KEEP PLANNING time / space / about #032 Eric Angal DMV

The DMV is full. That means six rows, eight foldup chairs per row, all occupied. Some people opt to stand and they populate the wallspace, clutching their tickets, occasionally checking their number against the NOW SEEING number on the LED display which hangs over the clerks’ counter. There are three clerks currently working the counter and behind them one can see other DMV employees shuffling about in a shared officelike space. These peoples’ jobs look vague and unspecific. The clerks sit behind their plexiglass sneezeguards at the fore of the horrible room, unsmiling, impartial as sentries. This could be any day of the week, but today is Thursday. It is 4:34 p.m. Most people lean forward in their seats, elbows on their knees, staring down at their phones. Those who aren’t on their phones either idly space out or stare daggers through the reflective sneezeguards at the clerks, as if glaring would afford them some sort of priority treatment in the neverending queue. There are three people being seen at the counter now, one per clerk. The first person—that is, the person being seen who, chronologically, arrived first out of the three of them—is Kaitlyn Corey. She wants to renew her registration for a 2014 Honda Civic. She drove straight to the DMV after her shift at Pink Acres, a daycare center in Burien. She arrived at the DMV at 2:43 p.m. and had waited an hour and fifty-one minutes to be seen. At this exact moment she’s experiencing, like most of the others there, a sort of annoyed boredom. She’s attempting to sound out her address to the clerk, Qing Su-Yen, for whom English is a second language. Kaitlyn’s tone is clipped and impatient, the edges of a barely restrained exasperation audible in the hiss of her plosives, a frustration compounded by the wait and ever-amplified by a growing annoyance at Su-Yen, specifically with—and, she clarifies to herself, y’know, none of the annoyance is derived in or stems from any sort of xenophobic impulse, on account of Su-Yen’s race, or anything—of course not—but specifically, her problem is with how Su-Yen types. Su-Yen’s hands are poised in halfclosed fists, and she stabs the keyboard with her extended index fingers, every keystroke tentative, her slanted oriental eyes darting back and forth between keyboard and screen to ensure the accuracy of whatever it is she’s typing. The problem is exacerbated by the phonetic complexity of Kaitlyn’s address (Dahl Haines Blvd.), which is just impossible to sound out, and Kaitlyn finds her forehead almost bumping up against the plexiglass sneezeguard as she cranes her neck attempting to glance at Su-Yen’s computer screen in order to verify the address as it’s being typed. Look one lane over and there’s John Matthew Henderson and he’s renewing his license. He isn’t so much annoyed as he is excited about the prospect of going to Dick’s Burgers after he’s finished there. Like Kaitlyn, John had also driven to the DMV straight from work, where he spent all day replacing victaulic fittings on a five-hundred ton chiller at an office park in Tukwila, and he’d skipped lunch. His stomach had been growling sullenly at him for the past four hours and all he can think about is purchasing four Dick’s Deluxes and scarfing them down in the cab of his company truck right there in the drive-in parking lot, a secret he’ll have to keep from his wife, who, if he recalls correctly, is making spaghetti tonight. His clerk, Calvin Markson VII, the seventh successive Calvin Markson dating back to 1824, is only half-occupied with entering the requisite transaction data for John Matthew Henderson’s paperwork. At only twenty-four years old, Calvin Markson VII, for all intents and purposes, is the youngest and greenest of anyone working at the DMV. His own father, Calvin Markson VI, had worked at that DMV for forty-five years and had established such intimate knowledge with day-to-day operations there, to include the ability to resolve such extenuating circumstances and strange outliers as out-of-state title transfers and Covered Farm Vehicle (CFV) designation disputes, that he was considered indispensable to his superiors, and was venerated by his subordinates. Before he passed away of pancreatic cancer three years ago he vouchsafed his son a position as junior clerk, a final act of charity from an endlessly understanding and forgiving man, or so it would seem, because Calvin Markson VII was such a goddamned disappointment. A perennial fuckup and oft the subject of consternation around the Markson family dinner table, VII’s exploits and mishaps were so recurrent that blundering or erring soon came to be known as ‘pulling a sevvie,’ an intrafamilial idiom which more or less translated to shitting the bed, or screwing up...Yeah that’s right, he pulled a sevvie, VII distinctly remembers overhearing his own father saying...when he’d heard it he was up the stairs and they’d probably thought he was out of earshot, but of course he wasn’t, of course he’d heard, and although VII couldn’t place the context of what was being said, he understood from inflection alone the idiom’s rhetorical significance, and a pang of confusion and anger and sadness nucleated in him like a welt, that’s how he thought of it—that queasy gurgly feeling in the pit of his stomach, that embarrassed shameful breathtaking hurtness that physically translates to a numbness in your own skin, eyes squinting to ward the onset tears—a welt, a growing purpurescent geoid rearing its head outta the mess of your own anguiform innards...lumping up the pit of your stomach and staying there, this welt...and the worst part of it all was that he understood, he knew where his father was coming from, couldn’t blame VI for adopting the saying, and VII had to overlook the feelings of betrayal that naturally stemmed from this realization that VI’s casual shirking of paternal endearment to which VII was so accustomed was actually completely justified, because VII knew that he was a fuckup and a huge disappointment and wholly unfit to bear the patrilineal first name upon which it was his duty and his alone to pass down to future generations, so that there may be a Calvin Markson VIII, IX, X, and so forth. And what was it I did which damned me so permanently in my father’s (my family’s) eyes? Calvin Markson VII thinks, a tautological question which he involuntarily revisits every so often (two-to-three times per waking hour). What was it I did...? and he remembers the sickly cloying thrill of the orgasm that had done it, he remembers Beth’s flushed face atop the pile of dirty leafblown clothes in his friend’s basement and pulling out of her one second too late and the way his glutinous jism spangled her pale skin and last he saw was smeared down the front of a rag, no, an old Astros jersey...and he remembers the acrid stench of the burnt foil’s contents seeping into his nose, his lungs, tracing a whitehot vein beneath his skin, February nights so cold in those concrete outdoors that his fingers froze together and his breath turned to ice in his nostrils, even when he was sitting crowded body-to-body on top of exhaust vents on the permadamp cardboard in that foreign city, and the building air wafted up to smother him, and disappeared in tufts of vapor, and carried him up to meet the purled sky... Run! Calvin turns, startled by the sudden voice at his shoulder. But, again, he finds that no one is there. The third lane is occupied by Luis Hernandez, who is trying to renew his registration. Helping him is Melvin Martin, forty-three, twice-divorced. Melvin has been working through a heavy brain fog all afternoon—he’s been haunted by this ‘fog’ almost daily for the past three weeks, and he’s fearing the worst, but at the same time he’s more or less resolved to accept whatever it is that’s causing what he assumes to be some sort of terminal illness, and to succumb unresisting to what he believes will be a prolonged and arduous death. It’s a strange and dialetheic conundrum, he ponders: because Melvin, quite naturally, fears death immensely, even this ridiculous and hypochondriacal and completely conjectural death stemming from the unknown and unconfirmed vector of his purportedly ‘terminal disease’ —and it will remain unconfirmed and undiagnosed, since he’s too afraid to even see any doctors about the issue—that, and think of the money, how much it would cost, although he has no children or family for whom the money would be otherwise saved, but—but it just sounds so depressing, like such a bummer, the idea of sitting wanly in an ill-fitting hospital gown on the doctor’s table, twiddling his thumbs while waiting for an injection, a diagnosis, a bill, some news, good or bad—this thought alone is enough to keep him from going. That, and he almost welcomes death, the idea of it, at least, comforted by the notion that maybe once death arrives it’ll be how they say—it’ll be painless, simple, effortless—you’re not to be harried anymore, by anything, you don’t exist, you’re just gone—no semantics, no politics, or—or all of that is wrong, and he’d be pitted against whatever the afterlife has to throw at him. He sees nothing about his life upon which he could be judged—nothing strictly damning nor redeeming. He’d lived a life of torpor and inaction, and only his failed relationships could be marked against him. But he doesn’t believe in the afterlife, not really. He doesn’t know what to believe, has never known his whole life. It could be that there’d be nothing after death, nothing but pure blackness—it could be that he’d wake up in heaven, or in hell, he doesn’t know, how could he know, and no research has ever truly helped him span the ideological dead space of his lukewarm agnosticism—not even his impending death could push him to form some sort of opinion. The truth is that the theory behind all that sorta shit (death, the afterlife, what life means, why we’re here) doesn’t interest him so much. To waste time on any of that just sounds very wistful and pathetic and uninteresting. The stuff he cares about is tangible—the stuff he cares about, there are winners and losers, and understanding can be columned into that simple binary—talking here about local sports: the Mariners, the Seahawks, the Krakens, the Trail Blazers. There are enough teams, enough overlapping seasons for him to keep himself occupied all year. And this year the Seahawks are kicking ass—they’re doing much better than anyone had given them credit for, and, with disdain, he even noted that a lot of fairweather fans were returning to the sport, local losers who wouldn’t know loyalty if it fucked them in the ass, and they were driving the ticket prices way, way up...but, the important thing was that the Seahawks were doing good, yeah...they might even go to the Super Bowl...hell, they might even win...and it’d be the first time since 2014... —don’t hog the chips, hun, bringum here... Sorry, hun...and he remembers looking over to see his second ex-wife with her outstretched hand extended toward him, reaching for the bowl, as on the 