In Defense of Cheesy Monster Movies

               Everybody hates thinkpieces. Periodically, the blogs and publications I follow get a bad case of the ol’ self-righteousness: some ancient evangelical urge bubbles up, and a navel-gazing pundit waddles onto a soapbox and announces This Is The Way It Is! Deal With It, Scrubs!!!! They’ve got the answer to Current Social Problem XYZ, you see, and if you just reblog their position enough, you too can be enlightened… Such intellectual monkey-spanking is endemic—when you run a blog, it’s very easy to go groping for that soapbox, and tell yourself the world just doesn’t get it, maaan. And your two-and-a-half followers might happily back you up with an echo chamber where you never have to be wrong or uncomfortable.

                I’d rather direct my energies towards something a less topical. We’re all sick of topical shit right now—even the supporters of His Oiliness the Cheeto (short may he reign, senile and debauched) are worn out from all their sieg-heiling. So let’s focus on something a little less current-events, and a little more ridiculous. I’m talking about cheesy, shitty monster movies. The absolute shittiest. I'm talking The Crawling Eyeball, Human Centipede XXVIII level stuff.

                The genre’s had a revival, recently. Godzilla and King Kong are lumbering slowly back into theaters, and Toho itself—the company who created Big G in the first place—has stretched its muscles with the excellent Shin-Gojira, 50% horror-Godzilla and 50% men in suits arguing over noodles. Legendary Pictures is brewing up a Pacific Rim sequel, and nerds like me couldn’t be happier. Meanwhile, my family and girlfriend remain totally confused by these schlock-fests. “They’re so juvenile,” a homemade straw-man hypothetically might say. “Why do you watch that junk?”

                Well, there’s nostalgia, to begin with. The things you enjoyed in childhood never quite go away, and men in rubber monster-suits beating the crap out of each other was one of my first passions. But I think there’s a deeper pull towards high-lactose thrills like “Matango” and “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.” There’s a dweebish joy to these movies, but also a cultural story, the evolution of the fireside tale into something new and strange. Once upon a time, these monsters scared the crap out of audiences: it seems impossible , but the original clay-motion “Lost World” adaptation convinced people the director had filmed real dinosaurs. And the famous “War of the Worlds” radio adaptation in the 30’s sent hysterical families rushing to lock their doors. We may laugh now, but in a world of “fake news” and paranoid travel bans, these reactions start to make a sort of sense. People jump when they see the boogeyman, and they even jump when they think there's a boogeyman. Or there might be. Our ape-like instinct runs deep, and it teaches us to keep out the menace, the outsider. The monster.

                Monsters have power. They stand in for things, neatly slipping into the role of the scapegoat, the Antichrist, the menacing foreigner. They take the slings and arrows of our natural xenophobia and terror of the unknown—and that's a good thing. If we didn’t have entertainment to soak up our fears and paranoia, the world would be a whole lot worse. We'd go to witch burnings instead of movie theaters, for starters. Even the original Godzilla film was a manifestation of fear: fear of atomic power. A beast rises from human mistakes, and burns mankind. If you go back further, you find the precursors--the werewolf who became Kong, the dragon who became Godzilla. Their power didn’t dry up and go away when we started telling our stories with film projectors—if anything, they got stronger.

                “Cheesy” monster movies are an inversion of this kind of fear. They take the unknown, the terrifying, the cosmic force that stomps buildings... and turn it endearing, almost goofy. They break down the invading evil into something digestible and sane. When Ultraman punches a bug-eyed alien, we cheer, or we laugh. (Or, if you're not me, you turn off the TV and wonder how that station stays in business doing Ultraman reruns. Which is a pretty legitimate question.) The dust settles, and the monster has been neutered by defeat. It can’t hurt us, and this is why B-movies will always make money. The plentiful fears of the modern world have been condensed in these films, locked away on the screen. The monster appears, terrorizes, but is then swiftly dealt with by the Army. Or wild-haired scientists. Or heroes in spandex.

                There is, of course, a dangerous flipside to this.

                When we take the monster and break it down to a punchline, we forget why we feared it. The werewolf has not gone away; in fact, he seems stronger than ever. The werewolf is the betrayer, the cannibal. He is mugger, the office shooter, the lurking terrorist. Each day we are told to See Something, Say Something, and yes—I’m returning to politics. Sorry, not sorry. The parallels are too strong. Our president practically postures with a silver revolver every day, insisting only he can save us from the werewolf among us. And people totally buy it. "Watch for the mutant!" he crows, shaking an orange fist. "Watch for the heretic! Keep those torches ready!" He defies the Other. And we eat that up. We always have.

                We’ve forgotten that the monstrous is fiction. People do horrible things, but not because they're inhuman: they do them because at some point the fragile network of human decency has failed them, and allows them to behave this way. But that level of responsibility as a species is too much for us: we much prefer to see evil as the face of the monster, the face of something alien, and therefore outside our responsibility. There is no longer a division between the xenophobia we direct at our screens, subconsciously, and the xenophobia raging in our own lives. The walls of unreality have been unable to contain the monster-hunters: they have stormed the voting booths, the online forums, the talk shows. Our rubber and CGI “cultural pinatas” have all been beaten to shit, and can take no more; they have failed us.

                But still I hunt for secondhand "Gamera" DVDs, stockpile the history of imaginary beasts in my brain, and write stories about the Creeping Brain-Eater from Venus. Why? Because the monster itself still provides a focus for fear, an escape, softening the blow of the real world’s monsters. And the cheesier the escape, the better. These stories also remind you to be cautious when real horror and fear creep in: once you are familiar with the fake monsters, it becomes easier to handle the real ones with logic and patience. "To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders." I don't think Lao Tzu was talking about the comfortable sanity that comes from indulging in kitschy kaiju movies, but he might as well have been. And he's not wrong.

                We have to control the monster in some way, or he controls us.

The Retcon

                “I used to be a hero.” I cleared my throat. “Well, a sidekick, technically. That’s the first step towards recovery, right? Admitting you had a problem.” There were quiet chuckles from the group around me, but the laughter didn’t reach their eyes. Under the ceiling bulb, in our circle of folding chairs, we looked like a bunch of monks in bright, trendy clothing. “You guys knew my mentor—Cellular Man. Re-shaped his own cells to shapeshift, fight crime, the whole routine.” I stared through my fingers at the floor. “Guess he thought having a ‘sidekick of color’ would pad out his resume, or something. Whatever his reasons, he hired me, and we made a good team. With my plant powers and his cell control, we changed the world—for the better.” I sighed. “He called me ‘Verdant Lass,’ and it stuck. Worst goddamned sidekick name in the…” I paused. “Sorry.”

