly, he would’ve banned me from further contact with him forever if he had found my company too abhorrent an idea to revisit at some later date.

Buoyed with this possibility that I might be liked, I convinced myself so thoroughly of my newfound acceptability and status as a wantable friend in himself, that I forgot to mourn my unwanted homecoming. I forgot that I would be crashing a family of strangers, hell bent on keeping up the illusion that they knew me and claimed me as theirs for their own sick, twisted agenda.

            But I was in for a welcome treat. I opened my flat door to find a stranger waiting behind my kitchen table. I wondered, had my former hovel been reassigned to someone who needed it more than me? A second glance, however, gave me pause. This stranger didn’t fit in a sad enough slump behind my grey table. He was too bespoke-suited, too at ease with himself, too assured of his identity to belong in my tabula rasa of a space.

“Campbell, hi. Martin Indongo. Private Investigator with Lantham-Boll Associates.”

            “Oh! Hi? Martin? I apologize…you can’t be a new tenant?”

            “No worries, come in. Please sit down. We should’ve picked a different date, but we had no idea when your flight would land and we wanted to speak with you as soon as possible. We’ve been checking in every few hours here. You must be exhausted.”

            “Weary. In a lot of ways.”

            Martin shook my limp hand, pulled a seat at the table for me, and slid over a leather folio he’d been holding behind his back.

            “This should only occupy a few minutes of your time.”

            “Sorry, is this an interview…am I under investigation?”

            “So, I need to make something clear to you before we exchange further specifics.” He looked at me with a faux serious frown. I nodded, unsure of whether to gulp or giggle.

“Lantham-Boll Associates is no longer contracted with any entities or persons currently or formerly associated with any U.K. government agencies, domestic or abroad, including the Treasury Department.” He coughed to end the recitation.

            “Oh, well that’s great. We’re not a pleasant lot.”

            “As a private citizen? Much appreciated. As a PI, I’m not at liberty to agree or disagree with any opinions you wish to convey. I only need you to verbally indicate you understand. Whatever you say to me now or to any of my collogues in the future, should they contact you, is strictly confidential. Additionally, we don’t make any recordings or keep any official records once an investigation is formally closed.”

            “I understand…hopefully.”

            “So, just in case, everything I said is recapped in legal-verbage on the first page of the folio you have before you. Take your time, read through. But I do need your signature before we can continue speaking.”

            “Right. And I can’t ask you, as a private citizen, about the nature of our possible conversational subject matter?”

            He raised an eyebrow. “You won’t be disappointed.”

            The hint was enough. I skimmed, signed, and held my breathe, reassured by Martin’s genuine excitement at the prospect of telling me something that, in all likelihood, wouldn’t be soul crushing.

            “Painless?”

            “More or less.”

“Now, on to the fun. I’m not sure how much you’ve kept up with the internal Treasury implosion since June.”

            “I should’ve been more engaged…bureaucratic kakistocracy wore down my hope for a brighter U.K. of tomorrow.”

            “Never comes, right? Between us, private citizens, I agree. The hoax leak wasn’t blowing any high-powered gaskets enough for change. But…but, but, but1”

            He drum-rolled on my counter. “I am now able to inform you that Sir Laurent Oswald has been issued an arrest warrant as of last Friday. And an official inquiry into his conduct as a senior government representative will begin Monday morning. I can also inform you that an American court-ordered subpoena was delivered yesterday to a…Ms. Shanna Ritter in Marina Del Ray, California?”

            “Really! What…who did them in?”

            “I’ll give you the set up. See, my firm was hired by an anonymous official source from the Prime Minister’s office to analyze post-leak exit memos. We were checking if any of the leaker’s claims could be independently corroborated. And, of the three thousand please don’t sack me sob stories, your memo caught our attention immediately.”

            “Well, I was feeling pathetic…I had to rant.”

            “And it was bloody hysterical. Our team is convinced, you should write satire. The phrasing of those antidotes…pure Gonzo genius. I’ll say the one that was Ozzy’s eventually downfall was a little on the sleazy, low-brow side plot-wise, but overall… no complaints, given the entertainment value alone. Plus the footage of you sucking that Mont Blanc, throwing your fingernails at MI6… some brilliant physical comedy there.”

            “Christ. I had no idea I was on camera…I hope I’m not a terror watch list!”

            Martin shook his head.

“Can you tell me? Was it the French cuckhold meltdown that got him?”

“Sexual harassment? Come on! Would never ruffle anything!”

“Then, I can’t think of other sleazy…”

“The American spirit tariff bribe! We took your insider’s advice, looked into the origins. That’s how we discovered that Ozzy, what an ass, forgot to wipe his phone messages regarding a possible exchange with a Mr. Beau Targill? And there were quite a few buried private emails. Ms. Ritter gave some unintentionally quotable lines.”

            “But…wait. What was the point of throwing me to the Americans?”

            “Oh, Ozzy only started talking bribes after you returned from your initial trip. I don’t think he understood a lick of Beau’s original intentions. He just didn’t feel like attending a work event and you were available. I don’t think he anticipated you going rogue…having a moral spine. But he and Ms. Ritter were still planning to talk you back into their scheme to facilitate the vetting research and crypto laundering after you declined Beau’s offer. They had a budget drawn up with a cut for you and everything.”

            “They believed I’d be an effective, international money launderer, of all the moronic drones around them?”

            “Apparently. Our team didn’t see it either…if that’s any comfort.”

            “Not at all, no! I’ll take the original compliment. Ozzy thought I was dangerously competent!”

            “Ehm. He called you a soulless, obsessive, freak.”

            “Fantastic!”

            Martin grinned. “Well, you seemed like a nice, normal guy…on paper. Very funny. And I’ll leave you with this. Mr. Targill was a convert. He wrote in a text that if you didn’t get yourself run out of town, he’d definitely adopt you.”

            I was giddy the rest of the night. I’d been accepted in precisely the ways I needed by not one or two but by three 50-something men who could collectively outweigh my father. Laurent thought I was villainously quick, Beau had considered me with paternal concern, and now Martin had confirmed my suspicion that I could be, with some practice, nice, normal, even relatable. These small affirmations were enough to keep me from reengaging with memories from the previous tenant of my transient’s studio

I left my suitcase unpacked and caught a bus back into the outside world. On my first whim, I popped off at new high street Waterstones I’d been judging for months as a commercialist pantheon to unenlightenment. The front window advert, featuring a iridescent dragon scale book cover besides a waifish author in a cliché black turtleneck piqued my disgust and suckered me inside. I was struck, spiraling up the cloudy stairs behind a bevy of lit-fluencers- emptier than the shelf-pretty books themselves- by a sudden ambitious question. What if, as Martin suggested, I cobbled together my stories and wrote a few damn words? Could I give someone else, besides my murderous teenage doppelganger, a sense of comfort in this bleak world? Maybe I’d found my calling. To reach the broken boys like Sawyer and cynical private eyes like Martin. To piss on all manner of scumbags. From the Beauford-esque hedonists to the Oswaldian megalomorons to the Shana-lite opportunists. I could get my Netflix deal and share my tales from the frontlines of psycho-bedlam.

 I would slowly, insidiously claim a niche as a chronicler of the somewhere else. One foot drowned in rose gold, snail mucus quicksand, one foot dangling free before an observation deck.

The acidic thoughts and desires I’d salivated over for decades suddenly foamed out of my brain in an orgiastic spasm. I babbled up words in plots on plots, killed-off darlings resurrected from a mausoleum, only a little wonkishly Jaxonian in their phraseology. But my mental crucible was ready, warmed by the reminder of Martin’s confidence in my persona’s on-paper appeal. I could smelt down volumes of canned, half-baked, oversalted antidotes into a novel.

 In fact, I would. I would virtue-shellac the hell out of a parable for golden riches strewn awry. Campbell and Sawyer, packaged humbly in sad burlap sacks, garroted with a tighty-whitey little Beau and a sprig of Heather, could be reborn as anti-privilege heroes. As othered rejects who wanted nothing more than to reassure humanity. We don’t need to be castrated and tarred or stalked by the FBI. We will soon break and come in pieces just like you.