86” flatscreen Malcolm Smith intercepted the ball, sprinted a sixty-nine yard dash to the endzone, unfettered, uninterrupted, and then the bowl was upended by her careless arm’s flail as she exploded from the couch, and he heard her own small contribution to the throngs’ ululations, which blared at him from the 75 watt soundbar, Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod... And at just that time, on February 2, 2014, Luis Hernandez himself was watching this very game, in Morton Springs, South Carolina—but he doesn’t remember what happened—couldn’t tell you even now if the Seahawks had won, didn’t give a shit then, nor now, because to him the Seahawks weren’t a local team, not at the time, and again not now, still, not ever...but he does remember that night, remembers a collapsing blur on the pavement outside the bar where he’d watched the game—a fight! A fight in which he hadn’t taken part, but’d witnessed...he remembers an orange jersey (a Broncos fan) smeared with blood from a broken nose, two bouncers wrestling him to the ground as he shouted slurs...the memory ends there. But he can vaguely recall that on that night, during the walk home from the bar, he saw what his buddies called a will o’ the wisp, and it hadn’t just been a hallucination, because everyone saw it, unless they were all affected by some kinda mass delusion...hand in hand he walked with his old girlfriend back to his apartment, must’ve been 12 a.m., not late, but he was drunk, they all were...and behind him his friend Will was with his own girl, (or was it Omar...?) and they’d stopped streetside at Brighton Rd. and had looked out at the circumambient swamp and saw, in the dead quiet of that moribund night, these tendrils of green brightening the spaces between the willows, a whispery scrimglow refulgence which died at the ceiling of the trees’ upper limbs. And he remembers this light as clear as day. In their drunkenness they attempted to ford the bordering swamplands to reach that elusive green. He remembers a stupid grin plastered taut across his frozen face, remembers the smell of the turbid swampwater, the fetid malodor of decay wafting up at him even in the cold, his frozen legs pumping mechanically as he groped for the miasma. But he doesn’t remember being inside it, what it looked like up close, or what happened afterwards. Just the impulse to know it, as if standing inside it would afford him access to the secrets of its being. He thought of what men from the long past considered when they saw the stars and figured he was feeling something similar—this marvelment at the unknown—and his conclusion from then on was that it was good that there were things out there which could never truly be known—it was only right that some things never be sullied by the corrosive forces of knowledge... John Rawlings, sitting in the second row, ticket number 784, once held the distinct opinion that knowledge itself was unattainable. Obviously he didn’t really think that, because no one who’s ever said that really thinks it, but that was the position he held, mostly due to its novelty, and because he could argue the position relatively well, having familiarized himself with the work of some of the noteworthy logical positivists (for whom no axioms were sacred). Since one’s sensory perceptions are the medium through which we engage with the world...he remembers saying, some twenty years ago, to an undergrad he’d shared a Viscom class with who he’d been on-and-off fucking, as she stared up at him, doe-eyed, hanging on to his every word—blahblahblah never interact with the world, not truly...just an epistemological vacuum out there...and she’d started working at undoing his zipper at that point, and the conversation tapered off—that is what he remembers. What he doesn’t realize is that when he’d pontificated the way he had about radical skepticism, he was, in actuality, conversing with a completely different girl than the one he’d referred to in his memory, a girl he’d never so much as laid a finger on, although he tried to—he’d been hitting on her at a Halloween party when he was a sophomore in college—and the fellatio that had put an abrupt ending to his little lecture was completely and utterly fictionalized—but, obviously, that’s not how he remembers it. So in a way, he’s right about knowledge being completely unattainable, but not by the virtues of it being filtered through the medium of sensory perception. The perceiver himself, the man behind the wheel, is like a broken cup trying to hold water, and the water flows through its cracks and drains or is spilled until the vessel is emptied, and what’s left is the silt of one’s own dregs, and that is what one knows. The real girl, the one he’d been talking to, who he can’t actually remember, was staring very distinctly at the right half of his face while he spoke. He only noticed this because when he made eye contact with her she kept glancing over his right shoulder. He asked her if she was waiting for someone, or if he had something on his face, or something: No. Oh, sorry. It’s just—you keep looking— One of your eyes is much smaller than the other. Oh. He stopped, frowned. Really? Yes. It’s very apparent. Well, I’d never noticed. Are you high? Or drunk? You wouldn’t have to be, she said. I want you to go into the bathroom now and look into the mirror. You’ll see what I’m talking about. And she excused herself from the couch, brushing past him to head off somewhere deeper into the house, and she was lost in the throng’s tumult, and he didn’t pursue her but instead stared dumbfounded at the spot on the couch where she’d sat, and only when he returned to his dormitory later that night did he take her advice and scrutinize his lineaments in the bathroom mirror, with the door locked and the fan on, and look for whatever it was she was talking about. And he immediately realized that she wasn’t lying: his face was significantly asymmetrical. So how had he not noticed it before...? And, more importantly, what else have I not noticed, have I purposefully or subconsciously ignored...? And Ticket Number 803 knows about this, the misery of endless physical self-scrutiny. He is Alex LeGrande, a twenty-three year old ‘amateur endocrinologist’ who runs a semilegal SARMs shipping and transport operation through an online platform called AMINO HEAVEN. He’s sitting in the fourth row, occasionally trying to instigate an eye-contact situation with Ticket Number 792, a beautiful brunette with, hmm, if Alex has to guess, probably c-cups, or something like that, yeah... Alex was born blissfully unaware of the limits of his own genetic potential. He was never really conscious of his physical appearance until he was about fourteen, which is when he was forced to watch his friends grow like beansprouts while he stayed small, really small, at only five-foot-one. He watched as his classmates began to treat him differently—those who had respected him previously now looked down on him, no pun intended—and even if they denied it, he knew they weren’t taking him seriously because he was short and wholly unintimidating. Those middle-school weeknights were full of painstaking and torturous research, speculating aimlessly on internet forums where he asked, multiple times: If I’m 14, and my mom is 5’3”, and my dad is 5’11”, and my maternal grandfather is 5’7”, and my paternal grandfather is 6’1”, what are my odds of breaking 6 feet? —but he was largely ignored because of his age. No one had time to pay attention to the plaintive ramblings of a middle schooler. He did start reading a lot, though, and he learned—he learned that the only way he would ever have any chance at happiness was to commensurately offset his physical stature through money, physique, general looksmaxxing, et cetera. He learned that every man can, to some degree, enhance their own attractiveness, sometimes inexpensively and without surgery, simply by adjusting their facial posture, by maintaining a clear complexion, or by learning how to walk with confidence, how to command a room... He took his notes. He discovered, through implementing a well-researched program of rigorous weightlifting, that he had good proportions—the short man’s boon is that he is generally able to grow muscle quickly, due to having less frame to fill. He began to develop an eye for fashion, and spent a lot of his parents’ money furnishing a wardrobe that complemented his build. He began tinkering with peptides, ordering them through gray market distributors with his mom’s credit card, and by sixteen he’d developed a lifelong plan in which he would pharmacologically enhance and preserve himself in order to become the strongest, smartest, and best-looking Alex he could be. Then he turned seventeen and he found that all his worry was for naught. He experienced a belated growth spurt, and by the time he was a senior in high school he was five-foot-eleven and a half, which he conveniently rounded up to six feet—and no one would be able to tell the difference, anyway, because he wore shoes with expertly hidden lifts—and, now that he was neck-and-neck (literally) with the other males in his age group, he found that he was at an advantage in terms of his ‘sexual net worth,’ because for the past three years he had molded himself into the ideal Adonis, while the rest of his peer group was guilelessly enjoying their youth... And it was around then that he’d started hanging out with Maggie, one year younger than him, a sophomore—they took French together—sat next to each other in class, those seats arranged alphabetically, Alex LeGrande and Maggie Louis, stuck in the dead middle of the room, passing each other notes, copying each other’s work... And in the span of less than one second, a fraction of a fraction’s worth of time, a dozen images populate his mind—no—a hundred, a hundred images—doing homework with Maggie after school—petting her dog on the couch—smoking weed in the den—an epoch of his life which exists only in the inchoate haze of this bygone color—remembers watching as she cried on the edge of her bed while he was poised in her doorframe, his whole body tensed, one long muscle from head to toe, and he remembers...he remembers his shadow cast on her wall—from the light of the hallway his shadow was bent and splayed into her room as if it were some lurid predator, a projection of his own warped substrate, a demented negative which loomed over her, and she was trapped in it, darkened by it... And then the brunette with the c-cups catches his eye, and he snaps out of it. She smiles at him politely and he smiles back with two rows of aposematically fluorescent teeth, and he flashes his ticket. 