                “Don’t apologize,” said the guy across from me, Toby Wires—aka Wire-Lad. Used to be, he could control metal cables. Why just metal cables? We never found out. Of course, now all he controlled were lattes, as a barista. “We’re not an ‘example’ anymore, Shawna. You don’t have to worry about the code of morals—you can speak freely.”

                “Right you are, fucker!” More laughter, and this time I saw some genuine smiles. “Damn, it feels good to curse. One good thing about the Rewrite, we finally get to act like people.”

                “Represent!” said Gamma Gal, pumping a fist.

                Toby put out a hand. “Okay, come on. Let the girl finish.”

                “Anyway, I’m no different than you guys. I still miss my old life. After…” I swallowed. The cement floor seemed to spin underneath me, as I tried to reconcile reality with who I used to be. The thing I used to care about. “After the Rewrite, when we ended up here, I went to see Cellular Man. A lot of heroes, they couldn’t deal with the loss of their powers. The villains were fine—they ran off to run governments, work on Wall Street, they fit right in. But Cellular Man…” I swallowed. I could still see the blood.

Every day, tried to wash it away, but it wouldn’t go. Out, damned spot, out. It was everywhere, staining my clothes, my sheets. But taking that horror and putting it into words was beyond me. “He tried to shapeshift… without powers,” I said, my voice shaking. “He cut off… pieces of himself, stapled or stitched them onto other body parts. It was…” I couldn’t finish. My throat was closing up. Toby got up, brought me a glass of water, and I choked it down. I found his hand on my shoulder.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to—”

“I want to,” I said, a little more fiercely than I’d intended. A couple ex-sidekicks winced. I must have looked a mess; eyes streaming, hair akimbo. But I needed to finish the story. All our lives had been cut short—I deserved that much. “I need this.”

“Okay.” He sat down.

“When the police came… the new police, not the kind we used to know, not the bumbling extras who would eat donuts and wait for us to show up… when the cops came, they threw me in a squad car. They were going to pin it on me. I was stupid enough to touch the knives, I tried to pull them out. They had fingerprints…” I focused on breathing, zoned in on a small hole in the concrete. A perforation. “They were convinced I did it. I was done for. And then he came.”

“The Storyteller,” said Toby.

I nodded. “Yes. With his cashmere sweater, and his pipe, and his stupid fucking…” They all blanched. “His… big glasses.” I wasn’t scared of him, not like they were. They all thought he was God, that he could kill any of us at any time, for speaking ill of him. I knew better.

If he’d wanted to kill us, he wouldn’t waste so much time torturing us.

“He walked into the police station. He wrote something on a piece of paper… Taped it to my cell. No one seemed to notice him. And the same officer who’d slammed my nose into the floor, broke it and wouldn’t give me a phone call, that officer opened the cell door. Smiled. Offered me… offered me coffee.” I fingered the crook in my nose where the splint had settled the bone. It still crunched, sometimes, when I poked it. “They said they were sorry, so sorry for the mix-up. That night they arrested some random guy, charged him with Cellular’s murder. Last I heard, he was doing fifty to life.”

Silence, around the ring of pale and frightened faces.

“I came back here. Back to the cul-de-sac, where all of us seem to end up—no matter what jobs we land, no matter who we once were. Villains, heroes, sidekicks, fucking henchmen… We all end up here.” I found I could breathe once more. Some great and awful weight was lifting from my joints, my spine, fleeing my guts like the sudden absence of a tumor. “Someone else moved into Cellular Man’s house, the week after. Like nothing happened.”

“What was on the piece of paper?” This was Remora Boy. He was sucking on a lollipop: slowly, compulsively. His way, I assumed, of dealing with the lack of his suction powers. I couldn’t judge. We all had our own ways of carrying the cross, the weight of a past world, one that had never existed.

“It had this elaborate, cursive handwriting. Very small, very precise. It said… ‘After the gruesome murder at Olympus Circuit Drive, young Shawna was falsely accused, another victim of our flawed criminal justice system. Luckily, a stop-and-frisk caught the real culprit with the victim’s blood and several murder weapons, that very night! Vindication never tasted so sweet.’”

“Our state doesn’t have stop-and-frisk,” said Toby.

“Exactly.” That tiny hole in the concrete seemed to swallow my world, as I delved into the memory, explored its nooks and crannies. Searching for any missing pieces. “There was more.”

They waited.

“‘The good people of Olympus Circuit welcomed her back with open arms.’” I’d kept the paper, pinned it to my fridge, to prove I wasn’t crazy. Memorized it. “‘Soon enough, the terrible act was forgotten, and life returned to normal. Shawna Mason continued her life as a landscaping designer… an ordinary, everyday hero, making the community more beautiful each day.’ And that’s why I came. Because… because no one remembered him. And that wasn’t right.” I broke up a little, and Remora Boy handed me a tissue box. I took it reluctantly, snorted into a Kleenex.

“Anybody got a trash can?”

“Over there,” said Gamma. I threw a mess of mucus and shame into the bin. Stared at the floor again.

“You say this was months ago,” Toby prompted me, softly. “Why now? If he made us forget, why did you need to share this with us now?”

My hands balled into fists. “Because… because I don’t think that’s the only thing he’s made us forget.”

Toby frowned. “What do you mean?”

There was a knock on the door. We all jumped. I knew who it was; I knew what was about to happen. For all we knew, it might have happened a hundred times—because none of us would remember. Not with our lives rewritten out from under our feet every morning.

“I think he’s Rewritten more than just our pasts,” I said, speaking over the sound. “I think he’s messing with us on purpose. Torturing us, building a Purgatory, for something the heroes did. Or something he thinks they did.”

“Shawna,” said Toby, rising, “maybe we shouldn’t—”

“No! Fuck this!” I rose. Pushed my chair in front of the door. The knocking grew louder; I tried to shut it out, tried to think of anything but that sound, my nails digging blood out of my fists. “We can’t let him do this! We were the good guys, damn it! We don’t deserve this!” Remora Boy was crying. The others had pulled away from me; their faces were sheep’s faces, panicked and wild-eyed.

“We have to fight back,” I said, and the knocking grew louder, and I could feel his influence slithering into the room like a fat slash of red ink through our lives. “He’s going to stop us meeting like this. He’s going to make us forget. But we need to hold on. He can’t rewrite everything! There has to be some hole—some way through his powers!”

Toby stepped forward. First I thought he was going to hit me, stop me from bringing the anger of our new God into this room, into our minds. But he just put a hand on my cheek.