Two months plodded under my feet while I typed on, inventing words at three times my usual keystrokes per minute rate. I wrote in a hemiola-rhythmed frenzy, a truly fictional accounting of the prelude to a death. Not a murder per say. A death of a good conscience, brains blown via a firing squad of mental abuses.

I put my obsessive focus on a single task to good use and soon, the draft in my flat wasn’t so unbearable. It wasn’t pretty. It was a green, fresh, hoary tale evoking those childhood DYI seedlings popped from jarred kidney beans. But still, it was mine, and I was proud.

I’d survived a two-day sleep back in London when an international email arrived in my inbox that, as usual, I couldn’t leave unanswered. An American press, the affectedly rebel-rebel New Yorker Magazine was dismantling authoritarian incompetence with a blistering expose on police mishandling of the Targill Case. Of course, the grandpas’ Virginia Times and the perverts’ Virginian Sun both passed on the same story that pitched an awful lot like algorithmically mid, escapist true-crime. No numbers savvy editor wanted to touch such a trifling amuse bouche privilege cleanser only for the multi-millionaires contemplating an eat-the-richer-than-us tasing menu.

But low click-rates for East Coast intellectuals wasn’t a threat. If anything, it signagled the exclusive scarcity precisely in the wheelhouse of muckraked, shock-slop provocateurs, Whalen Schoff and Ormand Prim. No fear of being too niche would stop the duo from wringing a sweeping class warfare treastise and maybe a Pulitzer nom out of a sui generis domestic tragedy.

 By the time they’d contacted me for my first tell-all interview, Whalen had already hacked the local police department’s archives. She and Ormand had reviewed the security footage no less than twenty times in glacial motion.

They felt they had a preponderance of evidence that the dirty, mountain-folky cops were obscuring a very different truth from the one cited by the local Fox affiliate station. I’d been set up, not by Sawyer, but by Beau and Heather themselves! Sawyer too had been set up by his parents. And together we were innocent victims of a crusade against the only noble source of wealth in a progressive democracy, liberal enlightment.

To their credit, the New Yorker duo never wavered in their conviction that anarchized MENSA darling chess prodigy, Sawyer, wasn’t a lost babe suckling pipette nipples from the backwoods poor. In their lore, he was a another sympathetic, precious idealogue wholly justified in killing for his principles.

And there were plenty of alternative explanations for why the so-called Targill “murders” ended in such a bloodbath. Whalen was a big proponent of the suicide-pact theory, according to which Heather and Beau’s deaths were the direct result of their falling out with fellow members of a libertarian networking cult. She methodically laid out the theory in a digital timeline.

Apparently, the Targills had been smear campaigned a few months prior into parallel states of Neanderthalic self-preservation. They’d been publically shamed for fumbling insider trades and TMZ- pilloried as right-leaning kinksters by jealous frenemies. Later, their marriage had been outed as one for a show, a two for the road to a colossal IRS investigation, tacked together only by the fate of Beau’s investment portfolio on hospice deathwatch. One more unchristian, uncapitalist unraveling of their personal secrets- like news of Beau’s affair with Valeria, the Georgetown sophomore- would undoubtly have cost them their D.C. jerk circle of financial backers.

Now, how else would they stave off the damoclean threat of quiet, upper-middle-class life adjacent to the powerful? They were weak and vain and therefore, primed to choose death by their own son as their only escape from imminent mediocrity. Naturally, of course they knew how to push. So, they pushed and pushed Sawyer until he snapped and fire squaded them, limb by limb. This was the only logical explanation.

Former neuroscience dropout Ormand also had a bevy of origin stories for Beau and Heather’s murderous psychological roots that he was eager to shittalk into reality. He sent me an attached PDF of his list unprompted, his notes treacling with stalkerish obsession.

Heather was raised in the same off-brand LDS polyclan church that had spawned a few of HBO’s killer mothers. Beau was known for DM-ing tradwife daughters with explicit photos-included for my viewing in an addendum- that he couldn’t have Sawyer leaking. As a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Targill were notoriously incompetent saboteurs of everything from prep school trustee elections to prediction markets for spirit revenue fluctuations. In sum, to believe that these they were unhinged saddists who expended vulnerable Sawyer wasn’t insane. Would I not agree?

No! Implied in Ormand superficial question was a ploy to engage my subjectivity as an obvious foreign emissary to the American somewhere else. What was my impression of Sawyer?  I knew better than to put in writing my opinions, though I agreed. My sympathies lay with the boy not the parents.

 Sawyer was, at his core, an overparented, underloved victim paralyzed an in infantile regression beyond his control. To flanderize him as an innately bad seed, an overgrown primordial narcissist, was to pretend that his thumbsucky trauma-state hadn’t germinated from behind the smokescreen of the bonfire Beau and Heather lit between themselves. And I vowed that I would never do to another what had been done onto me. I wouldn’t deny Sawyer his pain, however he felt it. I certainly couldn’t fault him any more than I could blame Beau and Heather for inconveniently dying in my vicinity.

But later, puking over my non-verbal toilet, I grappled with a sudden panic. I had my personal reasons for engaging in what I understood to be Whalen and Ormand’s speculative reassemabling of my memories. At least, I was curious about the strength of their fidelity to our shared reality enough to meet them for an official Saturday Zoom call. Yet I worried. How far would they- knowingly or not- push the fairytale of a righteous, well-bred Jacobin escaping the bourgeoise hell of capitalist pig daddy and bimbo stoner mommy?

I felt a guilt twinge when, on the next grey Saturday, I came screen-to-screen with two 20-something WASP hipsters in skimpy hiking fleece. Their bronzed calf tats mermaided on block-print hammock seats binding a veal-grey BMW camper van to an abandoned fence post outside a wheatfield with a Fullerian silver barn. I momentarily escaped into my mind. Was I laughing at them? Was I using them for my amusement? Would they make me- a self-effacing white, heterosexual man who readily stated pronouns- yearn for a lineage with Margie Thatcher and stuffy King Charles?

But Whalen’s intensive spreadsheet on the dubious cash flow behind Beau’s pentagon bottle-service defense contract, air bombed in another PDF, reminded me to pay them a little more attention. And I quickly realized that they were using me for their needs. I was the southern cops’ red herring out of Atlantic water. I’d been pre-tenderized and mentally tortured inside the blue wall fishbowl, like a lobster on death row. Perfectly bred to be an unstable, unreliable, but Britishly accommodating witness.

I had a sense that, on first glance, the artful Americans had zeroed on my neediness for approval from kids as cool, as eclectic, as assured in their rightness as them. I would be their Piltdown man, their seemingly credible missing link between the cops’ lies and the truth that only Sawyer and I knew.

Ormand made it clear in our first three minutes together. He understood why, under duress, I had willingly regurgitated whatever unnuanced garbage theories the fascist puppetmasters sought to plant in the Virginian collective consciousness via my authoritian, colonizer’s accent. I was simply watching out for my own kind as rich fucks do. Totally normal, if not unforgivable. But now was my chance, on the record, to make it known that I sided with the overthrow of the ruling class, who definitely didn’t subscribe to The New Yorker.

I chose my words at length. “I believe, however, we may be veering into a misinterpretation of my conviction in my own statements.”

Ormand handwaved me into silence. “Yeah, but it’s hard to feel, ever, what you’re really feeling? Like so many studies show. We’re baseline sad but actually fucking happy about it? Don’t get me wrong. I can’t imagine. You had a super visceral trauma. Then the cops think it’s okay to jackhammer you with the same, asinine questions, but-“

“Well, I gave the police the same account four times. My details never changed. And what I said was obviously corroborated by the footage. So, what is the-“

“No, we totally get it. It’s hard to release your emotional first impression. That’s why our piece wants to widen your lens, right? Take a step back. We’re trying to get at the logic and see. Is there a better explanation? What if Beau ”

“Okay, let’s talk about how would the kill sequence have worked. Beau is shot in both knees, yet he’s not bleeding out? Then he has the frankly, Herculean strength to subdue Heather and grab the gun from her? They were in a hallway. She wasn’t weak. She could’ve easily run away. Also, why would Sawyer wait to intervene if he’d heard Heather’s initial gunshots. And why would he have written a manifesto, presumably the night before the shootings? Does any of this sound…illogical?”

