Issuu

Antihero

PENGUIN MICHAEL JOSEPH

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For Jonathan Pageau

As iron sharpens iron

A man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.

– C. S. Lewis

Every man is a variation of yourself.

– William Saroyan

1. All Fight. No Flight.

Shiny penny-sized blood drops on the white tile floor of the East Los Angeles bodega reflect back the sterile fluorescent lights above. In the immediate wake of the violence, the bodega is deserted, aside from the clerk who clutches his chest with one hand and covers his mouth with the other. His ancient sun-beaten skin is paper-thin, and he is frail, bones tenting the fabric of his off-brand polo. He has seen a lot of violence in his day. But nothing like this.

A finger, cleanly sliced off, has landed on the cloudy plastic mat beside the cash register. An arm, severed just below the elbow, rests on the floor a short distance from the checkout counter. The wrist, grotesquely, still wears a retro Pac-Man watch. The clerk is incapable of tearing his gaze away.

A display of Hostess desserts is knocked over from the post-ambush struggle, Ho Hos, Twinkies, and Sno Balls strewn across the spattered floor. Ghostly crimson footprints choreograph the struggle where five grown men attacked Lesandro, a fifteen-year-old boy they had mistaken for a rival gang member.

The revelation of Lesandro’s mistaken identity came only after half of his limb was cleaved from his body in a single hack. In an instant, the boy had been transformed from mistaken target to innocent to witness, capable of testifying against his five attackers, his own disfigurement ensuring the hit on him had to proceed. In the momentary confusion, Lesandro had managed – barely – to flee.

A bloody handprint mars the glass of the single automatic

door, which bangs open and shut against Lesandro’s shed Air Jordan, which lies trapped in the threshold. Night air blows through in sporadic puffs, tasting of car exhaust, oil, carne asada on a distant grill.

If you ease through the oscillating gap into the chill black night, you can follow various footprints for a half block until the red fades away. After that, a convenient trail of dribbled blood continues to mark the way. You might catch up, if not to Lesandro, panting and wild-eyed, then at least to the five men in pursuit of him.

A half block behind him but closing the gap, they wear wifebeaters or white T-shirts with blocks of blue, red, and green. They wear headbands or backward baseball caps with flat brims. They wear expressions of teeth-bared malice and flecks of blood on their cheeks.

You might not believe there is a gang as vicious as MS -13, but that speaks only to the limits of your imagination. The decades-old Trinitarios were birthed in Rikers Island to protect Dominican inmates from the Salvadorans, Latin Kings, Bloods, and other predators feeding inside the lethal prison ecosystem. Their weapons of choice are machetes because, they are fond of saying, a gun runs out of bullets but a blade never does. Torture and murder, home invasions and drug running, they do it all. So vicious are they that the gang itself splinters and those splinters splinter until they are a rageful disintegration of packs turning on themselves, maiming and killing indiscriminately.

An East Coast gang, they have recently spread to make inroads on the left coast, a murderous manifest destiny. These five Trinitarios are at the forefront, franchise openers for East L.A.

Right now they are picking up steam. Lesandro is losing steam. Understandably so.

His sock flops from his shoeless foot. He stumbles and weaves along the sidewalk, occasional passersby darting to safety in doorways or sprinting across the street. His face is pale, lips dry and cracked, flaked with cotton in the corners. Now he can hear the footfall behind him, quickening.

Cupping his stump, he bolts up a narrow and dark side road, the streetlights flickering or shot out overhead. On either side of the potholed stretch of asphalt loom longabandoned places of business – a graffiti-covered mechanic shop, a shut-down textile-processing plant, a low-income housing unit scorched through with arsonist’s fire. Jagged mouths of window openings sip in the night. Discarded furniture rises from dumpsters.

As Lesandro casts a frantic glance over his shoulder, he staggers into a parking meter, which knocks him across the curb and into the street.

A truck bears down.

Not just any truck.

A discreet-armored Ford F-150.

Behind the wheel sits a shadowed form of a man, ordinary of size and bearing.

The truck halts abruptly, veering sharply to barely avoiding finishing what the Trinitarios started in the bodega.

Lesandro slams into the passenger-side door of the truck. Internally lined with bullet-resistant Kevlar, it does not dent. He takes a few wobbly steps up onto the curb and leans against a rough brick wall beside a blown-out window. Breath heaves from him.

His pursuers near, backlit. Their shadows pull high up the dilapidated buildings, a convoy of ghouls. If you squint, you might make out the silhouettes of machetes at their sides, dancing along the wall.

Lesandro is a sweet boy with Gauguin eyes and a broad,

pleasing nose. He sags against the brick rise, his face tilted down. He is drooling. At his side, wind sucks through the broken pane, a wail that underscores his own labored breathing.

The men rush forward, closing in on Lesandro.

The truck’s passenger door flies open, catching the first in line squarely.

He body-slams into the door, his nose meeting the laminated armor glass of the window. The glass does not crack, but one cheek and two ribs do. The man emits not so much a grunt as an ejection of air, and collapses onto the street. Inside the truck, the dark form in the driver’s seat leans over once again, and the door pulls shut above the unconscious body.

The other four men halt in the darkness of the street, weapons dangling at their sides, breath huffing in the February air. Three of the men wield machetes. One holds instead a slender steel pipe. Silence befalls the street.

The driver’s door opens.

An Original S.W.A.T. tactical boot sets down onto the street.

The man emerges.

He is known by different names – Orphan X, the Nowhere Man, Evan Smoak.

He removes a rugged-looking phone from his pocket and dials three numbers, gazing calmly at the men. ‘Yes, hello. Please send ambulances and PD to this location. I’ll text decimal coordinates now. There are six injured parties.’

The Trinitarios look at him, more perplexed than angry, their heads tilted in comical unison.

‘Yes, six,’ Orphan X continues. ‘The most acute is a young man with a severed left arm and a finger missing from his right hand. The wound has just been stabilized and I’ve

started fluids. The arm is likely gone but please bring a waterproof bag and ice container for the finger in case it can be located.’

‘Hey,’ one of the gangsters says. And then, louder, ‘Hey!’

Orphan X holds up a just-a-sec finger to him, listening to the question over the phone. ‘The other injuries? Those have yet to be ascertained.’

On the ground by the passenger door, the fallen man releases a moan of pain before falling unconscious again.