803 here. What about you? She looks down at hers. 792. I’ll trade you, he says, grinning. She laughs. Yeah, no thanks. I’ve been here about an hour already. He sucks air through his teeth, suddenly looking ponderous. You look familiar. Do I know you from somewhere? She frowns, shakes her head: I—I don’t think so. I’m Alex, he says, reaching across the aisle to proffer his hand. She shakes it, her smile fading to a half-smile as if apprehensive. I’m Jill, she says. She’s Jill Thomasson, a nuclear engineering student at the University of Central Washington, and she’s trying to rack her brain for where she’s met Alex before, because he does look familiar. But she can’t place him anywhere...not really, at least...when she thinks about where she’s seen him, all she can muster are vague comparisons to people he kind of resembles... I don’t know if we’ve met before, is what she says after thinking about it. You do look familiar, though. Maybe that’s why she’d been looking at him in the first place. Although it could’ve been for any reason. She’s not particularly conscious of who she looks at, nor is she aware of what draws her eye. Admittedly, she’d been distracted when she glanced at him—not by him, not by anything in the room, even—she was lost in thought—she’d abandoned the school quarter midway through, returned home suddenly, showed up at her parents’ door trailing two suitcases, her heart trembling as she rang the bell, and she couldn’t meet their eyes when they exclaimed their delight at her sudden and unannounced presence, couldn’t listen to their reassurances as they told her It’s okay, it’s okay to take a break—you can’t have just about everything figured out, not so young—nuclear engineering is hard, maybe, maybe it’s not for everyone—but that wasn’t it, she thinks...her heart’s just not in it anymore. Her heart hasn’t been in it for a while. Not since— That’s wrong, Kaitlyn says sharply, just loud enough to alert the surrounding customers of her rising irritation. That’s incorrect—c’mon— And as if a switch flips, she steps back in apparent horror of her public display of effrontery, and she takes a deep breath, calms down, and then smiles reassuringly at an alarmed Su-Yen. I’m sorry, Su-Yen says, bowing her head in apology. Kaitlyn feels a wave of awful guilt rushing through her, and, looking around, she notices the other customers staring at her—her cheeks darken with embarrassment. No, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, that was so rude of me. My English is not so good. Here. You can check all your information. Su-Yen turns the screen towards Kaitlyn, who squints at it through the sneezeguard. Su-Yen looks at Kaitlyn and sees, somehow, her older sister. Despite the fact that Kaitlyn looks nothing like Feng and doesn’t speak the same language nor share the same culture, something about Kaitlyn’s deportment, the way she moves, and other affects which Su-Yen can’t place, doesn’t have the words to, in English or Chinese, reminds her of Feng. Or maybe she’s just looking for an excuse to think of Feng. Maybe the two women had nothing in common at all. Su-Yen studies Kaitlyn as she bites her lip, squinting to read the screen through the Windex-mottled plexiglass. Feng would be thirty-five next month—Su-Yen herself was thirty-two. When they’d grown up, Su-Yen had always looked up to her older sister, but at some point, when their age difference had grown almost negligible, Su-Yen realized that she was the more mature of the two of them. Feng was brash, loud, sincere to a fault—then, as she had gotten older, she’d grown more sullen, wary, recalcitrant, and in their early twenties Feng had floundered while Su-Yen resolved to attend a secretarial school and eventually became an accountant. Then Su-Yen met Qing Xilong and fell in love, and then he had gotten a job offer to work for an American tech company. And so now she is here, while her sister is over five thousand miles away. 中国就没有好工作吗? she asked her husband once. 我们很快就会回去, he said, as he always said. 我不明白你为什么这么恨美国 。 我们在这里谁也不认识，也没有亲人。 我不想在这里组建家庭。 为什么不呢?我们会变得富有。 为了财富而终生生活在自己憎恨的国家值得吗? He scoffed. 这就是为什么男人是家长， 女人待在家里的原因。你不知道什么才是最好的。没关 系，我明白。你现在不必高兴， 但很快就会高兴起来， 因为你很快就能买到所有想要的东 西。 只有在这里才有这样的机会， 别的地方没有， 只有这里。 做决定就交给我吧。 或许我会独自离开。 或许有一天， 你醒来发现我已经消失了。 He shook with a short and nervous peal of laughter. Then he advanced quickly across the room—instinctually, she brought her hands up to protect her face so that his first slap was ineffective—she only felt a sting and then a sharp throbbing on the back of her hands—but, upon realizing this, he laughed again, and kicked her as hard as he could in her left shin, and she buckled to the floor. 你说什么? Ah? 你说什么? This all looks right, Kaitlyn says, reciprocating Su-Yen’s apologetic little bow. I’m sorry, again. I’m sorry. It is okay, Su Yen says. I know my English is not very good. I like your ear rings. They are very cute. She motions to a pair of birds hanging from Kaitlyn’s lobes. Oh, these? Kaitlyn smiles. Something in her softens, and Su-Yen can tell that the smile is genuine. Real gold? she asks. Kaitlyn nods. And enamel. One is a raven. The other is a dove. She still remembers his words when he’d given them to her: The raven was the first animal to depart from Noah’s Ark. It wandered around the barren and flooded world and never returned. So then Noah sent out the dove, and the dove would search for land, and when it found none it would return to the ark. One day it finally came back with an olive sprig. He showed her the dove pin. There was a small spangle of green affixed in its beak. They’re very nice, she said. They’re beautiful—wow, they’re really beautiful, thank you— So you like them? Of course—he had green eyes and a wide smile and his expression was heavy with anticipation. She had known him to be impulsive, larger than life, and he was often prone to symbolic gestures he only nebulously understood. She thought it prudent to acknowledge that such details as the dove and the raven were wrought with symbolism, and their inclusion in the story of The Flood must carry some import— What does that story mean, do you think? Oh, I dunno—I think—he screwed up his face—I guess I just think that, uh—the raven is, like, sin—and the dove, the dove is, uh, purity—so the purity returns...and the sin—I guess that would mean the sinner— Life is slow accrual, and then tremendous loss. It is the gathering of a sprig after the world has been buried beneath you. It is the endless wandering of the carrion-feeder in the aftermath of all this uncontrollable entropy... That night he fucked her as if he were devouring her. She held her chest to prevent its heaving, and so he had to close her absence elsewhere, around her sides, around her neck, his forearms braced around her head, his tongue searching for purchase anywhere she would allow it, his teeth closing over the corners of her again, again and again— I like them too, she says. Thank you. VII knows a fake thank you when he hears one, can’t help but turn to look at Su-Yen and the girl, the fuckable one, one of maybe five fuckable people in the building, he thinks, because what kinda man would he be if he wasn’t keeping tabs... Calvin! He jumps, he looks up, behind him, above him—John Matthew Henderson frowns— Y’alright? I’m fine, Calvin says, says too quickly—can’t stop and ask, ‘Is that you?’, can’t be like: ‘Who is that?’, as that’d give him away as a kook—as a crazy man. Which maybe, honestly, maybe he is, maybe that’s what it’s come to, at this point sitting with her legs dangling idly, lustrous legs, kicking her sandals out into the grass, and he followed her legs with his eyes, up and up, a slow ascent from legs to hips to halfexposed stomach, that nice trim stomach, pert breasts, eyes lingering, naked shoulders, a long neck, then past her auburn hair, and the search ensued for her face—but he couldn’t see her face, she was too far away—she was looking out—out at what—? can’t remember, but out somewhere—he knew he loved her then, as his gaze traveled up past her to the sparse plumage of the Ironwood, he knew it’d already happened—he had no say about it—as if from the cockled sky a bolt had traveled down to strike him right then right there, born from the thin plastic haze of that wildfire summer, shitsmelling smoke and misery and heat in that dust, right there— A frown. We’ll have you finished in just a sec, Calvin assures Henderson, who can’t help but notice the involuntary twitching of Calvin’s right eye. You’re all good, Henderson says quickly, but his stomach growls in disagreement—a familiar feeling—he’s reminded of the last time he’d gone hungry—actually hungry—real hunger is when your body flagellates itself, a burning gastric pain and a hollowness in your bones that empties you of all impulse, that winds up some clock in the back of you, a quiet and desperate countdown— When he’d sparred at Rolling Rock they would weigh him just beforehand to ensure he had no unfair advantage over the fighter in camp—the expectation was that he was within five pounds of the fighter come sparring day, and if he weighed an ounce heavier, well, he could kick rocks—and so he would jump rope in a sauna suit for two hours before sparring, sweat up to a gallon of water in order to make the scales. For no audience, with no corner, he fought twice a week, six rounds apiece, twelve dollars a round. Henderson would listen as his uncle Efraim would shout at his fighters, Kill him, kill the fucker, rape that fucker into the dirt. No eyes were on him—he was just a whetstone. He wore sixteen ounce gloves while his opponents wore twelve or eight. He had no ref to count him out if he was dropped or knocked out or fouled or defenseless on the ground. He was his own keeper, and he fought through injuries on account of his pride. To this day he only remembers half of it. But he does remember the agony of his self-inflicted starvation, remembers the vaguely disappointed look on Efraim’s face as he was dropped atop the bloodsoaked canvas, his vantage suddenly all floor (or all ceiling, depending on the blow inflicted, staring up at a ceiling fan spinning in some distant and conjectural atmosphere whose air was not his to breathe)—and when faced so intimately with the canvas he was all but forced to confront its surfeit of stains, the purpuric face of the material so mottled with this excess of spilt blood that looking at it it almost didn’t make sense, this putrefied bunting spread drum-tight over three-hundred-twenty square feet, dark fluid pooled and long dried and faded and imbrued into the thumping fabric, the bassy clamor of his opponent’s footsteps on the wooden floorboards beneath him drumming a seismic rhythm into his spinning world, a world whose axis was Efraim’s downturned eyes— Get up, get up, c’mon— —remembers feeling pain when he breathed, a clicking rib clutched by a low lead hand, weight on the back leg, a smashed nose through the facesaver, a thin strip of vision afforded by the headgear, a pause in the action as the opponent and the circumjacent spectators waited to see if he was game, if he wanted to continue... Calvin waits for the payment software to load while digging into the meat of his palm with a ballpoint pen. Not that it mattered but it wasn’t him who’d killed her. He’d only gotten her pregnant. She was older than him by five-some years. Six years. No—four years. How could he have forgotten? And, he thinks, a quiet thought that flits through the conscience so surreptitiously there is no way it