Of course, I was cherry picking evidence! The duo had already invented a lengthy alternative plot to the one outlined in the police report. They started with the premise that Beau had confessed something awfully life-ruining, God knows what, to Heather, while struggling to initiate sexual relations. In response, Heather had shot Beau for. We were to assume she’d aimed dickward for maximum drama but ended up weakening him in the knees. Fueled with the adrenaline of masculine inadequacy, Beau had struck back, fourteen times. Then, naturally Sawyer must’ve been keen to go after Beau’s heart and avenge Heather’s death. The hanging of Beau by his own used Calvin’s was an oedipally defensive kill by innocent Sawyer who didn’t realize that there were any bullets left in his father’s fuckbuddy’s neighbor’s gun.

I suggested that perhaps, in a hasty effort to narrativize this unfathomable crime, the detecives had attributed the genesis of the rube-goldberg kill sequence to my presence. The hippies agreed from their philosophe’s hammock chairs. While I might’ve started off an inessential voyeur, I’d been rebirthed after Sawyer’s metaphoric “death” as the essential, scapegoatic panacea to the discomfiting conclusion. There may be a teenage psycho on the loose.

The cognitive distress engendered by the mere thought that Sawyer- on his own- could be such a soulless, obsessive little freak, needed to be quelched. No one wanted to think about coddled, lucky boys randomly shooting their mothers’ eyes out, strangling their fathers, and faking their own deaths. Enter me, a useful weirdo. I could bear the brunt of guilt that someone, some expendable sufferer who had been in the room, ought to have felt. And I wore the guilt-ridden’s sackcloth well.

On Aubrey’s wall hung an old nude weighed down on rickety knees before an abstracted window, his whole front upturned to our noses, one white head hung unseen, consumed by a clavicle paunch. The other head chucked our chins with it’s crooked, droopey flesh jut, shrilved from unwiped urea. I recalled the tells mentioned in forgery documentary I had watched with Uri. There was no brushed signature besides this man, no annal retentive implications, no imprimatur of greatness drawn at gunpoint here. The oil slick strokes of his rot were too young, too intentionally grotesque, and worst of all, too kindly dispassionate towards what I assumed was aweful source material. I confirmed my suspicions with an inspection of the painting’s seams. The canvas was overly flush, a little too settled in a cush, new frame. This was a fake. And not tight enough a joke to gag on.

But were you supposed to laugh? I didn’t think so. You were supposed to mm-hmm and offer some obscure, slightly dirty factoid about 20^th century artists’ sexual proclivities like a real dick sucking conniseur. The expectations that you either fell for or bought into the reality of this fake were clear.

My brother fully believed he could ensnare the world with a ruse that here stood some putative Lucien Freud anti-hero in his grasp, spared from Christie’s auction chopping block by Aubrey Grice-Hutchinson’s tasteful magnanimity. Now that you’ve kissed my almighty ass of class, feast your eye lips on my well-curated taint cover, this shameless wise man dared us. Perhaps Aubrey imaged that this painting was his talisman, his spirit guide to the somewhere else of our parents and that just beyond the gates from which we were othered, jaws and undergarments would drop for him, now untouchable.

Jealously, I scanned the monstrous beauty down and up. At the bottom, the sallow, bulbous slabs, dripping has-been sack fat from the tired muscles that wouldn’t hold another night. Rising to the center, an ungaped pucker, annularly pink-grey, booby tripped with five o’clock gristle wires. I glanced even higher. The dead weight arms and saw-offed fingernails, clasping old skin-shavings of a self together in a shoddy ribfull above the fall of the prodigal man’s heart. I knew this pose well.

This must’ve been a self-portrait. Or, if this man had been imprisoned on a pedestal, maybe a fuck you to the persons who couldn’t swallow the details of his life in flacid decline. I was utterly charmed, not taken aback and not affronted by his pose. This should be my royal portrait I decided, a perfectly artful weaponization of our disgust tolerance for the powerful, representing how I’d like to be feared someday. By those who dreaded when I would accept my being, flops and all, without their permission.

            I stepped back to admire myself while I ransacked drawers, weeding through Aubrey’s debris for an explanation. Why did he have a painting of me in his room? But my curiosity waned and hunger to hurt soon drove me down, under his desk, to zero in on a cache of chocolates that he had stashed to one side for God knows what emergency. I slide out my golden foil’s war chest and faced his rows of dusty sweetturds. With my manly incisors, I drew fruity blood from one’s center, sucking off the domed top. The juice, cherry perhaps, was acrid, rancid with virginal joy ignored. In a fit of happiness and maybe a drip of brandy, I crawled back to my anterior. On tippytop knees, I finally reached to graze my painted center with my half drawn and quartered chocolate.

            Then I smashed and smeared the confection, blighting out my dangling future prospects. Very apt symbolism. I began to pound my fist, driving my knuckles deeper and deeper into the taught canvas, drooling up blood and a cacklish scream. Someone was here to correct me with logic upchucked from a drunk hawk. Peregrine!

            “What is your-“

            “Really, you don’t know?”

            “I…I…no, because I’m not a maniac!” She was rendered speechless in a pink tulle ballgown. A good witch, here to sugarcoat.

            “Well, obviously I’m creating in vivo performance art. I thought you’d recognize a fellow comedian. This is my self-soiling of post-modern Freudian manhood.”

            “What on earth are you talking about? You’re making fun of me?”

            “What do you do with Aubrey? You perform, you act. But I think your show should’ve been cancelled a few seasons ago. You can’t keep recycling the same plot.”

            “Bastard! This…it’s your meltdown…it isn’t about us.”

            “He doesn’t love you. You don’t even like him. Neither of you are subtle with your resentment.”

            “As if you’d have any understanding of what it’s like to be truly loved, Campbell.”

            I shrank at the rightness of her words. She knew me well enough to hurt me after years of side-eyes and sneers at one another. Peregrine and I had originally met when she was a grad student and I was a twenty-year-old enfant terrible, forced by my academic advisor into one of her courses to prove that I knew how to wax poetic on others’artistic achievements with proper pedantry. We’d never had a strong positive rapport and even her dating Aubrey hadn’t altered her opinion of me as a little deviant.

“He’s seeing other women. I should’ve said that bit first.”

            “And he grovels in my penthouse every night. We have what’s called a partnership. Quid pro quo.”

            “Yet you still want to marry him?”

            “Oh, don’t be such a child. We feed off each other. We make beautiful tabloid fodder.”

            “And aside from these shallow reasons, you have no other justification for-”

            The door swung open and my brother stood there with the perfect ovular mouth to scream, “Here’s Aubrey!”.

But he simply looked into our scene, not at me or his sobbing soon-to-be fiancé, but at my banged-up fist, submerged in my hollow center. My pose was indefensible, so I listened to him like a sullen boy, no longer the wise or eloquent adjudicator of what ought to be right. Maybe Aubrey and Peregrine deserved each other. Maybe they deserved their fake painting and their fake love. They were the adults in the room and what did I know about being loved?

“Campbell, if you don’t move-“

“Enjoy your fraud! He’s not real!”

“Get out!”

I lunged for my chocolates, grabbed another shiny box from the desk, and withdrew, some would even say scampered off, passing Aubrey’s blanked-out corpse close enough to peek at his throbbing left pectoral.

That was how I ended up curled on the sofa, facing down Ida and Aubrey. Aubrey knew that he had won. He’d dragged his prey, my carcass, before the single tribunal jury member who could weasel a deathbed confession out of me.

“Care to…?” Thankfully, Ida wasn’t particularly interested in hearing my voice. I shook my head.

“Ma, look, he’s out of excuses. For the first time. This is massive progress!” Aubrey was gloating.

“No.” I crossed my arms, kid style, backtracking on the possibility of progress.

“And a one-word complete sentence…did he pity screw himself into silence?”

“I really…oh God, I hate you.” My voice cracked to a lispy whisper, the words falling fast and familiar as I carressed my front teeth with my tongue, checking to make sure they weren’t phantom appendages.

At last, I understood the simplicity behind Sawyer’s motives. He wasn’t driven to hate by some elaborate crisis of sociopsychological failures contributing to the mental decline in disaffected, privileged young men. No, he was just an average kid, with an average need for respect and love, provoked to the point of shame, one too many times by unaverage jerks. I knew that feeling.