‘Rapa tu mai,’ one of his cohorts hisses at Orphan X through irregular gold teeth.

‘Depending on how this goes,’ Orphan X says into the phone, ‘you may want to send a hearse as well.’

He hangs up. Frowns at the screen. Thumbs once. A bloop sound effect confirms the conveyance of coordinates to 911.

Casually, he circles the back of his truck, passing within feet of the poleaxed gang members as he walks over to Lesandro. Blood drools from the stump through the thumb and remaining three fingers of the boy’s good hand. His teeth chatter.

Orphan X takes the boy gently by the shoulders and slides him down the wall to sit. A breeze whines across the broken glass of the pane to their side. A weathered mural of a young mother and her younger girl remains faded on the brick near them, dates bookending too-short lives, a memorial for the Trinitarios’ last innocent bystanders.

Lesandro’s teeth chatter some more. ‘My watch,’ he says. ‘I c-can’t find my watch.’

Crouching over him, Orphan X says, ‘It’s okay. We’ll get it soon enough.’

‘Yo,’ one of the attackers says, stepping forward. ‘What the fuck, mamagüevo ? You know where you are right now?’

The machete tap-tap-taps the outside of his thigh.

Orphan X turns to appraise the man in full. His white Tshirt looks useful.

Orphan X’s left hand blurs and a Strider folding knife lifts from his pocket, snapped open by the very gesture. The machete has no chance to lift from the man’s side before Orphan X steps forward and punches the knife into the intercostal space between the man’s second and third ribs. Air hisses out as the lung collapses.

Orphan X push-kicks him in the hip, spinning him around, grabbing a fistful of shirt at the back collar, and whipping the Strider upward to rake through the fabric.

The man falls out of his own shirt and fetal-curls on the asphalt, lips guppying.

The three remaining men take an inadvertent step away. Again, Orphan X turns his back on them.

Returns focus to the boy.

He pulls the ribboned shirt taut and starts tying it around the boy’s arm, just above the stump. The boy’s lost left forearm and hand will be unusable, but the missing finger of the right hand shows a clean amputation line. Given the damage on the other side, it would be beneficial for the boy to retain all five digits of his dominant hand.

One of Lesandro’s feet wags back and forth, the dirty sock half pulled off over the toes. His head dips, eyelids fluttering.

‘Look at me,’ Orphan X says. ‘Look at my eyes. See my nose? We’re here together.’

Lesandro’s gaze comes into brief focus. ‘Name. What’s your name.’

His lips move but the rest of his face stays locked in shock. ‘L-Lesandro . . . Candella.’

‘Where is your finger?’

Lesandro jerks his head slightly to the north. ‘Bodega. Block that way. Where they j-jumped me.’

Weak words. Heavily accented English. The rhythm of the accent sounds Dominican.

Orphan X cinches the knot. He proffers the tail of fabric to Lesandro so he can hold it tight. ‘Fist or mouth?’

Lesandro’s right hand clenches weakly. ‘Mouth.’

Orphan X guides the end of the makeshift torniquet to Lesandro’s teeth, and the boy clenches down. Orphan X sends a second text to 911. Retrieve severed digit in bodega one block west.

From behind them: ‘Yo, bitch. We gonna take your head.’

Orphan X rises once more, turns to face his recent interlocutor. He’s the biggest of the group, a low wide belly stretching a guayabera shirt, slugs of belly fat hanging out the bottom hem on either side.

‘How thick is that pipe?’ Orphan X asks him.

The fat man’s eyes jag briefly to the pipe in his raised fist, time enough for Orphan X to crash forward and lock it up with both hands, slamming it into the man’s broad chest. One of the other men swings the machete at Orphan X’s head but X skips forward, propelling the fat man with him, and the blade sails past him, embedding in the shoulder of the third man.

An unhuman wail. The injured man falls away, the fleshburied machete coming with him, his friend staring with dismay.

Orphan X twists the pipe from the fat man’s grip and in a single swift motion rotates it up beneath the padded chin, shattering the jaw. Before the man can tumble, Orphan X spins to crack the last man standing on the side of the neck. A debilitating blow that crushes the carotid artery, disrupting blood flow to the brain. It also strikes the vagus nerve, dropping heart rate and blood pressure, and the man himself to the asphalt.

Five men down, drawing rasping breaths or whimpering. The flickering streetlights bathe them in horror-movie lighting.

Orphan X returns to Lesandro. White-faced, the boy holds the end of the tourniquet between his clenched jaws. Orphan X tries to take it back from him, but the boy will not let go.

‘Hey. Hey. Look at me. It’s okay. You did great. You can let go now.’

Lesandro releases his jaws.

Orphan X slips the slender pipe through the knotted fabric and twists it, cinching the tourniquet tighter. After a turn and a half, the boy passes out.

That’s good. He could use a break.

Orphan X tucks the pipe beneath the boy’s armpit to hold the tension and walks back to his truck.

The man puddled beside the passenger door manages to hoist himself up onto his elbows, blood from his shattered nose streaming over his mouth and chin like a wide-based goatee.

As Orphan X passes, he stoops to strike him in the side of the head, a quick jab that knocks him unconscious once more.

Orphan X hops in the truck and reverses swiftly, tucking the truck into an alley ten meters away. From the locked vaults in the truck bed, he removes a bag of saline, tubing, and duct tape. As he jogs back to the boy, he notices the man with the machete embedded in his shoulder hunched on his side, fingers digging at the leg of his jeans. The denim cuff has hiked up, revealing a revolver in an ankle holster. Orphan X kicks him in the side of the head, knocking him out for good. He removes the revolver, heels it down a sewer grate.

Back to Lesandro. Spiking the saline bag, he slips the

catheter into the antecubital vein in the good arm. The boy stirs but does not wake.

Orphan X squeezes the bag to start the saline bolus. Lesandro’s eyes flutter open.

Orphan X eases him onto his side, cupping his cheek so it doesn’t strike the pavement. ‘You’re safe now,’ he says. ‘You can rest some.’

At last comes the sound of sirens, perhaps a half mile away.

Orphan X duct-tapes the saline bag to the brick wall above the boy’s body, letting gravity do its work.

To his side, the fat man grunts and sits up abruptly and stiffly, a vampire rising from a casket. His lower face is ruinous, a morass of bone and blood, his teeth chipped down to little jagged nubs. The sirens grow louder; Orphan X can even make out the squealing of tires.