could’ve been voluntary, and, the baby woulda come out fucked up—with all the drinking and the drugs, it woulda come out fucked up anyhow...so maybe it’s for the best—but of course: No, don’t think that, don’t go there! He feels a little pang of guilt, just a little—the thought was anything but novel, it was well-worn, like a pair of old sneakers—whatcha gonna do. What could you have done. Maybe— —stepped in and gotten her some help— —taken my dad’s advice— Or, or we could’ve never moved to Portland—if we hanta moved to Portland, nunna it woulda happened the way it did— Can see her now, the way she was, the blurry distorted fucked-up way he remembers her, at least, which is the way she always was—not aged a day, on the couch, with a little toddler running in circles around her, goo-goo and ga-gaing—smiling up at him, sun streaming through the blinds, coulda all been different— Well, but no. Because you learn after wresting yourself from the throes of addiction that you’ll always have to parse the fictive from the real, your brain having been addled so much it gets hard to know what’s what. You can smell what’s real, you can see it, it’s in front of you right now, the Oracle transaction portal loading on the screen, the pellucid plastic through which Henderson appears like a luminous specter, suffused with the reflection of the fluorescents like some kinda gloomy, hulking angel— There. In the sneezeguard there for one second he sees the face of his father—and he blinks squints and no it’s there, VII can see him. In the reflection, calling to him from out of the glass itself, his old man. Run! What... ...is that? Jill says, gesturing vaguely towards Alex’s hands—he flourishes an adjustable grip trainer, squeezes it shut while his arm is proffered, allowing her eyes to feast upon his hard-earned striations, his forearm cabled in flexion. It’s a little grip thingy, Alex says. Oh. So you’re like a ‘workout guy,’ she says, rabbit-earing some air quotes. I work out, yeah, Alex says, and he shrugs. But I don’t know if I’m a ‘workout guy.’ I’ve been doing it too long, now, so long...going on ten years, now, and I’ve been working out almost every day. How old are you? Twenty-four. You? Twenty-one. I’m getting my license today. Alex smiles, a molten crescent of bleached teeth. His eyes widen when he smiles and he raises his face such that his eyes are tilted back, therefore lengthening the lower half of his jaw (where the ‘smile’ is physically located) to make his bared grin appear larger and thus more congratulatory. He’d rehearsed this smile in the mirror dozens of times, and in person it appears flawless and unaffected. Hey, good for you, that’s great. Congratulations. Thank you. Yeah, it’s lame. I shoulda been driving this whole time. There was nothing stopping me. But I’m weird about cars. Weird about cars—aren’t you going to be some sorta nuclear engineer? She laughs. That’s different. So you’re afraid of cars, but not nuclear reactors? I guess it doesn’t really make sense, when you put it that way. (No, not really, Alex thinks to himself—not really it doesn’t, you dumb bitch—) She was smart, but all women are stupid. At this point Alex had slept with smart women, dumb women, dumb women who pretended they were smart, smart women who pretended they were dumb—he’d seen them all, and yet his approach remained unchanged. He used to agonize over game theory when he was younger, but as he got older his successes had taught him not to overthink anything—women can smell it when you’re overthinking them, and it registers as disgusting—and so he stopped caring. If there is some universality to the methodology he practices, he is only vaguely aware of it. So much lies locked in that interminable stream of sensory minutiae which must be parsed second-by-second—so much of his hunt is rooted in instinct, in his gut, or rather, sifted by some intangible set of libidinal antennae which seem to scry the answers to his problems outta thin air, moment-by-moment... He thinks I don’t know, but I do, from across the row. Because she’s met a million Alexes. They’ve existed in her life for as long as she can remember. Ne’er-do-well scavengers with the scent of meat stogging their nostrils, chops dripping with saliva, panting a fetid breath— The way you quaver when I touch you...don’t you know I’d kill myself for you baby I’d kill myself if you wanted— —estly people are idiosyncratic, she says. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about people, it’s that they don’t make sense. I guess I’m not above realizing that about myself. Alex nods. He can appreciate that. I can appreciate that. But I am—I am afraid of nuclear reactors, though. I’m afraid of everything. The more I learn, the less I feel that I know and the more afraid I get. Some people it’s the opposite. Knowledge, to them, feels empowering—but not me. She smiles a shy smile. Sorry. Was that too, like—I don’t know, serious? He shakes his head. Not at all, no. I’d never thought about it like that. You’re right. There’s two types of people. You know what I’m talking about? I do. He imagines her naked. There’s always something about them naked, always some incongruity that does not quite square with the mind’s portrayal—and she can see his eyes glint as for a second his perception falters, and she smiles to herself, almost imperceptibly, which brings him back into the fold. So what brings you here today, then? she asks. Oh, me? I’m just getting my car registered. Ah, she says, nodding, glancing out the window, her eyes suddenly catching, and she gestures: renewing a registration on that ‘96 Civic out there, very nice, good for you— He laughs, an affable laughter darkened by an affected masculine baritone. In one silken movement so fluid it must have been rehearsed, he brandishes a keyfob, making sure his thumb isn’t obscuring the Mercedes logo— A new Benz-SL. Just drove it in from the dealer in Bellevue. She almost rolls her eyes. Wow. Okay. (There’s that smile again, she thinks. Like hi-beams...) What’s that? You’d made some uncouth assumptions about me which turned out to be untrue? Are you a tech worker, or something? I’m a pharmacologist, he says. It’s how he introduces himself, even though it’s only half-true. His real pharmacological chops were bred and honed on internet forums, outside of the rigors of academia, with its glacially slow bureaucratic processes of trial and consensus—no, his was a messy, gray world of anonymity, of illicitly obtained solvents and vials and esters and syringes, blood tests and ng/dLs, testosterone, dihydrogenous testosterone, estrogen, estrogen aromatizers, a world wherein one can shape their physique like so much unworked clay, where every man scrapes blindly through the vast darkness of misinformation (or non-information, or vague information, or the conflicting results of multiple case studies) to search for that rich vein of truth, which must exist out there—a universal truth, the alkahest!— —that rounded esker of undulating altostratus, clouds in serried wales, zebra stripes through the square of window, jaundiced moon. The taste of her, had, suddenly sour... Ahugh...Ahau... Why are you doing that? Why are you—why the fuck are you crying about, why what the fuck do you have to cry about? Stop crying... A body shaped like a C in that old too-small bed. She sat upright, slowly, and her form was twinned in the far of the room, lessened in the mirror—his eyes were drawn past her and to the man at the foot of her bed, his shrinking cock drying against his legs, his unrecognizable expression of anger, which only scared him, made him angrier— Stop crying— I’m not even— Why are you crying? What’s—what’s wrong, because of me? Because it was with me? Why, I’m not good enough? Your— No— —then— It’s— —say it, what, what the fuck’s the matter? It’s not that—I mean—I don’t know— You didn’t want to? Don’t—don’t tell me that—oh, come the fuck on— I don’t—and the rest of the statement was unintelligible, unable to be figured due to a fit of coughing, of sobs, another lapse into confused tears through which he could not speak to reach her, and no matter what it was he said, whether he pleaded or vituperated, it only served to make her cry harder... —alkahest...sorry, at the behest of the, um, client, he says, gritting his teeth. Usually old people? Like, for, uh, testosterone clinics, that’s for older guys, right? Yeah, he says. Usually. Well. Depending on what you consider old. A lot of guys start treatment in their early thirties. That’s old, she says. So, he says, quick to change the subject, what’s, uh, how’s working with nuclear reactors—what’s that like? Oh—well, I guess it’s alright. I don’t really work with them. I’ve stood under-instructs as a reactor operator for the little two-megawatt reactor they’ve got at the University, but that’s not, that’s not real work, not at all... She scratches her neck, frowns. I think I’m gonna take some time off, though. I’m thinking about switching majors. Oh yeah? Why? You tried it and didn’t like it? I don’t know, she says. No, I don’t think that’s quite it. I don’t know, it’s complicated. (A guy, Alex thinks.) A guy? She laughs. (Oh, pretty laugh—) —and in the bathroom, Peter Panopoulos orgasms into the humid warmth of his own cupped palms, breath leaking through clenched teeth. He could recognize her laugh anywhere. Then, an aspiration so loud it snuffs the distant din beyond the walls, only to be interrupted— —a knock— You almost finished in there? Peter grimaces, doesn’t bother responding. He stands, waddles from the toilet to the sink with his drawers still bunched about his ankles, and then washes his hands. He trusses up his pants and fiddles with his belt and then places his backpack on the Koala changing station and opens it up and produces his supplies: a 1 gallon bottle of distilled water, a 2 liter Pyrex cylinder, a stirring rod, a vial of milky pink solution, and a bowl-shaped container which looks like it’s made of stone. His father had gifted him the original fifty-seven grams of Pu-239 before he passed away. Peter had never asked him how it was acquired, but could only guess it’d nucleated from the same compulsions which compelled him to produce his own little stockpile—like father, like son, as they say, the apple shan’t fall too far from the tree, no, certainly not—the thought simultaneously disgusts him, comforts him—no, it was almost definitely illicitly obtained through backroom dealings from when his father had been a regulatory commission inspector, or, Peter thinks, maybe before, when his father had not been some boilerplate quality-assurance enforcer but rather a true physicist, working for HERA in underground laboratories outside Zagreb, long before he’d moved to the United States—but who can say. In any case, it didn’t matter. The rest of the twenty-three grams Peter had bred himself—when he was promoted to senior shift supervisor at UCW-TRIGA-1 he had developed a plan to enrich what paucity of fuel precursors he had available to him, surplus industrial radiography shielding which had been smelted