“This has happened before,” he said. He was smiling, the genial expression of peace you might see on a saint. Or a martyr. “You gave us a phrase to repeat. A mantra. This time I remembered it.”

“I…” The hammering was thicker and now I recognized it for what it was: not a fist on wood, but the sound of a typewriter’s keys, old-fashioned and big as the stars, slamming down into us, changing the script. “What was it?”

“No one can break through the ceiling,” he said and then the Sidekicks decided to disband their quaint little meeting, for the good of all. There would be no more awkward confessions tonight. Because the old world was gone, and it was easier to forget it, let it pass. The comrades hugged, they cried, they ate crackers and cheese and slurped stale water from Toby’s kitchen tap. And then they went home, and fell into a deep, nourishing sleep, forgetting all dreams of returning to the old way. After all, their lives were better now: more meaningful, more human. No more silly costumes, no more playing dice with the fate of the earth. Their toys were broken, but they now had a chance to do real good. Lasting good.

In the quiet of Olympus Drive, there remained only the stillness of night, and the ripe possibilities of a slowly approaching dawn.

I woke up screaming. The scary part was, I didn’t know why.

My throat was raw. My hands were scabbed over with fingernail marks.

             I got out of bed, tried to wash the blood off my hands.

             No one can break through the ceiling.

             There was a note on the fridge.

Life After Arrowhead

                We all remember the world that was. Things like Reagan, New Coke, Walkman, the Ayatollah: all legends. The stories are meaningless, but we hang onto them, clutching them in the cold whispering night. I can taste the mist even, through my duct-tape seals: it has a tangy, metallic flavor that’s vaguely artificial. Someday it will fill my lungs completely, and oh, what a relief that’ll be. Because then the fear will be done with.

                I was a little girl, back when it happened. I’ll never forget the blood, the panic: hunched behind glass, we waited. So much screaming. But that’s over, and I have a purpose now. I’m a runner, a courier between the pockets of humanity that huddle in sealed-off factories and rubberized basements, in the tops of skyscrapers where only the flying things can get you.

                My name is Lupita.

                There’s barely any uppers, in the grocery stores and pharmacies. Decades of scavenging have picked those places clean. Spiders with the faces of men live there now; they've webbed up the leftovers. Good luck getting through that silk; your hands will burn off, and then how will you play your vinyls? So I make my first run of the day without the bennies or caffeine or methamphetamine pounding through my skull, hammering at my heart. I run clean, without a buzz. Maybe it’s for the best: there’s less fear, like this. The anxiety comes from real things.

                My Hazmat suit is patched in a dozen places; it’s a kaleidoscope of color, but they don’t see color, so I’m okay. One of these days, the seals are going to break, and I'll be dinner. I often wonder what’ll get me: whom among the scuttlers and flyers and pre-Cambrian rippers of flesh will do the honors. Some of them have acid venom; others just tear you limb from limb. I’d prefer to get stepped on by a Big One, if I’m honest, or  just fall in a sinkhole. Those deaths are quick, simple. Maybe even fun, if you’re zonked out on blues or reds.

                I wake up in the elementary school. Walls etched with chalk, kerosene lamp glowing. It’s a sturdy place, a leftover of brutalism that’s survived into the aughts, although its students haven’t. They’re still there, mummified little bodies webbed up in classrooms or scattered in the halls. I live in the maintenance shed, attached to the main building by one flimsy door. I open this door and pass by the bodies, like I do every day. I’ve never dreamed of cleaned them up. They’re my friends, Gap Tooth and No Face and Stripped Skin. Besides, moving them would risk attracting attention, releasing old scents that make my neighbors anxious. Excited.

                I sprint down the hall, the mist oozing over the visor of my suit. It’s thinner in here—thinny, you might say. I have a machete today, and that’ll do. Ran out of bullets years ago.

                God, I’m hungry.

                It’s like a dream, hammering down these old tiles and into the street, past the yellow buses with their flat decaying tires and rictus skeins of old mucus. The sky is gone, hidden in gray. The fog coats everything, turning objects into specters that hang half-hidden and lurch from the white as I approach.

It’s quiet. Particles of something unpleasant float, bouncing off the thin plastic of my suit’s visor. Spores, maybe, or a new breed of killer unleashed by Arrowhead. Evolution works fast, on the other side: things come through that were bred in weeks, days, to become perfect killers. Heard a guy say once he’d seen the portal, and it’s nothing but darkness over there, deep todash. I wouldn’t mind that.

                At least in the darkness, you can’t see what’s eating you alive.

                A big scuttler goes by, not fifteen feet away. I freeze; the little ones are blind, but the big ones are clever, smarter than the ‘average bear,’ if you kennit. This one's pretty dumb; its feelers play over my suit, and it gives me a nudge with its pincers, just to see if I’ll run. If I’ll turn out to be food.

                I hold perfectly still, as its sucker-mouthed tongue plays over my arm.

                Eventually it gets bored and skitters off. These things have quick metabolisms; it needs to find food quickly, or starve. I wait till it’s a shadow on Green Street, before I start running. My sealed boots go thwap-thwap, thwap-thwap against ancient, cracked concrete.

                My first stop is Wordboy’s house, by the pond. He picked out a nice place, an old mansion type of deal. Lanterns in the drive, lots of windows. He replaced the glass with sheet-metal and the door with a long airlock tunnel, made of duct-taped steel. Must’ve taken him ages to build it, but he’s a smart one. Taught me all my words.

                Wordboy’s in a talking mood. Once he scrubs me off, he invites me inside. I strip off the suit and lie nude on his moth-eaten couch. He doesn’t mind; Wordboy’s gay as lord. No boob has ever turned his gaze. I tell him the bodies are still where they lie, at the school.

                “Good,” he says. “Keep the bastards off your scent. How’s the shed?”

                I tell him it’s fine, though the latrine could use some work. He nods; plumbing is an issue when you can’t churn up earth without attracting hungry mouths. He’s had similar problems, and candles flicker in every corner of his home, masking his scent. One day, I think, this whole place will burn down.

                “Wordboy,” I say, and I ask him—it’s become sort of a joke, you see—I ask him this every time. “Wordboy, when’s it gonna end? When’s the mist going away?”

                He laughs. “When the army comes back, and television comes on, and Project Star Wars is back on the budget.” He’s stooped and his teeth are rotted from eating processed junk to survive, but when he smiles I still see the old professor in him. He waves his empty rifle at the chalkboard in the corner. “Been tracking their migration patterns—south, like always. But slower.”