As Orphan X walks over, the man raises his hand, fingers splayed against what is coming. He is fortunate to still have both arms to raise.

Orphan X leans over to squeeze his trachea, thumb and fingers expertly seeking out the right arteries, veins, and nerves without crushing the windpipe.

The fat man gurgles and stares up with pleading eyes. When his pupils roll up, Orphan X releases the compression. The man collapses once more, the back of his head knocking the asphalt.

Flashing-light projections come visible on the main street ahead, throwing patterns against the storefronts.

Orphan X returns to Lesandro, checks the saline bag and the infusion. The boy stares up at him, his sclera pronounced. ‘Wh-what’s gonna happen . . . me?’

He looks so scared, so lost.

Orphan X wonders what will happen to this young man.

Will he be able to handle what he needs to in order to repair himself? Can he afford the medical interventions necessary to put himself back together? Do Orphan X’s responsibilities to Lesandro end once he is out of sight?

These are not the kinds of questions Orphan X has been trained to contend with. Nor are they ones he welcomes. He crouches over Lesandro once more.

‘There will be pain,’ Orphan X tells him, ‘and it will be hard. But you will be whole again.’

Lesandro nods, tears leaking.

Orphan X rises. The wind tunnel of the narrow street plasters his shirt to his torso. You might make out the outline of his appendix carry holster and the ARES 1911 ghost gun it contains.

All this time he had a pistol. He just never bothered to draw it.

The sirens are close enough now that they sound like a scream. The red-and-blue strobing on the main street grows more intense. Orphan X ducks through the shattered window near Lesandro’s curled form, vanishing into the building. As the emergency vehicles sweep around the corner, their approach masks the sound of an F-150 engine turning over and coasting invisibly away.

If you could check Orphan X’s vitals, you’d find them normal. Body temperature 98.6°F, heart rate 60, respiratory rate 14, oxygen saturation 99 percent, blood pressure an athletic 105 over 55. He has not broken a sweat.

He is all fight. No flight.

You might wonder if he is real.

You might wonder if anything scares him.

You might wonder if he sleeps and, if he does, what nightmares haunt him.

2. Still He Refused

In the beginning it was dark.

Four concrete walls, concrete ceiling, concrete floor. Windowless.

Evan Smoak had been taken. He didn’t know how. The circumstances of his capture hovered back in the haze somewhere before this present flash of consciousness. It was not entirely unexpected; perhaps it was inevitable. In defiance of the law of man, country, and more, he had killed.

And killed and killed and killed.

He’d been chased from a fugitive’s hide into the blinding light of day. Taken hard to the ground, rending the flesh of knees, chest, and chin. Blindfold cinched tight, spit hood over his head, manacles binding hands and feet.

He’d been interrogated. Called to account for every aspect of his sordid past, pressured by fist and fiat to justify his very unsanctioned existence. Each trespass magnified to eclipse whatever humanity he had retained. Each fact decontextualized. Each choice filtered through a prism of worst-imagined intentions, transformed into something worse than a lie, an untruth. Demands were made – to apologize, to affirm what he didn’t believe, to bend the knee. To consent to a false story of himself, a hammered-flat narrative far removed from the actual sins he carried in the chinks and fissures of his heart.

But he refused to yield.

He refused to break his code.

He’d been enclosed in this concrete box and questioned

with greater enhancement. Fingernails and car batteries. Cattle prod in his side. Waterboarding, sleep deprivation, static blaring through headphones duct-taped to his head, a crown of anguish. Sweat wrung from his pores spattered the concrete, matching spots of a darker hue.

Still he refused to break his code.

His face, released to the media, shot through the veins and arteries of the known universe. Orphan X revealed, exposed. Salacious and damning details propagated through roaring algorithms. War criminal. Terrorist. Fascist. Islamophobe. Killer of Jews. Murderer of Christians. Deep-state operative. Alt-right. Radical left. Anarchist. Instrument of the irredeemably corrupt. Enemy of institutions. Deranged psychopath. Traitor. Committer of high treason. Unraveler of order.

An endless, continuous, exhaustive public accounting of his soul was undertaken. Every act imagined or real was spun and bastardized and toxified. The filth of the world pulsed in quickening waves, a feeding frenzy of escalation, of projection, of insanity itself.

Still he refused to break his code.

He was hauled before a grand jury, ordered to spill details of his secret training, to betray his mentor, to bear outsize responsibility for the transgressions of the system that had broken and remade him in its own image.

Still he refused to break his code.

He was sentenced.

They fetched him from the concrete box. He was marched, chains ghostily clanking, to an antiseptic room with a oneway mirror, sterile lighting, and moppable white tiles. A doctor awaited and a warden and a man of supposed faith. An array of lenses readied to stream his fate to the world.

He was placed upon the cushioned table, ankles bound,

arms strapped to the cross’s horizontal, spread angel-like. They slid a needle into the femoral vein of his left thigh.

The syringes were lined up, one, two, three, automated so no human hand would have to bear responsibility for the final push.

They asked him for any last words. Still he refused to break his code.

He turned his head as the first syringe depressed. He watched the blue liquid inch through the clear plastic line and enter his leg.

He felt fire in the meat of his thigh and then radiating through his arteries.

Flayed open, bared to the world, he closed his eyes –– and awakened.

Floating several feet above the floor of his penthouse condo on the twenty-first story of the Castle Heights Residential Tower. Atop a mattress that was in turn set atop a metal slab that was propelled upward by powerful neodymium rare-earth magnets and tethered by steel cables. A push-pull mirroring the endless battle in his battle-weary heart.

The battle to be the brutal thing of darkness he was.

And to remain human.

For a long time he breathed the dark air of earliest morning, wisps of the dream catching in his mind. That windowless box. A towering bench so high he’d seen only the façade of dark wood and no judge above. The many-eyed stare of the lenses, windows to the world, watching greedily as the syringes sank to push their poison into his blood.

He took it in, all the poison of the world.

He took it.

And then he arose.

3. The Parity of All Thoughts

A mother with children.

That’s who you look for first. The second choice is a couple with kids.

Third: a woman, alone.