“I fucking, fucking hate you!” I broke down and pulled from under my legs the shiny box that I’d swiped off Aubrey’s desk.

“Why would you-“

For the first time, I peeked at box front, belted by a gold label advertising extra-large prophylactics. “Why do you care? They’re not yours.”

“How do you know?”

“Clearly, it says extra-large.”

“Are you even aware what they’re used for?”

“Let me guess.” I opened the box, chewed open a foil packet, and snapped a flaccid rubber at Aubrey’s smug mouth. To my dismay, it flopped a good meter from his feet.

Aubrey turned to Ida. “Tell him he’s behaving like a mental patient.”

But Ida was too far gone, laughing, with whom I wasn’t sure yet. “Campbell?”

“What is it, Ma. Have I disappointed you again?”

“Yes! You have terrible hand eye coordination. Pitiful…no sense of direction, aim.” She smiled weakly at me.

“God, you’re both impossible! And Campbell, you couldn’t even pretend to be sane? You couldn’t even hold yourself to basic manners? For the one fucking afternoon of consequence to my life? You leave disasters for everyone else, and think you can just run away, because you’re a selfish, God damn, prick and you could care less about me or our family-“

“Well, good. We finally agree on one point…you’re absolutely irrelevant to me!”

Ida glanced down at my swinging legs and her fleeting humor instantly dissolved into longstanding frustration. “Campbell, will give us a moment?”

“Take the whole evening.” And I walked out, thinking about how far I’d run from a life that would matter to me.

But I didn’t manage to put the distance I’d desired between myself and Aubrey before I caught my father pacing an orbital around one of our many impersonal hallways accessorized with family portraits. Was this chasing of his own tail evidence of rabid onset dementia? Was the end for one of us neigh? I was excited, almost giddy at the prospect, until he stopped at the far window overlooking his boxwood labrynth, fencing us inside his heaven’s gate.

 He glared down at my dissimilar shadow cowering before him on the burgundy carpet and with a dissmive nod, he signaled. I was a stranger to him and to the ambitiously repeated sneer lining the walls that he shared. I couldn’t be the Norman conqueror his gilded forefathers wanted in their bloodline. I was a foreign little blue boy. Toneless appendages lopped off four inches too short, eyes too softly dun and unpupiled to glare, concave invertibrate’s chest too ragged down with chronic melancholia.

“I heard you enjoyed shredding my painting.” He grinned at me and, though I couldn’t say if my father had ever held any artistic inclinations, I assumed he was lying.

Nonetheless, he was as pacific and genteel as I recalled him in our last multi-sentence exchange held when I was fifteen and moutheir. We’d gone for a late night row during my mother’s birthday party at Heston Bluementhal’s noroviral gastropub The Fat Duck. How we must’ve made a scene! Him huffing my crushed benzoes through a bespoke cigar, me, in a twee school uniform, both of us firing post-modern nonsense insults to outshine the other over the cobblestones of a medieval alleyway swathed in headlit white pathos.

I was reminded, here in his hall, of how he’d held me that evening like someone too familiar. How he’d petted the joint between my spinal cord and medulla oblongata with his assured, closed fist on my neck. And suddenly our unconversational match, delivered mouths on ears, beaten into my consciousness, rang again in my memory.

Yes, it would out of line to demand an explanation for why he’d put his arm around the waist of our neighbor’s thirteen-year-old niece at the swim club last weekend. Don’t be stupid Campbell! There was no need to inquire why he was taking my classmate, his collegue’s daughter, Mindy, with whom I shared a birth year, to a buy a gown for her sister’s bat mitzvah when my mother was scheduled to be out of town the following week. It was already inappropriate enough that I’d mentioned the theatre tickets he’d bought for Mindy to my mother, my drunk school therapist, and our attentive old housekeeper, Mrs. Robinson.

Most importantly, yes, I deserved to be disowned, in fact institutionalized for making up horrid lies about my father’s exemplary conduct and intentions. He donated millions to charities whose acronyms he pronounced like slurs and financially supported his wayward sibblings whose names he’d never bothered to learn. Hell, he even went to couples counseling with the wife he simply couldn’t forget! He was a good man who’d never taken a blow off his pedestal because no one could ever reach his height. And no, he wasn’t going to strike me again and knock me off my lowly cucking stool. Not unless I didn’t shut up and stop calling him a criminal pervert.

“I had no idea. You were an aspiring artiste? What a shame you never pursued a healthy creative-”

“Campbell, I don’t know what your demon voices are instructing you to fuck up this time. But you ought to seek help before your condition gets worse. You can’t go on like this. Annihilating our family, relationships, our public standing. And if you’re too feeble to make that choice on your own, we need to discuss options. We love you and we want you-”

“Wait…wait, wait your standing among the financial grifters? The pedo creeps? Am I gatekeeping you from the saints of humanity? The people you can freely abuse and cheat and jerk off with?  How unconscionable of me. I apologize, what a little shit I’ve been, thwarting your access to such greatness and-”

“Enough! I’m no longer willing to delude you into thinking you have basic adult competencies like your mother does. You’re not well. You’re obviously distressed and manic right now.”

“Can’t help it. You’ve raised me in your own image.”

“What is that?” And the fight had begun. I could tell, he was giving me round one.

“Oh, you’re the fucking Messiah of delusion! You’re trying to delude me that I’m delusional and that’s truly delusional. You can’t see? I’m here now. Fully present. Aware, self-respecting. You’re on your own bizzaro, revisionist mindtrip. Alone. It’s comical. You still think you can subjugate my reality and I simply won’t notice. Why! Because you’re paranoid and you need an even more paranoid accolyte? Because you need to control someone and you’re hoping I’ll be the pathetic, co-dependent sucker you raised? I know exactly what you’re doing!”

“Sure. We do this dance every God damn year. You have your two minute breakdown. Throw your fit. Change your meds.”

“And you’re still goading me to jump out the window. So can you pronounce me legally insane. I know. But did you know, I’m actually afraid of heights?”

“Go on, pull that same cheat card. Jump. Pull that trigger. We’ll miss you deeply.” He smiled and waved me off, facetiously, like a child about to degut a thrashing flounder.

I

This evening was supposed to be a sacred blood fusing of two well-adjusted clans bearing no signs of overbred paranoia or underbred love. Yet it was palpable, in the tenuous angles at which we each pivoted our chairs away from one another’s eyes, that entropic fission was the most likely outcome of our interaction. Whatever we were as an admixture of unrelated relatives was nuclear at worst and fizzled out at best. We all hid gentlepeople’s fists beneath our common surface while we kept our heartburned truths close to our chests. And unfortunately, not one among my diner companions would question our groupthink adherence to this bonding ritual steeped in ancient misery.

Peregrine and Aubrey, our clans’ chosen avatars, could feign no more interest in one another than they did in their own glares off their silver spoon backs. Meanwhile, Ida was put out and pastured between her thoughtless husband and Peregrine’s French waif step-mother, made in 1991. Father Peregrine, hair-gelled boomer dandy, won second bitterest of the night, stuck between the flat-chested wall and my incense coated uncle, Eamont.

Eamont was a shaggy, skinny-jeaned film sociologist, a creative tool my father kept around to boost his ego. Now, why precisely my uncle needed to see one out of his four nephews married off was a curiosity to only me. Because what did I understand about the appropriateness of relationship boundaries? But Eamont apparently knew Pergrine quite well in their niche of niche academic meditation circles and I suppose Aubrey liked him enough, in the way that one likes an odd-looking pet.

It dawned on me, as I made mental notes of these various liasons around me, that I was the real neo noir scapegoat here, the least intentional invitee with the fewest ties to the group. That distinction couldn’t be pinned on Eamont, young Mother Peregrin, or the wall. Worse yet, I realized soon into our hellos that I was wholly unnecessary and in fact detrimental to these proceedings. Campbell on the guest list was supposed to be a void-filler. Having an opinion on marriage ideals wasn’t in his role’s description as fuckup baby brother number one. So, my scoffing underbreathed quips and pulling judgy eyebrows were tantamount to going too blue, playing too risqué a truth telling shit for the evening’s delusional, Hallmark tenor.