                I nod. It makes logic. Whatever’s coming through Arrowhead wants to fill the whole world—stuff it to the brim, with teeth and claws and greedy mouths. It hasn’t done that yet, but if the migration’s slow, it must be close. “You think when the mist is everywhere, maybe they’ll move on?”

                He shakes his head. “Never. This ecosystem is too perfect—everything eats everything else on their world, but ours... ours is a free buffet. All you can eat, forever.”

                I throw up my hands. “Wordboy, you don’t give me hope, sai.”

                “I know.” He taps the stock of his Remington. “But we’ll rebuild. We’re a stubborn breed. That’s why I have my books, ken? Someday we’ll build a way to stop them.”

                His arrogance is immense. I roll my eyes. “Sure, sure. And someday I won’t shit in a bucket.”

                “I’m telling you. Things will change.” The worst part is, he really means it. Smart types think they have it all figured out; me, I think with my legs. It’s the only thinking worth doing, when a thousand grasping arms are reaching for your meat. “Someday, Lupe, we’ll fix it. Until then…” And he presents me with a miracle. An unwrapped, still-fresh Twinkie, virginal and yellow in its translucent shell. “Here. For the Hodgson books you brought me.”

                I take it. “Is this… real?”

                “As real as anything from the dead past.” He shrugs. “Tastes better than hydroponic carrots, at least. Try.”

                I do. My body is starved for carbs. I want to save the treasure for later, but I can’t help it: my fingers rip open the wrapper. “It’s beautiful.”

                He laughs. “I’m sure the manufacturers would appreciate your review.”

                My first bite is heavenly: stale, yes, stale as dead skin. But so fluffy, and sugary, and light on my mouth! Melting, on my tongue! My eyes roll, and this time it’s from pleasure. Once my Twinkie-gasm is over, and I lick my fingers clean, I stand. “Can’t stay. Lot of runs before dusk.”

                “I can dig it.” He hugs me, and I hug him back. We aren’t family, or even close friends, but we both understand this need, the need for mutual human contact that’s been lost in the face of the forever-darkness. The sunless earth. “I wish you’d come and stay here.”

                I shake my head. In my stomach, the Twinkie churns nauseously, unrecognized by digestive enzymes. “No. I need to be alone. They smell you, if you gather. That’s how they got Brighton.”

                He sighs. “If we don’t gather, we’re just going to go extinct. Matter of time.”

                I don’t care. I don’t like people. They scare me, because at least with Big Ones and the scuttlers, you know what you’re getting. But faces are hard to understand, and caring is harder. Better to be alone, and safe, with my Atari and my corpses. “I know,” I tell him. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

                He nods. “Well. If you change your mind… I’m here.”

                “Yes.”

                I put on my suit, I pass through the airlock with its mist of ethanol-bleach. My boots hit the pavement and I am running, running, past the lumbering legs of something ten times my size that sweeps the ground with a clawed tentacle. I run past a man-faced spider, fighting with its fellows over the last scraps of a dog’s bones. My feet pound the roads, my face stares blank and gauzy from the fogged-up visor.

                Someday, I think, breathing hard. There’s Twinkie on my breath.

                Someday.

"The Uber Out of Time"

You slam the door on your way out.

Stupid, stupid. If you'd just kept your voice down, just tried to work things out, maybe she wouldn't have accused you of all that. Stupid. Doesn't she know what you're going through? You can't be expected to listen to this shit. It's not your fault--you were coerced! You can't be blamed.

You need some air; you need to get away. Soon the ride-share car rolls up the street, speckled by drizzle. It's a Saab, of all things, but well-kept. You haul on the door handle and throw yourself in.

The driver turns around. He's nondescript. The app says his name is Kameel. "How's it going?"

"Hey." You aren't interested in small-talk. Not right now. Rage burns under your skin, and you feel like punching the back of the passenger seat. You don't.

"So, when do you want to go?"

You stare at him. "Now. I thought that was implied."

"No, no..." He holds up his phone. The app there is unfamiliar. You look down and see the app you have open isn't familiar, either. It sure as hell isn't one you downloaded. "I mean, what year? What point in your life?" He checks his phone. "You are Chuck Wentworth, right? You didn't put in a timeline when you requested me."

You stare at him. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm Chuck." You're not.

The app is asking for a year and a date. Outside, the rain is thickening, fat spots of drizzle sliding cold and viscous down the Saab's window. Some corner of you wants to slug the guy, or laugh. But then the other side, the shrewd self that's been hiding lipstick smudges, kicks in. Maybe you'll humor him. See if there's a scrap of truth in his bullshit.

"How far can I go?" Can't believe this crap.

"That's on you, man. Big surcharge on 2020, though. Surge pricing, y'know?" Oh, ha-ha, very funny. You roll your eyes, and the rain stops coming.

It doesn't just pass--it stops falling completely. In midair. Droplets hang suspended; wind-swept showers wait on the cold breeze, captured like a photograph. A photograph you're inside of. Nearby, a sparrow caught in the wetness dangles over a puddle, the spray of its takeoff surrounding it, a halo of dew under the soggy orange streetlight glow.

The driver fidgets. "What's it gonna be? If you wanna cancel, that's fine, but there's a fee..."

"No, I'm fine, How about...." You swallow, the walls of your belief cracking open. "Same timeline. But... six months from now."

An eyebrow is raised. "You sure? Same timeline?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, bro. You asked." He circles the block, gently easing around frozen cars. When he arrives back in the same spot, there's a blinding flash--the corona of two hundred suns flashing across the sky all at once. A wave of heat and cold in alternating stutters washes over you. You find your fingernails longer, your hair shaggy. Your stomach paunchier. Clearly these six months without her have been stressful. Good thing you didn't have to live through them.

"Well, there you go, man. Home sweet home. Thanks for riding."

"Thanks..." You climb out of the car. It's sunny, now, and beautiful. The early, crisp days of March. You check your phone and see that you were charged $10.56 for your ride, courtesy of Yog, a company you've never heard of.

Well, damn.

You swagger up the sidewalk towards your apartment--free, easy, no weight on your shoulders. Barely comprehending. Yet you're loose now: no more responsibility. You cheated, in more ways than one: you've escaped. Now you can live your life without interruption, without nagging. Thank God. You always wanted to be a bachelor, on the inside, but you hated the loneliness, the stigma. Now you can start over.

When you get inside, your girlfriend is on the couch. She looks due in about three months: puffy, tired, and enormous. Her things litter the walls, crowd your tiny living space. She looks miserable.

"Hey," she says, cradling a bowl of ice cream. "Did you get that second job?"