You need to pay attention for when it starts to happen. Rich taste of copper. That’s how it begins for me. Then the taste turns into colors and colors into taste, which sounds completely weird but when it happens it makes perfect sense. Dark greens swirl into cobalt and indigo, and then needles sparkle through my brain, a brilliant ticklish pain, and then my thoughts go horizontal, all of them perfectly equal and weightless. The fanged premonition that this will finally be the time I won’t come out of it holds the same non-weight in my mind as the gum stuck to the subway seat across from me. The parity of all thoughts is a delirious release.

And right after that? It takes me out.

As the train rolls and rattles me through the intestines of Manhattan, I clutch the laminated oversize index card to my belly. I have it looped around my neck already and I’ve used yarn for the lanyard instead of string since string almost choked me out once when it caught around my throat. Now I make sure there’s plenty of extra yarn for a loose fit.

In my not-terrible handwriting, the first line on the index card reads:

Please help me.

It is all I have to ward off evil – purse snatchers, the fury of my nervous system, the stainless-steel curve of the hand pole three feet from my left temple.

Fourth choice is a man with children.

Fifth – a pack of girls, preferably working-class.

No matter how hard I try to reduce my vulnerability within myself and before the world, it is unavoidable. Reminders are everywhere, in the backup stack of laminated index cards on my office desk in the church basement, in the way I constantly catalog faces of strangers, in how I clutch my backpack in my lap right now, the pillow inside stuffed atop my work files for easy access.

I’m twenty-five but I look no older than nineteen, which I don’t say with vanity (because I’m still too young to care to look younger). I say it because a nineteen-year-old-looking girl is at even greater risk when she must trust herself to the charity of the world.

My father named me Anca, which means ‘merciful grace,’ because his heart broke wide open at the first sight of me. Imagine how fortunate I am to play this role in our family mythos. Wreathed in smoke from the Pall Mall riding his gesticulations, Tată used to puff himself up big when he told it, full-hearted in his Orthodox Christian chest. How he loved the tiny parentheticals of my knuckles. My impossibly diminutive toes. My light blue eyes.

I’m dark-skinned, which isn’t as rare for Romanians as you might think. We are descended from Romans and surrounded by Slavs, so we have all the passion of Italians with Russian defeatism sprinkled atop. Depending on who you ask, we are either optimistic pessimists or pessimistic optimists, though Tată definitely belongs to the latter category. Our family has a hint of Asian somewhere back from all the cross-continent invasions, Genghis Khan and the Ottomans

and whatnot. Plus us Southerners are just a stone’s throw to East Asia, so who knows who got up to what. In Tată’s eyes, I was a great beauty, but I know I am merely pretty-withsome-effort (Tată also taught me to be mindful of humility).

All the more miracle, his love for me, is that I came at the expense of his greatest love. Obstructed labor, the impossible choice – her or me. Together they chose me. In her dying moment, Mamă chose me.

The blessing of that. And the further blessing that my father viewed my creation as a painful miracle he would honor, this immaculate conception of another type – a daughter born from purity.

That gives me something to live up to every day, however imperfectly.

When I was no more than a year old, my father brought us across the world to the affordable Bronx. His great American hopes never materialized, not in the way he hoped, but I never once wanted for food and he held on against the dark spots in his lungs until I graduated high school and finished a year at Mercy College.

He was so strong. That wrenching cough rattling the bathroom walls when he thought I was already asleep. The rust-speckled balls of Kleenex. The coats that hung costumelike on his diminished frame. He stayed for me until three days after my eighteenth birthday. Until I was a legal adult able to get a job and keep a roof over my head. He did that for me, shouldered all that pain for love and duty.

The sixth choice is an elderly man.

Seventh is two females.

Past seven the rankings blur together. At that point, it’s up to how much kindness you sense in people’s eyes.

The 2 line keeps rocketing north, shaving beneath Central Park. A sketchy stretch, my least favorite. I chose this

particular car because it was crowded when I got on in Brooklyn, but by now the passengers have thinned out, my options dwindling. From what I can see on the snaking turns, the neighboring cars are mostly empty, but I’m not too worried because there’s a girl about my age sitting across from me. A micromini skirt shows a whole lot of her body. She has chewed-down nails and wears too much makeup and looks a bit lost, but her eyes are soft and soulful, and the way she sits with the heels of her hands jammed to the seat at her sides, her elbows locked, and her shoulders jabbed up by her ears makes her seem fragile. I am grateful to have an Option Three.

As always I am dressed modestly, a winter coat over my shirtdress with long sleeves. The floral pattern sets tiny lilies against a cornflower-blue background. I am coming back from visiting Ioana, an elder from our parish who lives all the way out in Brownsville. It’s a bit of a trial for me to get home but it’s a broken hip and she cannot get out to the grocery shop and no one else volunteered. I started out after Vespers so it was late to begin with and we all know Ioana needs care and conversation. Despite the complexities that govern my existence, the church has trusted me to be director of social services and that is a responsibility I honor as best as I humanly can.

At the moment it’s a bit past midnight. The last-gen subway car is torn up from the crime surge, one of the harvest-orange seats shattered jaggedly into plastic fangs. Across the ceiling ads curves unimaginative graffiti – a giant dick, a floating pair of boobs, and a street tag that resembles bird-shit splatter. With matching black spray paint, the dome casings of the embedded security cameras have been turned opaque, the tang of shellac still heavy in the unvented air. The cabin lights are flickering on and off, too, a quicker strobe

than that of the passing stations, and I reassure myself that the lighting change indeed originates from the subway and not inside my head.

We stop at 116th Street. Most everyone else clears off and then it’s just me, Option Three, and a passed-out meth-head at the far end. Even over the roar of the train, I can make out raucous laughter in the trailing car. A hyena pack of young men.

A group of young men is always the Last Option. I look down.

Beneath Please help me resides the second line, which serves as a caption.

My Seizure Plan.

My condition urges me to hold perennial humility and for that I am grateful despite how challenging everything else can be.

Don’t be scared, the next line pleads.

I get up to two seizures a day. They last between one and three minutes. Then I list the basics. Lay me on my side. Keep me away from sharp objects. Please don’t call an ambulance – I can’t afford it. I’ll be awake soon! Please stay with me until I’m back inside myself. I still debate over the sole exclamation mark in case it seems manipulative instead of merely comforting, which is my intent.

Despite all the instructions on the laminated card, my true asks are really prayers: Please guard over me. Please show me charity. Please have mercy on me.

The voices from the car behind grow louder. Amused howls mixed with chanting. The mood, were I to guess, is lubricated with alcohol.