And as expected, for my truancy, at some point during course two, any neutral will towards the space I occupied evaporated. My father took deep offense to my suggestion that labor’s nationalizing Welsh windfarm energy production wasn’t the crime of the century against taxpayers in London. He struck me between my ribs. Fist in the same divot where Sawyer had slugged me with his elbow. I shook with what I should’ve known as PTSD but wrote off as caffeine high.

I was sure no one noticed my panic reverb as usual, least of all the groom-to-be besides me disintegrating over the eel jellied rocket slop we were supposed to eat. But somehow I caught the reflection of a pink nick in his cornea when he snuck a glance at me, a sign of rubbed away tears. And I rejoiced. Who knew that Aubrey wasn’t so far beyond my reach! He was gritting mollars with outsider’s anger. Yes! He was outside of the great somewhere else. With me. And he was refusing to look inside the golden gates of Hell! He wasn’t so lost any longer.

Christ, he was soon blinking at me with unconditioned concern. In fact, he was so found that when Father Peregrine struck up a particularly rage baity tangent on immigration fluxes in the investment broker market, Aubrey committed the unthinkable. He addressed me.

“Are you okay?”

“I don’t know yet.” Honest, true, non-committal.

“Do you want to…go?”

“Are you asking to whisk me away with you? Are you…losing it?”

“I’m afraid.”

“All right, you can take me somewhere on your engagement night.”

“I do want to make a scene first.” He looked at me expectantly.

“Sorry, I can’t advise on proper technique, scene making just comes so naturally, it’s second nature.”

“But what would you do.”

“Run?”

Aubrey laughed, I laughed, and I think he was excited for the first time in decades when it appeared that Peregrine was suffering from a sudden aneurism in the face of our delight. Or maybe she’d never heard him laugh before.

“Darling, what’s going on? Did something happen?” She grimaced at him.

“Yes, dear, I’ve decided, it’s time for you to leave me.” His smile didn’t fade.

“Because you’re too much of a coward to walk yourself?”

“I was giving you the upper hand. But I’ll walk. I need an actual drink.”

“Did you forget you’re an alcoholic?”

“Well, at the very least, I deserve better than tap water. After how cold and dry you’ve been.”

“I’m only dry around you.” She flung her monsterous diamond ring on his plate.

“So who is it? Which one of these fine gentlemen in my family are you screwing!”

“None. I’m too old for your father and too young for Campbell!”

Thankfully, before my father or I could object and reveal our paraphilic desires to each other, Eamont took the stand with an audible gasp. “Me.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of the confession. I knew, from a few odd articles he’d penned for queer kink cinema zines, that he was- at least in some circles- identifying openly as a gay man. Maybe he was closer to queerbaity Bowie looking for a supermodel wife than he was to Elton? But he’d officiated same-sex weddings since the legalization date, wasn’t shy about AIDS activism, and had a long-time best friend named Leo with whom he shared a flat and a puppy. Was I a bigot for making assumptions?

Before I could question my character, Peregrine burst into tears on cue. “Eamont, you don’t have to-“

“No, chere, I’m in love with you!” And he said no more, utterly convinced that he’d made the coolest of justifications for the subversive sublime of grey haired horndog cheating. As if to say: consider the beauty of our naked bodies entwined on the toilet of our members only club lounge. Think of my arthouse dad bod slapping up against her dieted ribs, my receding hairline hidden tastefully beneath her thirty grand extensions, my grasping at false youth made less tragic by comparison to her wasting of realtime young adulthood on little, old me.

But really what he’d done was more magnanimous than he’d ever know. He’d killed off any claims our party had to basic civility. Those most committed to our prestige drama gave up on fighting the authentic seeping in of cringe comedy. Shouts, fingers stabbed in lettuce Jello, a punching down of Eamont by Father Peregrine, a shriek from young Mother Peregrine, and impressive curses from both my parents at their sobbing ex daughter-to-be, ate up the last of the fresh air.

I was a very satisfied observer of bedlam.These small tells from the barbarians revealed slivers of a larger truth to me, their chosen problem no more. If I was the outcast among these crazy hellions…why had I ever felt ashamed?

Aubrey tapped my shoulder, cutting off my revere. “Shall we?”

Single file, we escaped out the side door, tumbling like the innocent boys we never were to the alcove of our parents’ gravel driveway where Aubrey had stashed his spruce green, open-topped Bently for this occasion. In unison, we jumped the doors, pretending we’d sacked Babylon, plundered our fair share of trauma, and were now seating ourselves for an overdue absence of debauchery, hedonism, and all unholy bacchanalia. Aubrey wasn’t fit to drive, but he wouldn’t relinquish control of the night to me, the worrier between us, and so he pitched us with the finesse of a Formula One reject across our parents’ lawn.

“Duck!” He whipped us past a thicket of shrubs, our matching curly heads grazing branched spikes.

“Huh…fuck!”

            “You told me to run!”

            “I told you that’s what I would do. You made the poor choice to emulate a mad man. God, this is worse than being kidnapped!”

            “Who would kidnap you. That would be self-torture.”

            “Why not. I’d be fantastic, I’m very compliant, and you’re still alive…so we have one person who survived me.”

            “I’ve achieved the impossible, haven’t I!” He pulled a leaf out of my hair, almost tenderly as he drove us far away from our origin pitt to the edge of a kingdom we no longer wanted to conquer. London was our parents’ city forevermore and we were running from them.

We arrived to purify ourselves in Bath too late for a hotel room but early enough for free street parking that we snagged at the foot of a medieval bridge spanning freshly polluted water. I wasn’t keen on talking yet I could sense that Aubrey needed the noise. I watched him from behind, my arms braced around my own torso to deny a shove, as his shadow thudded, headfirst, body pitched forward with downhill momentum over the flattish cobblestones.

            “Who would you push in order? Out of all of us?” He leaned on a crumbly outcropping and a momentary concern struck me that he was dangling far enough from the water to avoid drowning.

            “Who would you choose…after Eamont.

            “Dad, I suppose. Next, I’d have to pick you. Only because you’d be too honest and turn me in for pushing someone, even Dad. I’d be okay leaving Ma alone. She’s not naïve and she can keep secrets. How does your hit list go?”

            “So we are including each other.”

“Yes, Campbell, you can push me. Go on.”

“Me. I’d bury my own feet in concrete and crawl over the edge. Then all of you would watch and hopefully crash to your collective demise in my wake. But if you lived, maybe you’d be indicted for my tragic death. And really, I can’t decide which ending I’d prefer.”

            “Narcissist!” He suddenly reached a hand for me and animal recall forced me into a shivering recoil. My femurs pinched and I dropped down at his feet.

            “Oh, get the Hell up. You’re not always such a martyr!”

            I took a facetious knee. “Why, you make me want to be a better victim. Every day.”

            “What did you think I was going to do to you? Strike you?”

            “I wasn’t thinking…” There was no excuse I could conjure to hide my self-consciousness. I wobbled up to standing, at a distance from his grasp.

            “It was all in jest! Everything I said. I wanted to tell you…I…”

            “You owe me nothing.”

            “I do…I should say I’m sorry, I-”

            “No! No! I don’t need you to coddle yourself with some self-appeasing bullshit mea culpa! You can give that monologue to your paid therapist! I want you to let me move on!” I was garbling my words, re-sucking snot down my epiglotis. Meanwhile, the pain of growing up was left to dull on my brain’s farthest hormonal backburner.

            “I know you’re not ready to hear me out. And I’m not ready to give the proper apology I do owe you, either. But…I don’t want to lose you again. That’s all I can offer right now. Take it or leave it.”

            “Okay.” I held a hand outstretched to him and he took it in his, reeling me closer, alongside him. Then, together we daubed our faces with moonlight over the grey mirrored basin under our bridge for what felt like years collapsed in seconds.

“You’re shivering.” Aubrey put an arm around my shoulders.

            “Oh God!”

            “What.”

            “You’re falling in love with me!”

            “You have a certain effect on people…it’s not unappealing.” He rumpled my hair. I let him.