THE GUARDS ARE TALKING BACKWARDS

                Getting up there was easy. The UN had pooled resources to send a mission up to the vessel; we didn’t have a name it then, but a lot of folks in the Army were just calling it the Craft. Capital C—not ‘a’ craft, THE Craft. Real dramatic, those army boys.

                They came with me, Patterson and Trace—we were Contact Team Nine. Eight had gone inside, none had come out. Around this time, the UN -consul general finally admitted it was time to arm their “diplomats.” Took them too long, if you ask me. A twenty-mile-wide, alien craft hovering over New Jersey, and the welcome party didn’t bring any weapons? My brother is a hostage negotiator for the police, and he told me something: if you want something, manners are important, but a gun is easier—long as they don’t see it coming.

                We jumped up into orbit, on these sweet-ass space planes… retrofitted shuttle paneling, horizontal takeoff, the works. They were made for ferrying rich tourists to space. They were a little beat up from the first eight teams, but they were our only ride.

                Inside, time seemed to stretch… It’s still stretching. I’ve been experiencing events backward for some time now. You can’t see it, but that’s what I’m doing. Every moment and event begins with its own results, then folds backward into previous events… and that shape folds into itself, and on and on and on, without ever getting any smaller. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Who told me that?

                They told me.

                Not in so many words, of course. But I want you to understand it’s important for you to know I am experiencing all of this in rewind—did I say this already? My lips are flapping as they sound out a word that makes no logic to me, that my backwards mind cannot accept because every neuron is twisted inside out, retracing its own pathways. No, I wouldn’t call it strange.

                Together, we exited the space plane. It was damn dangerous: even though we were in low orbit next to the Craft, they didn’t give us an airlock to get into the thing. No. We were pushed from the opened hatch of the plane into a smooth, round hole in the rock of its side. We knew it was made of rock: that much was evident from the pits and crags on its surface. But how does a rock hover 20 miles over New Jersey, unmoving, for thirty days? Based on the imaging we’ve obtained from sonar, we knew the thing is hollow. It was understood prior to… prior to… God, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? We are fifty-three days before the day I’m talking about, the day we went in, but in the wrong direction. It’s all folded to me, the memories bunched into a sleeve… gotta work my way through the creases. Fifty-three days ago we made a solemn vow not to hurt anything we found inside. They got me in on this pact, even though I didn’t agree. Even though I thought it was a pussy to do. The last eight teams hadn’t made it out for a reason, and here these goddamn fools were promising to hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Well, I wasn’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

                We were heavily armed. We were supposed to defend ourselves, if push came to shove. They’re showing me my childhood, ever since that moment: Autumn leaves crunching dry-crisp beneath our feet. The backyard. The air is chilly and me, my sister and I, are jumping… in…

                The sun hung low-slung and deep-set, those days. In the days of apple cider and cinnamon shaved fresh all over glazed buns. The smell of molasses from the barn. It’s food I remember most, and I guess it makes sense. It’s the only thing I’m allowed to savor, from those days. Everyone is gone.

                The inside was smooth and curved up towards a green light. We approached it… we didn’t know what else to do. We were drawn to it, like deep-sea fish glimpsing an angler for the first time. We each wanted to be the big kahuna, the first one to talk to an alien species…

They aren’t better than us. They make mistakes. We went through, and to each of us the ecosystem inside was something different—superseded over our own perceptions and filters of reality. Our histories, laid out for us, woven from our own minds.

                You’ve been calling them “creatures,” the things that made the Craft. You would be wrong; they aren’t alive, not in the way we know. They are sentient light, beings made of frozen photons running through a certain type of ice, which naturally forms in cubist structures on their planet. Ha! I’m kidding. Just kidding. Sentient ice! Ha, the look on your face, you really believed me! I’m not telling you shit, you government goon. You put us in there. You did this to our minds!

                I’m sorry, have we met before?

                Alive… yes, they are alive. Alive and full of love. And rage. And confusion. They are the essence of thought, distilled and zipping around on air currents. They’re also astronomically large worms, each one as long as a solar system. They are anything that has ever evolved, in this galaxy: they have moved past us on a quantum level, they are entangled with everything. Everything! From the day you were born, they knew your name. “Even before I shaped you in the womb, I knew you.”

Dimensions lie in layers over them, baked into their tissue, their limbs. They are so far from us that we may as well be atoms under their microscopes. And yet, they love us.

                I knew we had to bomb the thing.

My wife? She had divorced me the month before I left the Revivalist movement in New York. The good brothers and sisters thought the Craft was Jesus, was His chariot come to deliver Him. Like a pizza! Ridiculous. We had a “disagreement,” and if I’m being honest, I knew it would come down like that. That damn cult split me from my wife. I needed to prove she was wrong about it… about the Craft being divine. You can’t kill God, right? He’s eternal. I wanted to test that theory. Why do you think I worked so hard—wormed my way into security detail? I killed one man—just one. He knew my secret, and I wasn’t having it.

No, Maria, the dishes are in the sink.

               

These things… see, they aren’t eternal. They aren’t immortal. They are the past, the instant flash-bang of a species’ final steps away from the one from before it, and before it, and before it. They are less than an instant of life. Their life-span ticks off in attoseconds.

                They showed me the technology that made them like this: they showed how to see inside a star, how to watch the sub-atomic dance unfold. They taught me that every single second happens at the same time, every moment of every world. They showed me things my mind could not have grasped if given a lifetime to contemplate the reaches of my irrelevance.

                Sir, I don’t reckon good human beings need to see things like that.

                Our power is in our brevity. Our short lives, our limited hands and limbs and eyes are what define us—what make us the clever, original, cunning and dangerous apes that we are. If we were handed this gift, this Pandora’s box, we would have lost ourselves. Any hope of identity would have disappeared—one human mind, one human spirit. One human moment spread across countless millennia, with no frame of reference for what is heroic, or evil, or the meaning of kindness. Kindness requires a physical shape.

                Kindness requires a soul.

                So yes, I killed it. A week inside the Craft, and then I blew it to pulp. You can blame me, call me a lunatic. You can say I sabotaged our only attempt at contact with another species.

                But I stand by what I did. Those idiots on my team stood around slack-jawed in the billowing infinity, consumed in the light of orgasmic comprehension. Transported by it. No different than the religious sheep my wife is following: the light made them blind. Stupid. We can’t worship these things; we simply can’t afford to. We didn’t evolve to interact with them: the human mind can’t survive it.

                I see. You want to know why they came? Why they taunt us with their presence, if we can’t talk to them in ways that don’t turn our minds to soup?