Despite Option Three right across from me, I cannot risk being stuck with the Last Option if the young men decide

to switch cars. I’m just readying to rise and move on when I taste it.

Copper.

Rich and hot, melted pennies.

An initial flurry of panic claws its way up my throat but I’m practiced enough to soothe it back down. I’m safe in this moment and I have my laminated index card and my pillow in my backpack and an Option Three. I do, however, need to act fast.

As I gesture to catch the young woman’s attention, I’m already tasting colors, but they’re still light yellows and golds, so I have a few moments.

‘Are you staying on the train?’ I try to keep the note of desperation out of my voice.

She sweeps aside blond tresses of blown-out hair to unscrew an AirPod. ‘Huh?’ Her eyes move to the laminated card, which I’m holding up dumbly like a jail placard. ‘Wait – seizures? Like, seizure-seizures? Okay, okay. Are you having one now?’

‘No.’ I pull my pillow out of my backpack. ‘Any second.’

Option Three swings herself across the aisle of the moving train and plops down next to me, giving her micromini a practiced tuck beneath her thighs. She plucks the laminated index card from my hand, scanning it. Her eyebrows are high. She hums with anxiety.

‘It’s okay.’ I rest a calming hand on her forearm. ‘I’ll be okay.’

I set my backpack on the floor at my feet. Folding the soft pillow, I rest it on the seat to my right and lie down, nestling my head in its cushion. The dome of the security camera looms sightless overhead, blotted out with spray paint.

The greens come on now but they still taste light – celery and chartreuse.

‘Can you . . .’ My mind-mouth connection blinks out but then comes back online. ‘. . . stay with me?’

‘How long?’ Nervous chattering. ‘I have to get off to catch the Metro-North. I’m sorry – it’s a – There’s a helicopter waiting for me in Westchester I can’t miss. I have to – Are you sure you’re okay?’

‘Umm, hang on.’ I breathe heavily, my head going slurry. ‘If it gets really bad’ – now kelly and sage burst across my palate – ‘can you roll me onto the floor?’ It all seems so ridiculous, the gleaming poles and marigold seats and the terrible lighting that makes my teeth ache. ‘And if you have to go, would you mind finding someone else’ – the taste grows ominously darker, emerald and fern – ‘who seems kind?’

Somewhere deep inside I’m registering danger but it’s just a fact like every other fact. I sort through the sludge of sensation until I zero in on the threat: the chanting from the car behind us. Louder now, accompanied with thumping. The young men are stomping their feet. My thoughts veer zoological – images of baying and hooves, predatory displays and bone-crushing jaws.

All at once the subway brakes screech hellishly. The cabin lights dim and flicker and we are coasting through subterranean semidarkness and I am trying to say, Please can you stay with me one more stop, but my words aren’t working anymore and now I’m tasting forest and olive.

Option Three crouches before me. ‘I’m sorry, sweetie. If it was literally any other time I’d wait with you but the helicopter’ll leave without me and – and I can’t afford to –’

She’s clutching my seizure plan and her eyes are wide and I can see beneath the fake lashes and the crust of her mascara how pretty she is even without all that glamming up. But her eyes are party-drug glazed in a way I hadn’t noticed before and I can see she isn’t thinking clearly and that makes two of

us and the brakes are screaming and the boots stomping in the trailing car grow louder.

Her face contorts with regret and for an instant I see straight into her. She is racked with guilt and uncertainty. She is fighting within herself and I pray the right side will win but now the greens are bleeding into blues, which means I’m nearly out of time.

Please don’t leave me, I don’t – can’t – say.

She rubs my forehead gently, not knowing that makes the needles in my brain prickle all the more. ‘I have to go. You’ll be okay, sweetie. I promise. Someone’ll come. Someone else’ll take care of you.’

And I feel her shove my laminated index card between my back and the seat so it sticks up. The subway brakes grind away and the pale yellow light of the station ahead beams ever stronger. Lying down, I cannot see the platform but I pray that more people will get on, that even at this late hour the seats around me will fill with families or Good Samaritans.

We shudder into the glaring light and the doors jolt open.

I look at Option Three and form the thought again through the brilliant skewers inside my mind: Please help me.

She gets up, hesitates. She is having second thoughts. The doors are still holding open and she hasn’t left and my heart readies itself to leap with relief.

She leans forward and kisses me on the temple, feathersoft. Her breath is pot and bubble gum: ‘I’m sorry. You’re good. You’ll be okay. Someone else’ll watch over you.’

Behind me I hear the intercar door bang open on its hinges, lifting the volume on the roar of merriment from the trailing car. As my eyes strain to see what is coming, she says brightly, ‘See, people are here now.’

In a blink, she drifts backward, skimming through the bumpers onto the 125th Street platform. My frozen view

stays locked on the doors and her face in the window. As she glances at the men in my blind spot, I see a single note of dismay arrest her face, furling the tiny spot between her eyebrows. She fades away as I lurch forward again and sapphire leaks along the sides of my tongue and I am touched with exquisite pain and the anticipation of release.

Midnight blue spills through my mouth. My brain sparkles. I feel a human presence behind me, the heat and clamor of the pack, and all at once a chilling silence fills the car as I am noticed.

A clank as something drops. And then it rolls into view before my paralyzed face.

A can of black spray paint.

There comes a stir of excitement, yips of delight, and then a voice wrenched high with malice proclaims, ‘Lookee lookee. What have we here?’

Before the last streaking lights in my head wobble into darkness, I have time for a single last thought. Please don’t let the hyenas get me.

4. Or Else

In the material world, Luke Devine was wetting his beak with Campari and preparing to have sex.

But the material world was not where he was currently located.

Instead he was roving among the countless back burners of his cognition, refining various plans at various stages. Kneecapping a senator from Alabama who was in the pocket of bad influences. Blocking a shipment of Iranian precisionguided missiles en route to Hezbollah via a civilian flight through Beirut–Rafic Hariri International. Obliterating a married Hollywood studio head with a proclivity for undercharging license fees and overpaying for threesomes. There were many more bubbling cauldrons on many more burners as well. He rampaged among them, stoking and stirring, an amphetaminized short-order chef.