down into pellets. He had subjected this relatively benign (and easily obtainable) U-238 to a neutron flux using a hidden annex within a retired pneumatic rabbit tube system inside the 2MW TRIGA reactor where he worked as both shift supervisor and as an Advanced Reactor Physics professor. The neutrons were thermalized by the water, which comprised the entirety of the shielded volume—the reactor was submerged. He approximated the average flux density to be about 2.764x10¹³ n/cm²/s given standard operating power levels. Fortune was on his side: the reactor often operated for long periods at high power, as the university had agreed to burn EFPH in order to test plant control software for Lapland-Sykes. He figured that he would be able to mature the requisite mass of plutonium in about ten years, give or take, depending on how things panned out. The goal was to transuranically permute the effectively stable isotope of U-238 into a fissile isotope of Plutonium, as such: ²³⁸₉₂U + ¹₀n → ²³⁹₉₂U (t₁/₂ 23.5 minutes) → ²³⁹₉₃Np (t₁/₂ 2.4 days) + 𝛽- → ²³⁹₉₄Pu + 𝛽- and ²³⁹₉₄Pu + 2n → ²⁴¹₉₄Pu The hard part would then be extracting the plutonium from the core prior to its refueling, but he’d planned for this as well—he was the only member of the staff authorized to perform initial entry of the reactor housing substructure after regularly scheduled shutdowns and system drains. Upon draining the system, the room would be posted as a Potential High Contamination Area, and only a limited number of workers were authorized to enter after his initial entry surveys were performed. There were no cameras in there, and he managed to avoid frisking hot on the geiger counters by placing the product fuel in a lead-enclosed container which he’d also furnished from his father’s surplus. Using a self-constructed glovebag he’d made in his garage and a vent system comprised of old fume hood equipment he’d bought at an auction, he endeavored to dissolve the product fuel in 6 M nitric acid before treating it with a tributyl phosphate solvent. Then he reduced the plutonium nitrate with hydrazine to achieve a considerable recovery yield—ostensibly less pure and more contaminated than what was hypothetically feasible if he had everything he wanted, sure...but it was still sufficient for his means... He takes a deep breath. She laughs again at something he can’t hear. Mm, he says, imperceptibly quiet. Thinking back: big, inquisitive eyes, that flash of dark hair—shimmery under those heavy stadium lights outside the orientation center, where he’d given his introductory lecture—he’d stayed back for questions, but no one approached him, as almost no one ever did...he thumbed listlessly through his dogeared copy of Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics and waited the required fifteen minutes before heading out into the autumn dark, bracing for a slow trudge to his car, a slow drive back to his small home on the outskirts of Chehalis, where a few microwaveable burritos and a bottle of Pinot Grigio were no doubt waiting for him... Professor? Professor Peter Panopoulos? Hm, without looking back. Like Peter Pan? No. Not like that at all. Then he turned to face her and was caught in the refulgence of hair, eyes, shimmer, lights... Oh. Hello. Sorry to bother you. Not at all, not at all...uh here uh, here, here’s my hand. And what’s your name? Jill. Thomasson. It’s nice to meet you. Oh, well...removed his glasses, blinked. What can I help you with? I just, I had, well I think I signed up for your ARP-401 here, and I had some questions about the plant... ...feels himself almost getting hard again, the tears welling up a little... No but look at this, his father’d said, there in the garage producing that little knob of raw ore he kept atop the Craftsman—looks like, looks like nothing, yes. Mmm? Looks like— It looks like a regular rock, daddy... His father marveled at it, held it at arm’s length, sacerdotally...This power, power inherent to the Earth...did you know that deep down, low beneath the soil, a very long time ago, there were fission reactors, yes... How could this be, how could this fantastic thing be...but, there it was, no questioning it. We have the evidence in the isotopes which still prevail in the soil there. Two billion years ago, in Africa, there in the ground they had water, seepage, runoff...which moderated the source neutrons produced from the errant spontaneous fissions of Uranium Two Three Five...you understand? Then what do you think happened. I guess...he remembers making a show of pursing his lips, furrowing his brow to indicate the expenditure of mental effort: I suppose daddy that with sufficient mass and geometry, the raw fuel could go critical—which would heat the water—whose negative temperature coefficient and subsequent flashing to steam would slow the reaction— Good—smart— An approving nod bolstered Peter’s zeal, incited a juvenile question: Wouldn’t that make the Earth a type of star, then? What? What are you saying? Like, the sun, the sun is a nuclear reactor— Peter. What kind of reaction occurs inside the Sun? Explain, now—explain yourself— Well, I don’t know— Idiot boy. No sooner you open your mouth with good knowledge than you prove yourself a fool with your next utterance. The sun is a what type of reactor, do you think. Do not just stand there, I want thought. Binding energy per nucleon. You remember the graph? He remembers the graph—could reproduce it in his sleep, that simple graph, that steep, unmountable cliff, that gradual plateau... She had wanted the sun. She had wanted out of him what proved to be unachievable outside of the cold sterility of laboratory tests, even after he had told her, yes, fission is the only commercially viable enterprise, fusion is a fool’s errand, a dead dream, always fifty years away, always on some distant horizon...we must mind the facts, he said, mentioning the promising results yielded by recent efforts with molten chloride, salt reactors which never melted down, high thermal efficiency gallium cooled fast reactors, superfissile breeder reactors which produced more fuel than they spent—we are stewards, he said, only capable of so much—and now this—and now she’d left— —a mark on your record, Melvin Martin says, frowning at the screen over his blue-light glasses. What? Luis almost snorts, awakening from a trance... Yeah, looks like, says here you have some outstanding dues on a few parking tickets. No, I—what? No—no way... Have you moved a lot over the past few years? Well, yeah, but—that’s, that can’t be, something’s—I always pay off my parking tickets— This was malicious work, no doubt...this was deliberate sabotage by one of his enemies. He reels through a list of possible suspects...coulda been John, May, Santiago, Daniel, Marylou, or Marylou’s new boyfriend...coulda taken it right off his windshield, that’s all that would’ve been required in order to effect this debt, its slow accrual no doubt burning a hole through his already damaged credit, which was the impetus of his constant movement, surfing Craigslist ads to jump from roommate to roommate, sometimes even living out of his car, if he had to... How much? It says here two forty-nine, seventy-one. I don’t just have that shit on me, Luis says, bristling. I don’t have no two forty-nine seventy-one...I barely got enough for this shit, which, by the way, I don’t believe in, lemme see that, that it could cost a hundred-nine dollars to renew a mother fucking registration, jeezus... Sir—sir, Melvin says, used to stuff like this—it’s not a big deal—we can set you up on a payment plan, you know—this is a current address you gave me, right? I don’t want no fuckin payment plan—yeah, that’s a current address, Luis says, licking a thumb, leafing through his wallet, recounting a stack of thrice-counted bills—I pay in cash, I only pay in cash... This variety of delusive paranoia had germinated out of a night some three or so years ago, long after the will o’the wisp, wherein he’d encountered the work of the curse which had been cast upon him. He’d been smoking weed and was playing Diablo III when suddenly there’d been a crash from his bedside window, loud enough to hear through the game’s maelstrom of violence, and he took his headphones off tentatively—then he jumped, stunned...another crash! What the fuck— And he’d gone to the window to investigate, unshuttering the blinds only to be met with a projectile borne of the night itself, a sheen of black velocity come trouncing against the pane, pane bending, glass thrumming in its muntins, and all he could register was a marbled eye and the withdrawal of a glossy beak as the crow slumped into the underbrush— What the fuck! He grabbed his coat and slipped on his shoes and went outside to investigate, heard the commotion of the dying birds before he saw them. They laid squawking and twitching in the verdure outside the window, their broken wings sending them wobbling like tops in nutation, collapsing, rising, collapsing again— He stood staring in frozen terror at the spectacle before squinting up into the violet sky to discern what was legible in the neighboring streetlight’s cone of luminescence—whether any shapes could be picked from the gloam, if any birds were silhouetted atop the telephone wire, some clue as to the behavior of these here suicidal crows— Julien! Get down here, bro! But by the time Julien came, Luis was already back in the house, bolting the door shut, jamming an eye against the peephole, and when Julien asked what the hell’s going on he was greeted with an emphatic shushing, Luis’s frenzied whites alerting Julien to the severity of whatever was occurring— Should I grab my gun? Julien stuttered. He was always looking for an excuse to get that fucking gun of his, Luis recalls... I dun give a shit...just shut the fuck up, yeah, keep it down, yeah— What the hell is it? It’s just a—dude, there’s a—there’s a person out there— I’m getting my gun, Julien said, running back up the stairs, leaving Luis to confront this specter alone—and he turned back to the peephole, lined up his eye to the bead, only to find that whatever distortion he’d seen had already disappeared, was gone! Then he heard the sound of a magazine being rammed home, a forward assist ratcheting the slide in place— Where is he? He’s gone, he’s gone, I lost him— And Julien flicked the blinds with the barrel of the gun, peering through... What am I supposed to be lookin at? Luis explained about the birds and the figure. What the fuck? Yeah. Yeah I see what you’re...yeah, that’s all fucked up. You see them deadass birds? I do. So I’m not crazy, then. Didn’t say that, did I? Wait, lookit that, lookit that... I see it! Across the street, in an empty and forested lot, some red bunting streamed from the darkness of the trees, a crimson ribbon like a serpent’s tongue billowing in the distance, bedded in a faint blue light... I see the fucking shit too... Three crows, bro...like, it’s mocking the trinity... Yeah... Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven...give us this day our...daily bread, and forgive us from evil, that we may forgive those who have done...that we forgive those who trespass against us...and deliver us...shit, do you remember this fuckin shit? You’re high...what the fuck is that? Go out and see. You got a gun. Tchh, fuck no. The shape retreated into the foliage, its withdrawal into darkness seeming to bleed the night of its already scant color, the sky’s vibrancy fading back to tones of hushed violet, the lamplight reduced to its ochres... A curse...we’re cursed... I dunno bout we, there, man...that was, that was your window those birds came after... Maybe it was this same curse which had cast his life into ruin, he thinks, thinks again. Whoever recruited the labor of this malevolent spirit had ensured he would be on the run, a child of Cain...and every night since, he had horrible dreams, dreamt of red ribbons, of blue glows—and the dreams would only subside when he would commit to moving, when he would scatter, which is why he moved so frequently, his life reduced to this constant upheaval... —dez. Mister Hernandez? Huh? Oh. Yes, yes— —can’t pay today, then I’m sorry but I’m gonna have to ask that you come back later— —dunneed to come back later, I can pay today, look, lookit right there there’s an ATM right just over there across the way—listen, lemme go just withdraw sumthin and I can be right back over here less than five minutes, less than two— —afraid that’s not going to—look, we have a lot of people still waiting, and we close in about an hour, here— —less than two, here, let me leave this here as collateral, unbuckling the clasp of a Seiko, letting the watchface clatter to the laminate on the counter to rest against a REAL ID brochure flattened beneath in a triptych’s sprawl—less’n two— —Mister Hernandez! —and if you fuck me on this, Luis hisses, baring a set of yellowing teeth, I will personally fuck you in your ass, you got that? I ain’t waiting in that line again, not till next year—and sure as fuck not comin back tomorrow, either, get outta here with that dumbass shit— —is that a threat? Are you threatening— But Hernandez is already halfway out the door, and before he’s even reached it the NOW SEEING sign illuminates 784, and an accompanying bell rings, and Rawlings pushes himself out of his seat. Melvin Martin raises his eyebrows at him, and Rawlings reciprocates— Got an unhappy fella there, huh? Not the first time, won’t be the last...what can I do ya for...? Left his watch, here... Oh, just, here, I’ll take it, Martin says, indicating for Rawlings to push it through the slit at the bottom of the window—nice watch, dude doesn’t have money on him but’s got a nice old watch like this... It’s a Seiko, it’s nothing special, Rawlings says, making sure his Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra’s mossy sunbrushed dial is poking unostentatiously from the mouth of a rounded cuff— —purchased, of course, because of its association with Daniel Craig’s Bond—a series of films which, up until his mid-thirties, Rawlings had ignored, until he’d woken up one day and stared into the mirror and wondered what happened to the young man who’d once been there to stare back at him—and in an attempt to regain some of his joie de vivre, he turned to the silver screen for inspiration. Craig only wore the Aqua Terra in a handful of scenes throughout his tenure as 007, and not in the colorway Rawlings had purchased (because the green-dialed model was on sale for thirty percent off retail price a few Black Fridays ago), but the association was still there, however nebulous—as if, Rawlings thinks, as if I’m asking for some sort of approval to wear a watch—like I need to know it was Bond’s, in order to know that it’s cool, like, why can’t I just like things for what they are, but, no, it’s about what other people think—wait, but no, I am a tastemaker—it’s different enough from the Planet Ocean and the 300M models, so I’m not a copycat—it’s got a green dial, a beautiful mossy green, yuhhuh—and at least I’m wearing a watch at all—and a quick glance around the room is sufficient to note a bevy of unclad wrists, except for the gentleman being seen by the clerk adjacent to his own, a big, burly guy in dirty tradesman’s overalls wearing a beat-up G-Shock— —a gift, a gift for you, John Matthew Henderson’s wife’d said—so you’ll always know when to come home—so you’ll never be late to dinner— Aww, well, you shouldn’tve, Marie, shouldn’ta done all that— —it didn’t cost much, c’mon, it was only about fifty bucks—live a little! —and Rawlings has to do his best not to smirk. I’m just here to renew my license— Okay, yessir. You want the REAL ID? I dunno what that is. Lookee here, and Martin taps at the laminate to indicate the brochure that Hernandez’s watch had been obscuring. You’re gonna need one if you want to fly or leave the country at all, pretty soon... Martin thinks of the last time he’d left the country himself—hell, the last time he’d been on vacation, even—which, come to think of it, what it musta been five years, at this point—after the second wife’d left, there was no reason to spend the money... And Maui—the sound of waves in the darkness, a shape rising on the bed—a sunburn’s aloe vera’d hurt cooling in the screendoor’s breeze—Sun coming up soon, get over here if you want to see it—and the mass of sheets agglomerated round her figure as she waded o’er nacreous tile to stand beside him and throw the sheets round his shoulders, burdening him with this excess of drapery— You’re naked— —and then laughter, that sweet laughter of hers— As the insinuation of dawn glowed on the horizon’s edge, peeling the moon outta sight, and the sun reared its head like an ember broken from the char, he laid her down on the cold tile and had her there, and as the day brightened his sight dimmed commensurately, still there on the floor, her with him, like clothes left out to dry— What sorta fees are we talking? Is it, like, an extra— It’s all just right there on the brochure. Martin cradles the bridge of his nose between two fingers, pinching at the beginnings of another migraine. Look, buddy, I’m just asking the question—you’re the one behind the counter, what, you don’t know how much it costs? Depends on if you’re getting six-year or eight-year renewals, look it says right there—doesn’t matter, if you don’t have proof of US Citizenship on your person then I can’t issue one anyway... Well, shit. I don’t wanna have to come back here...how’s a, how’s a passport card? Got one of these, had a job as a commissioning engineer a few years ago, used to have to fly all over the country—this’ll do, right? The square of plastic clatters in the pass-through slot and Martin reaches for it, still cradling his nose, glances at it, and passes it back. This is expired. What? It expired in March of last year. No, that can’t—Rawlings paws at it, squints to verify the expiration date. What, you can’t use it if it’s expired? That tends to be how expiration dates work. Next! Martin rings the bell, and the number on the display advances 785— Wait! Wait, no, I’m not finished here, what the fuck? Did you just, And the sound of their raised voices cause Su-Yen and Kaitlyn to peer over the partitions which separate the clerk stands. Kaitlyn raises her eyebrows, frowns. Yikes. Everyone’s in a bad mood today, huh? Su-Yen smiles. We are almost done, Su-Yen says. I will try and get you out of here very quick, now. No worries. Kaitlyn rocks back and forth on her heels. Su-Yen clears her throat. If it is not too personal for me to say to you, she says, you remind me of my sister. Kaitlyn doesn’t know what to say. Just the way you move your face. Expressions. Small things. I don’t know. You remind me of her. Is she—Kaitlyn wants to ask if her sister is in the United States, but then freezes when she thinks of whether the question could be considered racist—Su-Yen misinterprets her hesitancy, smiles reassuringly. She is alive. She is thirty-five. Three years older than me. You’re thirty-two? Oh, you look so much younger—oh, but I guess, I’m sorry if that’s rude— Thank you, Su-Yen says. Why sorry? It’s okay. Don’t be sorry. Yes. My sister, she is in China now with her children. Children, family, husband. Haven’t seen her in a long time. I miss her a lot. Your total, here. You are paying with card? Thank you—yes, Kaitlyn says, grabbing for her purse. How could I remind her of her sister, she thinks. This must’ve been due to her being a foreigner in a strange land for too long. Kaitlyn couldn’t imagine going to China and seeing anyone who would remind her of a person stateside. No, more differences than similarities, she thinks— I met someone who reminded me of you, he’d told her—met someone I think you’d like, like a wound blooming which would be left to fester over the subsequent months, to stoically shoulder and surmount, or to bury— Oh? Yeahhuh. She’s, she works with me. Uh. At the coffee— No, at my other job. I also work at Albertsons. The deli counter. I remind you of a girl you work with at Albertsons. A little bit, he said, smiling lightly—what, are you, that’s not, sorry. I guess I maybe shouldn’tve brought it up— Are you going to fuck her? What? There was that smile again. Confused, not malicious, maybe malicious—she couldn’t tell, wasn’t sure how much she really knew him at all anymore— She put the cigarette out on a pair of jeans folded on her bed, flicked the butt on the ground. You coulda asked for the ashtray— I don’t, uh, I don’t care, she said. You should leave. Why? Because I—shit, are you mad about that? I just—just said she reminded me of you, what, that’s— This was a mistake. And she watched silently as he gathered his clothes and shucked his socks on one by one in his postcoital torpor and mumbled a stream of feeble and halfhearted apologies... Then she remembers following him down the stairs to the door, following him outside, into the January winter, into the snow. She looked up and could not discern some greater dimensionality to the sky beyond the streetlights’ illumination, as if the snow was generated from within their cones of effulgence and fell to earth shortly thereafter—and now she recalls the unreal pearly brightness of that night, the pendant moon across whose visage the clouds had scattered, the look of his eyes turned away from hers as she watched him through his rearview mirror, as his headlights bathed her driveway in halogen warmth, animating the shadows, which danced and fell— Are you okay? You look sad. Su-Yen proffers a receipt through the window. Kaitlyn pockets her card and smiles politely. No, I’m fine. I’m fine. I don’t need the receipt, thank you. My sister is a very strong person, Su-Yen says. I used to think when I was young that it was me who was strong. I come to the United States, come to a new country, learn a new language, do all this...but now that I am older I see it is her who is strong and not me. Life did not make her change. She is strong for that. Maybe that is what I see, I don’t know. Su-Yen rearranges a stapler on her desk, as if this small act of tidying would be sufficient to retract her personal admission. But...I do not