                I think it’s because one of us… one of our future versions… the Earth that could be, that Earth is ready for them, because it is so much like them, a brilliant mesh of infinite possibilities not held back by doubt or fear… And they are forever seeking Earths like this, and destroying the rest by contact with them. No, I can’t prove this. You can’t prove a feeling.

                You think you can contain the fragments… But they are loose now, no longer bound into one concept, one idea. And the human mind loves ideas: ideas are like candy, rotting your head to a husk if you have enough of them.

We are so lucky. Where am I? They will change us all for the better—no, be quiet, shut up!! They will change us all, each diaper-shitting child and crumbling adult, each schizophrenic and depressive and obsessive, they will mold us into the infinite forms beyond this single, dry, turd-reality. We are the chosen ones. We are nothing, we are everyone.

               

I stand by what’s done. Maybe, if I’d left them in the Craft… if I hadn’t scattered their ur-flesh all over the landscape. But I stand by what’s done. It’s all you can do, right? You have to stick to your guns, in time of crisis. God help us.

My mother says it’s time to get up. I never kissed that girl behind the quad—no, no way. Not her, Dad. It’s my fault, I burned the bread. Where’s my scar? I used to have a scar… The guards are talking backwards. You might want to hear what the guards have to say. The guards are talking backwards.

               

I bet you’ll find them quite illuminated.

The Bonus Episode

An excerpt from "Obligatory Road Trip Book," something I've been working on for a friend.


                Almost a year after the trip, I had a dream.

                We were going through the deserts of New Mexico again, this time in daylight. It’s odd my mind chose to fixate here, because we barely spent any time at all in that state—after passing the crux of weirdness that was Roswell, we passed out of the state pretty quick. But something about the dream—you know, that implicit and wordless transfer of information, the mental “elevator pitch” if you will—told me it was New Mexico. Scrubs, desert, a little badlands and some mountains in the distance. I could feel the heat and light of the place.

                In the dream we weren’t in our trusty Passat, but instead in some kind of red-leather-upholstery, Oldsmobile type of deal. Again, I don’t know why it’s just these details that were swapped out. Was it a kind of mimicry, with small screw-ups from my subconscious, or do the changes mean something? Who the fuck knows, man. I don’t take stock in dreams; as far as I’m concerned, they’re the unconscious equivalent of a fart. The only useful function they serve is creating pictures, concepts and scenarios your feeble waking imagination can’t attain. Stretches of the brain, scenes and worlds you would never have conceived of before, because you’re limited to the reaches of your perception. Dreams, luckily, are not very concerned with reality.

                Enter Mitch.

                I’m calling him Mitch because the dream wouldn’t give me a name for him, a real name—the dream only told me that his name was generic enough not to cause concern. Again, specificity was not the strong point here. We were getting into the car after making a pit stop at a tiny, sun-beaten restroom somewhere in the New Mexico flatness, and there was Mitch, sitting and grinning

                Supposedly, dreams can’t show you the face of anyone you haven’t seen somewhere in life. This makes sense—no matter the power of the human mind, it’s just not clever enough to conjure up a whole new person, right down to the follicles and pores. But I think this guy was the real deal. One hundred percent computer-generated, if you will, a flawless CGI insertion into our story. He sat in a mysterious middle seat that had somehow appeared in the front of the old car, along with himself. And he was grinning, as if he’d been waiting for us to come back.

                You can probably see where this was going.

                Mitch was Bad News. He was that creeper who shows up at the beginning of a horror movie, uninvited, to foreshadow the shitshow that’s about to start. He’s the shapeshifter whose head pops open at some point in the story. And he knew it: he was acting the buddy, the pal, sitting between Sergei and the Nymph and cracking jokes. None of us laughed. With that sort of instant narrative telepathy of dreams, we all knew something was up.

                We drove in silence for a very long time.

                Eventually Mitch asked us to pull over beside a seedy, abandoned motel. We did. He took Sergei aside and they had a brief conversation, Sergei smoking like a chimney and Mitch just smiling, and smiling. Finally Sergei comes over to us and says he’s going around the back with Mitch for a while. He doesn’t seem worried, or angry, just calm and lighting up another butt. Even in dreams, presented with a horror movie cliché in the flesh, Sergei was suicidally determined to be unruffled.

                The Nymph and I are scared shitless at this point, so we both agree to wait by the car. Sergei goes around back with the smiling guy, who by this time had teeth so big you couldn't stop looking at 'em even if you wanted to. This is all typical spooky story stuff, right? You’d expect Sergei to end up dead and the chase to begin: me and the Nymph on the run in the dying New Mexico light with a monster in tow.

                Nope. Nothing of the sort. We waited for hours, till the sun was getting low, nervous but afraid to leave. There were no sounds—maybe the dream’s audio department lost an MP3 or two. But eventually Sergei comes around the front, wiping his hands on his pants, and says “let’s go.” And we go.

                I don’t present this thinking it’s a super fascinating delve into my head. Woop de doo, you had a dream, good job buddy, do you want a Snickers? But I do present it thinking, despite how afraid we both are of Sergei sometimes, this is the kind of thing even your unconscious expects from him. It just fits. He defies expectations, whether he’s supposed to or not, in reality and in fantasy. And whether we like it or not, he’s miles tougher and more strange than the other two of us combined. Crude, he might be, but he damn sure is effective.

                And so we drove on, and the dream segued into someplace and sometime different, the cast shifting and changing with the random and unfathomable needs of the night’s visions. On to a remake of “John Dies at the End” with puppet animation, and something about my dead uncle Ward. All these things revolve, and all these things come back, playing over the mind’s eye. Things that might seem irrelevant or stupid rise again, from the muck of our brains.

                And some experiences never go away.

Shooting Sweeps

You never knew what Mr. Tracey was going to do next. Prajeet was his driver, and had been for four years, ever since Tracey struck it big with that movie of his, and had his name plastered in lights all over Los Angeles. He didn’t seem to like LA much; like many of his predecessors, he was eccentric to the brink of insanity, and the noise and glamor of the city undermined his sense of self-importance. He moved to a sprawling estate in Montana, and Prajeet followed him. Well, technically he’d been following the money, but unfortunately, the money was attached to Mr. Tracey and there was no way to separate the two. If there was, he thought often, he would have done so.