At midnight, a lost cabbie offered us e-cigarettes and needles among various life-blunters from his window storefront, promising to mellow out all manner of “tight ass posh fags”. We considered the offer, Aubrey seriously, as if making a business deal, me with half-hearted humor, waiting for confetti to shoot out the needlepoints and up our veins. But after minutes of haggling under a lamp, I only convinced one of them that we were now too old to say yes, why thank you sir, for the distraction from what we ought to be talking about. And so, for the rest of our wander, Aubrey and I hobbled in sleepy circles, distracting ourselves with revenge dreams against harmless Eamont, poor punching bag, until morning came.

I woke, rolled in a fetal ball on a twin bed in a stranger’s beige guest room. Aubrey was standing across from me at a Frenchier door than young Mother Peregrine, his back dropped before a wall of gas-leaked sea fog. He was watching me, sipping from a chipped mug shaped like an urn.

            “Is this…real?”

            “Do you want me to pinch you?”

            “That would be too much effort wasted on me.”

“Yes, you lived.”

“And where are we?”

“I called in a favor from a work mate. His brother’s out of town. They gave me the key code. It was a good night…you didn’t insult anyone. I didn’t drink. We make a decent team.”

            I knew he was lying by his benevolent smile. No one could be that irrationally optimistic in my presence without serious help. He’d given me something to go away and taken quite a bit himself. I didn’t ask for details because he never told, though rumor had it, he liked sedatives. I let him drag me, half asleep, to people watch for our Sunday in suspension, in total denial of the wreck we’d left for our parents to clean up.

 To sober up, I had my first cheap pint in years, confident that I could spin a tale, pinning blame on Aubrey’s ass, if I got our teeth knocked out. He enjoyed keeping me less than tethered to reality and I enjoyed watching him wallow over cold water, still smarting from rejection by Peregrine. I had to agree, as we doubled back over the streets of last night, that we could’ve made a functional team.

            “Every second I see one, I think. I might take her. Then she comes closer. And when she isn’t Perri, I lose all attraction. Even when we were together. I never felt anything with the girls I’d shag at the office.” He nodded to a table of women brunching on a café patio.

            “You must’ve felt something or you wouldn’t have kept up the disgusting habbit.”

            “Sex isn’t only about the physical, you’ll learn that someday. And it wasn’t a habbit. I had two…dalliances. With sisters, in fact. And they both looked like Perri.”

“Would you be interested in cloning her? I’m sure you could find her hair somewhere.”

“The clone would never feel the same.” He wasn’t in on the joke.

            “Well, and Perri’s not a dog. But if you are going to be needlessly cruel to someone, wouldn’t it be more ethical to choose someone who already knows what you’re capable of and has an escape plan? Or would you wipe the clone’s memories.”

            “I’d rather embarrass myself with something fresh.” He scanned the street, resting his gaze on a smattering of twenty-somethings clustered at an outdoor bar.

            “Whose twenties would you like to ruin?”

            “The very grown woman. In the center.” He pointed at a tall, spindly towhead, a paragon of Peregrine look-a-likes.

            “She looks awfully familiar.”

            “Your turn. Who would you pick?”

            “I don’t fantasize about strangers.” That wasn’t true based on prior history, at least not around women of a certain age who gave me lectures on obscure subjects, but it tasted true in my mouth now that I’d learned to appreciate reality a little more than fantasy.

Aubrey was put off at my absence of melancholy. “Go back to the Americans. The lonely puppy look doesn’t fit here.”

I pulled down my eye sockets with shaky hands. “This is actually acute muscular atrophy from whatever you shot into me last night, thank you for the charitable donation…and I’m not lonely.”

“Do you ever listen to anyone else?”

“Well, if I heard you correctly…you want me gone?”

“Not always. But you only have so many chances to find someone worthwhile. Then you end up in a stalemate like me and Perri.”

His words, “go back”, needled into me for the rest of the afternoon until I forgot that I was supposed to be listening to his oral history on the fraught politics of modern heterosexual monogamy. He eventually gave up on my company and bought the Peregrine stand-in drinks.

I hadn’t intended to babysit Aubrey, but I was leery enough of my brother near alcohol to stick around the bar premises, waiting on the periphery of his exploits. I passed the time drawing on cocktail napkins while occasionally looking up to witness clips of painful interaction between old millennial Aubrey and Gen Z model Peregrine.

By late afternoon, I made a calculation. Aubrey seemed self-aware enough to leave with his date for a minute. I wanted to take a stroll on the waterfront and find out just how sick I looked. So I turned my back and stepped cautiously onto the street only to feel a jab in my back pocket.

“Hello?” I answered my cellphone. I was a puppet like Beau. With a string around my neck that could be yanked at any second.

“I spoke with the bitch’s mother. They’re at the Savoy and she wants to talk with your brother. You need to get him there. Right now.”

“Was yesterday that pleasant?”

“I don’t care. I want a wedding before I die.”

“You had one forty years ago, Ma.”

“I was still poor. I deserve a second chance…with a planner. So you need-”

I hung up on her repeat demand. There was no shirking off her desire to lay vainglorious claim to what would be the grimmest, convenience sham marriage in recorded history. I still would, as a faithful servant of my harmless mother, my savior, carry out the task that she requested of me. And then I would leave her, and all others above me, to fall where they may. I might be drowned, but at least I would be free.

As I silenced another call from her, I considered that our one-sided plotting was worth a derisive laugh from an outsider. The demands I asked of life, the same set of necessities that Saywer had demanded, could never be so fraught with gaslit manipulations and self-serving intentions. I simply wanted to find someone to whom I mattered, whom I found matter worthy. I would never let myself fall so in love with me alone that every outward expression of my passion would be vetted, gatekept, and controlled with contracts and schemes and plots.

            I trekked back to the bar where Aubrey was charm offending another, thankfully older woman who could’ve passed for a malnourished Peregrine with platinum highlights. I assumed neither amorati noticed me, leaving open a foot space midway between them and the door. I paused, eager to lose myself in this Campbell-sized spot while trawling for audio-snippets of their greasy flirtation, but the decidedly unsexy conversation that transpired in my earshot threw me back into motion.

            “Is that your brother?”

            “Who?”

            “By the door? I saw him earlier. He was drawing on a napkin. Some abstract Piccaso-type figure. It was a little dark. I thought he was you at first.” She peeked in my direction.

            “Is that right…you thought I was a creep? And you still let me talk to you?” He blocked me from her view.

            “Oh, no! He’s really talented…and he seemed intense…deep? You look the same. But you’re energy…it’s very different.”

            “So we’ve been told…excuse me. I should check on him, make sure he’s not planning a massacre.” His lip-grazed philtrum suggested he was furious that I’d crossed his potential lover’s mind for any reason at all. But he still left her for me.

            “Check on the car?”

“Ma wants you to meet Perri at the Savoy in an hour. Do you want to see her?”

            “I have no choice. Now that Ma’s involved.”

            “There’s a ferry down a block that goes to Isle of Man. I could drop the car at your garage.”

            “Come with me.”

            “Would you like me make you look wonderous by comparison?”

            “Be yourself, Campbell.” He grinned, sense of superiority restored, and I played coy. He’d never need to know that I was now undeluded and unburdened of shame. I’d been accidentally affirmed enough to understand a secret truth that I’d never tell him or anyone hanging ten degrees off his family. I wasn’t disgusting, or terrifying, or mentally disturbed to the point of constituting a leach on humanity in the opinion of the general population. I’d been okayed. I’d been accepted, even deemed publicly undangerous under the notoriously shitty American law! And by women at bars!

Feeling altrustic, I let Aubrey ramble through apology speeches to Peregrine without judgement while we returned to his car and a parking penalty notice with an anti-elitist price tag. Aubrey was too preoccupied to curse. He tossed me the bad boy slip and his keys while he mussed his hair in a puddled reflection until we looked marginally distinctive in his view.

But for my silence during Aubrey’s performance, I must’ve been slated by the Gods to learn. No slightly good deed goes unfollowed up. The subsequent hour over a tight highway, I was forced like Sissyphus to squint in semi-dark at peripheral license plates as an escape from his ego death.

“What if I promised her, I’d commit to couples’ therapy?” He preened back bloodshot eyes in the overhead mirror.