mean to be so forward. Thank you, and have a good day... What? What? Oh? Did I upset you? Oh, no—I’m sorry—Kaitlyn grabs the paperwork, the renewal stickers, her head conspicuously downturned, face hidden behind bangs—she tries to ward the coming tears—just, you are a very strong person, just the naive way it was said to her, the puerile assumptive nature of this foreign woman, that she could assume anything about Kaitlyn at all, some quality which was visible or apparent to this stranger, through whatever warped lens she saw the world, was so bizarre, so unexpected— I’m sorry, I did not mean to upset you— It’s okay— Hey! Su-Yen looks up and sees Calvin’s client staring at her in indignation, the big man knocking indignantly on Calvin’s sneezeguard as if it were a door—and, turning further, she feels Calvin before she sees him, a vicegrip on her shoulder—his frantic eyes scattering all over her face, before mouthing, then yelling: RUN! We all gotta RUN! We gotta, we gotta get out of here! Silence in the room—for a second, everyone stares at him in confusion— Are you—are you okay, man? Martin asks him tentatively. The bathroom door opens slightly, a foot appearing in the jamb—VII shrieks— RUN! EVERYBODY OUT, EVERYBODY OUT! His grip tightens around Su-Yen, and she feels herself being lifted from her chair— 你在干什么, what are you— But she’s on her feet, Calvin dragging her through the mess of copiers, and she trips as she acquiesces to his pace, and all the while he shouts: RUN, RUN, RUN! GET OUT, EVERYBODY OUT— And then they themselves are out, bursting through the fire escape, the door alarm trilling, running onto the pavement, Su-Yen’s wailing protest disturbing a flock of crows— —which startles Luis, cowering beneath the birds in their gunshot arc as they pass over him, each bird croaking raucously, a chilling hullabaloo which makes him shiver, each beaded eye seeming to leer at him on its way to the featureless stratiform—and then the detente releases his ATM card, and he turns back to the screen— Have a Good Day! Fuckass birds, squinting in some vague recognition at the floor-to-ceiling glass of the DMV’s facade, thin line of bloodred paint running its length at knee-height, now where the fuck have I seen that before...eyes widening in latent recognition, then in self-doubt... ...so that must be it, Peter Panopoulos thinks, eyeing Alex as he makes his way to a seat in the back row, out of Jill’s sight. Alex, he reaches across the aisle, puts a comforting hand on Jill’s shoulder, like a knife in Peter’s heart, oh— And how do you deal with that? his father had asked him, standing over him in that horrible room, the fragments of the shattered ore blurry on the ground, looking up to see the old man looming before him, large sweating palms grasping at Peter’s head, turning it forcefully to stare at the garagefloor’s spalls— —save me, to no one, to a quiet hum of background CPM, a stray click sounding from the geiger counter in the monitoring room, where he had taught Jill how to shape average coolant temperature, had put his hand atop hers that first time to shim the rods in UCW-TRIGA-1, so symbolic an act—as everything relating to the shattering of an atom was symbolic—as everything in life is symbolic—the sexual connotations of ¹₀n → ²³⁵₉₂U, penetration, absorption, reflection, the ballooning of the pregnant atom, the reproduction of two constituently smaller atoms, offspring, the mammarian qualities of fission yield visible even when charted on a graph, great heaving breasts, swollen and full— How does it feel, being the one behind the wheel? It’s—uh—crazy, Jill said, still preoccupied with the control panel, its surfeit of lights blinking at her sporadically—she had not yet learned the panel fluently, didn’t know its intricacies as he did—he had to be patient—he was the teacher, after all... The first time I ever did this, I got such an incredible headrush...of course, I had the control room supervisor right behind me, making sure I didn’t mess anything up—but, y’know, this, this is the real thing—it’s in your hands, right now, the shape of reactor power... That night he got home and ate leftovers, and afterwards he attempted to go right to sleep, since he had to wake up early the following day to proctor a Radiological Controls 201 midterm—but he couldn’t—couldn’t resist the thought of her, her silken hair falling in tumbles to hide her cheeks, her biting her lip and flipping a pen between a thumb and forefinger as she sat in the Reactor Operator’s chair, studying the panel, studying her logs, referencing the plant manual—the small of her back as she leaned forward, betraying the density of flesh beneath her loose jeans—the way her hand seemed to linger on his when he assumed control of the operating station, guiding her fingers toward the correct buttons, the correct switches— I see the way you look at me, she said, after the semester had ended, when they’d gotten drinks at the local watering hole—her eyes glinting darkly in the halflight, sitting in the dimmest corner booth they could find, glancing around whenever anyone passed by, conscious of their potential scandal—I don’t want you to pretend—I don’t want to pretend, either—come on, come on, Peter— It’s just, uh, you know. Well, without stating the obvious— Then don’t state it, then— I—c’mon. Jill you’ve got, uh, your whole future ahead of you. And I, I’m— —too old for this, Martin says, the migraine beginning to take shape—tendrils of fog seeping into his frontal lobe like an omen heralding the onset death which he believed was creeping closer day by day— —the fuck was that guy’s problem? Rawlings says. Martin ignores him, turns to a clerk tapping on his shoulder— Mel, Mel, I’ll give Calvin a call— Don’t bother...he’s probably, well, c’mon, let’s be real, he’s probably on drugs again...you heard his dad, what his dad used to say about him, right? You need some help? I’ll be fine, thanks—but maybe—maybe you could see about that guy, there— I’d greatly appreciate that, Henderson nods, raising a hand to indicate his presence to Calvin’s replacement, who rushes over to the booth to pick up where Calvin’d left off—Henderson nodding again in salutation, the nod going ignored as the replacement’s face is lit up by the white of Calvin’s screen, eyes darting in pursuit of an identifiable point at which to pick up Henderson’s lost progress, Henderson still somewhat stunned by the episode he’d just witnessed, reminded...reminded vaguely of Efraim, at Rolling Rock, pulling him through the ropes and outside of the ring, his voice— You should be ashamed of yourself! Y’all all should be ashamed of yourselves—hitting him when he’s down like that, what areya, buncha fuckin savages—Henderson struggling to right himself, hands limp in his gloves, mouthguard preserving a heavy oxide astringence, face so bruised it felt temporarily numb— Ge’offa me— Man, get the fuck outta there, GET the fuck outta there, big dumb fuck, Efraim yelled, what the fuck are you doin? Tryin to get yourself killed, you’re not even tryin to fight, your hands down, chin out, the fuck you thinkin? Some type of game? Uh, Henderson said when he realized Efraim was talking to him. And he looked at Efraim, the redeyed squint of Efraim’s face close to his through the bar of vision afforded by his headgear, and Efraim just said, what was it he said: This ain’t it, something to that effect—and, why don’t you pack up your bags and go home...not a Rocky Balboa story, not here, buddy... What are you saying to me? I’m saying you gotta go. And I don’t want to see you here Thursday— Fuck you mean, I’ll be here Thursday—and the next day after that, too, what are you talkin about— What for? Get the shit kicked outta you again? By these fucks, man, what for? You want to line up a fight, what do you think’s gonna happen? Be a journeyman your whole career? I can go down in weight—I can fight at light heavyweight— Jesus, man. Can’t even make two-hundred, how are you gonna make one-seventy-five? Listen. Listen, listen. Pack up your shit. Pack it up, go. I see you again, I’m siccin em back on you, and he gestured up at the ring. You want that? Henderson remembers spitting out his mouthguard, the rubber thock sounding against Efraim’s face, blood and saliva spattering against his cheek— Man, c’mon. Efraim wiped himself off. You’re bettern that. You cocksucking self-righteous faggot, you don’t know shit. Fuck you. Oh, okay. It’s for your own good, y’know. Suck my dick. Drag me the fuck outta here, then. Else I’m getting back into that ring. No, you’re not. And a hand came down to weigh upon Henderson’s shoulders, he didn’t even see who— Get the fuck offa me!, he swatted at the offender, a glove grazing fingers— One last chance. Here’s your shit—Efraim threw his duffelbag at him—and just take off, just get out of here, man, before shit gets ugly— But it was already ugly—hey, motherfucker—already ugly, couldn’t they see—Efraim, call the cops! And: Nah, we got it, we got it right here—remembers a fist landing square on his left kidney, bringing him to his knees—then an explosion of purple beneath his pressed lids as an elbow came to join the throng of flailing limbs, crushing his nose even through the face-saver—but he got up, managed to grab a single-leg on one of them, bringing him down, hoping it was Efraim—cocksucking mother fucker—and the face he saw belonged to some fuck he didn’t even recognize, but before they’d managed to drag him off, he’d made sure he’d done what he could— Excuse me! Excuse—excuse, me—hey, motherfucker, excuse me, loudly enough to return Henderson to the present, and in the reflection of the sneezeguard he, for one moment, witnesses the running of a mouth, foreign lips whispering, the shape of an alveolar consonant, tongue pushed against teeth that could not be Henderson’s own, a lie in the likeness there, What? I said, motherfucker, excuse me, Luis Hernandez half-shouts, half-spits into the plexiglass, pushing aside John Rawlings, who looks as if he’s about to say something himself—but I said I was gonna be a minute, and it’s been one minute, and now I’m back with your money, yeah? So just let me renew my goddamn registration— Martin talks over him, raising his voice a semioctave: Not how it works, sir, please, I told you I said before you left, I said we wouldn’t have time for all this, that you’d have to come back tomorrow— That’s fucking bullshit—look look look you’ve got my paperwork right now, how hard could it be? Sir—I’m gonna have to ask you to leave— I’m not goin fuckin anywhere! He was seeing me, John Rawlings says, and Luis Hernandez ignores him, further incensing Rawlings—hey, asshole— Shut up, Hernandez says without turning. Listen I can see that paperwork there that’s got my fuckin name on it, it’s got my tabs on it’n everything, all you gotta do is hand it to me through that slat, and here’s my money— Hey I dunno where you think you’re coming from but this isn’t a bazaar, you don’t come in here and just do whatever you want! You take a ticket, you sit down, you follow the rules—this is a government