On the day he fired a grenade launcher for the first time, Prajeet was hung over. He was not a drinking man, but he had found out the day before that his girlfriend was not coming to the States. She had found someone else, and the unspoken truth was that this man was wealthier than Prajeet, was better than he was. A driver for one of the richest filmmakers in America, and he’d been upstaged by a tech company manager! An assistant manager, at that! The betrayal had cut him deeply. He’d spent the previous night in the bar, muttering darkly about dowries to his friend Nathan. Half-cooked schemes buzzed in his head: he would show up at her door, with a fistful of American dollars. He would throw the bundles of cash at her feet, and he would ask, is this enough? Is this what you wanted from me?

That morning, when he arrived bleary-eyed and aching, Mr. Tracey had a gun.

A big one, very modern. He was cleaning it on the back deck when Prajeet arrived, the deck overlooking the infinity pool he’d had installed “because my guests miss their Western excesses.” The gun was long, black and looked like something out of a movie. It had a long barrel, folding legs that tucked underneath like the limbs of some deadly wasp. A prop, perhaps, straight off the set of American Sniper--at least, he hoped it was a prop.

Prajeet approached, with a pretty valid case of the jitters. “Sir? Your car is outside.”

“Yes, yes.” Mr. Tracey placed the gun in a case almost as tall as he was, and snapped it shut. “Very good.”

“I’ve been calling you…”

“Let’s not start, Praj. Punctuality is for people who’ve never won a Golden Globe. Come now, we’ve got work to do.” He hauled the case down the hall, resisting offers by Prajeet to help him. Very self-sufficient, was Mr. Tracey, even at sixty-two and with a mane of gray hair he combed back into a helmet-like shell. Prajeet thought he looked like Stan Lee, from the Marvel movies, but had never said so.

Into the limo they went. Its sleek black hulk looked so out of place in the shadow of Montana’s red-brown hills that Prajeet often felt they were out of their depth here. In winter, the limo needed snow chains to even get down the driveway, yet Mr. Tracey refused to buy an SUV with his piles of money. Americans, thought Prajeet, and hit the ignition button.

Mr. Tracey sat in the back, holding the gun case over his lap. “I’ve had all the arrangements made. Today’s going to be a good day, Praj, an excellent day.”

“Yes, sir?” Most of Prajeet’s responses to his employer consisted of various “yes sirs” arranged in different tones and inflections. If you offered any more, the gregarious old coot would suck you into a long conversation, and he was not in the mood for this today. Especially when his employer was carrying a gun with a magazine the size of a phonebook.

“Good day. Excellent day. Today,” and those silver brows arched, “I get my revenge.”

“Yes… sir?” Now Prajeet was starting to panic. It was one thing to be an accomplice in the man’s peculiar hobbies; it was quite another to assist in murder. He wondered if the man who’d shot John F. Kennedy had taken a cab that day, and how the driver might have felt once he’d learned of the shooting. A lot like this, he thought, the poor guy had probably felt a lot like this.

“Quite so.” Mr. Tracey’s phone rang, and the director fumbled it out of his back pocket, his fingers shaking strongly enough for Prajeet to see it in the rear-view mirror. “Yes! You’ve had it delivered? Yes?” He nodded. “Yes. Fantastic. Many people are called the man, but you are actually the man. Know what I mean?” Another nod. “Beautiful. I’ll have my people wire you the money. And the city didn’t make a fuss? Good.” He hung up. “Gorgeous fucking day, isn’t it?”

It was. The still blue skies of morning hung over a dry and scrabbly landscape spotted with pines, sagebrush and huge chunks of rock which looked to have been forgotten on the day of their creation. Prajeet felt his fear soothed by the sight; strange as this country was, much of it was very beautiful. “Yes, sir.”

They drove in silence for quite some time. Prajeet was afraid to ask what the gun was for, and his boss did not offer an explanation. He had finally worked up the courage to ask, but by then they’d arrived.

Mr. Tracey’s phone had spoken to the car, and sent it a set of GPS coordinates nowhere near Missoula, the filmmaker’s favorite destination for antagonizing everyone with ostentatious displays of wealth. He had guided them out into the badlands, an area that was half-Idaho in the composition of its heavy soil and all-Idaho in the bleakness of its hills and crags. Someone had set up a large table in the dirt nearby, and on the table were more guns. Lots more.

Prajeet kept close to the car as Mr. Tracey got out, lugging his case, and leaned it against the cornucopia of murderous tools. A swathe of hunting rifles, oversized pistols, stubby Russian machine guns, and even what looked like a grenade launcher sat patiently, each one awaiting a turn to do mischief. If Prajeet had been jumpy before, now he’d crossed the border into pure terror. He wondered how far he could run before he was out of range of those things. Pretty far, from the look of it.

“I’ll just, er, find a shady place to put the car,” he said. It was heating up, the height of June in a climate with few trees… and fewer places to hide if, say, one’s eccentric employer decided to go postal.

“Nonsense! Come along. Have you ever fired a gun before?” Mr. Tracey’s jovial attitude did not allay his driver’s fears, but against all his common sense, Prajeet walked over to the table with his boss. They surveyed the armory before them: it was, Prajeet had to admit, fascinating to see such an array of deadly force all in one place. “It’s quite thrilling. And today, we have the perfect target…”

“Me?” Prajeet blurted. He hadn’t meant to, but he was sweating into his white collar under his black suit-jacket, and sweating always made him nervous, made him blurt out things like “I love you” to a girl on the other side of the world. Both blurts were equally embarrassing.

Tracey looked at him for a moment, then threw back his head and laughed. “God, no! What do you think I am, some kind of sociopath?”

“Well,” said Prajeet, not sure how to answer that.

Tracey shook his head. “This isn’t a Leslie Banks movie, Praj. No, my revenge will be much more than personal. Today we strike a blow against an institution.”

He pointed. On a hill nearby, so small as to almost be mistaken for a distant boulder, there was a vehicle. Clunky and tall, it had a glass cockpit and enormous twin brooms on the underside. Prajeet squinted at it. “Is that a…”

“A street sweeper! Yes, of course.” Tracey rubbed his hands together, not unlike a praying mantis, and reached for a pair of noise-cancelling headphones at the end of the table. “Here, I saved one of these for you. I want a witness to my vengeance, now that it’s finally at hand.”

Prajeet, utterly perplexed but morbidly curious, put on a pair. The world faded into a muffled mime-show, a silent film. If Mr. Tracey was going to shoot him, he thought, he was certainly taking his time. He flinched as his boss plucked a Desert Eagle from the table, a gun so oblong and ridiculous as to almost resemble a marital aid, and emptied a full clip at the street-sweeper.

The noise was deafening, even through a shell of rubber and foam, Prajeet’s fight-or-flight instinct made him leap back. Shell casings flew and the Eagle spit fire; there was an echoing crack with every shot as the slide jumped and the force travelled up Mr. Tracey’s burly spray-tanned arms into the thickness of his neck. His eyes were dead-set, purposeful.