Texts and emails, calls and manic scribbled notes – Devine tapped the world to and fro. Lately he’d taken to keeping on his person a garage-door-remote-size gadget with a single button – his personal black box. Between barking orders into it at the army of staff who maintained his Hamptons estate, he sipped his liqueur and small-talked the lady before him. She was a fulsome blonde in a fitted white shirt and a pleated micromini skirt that showed off the bronze musculature of her thighs, which he hoped to soon part.

What? he thought.

Someone had spoken in the present time and space.

‘What?’ he said aloud.

The young lady twisted a wayward lock around her finger. Her fitted white shirt was now tugged up, exposing her breasts. He had some recollection of being the agent of its migration. He was sitting beside her on a massive curved couch in his expansive master suite. Inside the rectangular cuboid of glass before them twisted a contorted mannequin, trapped in its distress, a coffee table coaxed into artfulness.

Staff buzzed about them through the open space. There were all sorts of other people in the massive master suite, too, and all manner of activity he’d drowned out, his mind bobbing like a cork atop the background commotion.

‘I said, I don’t think – I can’t do this right now. I’m sorry.’ Her eyes were completely disconnected from the rest of her, and there was nothing sexual in her posture or his. He wondered how they’d arrived at this point and then just halted.

He blinked and then blinked again. What was her name? Alicia? No, that was yesterday’s. Or last week’s. Time did not exist. It was lost in the wash of his thoughts, an experiential river. He’d been humming at this speed for two days or five, everything a possibility and a reality at the same time, while the rest of the world sludged along in slow motion. He’d run through both hips by the age of forty, requiring double labrum surgery, the metaphor not a hard reach.

When he was at full gallop, he was fearsome.

He was blinding.

He downed the Campari, then palmed a pill into his mouth. Barely – barely – he registered the next wave of pharmacological alteration wobbling through his perceptual field. It couldn’t slow the engine of his anterior cingulate cortex but it could make him aware of it, how it pulsed and throbbed.

‘Okay,’ he said, to the young woman. ‘Hold on, just give me a –’

The black box chimed and then spoke: ‘Putin on the phone

from the Residence at Cape Idokopas.’ Rawlings, Devine’s chief of staff, flew into the room, sat phone pressed to his chest, ready for delivery.

Devine waved a hand. ‘Tell him to try me later.’

Rawlings hesitated in disbelief. Then he met the spear of Devine’s gaze, blanched, and faded back out of sight, stammering into the phone.

At a desk against the far wall, Underling No. 3 tapped at a laptop. He spoke quietly, as if to himself, but his words came through the black box. ‘The Leader’s whipping votes on the Online Safety Act.’

Devine spoke to him and into the black box at the same time. ‘Give her Missouri Seventh, the fat one with the floofy hair. I caught her being gymnastic with two Tongan rent boys in the pool house last summer.’

That was Devine’s glimmering magic. The formula was simple. Throw Gatsbyesque bashes at the mansion here on Billionaire’s Row. Invite a curated selection of members from the ruling caste. Put every imaginable sin on display. Hide pinhead surveillance cameras in each crack and wrinkle on the premises. Allow the guests to step into their fullest shameful selves. Memorialize them as such, timestamped and geolocated. Suck their money in squeaky clean through ‘suggested’ investments in his hedge fund. Gobble up their influence, too. Drink it in like blood. And then? Leverage it.

Underling No. 3 rose to show Devine a pleading email on one of three phones he carried. The head of the German opposition party had been caught frequenting a ‘massage parlor.’ There were photos. What was he to do?

Devine shuffled through scripts in his head, plucked out the best response, and then spoke through his black box to the invisible team standing by to execute his orders and see

to his whims. ‘He should issue a statement: “Clearly this is a deepfake. My penis appears too small.” ’

Back to the young woman. Something shimmered darkly beneath the surface of her flat eyes, an infectious hesitation that had leapt onto him. She’d experienced some kind of dislocation, a recent trauma no doubt. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled again, a touch drunkenly, as she yanked her top roughly down over her torso.

‘It’s okay,’ he said, wrenching himself into the present and trying to slow down. Something was wrong within her and, despite his legion of wicked impulses, he never took advantage of the afflicted. ‘What happened?’

She staggered across to tumble onto the bed. ‘. . . was . . . so awful. This girl . . . she got taken . . .’ She burrowed beneath pillows, hiding her head. She swirled in and out of view – wait, no. That was him.

The full glory of his imbibement kicked in, dolly-zooming his perception. He goggled at the scene before him, recalling now the shambolic party spread throughout the master suite. A German tattoo artist perched in a director’s chair. A trio of Manhattan socialites swanning around behind Audrey Hepburn sunglasses, leaving perfumed wakes of Shumukh by Nabeel. A high peaty scotch Devine didn’t own soaking into the carpet. Two Pekingese dogs prancing about, one of whom had left a tidy arabesque of shit on the shag rug in the corner, the other trapped with the mannequin beneath the coffee table, Devine’s role in the matter a hazy recollection. Though he didn’t smoke, Luke seemed to be holding a lit cigarette and his mouth burned. In the fireplace, a pyre of logs roared. His unbuttoned linen shirt clung to him like Saran Wrap.

It wasn’t that he didn’t remember the chain of events that had gotten him here. It was that the chain of logic that

had so compellingly brought this moment into existence no longer held.

His stomach pitched with the plummet. He imagined the feathers fluttering down with him, the sting of melting wax. The windows were grayed with dusk – no, cloudy morning. Moments ago – hours ago? – he’d been peering into the inner workings of the universe, his thoughts resonating with each clockwork twirl. Now there was just chaotic rumbling filling his chest, dense enough to blot out clarity.

He tried to say something but the words felt fragmented, puzzle pieces that wouldn’t fit together. His stomach churned and roiled. Only now did he realize that the engine block of his brain had come apart, scattered across the floor, whirring and clicking, mechanical parts severed from purpose. The darkness was dizzying, vertiginous, rushing through him, leaving him breathless.

The young woman needed help.

More acutely, he needed help. What had he done?

What else had he done?

And worse: What might he do next?

When he set down the black box and reached for the phone, he noticed the tremor in his hand. Dehydration? Meds? Booze?

Fear.

He had lost control. He hated losing control. It was worse, he realized, than death.

Gnawing at the edge of a thumbnail, his knee jacking up and down, he dialed. His breathing came shallow, irregular.

One ring.

Another.

And then that voice, soothing in its equilibrium: ‘Do you need my help?’