            “That is an option.” I wondered, where had the power to weaponize vague language been all my life? It had worked twice now on self-satisfied people who thought nothing of my personhood. Once on Gretta. Now on Aubrey.

            “Campbell, I need you. Do I sound callous? Is therapy too forward? Is it not intimate enough? Should I-“

            I couldn’t help myself. I shrugged and leaned over the dash to turn up the GPS volume.

            “What about…I saw, there’s this silent retreat in Reykjavic…it’s not for sex addiction per say but compulsive, risk taking?”

            “Sounds Scandinavian.” I dodged his fidgets across the few inches between us.

            “Oh, be a fucking tosser and give me a fucking judgement, will you? Tell me what you think of my plan. You have my full permission…bludgeon me. Please!” He was begging and I was ignoring. We made an excellent parternship.

            “We should stop at the next service station.” I loved my uninflected cadence, delectably void of all interest and emotion. Laced with the sadistic euphoria parents probably felt while extinguishing tantrums from helpless toddlers.

            “You’ll make me late…I can fill up on my way home.” He bit down on his lip and committed to silence. Good practice for his retreat, I thought.

The Savoy was always contemptable to me. I’d been imprisoned inside many times as an enfant terrible with my father’s parents. Long enough to puke on the goofy checkerboard floors by the feet of the self-appointed universe masters playing zero-D, multiversal chess against their own dicks in their longer bald heads. Nothing about the interior had changed in the decades since my last visit. I was once again overwhelmed by the same impression I’d formed with a world-weary decade under my belt, two thumbs down my pre-tonsilitis throat. There wasn’t anything romantic about the old money dying being scavenged for cultural cache by the new money living.

I wanted no part in entering the hotel and certainly wasn’t angling for a courtside seat to the Aubrey-Peregrine reunion. But, like all good quiet ones, I wasn’t asked for my druthers. My mother accosted me as a valet stripped my driver’s power to flee the scene. While Aubrey paced like a lobby pawn, I was shuffled to a far corner and shoved behind an elaborately potted fern that had given up on hiding plastic fronds.

            “She’s in that hideous tower room. You explain to her where you took him. What you did.”

            “He injected us with cheap ketamine and perved on younger women at a bar. I gave him a grace period without my judgement.”

            “Lie. Dress it up. You’ve always been good… with words, telling brilliant little fictions.” She was buttering me, waiting for me to cave.

“All right, Ma, I’ll go.” I fawned and she smiled at me, her good boy. She could think I was taking her bait for all I cared.

Aubrey and Peregrine were supposed to meet in a jewel lit, velvety lounge that screamed, “Villains fuck here!”. I scanned the dark room and caught Peregrine in a booth.

“They sent you first?” Peregrin laughed and slurped back a tumbler of whiskey.

“Well, I’m the best at looking ashamed.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“No. By the way, I meant to ask. Is Eamont no longer with Leo?”

“Are you drunk? Why are you even here!”

“I’m curious, that’s all. I remember, he used to write reviews for quite a few queer kink cinema zines back in the day.”

“What does that even mean, Campbell. We don’t all speak Cloud Coocoo wanker!”

“He reviews arthouse gay pornos? I was trying not to sound like a raging homophobic, bigot. But I’ll say it again. He’s a famous critic of man-on-man pornographic content for-“

Perri dropped her voice to a sinister giggle, as if she’d caught me in a compromising position. “But…how would you know that? Are you…wait. Why are you watching gay porn? Are you-”

I shrugged and gave her a real, bold laugh to the face. “Oh, thank God. You’re the raging homophobic bigot!”

“I’m not engaging with your… honestly they’re ridiculous accusations. You’re finger pointing. And Eamont has always been a wonderful, supportive friend. He was sparing me from what he thought was the mistake of a lifetime.”

“So, you weren’t a crucial player in his plot?”

“Plot? What’re we in, medieval times? There was never a plot! I said, let’s fake we’re screwing. You won’t have to take questions about Leo. And I’ll have something to hold over my sodding cad of a boyfriend before our wedding!”

“I doubt you’ll have a wedding. He’s been busy replacing you with 20-somethings.”

“What do the girls look like? Are they pretty?”

“Not besides a man pushing forty. They could pass for your daughter.”

“Has anyone ever told you, you’re an insufferable, self-righteous, conceited fucking bastard?”

“Of course, don’t worry about my deflated ego…quite often. But I still agree with Eamont. Marrying into our family would be a tragic mistake.”

“You’re so, so jealous, aren’t you. You’ll never have-”

“That is true, I’ll never be loved. And perhaps you’ll fit right into the clan. You can take my spot at the bottom.”

“Is this what you wanted? You wanted to come here and make a complete mockery of me? Of your brother? Of us?”

“I don’t think that often about you, Perri.”

Perri threw her glass across the table at me, splashing shards and whiskey on my neck while I flinched. “Why say such horrid, stupid, thoughtless, nonsense!”

“Why be concerned what an unloveable maniac says?”

“That wasn’t my phrasing. Don’t twist my meaning.”

While they kissed, I crawled from my seat and left them to their ridiculous, sappy declarations of deeply superficial desire. I had done my duty, completed the scene in which I was their zany obstacle to toss aside. I’d served my purpose well enough as a horror-comedy plot device in their tawdry romance. Now, I’d broken my character actor’s curse.

I caught a cab to my parents’ house, packed my suitcase, and wrote a note to my mother requesting that she compensate my blood, sweat, and efforts by priority shipping my nude painting to Jaxon’s trailer address. But there was too much of a glib ease behind the transactional undertones of my demand that disturbed me. I finished shredding my note when my mother knocked on her bedroom door.

“You’re running off again without saying anything!”

“Good bye, Ma.”

“Don’t go. Please don’t go yet.”

“There’s nothing more I’m willing to do here.”

“I wanted to tell you something.”

“All of a sudden?”

“I’m thinking of leaving your father. After the wedding.”

“Fantastic…I’m very excited for you.”

“I wouldn’t look like the queen of the spinster fuckups?”

“Forty or so percent of people get divorced…you’d have some competition.”

“Okay. You won’t tell him, will you? I don’t want him making the first move.” Was she unaware that I hadn’t exchanged two sentences with my father in the last sixteen years?

“Don’t worry.”

“Please stay. For your brother. We’re still having the engagement party next week. And it’ll reflect on him if you’re absent.”

“Oh, you could hire any stand-in to be ignored in a corner. There are tons of annoying actors, maybe you won’t snag a RADA grad, but I’m sure you could find some pathetic, desperate, whiny little prick who’ll do anything for his equity card. He’d give about as good an impression of Campbell as I could.”

I left her open-mouthed, fake blubbering in the mode of Peregrine.

“You could be a spy.”

            “Jesus, absolutely not. Being a spy requires extremes of competence and sex appeal, neither of which I have!”

            “But that would make you perfect. You’re so weird. High strung. That’s your cover.”

            “You’re saying this is my Peter Sellers fuckface schtick but really, I’m a slick MI6 operative up top? Micromanaging the narrative, secretly calculating how to wring information out of people by convincing them I’m a basketcase. That would be…pretty funny.”

            “Good, no? I’d buy it.”

            “But why couldn’t I actually be a pathetic, useless idiot? Isn’t that more likely… statistically?” I was only now catching on to the fact that he was seriously concerned I might be a spy.

            “Or a useful idiot.”

            “Okay, but if I was being deployed by some shadow entity as a Manchurian useful idiot, I wouldn’t be aware. I would still think I’m an ordinary moron.”

            “See? I have no way to check. You could be a very clever spy. Useful idiot. Who knows he’s a useful idiot. Useful idiot who doesn’t know. Or you could be, as you say, actually useless.”

            “Well, I’ll gladly debase myself, if it gives you peace of mind. I’m pretty confident I’m a very, very useless fuckup!”

            “Believing you is a risk. For me.”

            “Then…do you think I’m secretly brilliant?”

            “You could be.”

            “Evidently, I’m not!”

            “You have no proof!”

 “Oh, come on, I’m fishing for affirmation from a drug dealer! And that’s not even the dumbest low I’m willing to stoop to! I’d let you give me a craniotomy, you could check all my brain tissue if that wasn’t illegal! Do I sound like someone in possession of normal mental faculties?”