His aim had appeared steady, but no sounds of impact bounced back at them. He might be rich, thought Prajeet, but he was a pretty shitty marksman. “Hm,” Tracey said, grabbing a pair of miniature binoculars from his pocket. “Unharmed! Fate continues to mock me, after all these years. Prajeet, have you ever entertained thoughts of revenge?”

The driver’s mind immediately went to his girlfriend, who he had been excited to think of as his future wife. He’d built his life around the idea, and now it was all crumbling down. “Ah. Well.” He had to shout, to be heard through the earmuffs. “Sometimes, yes. I mean… doesn’t everybody?”

“Exactly! Spot on, my Indian friend. And when I was young…”

“Bangladeshi,” said Prajeet.

“What?”

“Never mind.” He’d said it many times, but some people you couldn’t educate. Especially rich ones.

Tracey leapt back into his story without skipping a beat. Thunder crashing between his words as he reloaded the gun, emptying another clip to no avail. “Right. When I was young, I lived in a city on the east coast. No need to name names, it’s all in the past. I don’t hold grudges.” But his thin mustache quivered, and as the sweat began to roll down their necks from the sun, he grabbed a revolver that would not have been out of place in a sixties western. The earsplitting pop of the shots going off was accompanied by sulphurous whiffs of gun-smoke. “I didn’t have much money, back then. I might seem richer than God now, and sometimes I think I am. And when that sequel’s finished, I’ll walk away even richer. But at one point I had nothing, a bank account full of mothballs and some petty cash. And a certain group of human beings took it upon themselves to persecute me.”

“Street sweepers?” guessed Prajeet.

The revolver was emptied in flashing spurts of force, but a glimpse through the binoculars showed no results this time, either. “Yes! Well, no, not the drivers. Those shiftless monkeys had no charge over the real scam. You see, Prajeet, I used to drive myself everywhere. Shocking, right? I had but one asset in the world: a Ford station wagon, old as the hills, and it was my only friend as I was writing scripts and struggling to feed myself. And these stupid weasels… These damned, filthy, spiteful animals… They towed my car every day.”

“I… see," said Prajeet, wondering if he was supposed to care.

Up came an AK of some kind—Prajeet recognized it from movies, but couldn’t place the name of it. A bayonet gleamed at its tips. A thunderous cacophony, and brass shells scattered as Mr. Tracy fired it from the shoulder. This time there was the tinkle of glass, and the clatter of metal being riddled with lead. “Ha! That’s more like it! Did you hear that? Did you hear that whoreson take a hit?”

“Yes,” said Prajeet, his teeth gritted at the echo. The noise was not doing wonders for his hangover.

“It’s wounded, I think… Yes, there’s motor oil trickling out.” The ritual of the binoculars was observed. “I know it seems silly, Prajeet. Even deluded. But every week, those bottom-feeding, purposeless vermin would go out, and they would steal my only earthly treasure. Didn’t matter the time, didn’t matter whether the street was actually being cleaned—they were very efficient, you see. Towing was big business, they all made a profit. And everyone got a slice! They called the police, the police called the towing rats, and off went my Bessie. It pulled them a hundred thousand in ticket money and impound costs every day. They were blue-collar scam artists, Prajeet, confidence men of the highest quality. Satan himself could not have pulled a better grift.”

“Ah.”

“It does things to a man, to have his happiness taken.” Mr. Tracey looked over his collection of destructive devices; his pompous boom had faded to a whisper, and he looked to be gradually deflating in the Montana sun. “Oh, how I burned to go out there and bludgeon one of them to death. Just show them how it was done: how easily a person could be pushed into homicide. But I held my tongue. I could have taken any one of those scum-suckers—maybe several. I could have mailed letter-bombs to their fat, crooked cop friends in the precinct. But I held back. I believe in civilization, Prajeet, even when it screws you. Even when you have nothing, and then that nothing is taken away.”

Prajeet said nothing. He was thinking of his woman. Not his, anymore—no, not at all. The bitterness in Tracey’s soul warmed something in his own, and he longed to gather around that fire of hate and frustration. But he didn’t want to overstep himself. Losing this job would be a final blow: best to let his mad employer do as he would, then go home. Sleep it off. Do nothing irrational.

The old man shrugged, to no one. He opened the big case, the latch-clicks coming from far away, as if they were underwater. “Well, no need to waste every bullet, eh? They’re just pea-shooters, after all.” That boisterous clangor was back in his voice, and Prajeet was almost glad to hear it. There was something too familiar in Tracey’s growling hints of murder; something he remembered from the pub last night. Words spoken in earnest, ugly things promised. Could you take a promise back, once you were sober? How much weight did your vows hold, when uttered in drunken fury?

“Feast your eyes,” his boss said. “I’ve loaded this beastie with depleted-uranium rounds strong enough to blow through concrete!” He bounced his silver-caterpillar eyebrows at the driver, gesturing at the gun, Vanna-White-style. “What do you say, Praj? Care to work out a little aggression? I promise you, it’s more rewarding than jail. Why, if I’d killed the entire precinct back then, I never would’ve made my money!” And he laughed like a child.

Prajeet looked at the gun, thought of his girl. That twenty-two-year-old waitress with dusky eyes from a Maharashta hillside, whom he hadn’t really known at all, in spite of late-night Skype sessions and whispers of a future together, of real, actual, lasting love. He thought of the things he’d like to do to the man who’d stolen her: public humiliations, vandalism, maybe the trick some local kids to throw a flaming bag of cow shit through his open window. This rabbit-hole of frustration went deeper, so much deeper than he’d expected, and suddenly he was very frightened.

These things—he was actually planning to do them. He’d already calculated the costs of the plane tickets, the odds of arrest. Suddenly he longed for an escape from his own evils, for a compulsive explosion focused through a tiny, reinforced metal tube and exerted on an enemy that wasn’t real, who couldn’t feel pain or the terror of revenge. After four years, he finally began to understand Mr. Tracey; behind madness and a vast, inflated ego, he saw a frustrated little boy trying his best to play safely with God-like financial powers. To exert his human furies, and harm no one—there was a certain nobility in that, a certain safety in tilting at windmills. He felt his eyes come to rest on the grenade launcher.

“She’s a beaut, that one. Got her from war surplus,” said Tracey, his eyes glinting with taboo delight. “Want to give ‘er a spin?”

“Yes, actually,” said Prajeet, smiling as he sized up his target. “I would love to.”