5. Eternal Outsider

Evan sat in his Ford F-150 in a shaded parking spot across the street from the Clark County Firefighters Local 1908 Union Hall. Visible through a water-stained fixed window, the memorial service for his closest friend proceeded. Various folks cycled past the podium and the transmitter he’d hidden beneath the platform lip, offering up their remembrances.

Earpiece screwed in, he streamed the proceedings: ‘– when guess who charges outta the barracks in his chonies, waving a lockedand-loaded boomstick? But who’s on the roof? Not some muj Santa but the fucking radioman from Operations. Dude screams, almost falls off the roof. Turns out he was up there diddling with the dish when Stojack stormed out and gave him the brown-star cluster.’

Laughter rolled through the earpiece, along with murmured conversations, the clink of bottles, the noise of someone sobbing quietly and receiving comfort. From the other side of the road, Evan noticed the faintest tremble of the windowpane. He could not see the podium from this vantage but he could make out a swath of mourners. Ragged beards on the men, luxuriant hair on the women, a few folks missing limbs. Carrot sticks with dip, cubed orange cheese on Dixie plates, Pabst Blue Ribbon toasts despite the morning hour.

Alone in the truck that Tommy Stojack had built and outfitted for him, Evan listened and observed. The faintest tug at the base of his lumbar on the left side announced itself, a lingering ache from a violent showdown he’d had in a ghost town a couple of months back.

Stretching in the driver’s seat, he looked at the military challenge coin leaning against the dashboard’s instrument cluster. It read no greater friend. no worse enemy.

He’d been given it by a woman he’d once helped. More precisely, he’d been given half of it. The other broken piece she’d gifted to Tommy, who’d been lowered into the dirt of the Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery last month.

Before he’d died, Tommy had soldered the halves together for Evan.

‘– really loved him. He was a crusty bear. Big ol’ softy inside, though. When my . . . When my niece got raped, he took her out twice a week for a year, taught her to shoot. So let’s all hoist a glass. Fair winds and following seas, you dear, sweet man.’

Tommy was the best armorer and the finest shot Evan had ever known, as well as a procurement and R&D specialist for various three-letter agencies. Dreaded by the bureaucratic class but beloved by spec ops, veterans, and emergency services, he’d been a bridge between Evan and the legitimate world. Now he was gone, leaving behind an armorer’s lair stuffed with ordnance, munitions, gear, equipment, and an abyss in a place inside Evan he didn’t know he had.

When Evan had deserted the Orphan Program, feared and hunted by those in highest power, he’d had the clothes on his back, brimming bank accounts in nonreporting countries, and not one single relationship. From the age of twelve, he’d been raised apart from anyone else, rotated through grueling training sessions conducted by a blur of subject-matter experts, senseis, and instructors. The only consistent face had been that of his mentor, Jack Johns, who’d overseen his tutelage, teaching him everything but the strange language of intimacy. The hard part isn’t turning you into a killer, Jack had pounded into his head. The hard part is keeping you human.

Staying human while committing unsanctioned assassinations at the behest of orders issuing from the shadowy underbelly of the DoD had proven untenable, even for Orphan X. Evan had finally slipped off the radar, reconstituting himself under another of his operational aliases. As the Nowhere Man, he took on personal missions unsullied by political considerations. That meant helping people who were being terrorized by others, people who had nowhere else to turn.

As the Nowhere Man, he operated as he always had. Alone. Tommy had become his first anchor to mankind. They’d earned each other’s trust, step by step.

They had become friends.

Evan’s first.

‘– med-boarded out, PTSD bullshit. Man, I was so lost. Still just a kid, twenty-four, wet behind the ears. He catches wind, my phone rings. He says, “Get to Las Vegas. Worse men than you have crashed on my couch for a spell.” So I do. First morning I go in to hit the rainlocker, thing’s full up with –’ A chorus of unintelligible shouts. ‘That’s right. Fucking moonshine in the bathtub. Like he’s some Prohibition bootlegger.’ The slightest crack of the voice. ‘Miss you, brother. Broke the mold, that’s for sure.’

Evan tried to imagine what would happen when he died. No funeral or memorial, no fruit plates and rambling reminiscences – certainly no poster-board prints on easels. He’d never had his picture taken, not since grade-school yearbooks from his foster-home days, and those had been carefully expunged from any public record, along with the other scant traces of his childhood. When he did finally catch a bullet, nothing would change in the world around him. He’d simply remain what he’d always been: the Nowhere Man. He rested his hands at the ten and two. What the hell was he doing out here eavesdropping on a memorial service?

He’d skipped Tommy’s funeral. His profession had inured him to rituals that were not his own. He dealt in blood and sweat, not buglers wailing ‘Taps’ and twenty-one-gun salutes. He had no need for any of it – color guards and flag-folding protocols, higher brass showing off chest candy and unit pins pounded into coffin lids, shovelfuls of dirt and solemn suits with epaulets of closet dust. And now, weepy speeches at a podium, apocryphal tales burnished into legend.

And yet.

Here he was, watching and listening, the eternal outsider looking in.

Behind the window, a grizzled vet hugged a teary young serviceman. A trio of women in tight white jeans marveled at a blown-up photo of younger-days Tommy. A little girl in a bright yellow dress ran through the guests, waving a fairy wand and banging into knees.

Evan would’ve liked to be in there near the celebration.

He would’ve liked to say a few words about his friend. He would’ve liked to give Tommy a proper good-bye.

But the notion of conveying intimate emotion in a public setting among others raw with grief was unthinkably messy and contaminating, a break from everything he’d been trained to be. It would’ve required courage that he did not have.

On the passenger seat, the RoamZone gave its distinctive chime. The untraceable encrypted phone was always with him. When he answered as the Nowhere Man, he never knew what new mission would present itself. What he could anticipate was that whoever dialed the number was calling from the depths of a hellish personal misery.

Caller ID was blocked.

He answered as he always did.

‘Do you need my help?’

‘Huh? Wait. Hold on – Do not let the fucking dog drink the Charles and Diana Dom Pérignon.’

‘Devine?’

Evan had come up against the erratic billionaire on a prior mission. They spoke rarely and only on Evan’s terms.

This was not on his terms.

‘What?’ Devine’s voice sounded hoarse. ‘Look – Can you just – Can you just get here?’

‘Get where?’

‘The Hamptons house.’

‘Why?’