            “I think you’re unaware. How you read.”

            “And that’s an excellent trait for an idiotic fuckup.”

            There perished the last interesting sentence I would utter for two days. Uri caressed my cheek against his wall of lockboxes and stuffed my sweaty hands into handcuffs whose origin story I couldn’t request due to rapidly dwindling consciousness from the head blow. Two unhealthy lunges later and he dragged me, nearly comatose, out his front door. Then he sank me into his mustang’s back seat floor and bound my ankles with a chopped up, max volt cable fringed at the ends. I wondered briefly if he would waterboard my feet before falling asleep to the sensation of being paradoxically trussed and spatchcocked, my nose baked against to his cowboy coke.

I woke to someone maternal licking my head. A tongue blessing me. Joy! My hands were secured to a warm radiator and I was rejuvenating on a tile floor in an enzymatic bath of Joy’s piss. Looking a little unhinged and a little hopeful like Sawyer post-tooth loss, I imagined. Joy might’ve thought I was dead, but I knew that in her care I was coming to, in fact coming into my own, when I saw a moth light through a fringe of macrame above me. We were in the yellow house’s grey-green bowls and there, not ten feet away was the woman Uri must’ve forgotten he once called very attractive. Wirey, oversmoked, old enough to be my mother’s enemy, caked in thinning denim with a lipstick tang. She was violently arranging plastic flowers and foam fruit in a swan-shaped bowl on a teal formica wraparound.

Joy barked and the woman turned to peer through us as if she knew we had less of a shelf-life than her spongey apples and glue-gunned roses. She kept humming some disturbing country tune about tractor humping that I vaguely recalled from Jaxon’s work playlist. There was no recognizition in her expression that I was watching her. She seemed content to angst alone, pruning fake leaves that would never grow and nibbling scuff marks off hollow, prop lemons advertising the Vatican’s orchard she’d never visit.

 I was also contented to be alone with my thoughts, eyes shut to new stimuli, but Joy had too much faith in humanity. She wanted this woman to care for us, so she howled until the woman couldn’t remember the song’s last chorus and took the bait to hide her sadness.

“Hey!” She was yelling for some else, her bonny hip to us.

“Here!” Enter Uri.

“Put your bitch down.”

“I’d take you first.”

“Ha! We gotta decide anyways…about this.” She gestured at the heap of me.

“Not getting up?”

“Nah, I say we put him down too.”

“We should find how much he has on us.”

“I saw the passport, looked pretty much like the real thing…”

“He has money. It’s a nice fake. And you haven’t heard him talking.”

“Why, he’s asking questions?”

“He was in government. Some treasury office. He knows shit.”

“Maybe he went to a fancy college.”

“They all do over there. But he knows big shit…real facts. Not just book stuff. And he finds dirt. On people online. That was his whole job.”

“Wait, wait…you sure?”

“He told me.”

“That’s stupid, why would-“

“Telling’s the cover. See. He’s not as dumb as he plays it.”

I had to put them out of their misery. “Well, thanks, but I am that stupid, I promise!”

“What the fuck’s your deal!” Uri leaned back against the counter and gave me the once over with his swinging foot. I caught smoke off his freshly discharged riffle strapped to his old man’s back.

“My deal? Let’s see. I was fired from an objectively shitty low-paying beucratic nightmare job and then I was excommunicated from my abusive family. I’ve got nothing else for you.”

“You’re a liar.” He was gunning me down between the pupils.

“Fine, would you like a true story? You can check my notebook. My life was supposed to be over two months ago. There’s a five-page list of grievances against myself, from February 23, I’d recommend not skipping. It’s a thematic overture. You’ll see, I had no plan in coming here, no savings, and four overdue prescriptions for antipsychotics. I had no purpose, nothing to-”

“Why me, huh?”

“I just needed an out from life and a genuine friend. And I really can’t stress how ill-equipped I am to judge anything you’ve done.”

“I don’t care. What you think of me. I care what you do. With the information you have.”

“Oh, I’m way too self-absorbed to undercover narc. And who would trust me? Really, I-“

April turned to Uri and whispered. “He’s…not lying.”

Uri ignored her. “Then why snoop”

“What?” I don’t know who said it first. Me or Joy.

“What were you looking for?”

“Well, first of all, I think you’re running a scam. You can’t cut that deep for what you’re collecting.”

“What makes you say-“

“Wipe out your trunk.”

“Liar. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I’m so fucking precious. And rich. So I can get away with it all. Why go through every box?”

“Where did you put Eden?” I let the question hang, my voice bleeding off toxins like Beau. If Uri and this woman were going to kill me with such blasé melodrama for such ludicrously paranoid misassumptions, I might as well make their last few seconds in my presence intolerable.

“You dipshit! Bringing a cop here!” April slapped at Uri, her skeletal fists repelled by his chest flab.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll take care of him. You sit. Watch.”

“Don’t fucking tell me, go watch, sit around…you expect me to wait for you to screw up? Shoot your load?”

“April, April, look. You look at me. You stop.”

But April wasn’t going to be pacified. She flung at Uri, flicked him down against the counter with a sweeping laceration from of her knife-tipped chin bone. Her swan bowl, a final vestige of domestic sanity, fell victim to his flapping hands, ringing a shrill scat riff out of shattered pottery and bouncing microplastics.

Uri’s illusion- that this night would be a romantic fantasy of blood and guts and torture for him to enjoy with a woman who shared his sensibilities- was utterly dead. He reached out to poke me with his riffle, butting the barrel into my neck. There was no guarantee that I would be easy to put down or that I wouldn’t bite off a few of his nerves in the process of wasting away and he wasn’t willing to take the chance that I’d be luckier this round in America.

“Where do you say Eden is?”

“You burned her to ashes, rolled her up in one of your boxes…likely sold her off to some desperate kid who just wanted a nice, psychotic break with reality but got a cremated sex-trafficking victim!”

“What would I gain?”

“You shut her up before she was paroled…and turned fifteen.”

“So?”

“I doubt you need an explanation.”

“You…”

He never received an explanation from me. April struck him down with a swan shard to the back of his skull. He fell, in perfect cinematic agony, grunting to the floor.

            “Whaddya think we both did?”

            “I already gave you my theory.”

            “But what would you say…about me…what the fuck I did?” She was frothing words but from the sag in her intonation, I knew she wasn’t planning to kill me yet.

            “Clearly, I’m not an adequate judge of character or I wouldn’t be here.”

            “We’ve got all night.”

            “Why do you want my assessment? I’m no one.”

            “You seem blunt…I need that. Said you got two months left? I got two days, two hours. And I need someone to know…someone to see…tell me what kinda shit I am.” She dropped into a kitchen chair and looked at me with the same expectancy of judgement I’d seen on Aubrey’s face. There was a need for absolution from someone like me who’d seen darkness.

            “I think you and your dealer pimped out your daughter for cash…and when she became a liability, you killed her off. He probably helped you.”

            “He tell you how?”

            “No, it was a guess…I couldn’t fathom the Hell you two put Eden through.”

            “But…boxes. Why did you-?”

            “It’s what I would’ve done, if I was a pedophillic, murderous kingpin.”

            “I gotcha. Dunno know how you got mixed in here…you seem creative, could’ve been someone. Eden was just like that. She wanted to drive away to this college in Portland, go be an artist.”

            “May I ask…I want to know. Where is she? For my own mental peace. I don’t anticipate being around to tell anyone tomorrow, I-”

            “Oh, she’s in state. Up in Maryland. They got her for narcotics. Seven years. I see her every two weeks.” She began to cry. Not in gulpy, splashy sobs like Peregrine or indulgent whimpers like Sawer, but silently, full bodied…

            “All right.” The only truth I needed to accept from her lie was that Eden was dead and I would live.I looked her in the eyes.

“I think some of us are explicitly procreated for unlove.”

“What?”

“Some kids are born so their parents have people to unconditionally hate. Isn’t it nice to think you can pull out of you some disgusting, worthless little follower with no rights to an opinion whose sole purpose is to justify your contempt and anger and disappointment.”

“Are you a cop?”

“No.

“