‘I think – I don’t know. I don’t know why. There’s a lot going on and my brain is roaring and I can’t – You three! Take your fucking purse dogs and get out! – can’t seem to find a handle – and – and – there’s also a girl here in my bed who saw something bad happen to another girl – kidnapping, maybe? – and I’ve got all these plates spinning, you see, with great geopolitical import, and I have to make choices and I don’t –’

‘Stop,’ Evan said.

Luke stopped.

‘You said there’s a girl there. In your bed.’

‘Yes. Yes. A young woman.’

Evan took a four count to draw in a breath. He held it.

‘Mr Nowhere? Why are you quiet? That’s a – That’s a terrifying silence.’

‘How old is she?’

A rush of an exhale. ‘Twenty-six. I’m not like that.’

‘You said she’s upset. Why is she upset?’

‘I don’t know. Hang on.’ Then, muffled: ‘Why are you upset?’ Another pause. ‘I don’t know. She’s still not answering. She’s curled up in the bed.’

‘What happened?’

‘Nothing. Nothing happened. I didn’t even have sex with her. I couldn’t figure it out.’

Evan let that pass, stayed on the seam of inquiry. ‘Does she need medical attention?’

‘No.’

‘Do you?’

‘No.’

‘Drugs?’

‘What?’

‘Is she on drugs?’

‘No, no, no, no, no. At least nothing serious. Champagne. Very fine champagne. In fact, do you know there were only ninety bottles at the royal wedding when –’

‘Are you ?’

‘What?’

‘Are you on drugs?’

‘Just the usual.’

‘Which is?’

‘Sixty grams of indica to slow things down. A half liter of booze by now. Maybe two-thirds? Oh – and ketamine.’

‘Special K?’

‘Not club. Prescribed.’

‘Okay. So: your average Saturday morning.’

‘Yes! Exactly. Don’t go freaking out and getting lethal.’

Devine’s concern was legitimate. He had greater influence than most nation-states, his power a threat to those in highest power. Evan had been tasked by no less an authority than the president of the United States to execute him, and he nearly had. Ultimately he’d determined that while Devine was a brilliant narcissist and world-class mind-fucker, he was not someone Evan could dispatch in good conscience. Yet.

‘What’s the young woman’s name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know the name of the young woman in your bed?’

‘I did at some point. There’s a lot going on in here.’

‘Give her the phone.’

‘Okay. Okay.’ Sounds of Devine moving.

A new speech was droning on in Evan’s other ear: ‘– the thing with Stojack was, he was always there, you know? No matter how down-and-out you were. No matter if you’d fucked up six ways from Sunday – pardon, ladies – or were at your worst with your missus or outta yer head with, dunno, shell shock or trauma or whatever they call it nowadays, he didn’t judge. He never –’

Evan unscrewed the earpiece, narrowed his focus.

‘She won’t take it,’ Devine said.

‘Try again.’

‘Here. Here. Just take the phone. Take it.’

A moment later came a feminine voice, hoarse and weak.

‘Hullo?’

‘Hello. What’s your name?’

‘Monica,’ she drawled. ‘Like Santa Monica.’

‘Are you free to leave?’

‘What? Yeah, course.’

‘Are you safe?’

‘Yeah. But you should get here, maybe, if he wants you here. ’Cuz shit’s crazy.’

‘Did he hurt you?’

‘What? No. No. He’s, like, aggressively considerate. Wanting to make sure I don’t do anything I don’t want to do. But I don’t feel like it’s about me at all. It’s not. It’s about him.’

‘Generally.’

‘And it’s exhausting. He won’t stop talking. He just won’t stop talking.’

‘You saw something bad happen to a girl?’

‘I can’t – I don’t really know for sure. I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Listen, man, I’m not feeling good and I can’t really think straight right now with your friend vrooming around –’

‘Give me that back. Give it back.’ Devine sounded winded. ‘Her perspective isn’t the useful one here. It’s been two hours and – I can’t find the handle. I can’t find the handle.’

‘Devine,’ Evan said. ‘Why are you calling me?’

At last Luke Devine paused. His breath whistled across the receiver once, twice, a third time.

When his voice came it was strained and small, an unrecognizable whisper: ‘I don’t . . . I don’t know who else to call.’

Evan stared across the street at the memorial. A couple of big guys were laughing hard. He could hear their guffaws from the discarded earpiece. A chunky woman sat on a folding chair in the back, tissue pressed to her nose, mascara streaking into black stalactites. In that easel-mounted photo, Tommy looked young and strong, maybe the age Evan was now. His eyes weren’t baggy or tired as they’d been since Evan had known him, but they still held the same measure of warmth.

Evan looked down at his hands on the wheel, cursed under his breath. His other adversaries came at him with steel or lead. But Luke Devine flipped reality like a Rubik’s Cube, tweaking patterns and perceptions. Within the force field of his influence, he complicated the world, which meant that to contend with him, Evan had to become more complicated himself.

‘Are you there?’ Devine asked. ‘Are you still there?’

‘I’ll be there in twelve hours.’

Evan slotted the truck into drive and pulled out from the curb.

6. Kill the Motherfucker

With Tommy gone, the number of allies Evan trusted implicitly had materially diminished. Humming along the I-15 back to Los Angeles, Evan dialed one of the few others.

‘Can you clear a flight plan from Van Nuys to East Hampton Airport?’ Evan asked.

‘Why?’

‘Because Luke Devine’s out of his mind.’

‘No mames! That culero is out of his mind when he’s in his mind. What is he capable of now? He pulls one wrong lever and he’ll touch off World War III .’

‘That’s why I need to get there.’

‘Why do you not just kill the motherfucker?’

Aragón Urrea was not prone to equivocation.

A self-described ‘unconventional businessman,’ Aragón had amassed billions operating outside international law, weaving back and forth across the blurry line between Big Pharma and drug dealing.

Years ago, when Aragón had found himself in the grip of a father’s deepest horror, Evan had helped him put his family back together again. To repay the debt, Aragón had vowed to stay on the right side of the law. Mostly. And as a show of gratitude, he’d put his small fleet of private jets at Evan’s disposal, which added remarkable efficiency to Evan’s Nowhere Man expeditions.

Evan gave the question proper consideration. ‘Devine’s not a nihilist. He’s got a code. If someone has a code, I can engage without having to kill them.’ A brief pause. ‘Usually.’