building, you can’t— Oh, a bazaar, huh? You wanna see a bazaar, then? Excuse me, John Rawlings interjects, louder this time: Excuse me, but he was seeing me— Here, Luis says, pushing the money through the pass-through window. Take the fucking—and gimme my watch back, gimme— You can’t—you can’t do that! Sir, I’m going to—call the—Martin struggles for the right words, the headache disappearing as his fingertips meet Luis’s in the canted tray, pushing bills this way and that— Gonna what? Gonna call who? The cops? For what? I’m literally trying to give you my fucking money—what, my money’s no good here? Luis says, laughing hyenalike— —Ahh, jeez, what the hell’s going on, a guy says to Kaitlyn as he steps out of the restroom. I don’t know, she says. Excuse me. She pushes past him and locks the door and steadies her breathing. Through waterlogged eyes she squints at herself in the mirror. You’re okay, she says. Stupid dangly earrings swinging with her head’s convulsions. Red eyes inflamed and set deep in a severe face. Ugly stupid bitch, she says. The mirror clouds up as her eyes swell with tears. When they’d met it was autumn, a colder autumn than had been expected that year. The sun had grown distant and the light went pale and the days stumbled blissfully into interminable nights and the sky grew fickle and tumultuous. Snow blanketed the earth up to the coastline and then was washed away by rain, and what moisture was left would freeze and thaw and freeze again. Even in this unprecedented chill she remembers that the late summer’s wildfires continued to rage to the east, over the Pass, which seemed impossible to her, the work of some strange conspiracy, or the heraldry of an impending apocalypse. She had not wanted to take things as quickly as they had—and she thinks of Oh my god, muffled by linen, followed by a hiss of breath, a cheek pressed hard into the pillow’s indent, his lips trailing her neck to anchor themselves in the divot of her collarbone, his face silhouetted, and then the flimsy darkness pared to reveal his eyes’ opaline whites as he rose to stare at the whole of her laid out on the bed, never been looked at like this before, and, neither have I, laughter, his face again subsumed in shadow as he fell to join her, tangled there, his breath warm and sweet— —and then again, some years later, that same saccharine breath curdled to bitterness as he pulled away in retreat— When I say I love you I mean you, I mean I love you, I’m only thinking of you, what you want what you need, so if this, if this helps, whatever of me it is you need of me or, I don’t know, if this helps, she said to him as he turned away, an expression passing and shifting and rent by shadow so as to be inscrutable, his face different, now, like in one whole second he’d become a different person, not even the person she knew—come on, it’s okay— —I don’t want to feel like I’m taking advantage of you— —what, you don’t want to? —no, it’s not, no, I mean I—I’ve been seeing someone— Don’t, don’t say that, just come on, she said, pulled him down to the bed beside her, don’t say that, come on, don’t think, come on look at me, you don’t want to? And for fifteen minutes, for twenty, it was fine again—and it seemed as though she lived in these little slivers of time, and in the moments just after, when he was gentle, kind—the world’s color returning, for just a moment— Don’t, don’t go, I want to die, please don’t go, please you don’t understand what it’s like for me, how hard it is for me, you know you know I’m not this this girl—this girl who oh, I can’t live like this, oh God— Just come on—this is why I said we shouldn’t see each other anymore, you know—I, I—you can’t just, like, say all that stuff to me, now— Ah, so much overwhelming her she didn’t know what to do, couldn’t say anything else, wilting in that bed with the covers drawn round her while he put his things on, so callous yes and so stupid of her to think that maybe it would be like before, that he would come to his senses...feeling, again and again, as though she were losing your mind, 你要带我去哪里? she says as VII pulls at her, looks back at the DMV, free hand jostling his pockets for keys— They’re gonna die, they’re all gonna die in there, he says, augh, I can’t, I can’t deal with the guilt of all of that, I can’t— What are you! What are you saying, 别抓我 放开我! I, uh, I can’t understand what the fuck you’re tryna tell me, uh, he says, but listen to me, we gotta go! Okay? Just trust me: we gotta go, now! Or else we’re screwed! What is going on? Just get in the car, half-throwing her into the passenger seat, her wincing, 笨蛋! A Sorry! muffled by the slamming of her door, then the slamming of his, the gunning of the ignition as he continues to speak feverishly, indiscernible through her own 我们要去哪里? and then, Where are you taking me? I, uh, dunno, I dunno, we’re just going, okay? You don’t know what is going on? What is it? Drugs? Are you taking drugs? What? No, no, no, reversing out of the parking space and accelerating out of the lot to a trumpeting horn and middle finger from the oncoming—Look, I need you to call the cops, can you do that? Tell them—tell them, trying to fish his phone out of his pocket— Don’t—keep watching the road, look— Tell them there’s gonna be some bad shit going down at the Burien DMV, uh, be vague like that, I mean—and tellem they gotta be fast! I can not—I don’t— Fuck it, I’ll do it, he says, fishtailing briefly to a shrieking Su-Yen’s protests as he pries the phone out of his pocket, and she fumbles with the seatbelt, which catches on the collar of her blouse to snag against her undershirt, revealing the contused skin beneath— I! I believe you, she says, what ever you are saying, I just—just tell me what is going on, as he fumbles with the phone’s lockscreen—and look out for that red light! It’s my dad, he says, you remember my dad? Calvin Markson Six? Yeah? Well, I saw him—just now! Saw him just now, at work, I know it’s crazy and I know—and—and he told me to run, I saw him in a reflection and I heard him say it, he told me RUN, and the last time my dad told me to do something and I didn’t do it, well, I killed someone, I killed someone very important to me, yeah? So I promised I would—for him, I would—yes, hello, I’d like to report an emergency! In, uh— —the whole of your imbecile mind. Because you have no respect for history, his father’d told him. Peter remembers it so vividly. But no, that wasn’t it. His connection to it was deeper than his father’s. The way it titillated him scared him, at first, when he hadn’t yet realized that it could only be that way, for such was his connection to it. Not like his father, who treated nuclear physics as sacrosanct, kept it at arm’s length, respected it for what it was—he would never understand it the way Peter did, no—the way Peter understood the atom was preternatural. His conceptions were oracular, mystical, more than the sum of their parts—in the way that a conclusion drawn from the subconscious can never fully be reconciled against the rigors of its figuring, a mind blindly grasping with mechanics can never be opened to true understanding, which was more akin to a leap of faith—akin to the passage of a traveler, journeying through the endless dark...and the product of rote learning, which calcifies in the mind like so much plaque, could stand no chance against the insights of the nonpareil visionary, for whom solutions nucleate from the gloam unbidden, he thinks, and he remembers, sees himself standing before his panoply of apparatus as a man intent on suturing the faults of the world only with what lay before him, there in the glovebag watching through sweatstung eyes, tracing his fingers’ pursuit, grinding, measuring, sifting, measuring, pouring, steadying the graduated cylinder’s descent as it betrayed its contents to one larger, the geiger’s stridulating chatter mounting in gleeful crescendo against his unbreathing silence, a tumescent persistence weighing between his legs as he toiled in reverie, labor as pleasure, a vision realized, and yet without her it was all for naught—she was the only one who ever understood him, understood him, and she was gone, he’d ruined it, Ruiner! his father’d said, you ruiner, prancing about all day la-dee-da, in your head, prancing about no problems just you are just in your head like some woman, like some faggot, well maybe that was why he’s now so creatively underdeveloped, maybe that’s why he’d never made the jump to researching fusion, not even at Jill’s insistence, realizing once he’d met her and fallen in love with her how limited he’d become—when he was fifteen, he had assisted his father in the design of a rodless core whose reactivity was controlled by boron concentration, and he’d correctly intuited, much to his father’s chagrin, that the necessary reactivity addition rates for criticality could not be achieved with the proposed surface-to-volume ratios allotted by the fuel concentration, not to mention the cladding thickness, provided bottom-channel poison loading was fabricated in accordance with design...Where is the math, how did you figure, and what did you change, his father’d said, looming over him, one hand tight against his shoulder, what did you move, what and how, how did you know? And he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know how, but he’d known intrinsically and at first sight that the design was not viable, just as he knows today without so much as putting a pen to paper that the mix of plutonium nitrate in the pyrex cylinder sitting dormantly in the backpack between his feet is about five and a half curies strong, billions of atoms disintegrating every second right beneath him. And how is it that I know, he thinks. I’ve been doing it long enough, but it’s not that. How is it that I know, that he couldn’t ever bench three-fifteen not even with a gun to his head. And how could that be possible after ten years of consistent exercise? No, longer—longer than ten years, now, he’d be turning twenty-five in three weeks—it wasn’t for lack of trying, and yet that glorious number seemed always to elude him because deep down you’ll always be that short little boy, well no man now it would be man, now, his come still drying on her stomach while she stared up at him in that hellish bedroom light with his lurid shadow as the only check, the only stop against his clambering atop the bed and fucking her again, harder this time, like maybe it’d change something and maybe he should’ve, he thinks, but no maybe not—short little man, maybe she was right maybe he would always be that, nothing more—and why, and why was it that the muscles could only push against so much weight? and why was it that the fibers were so unreceptive to growth, bound by a will of their own, antagonistically uncooperative? Stupid bitch doesn’t she know that she hurt me more in that instant than I could have ever hurt her, yeah? They’re really going at it, huh? he says to Jill, and she nods, looking uneasy. Maybe I’ll just have to come back tomorrow, she thinks, dreading the possibility of driving home, another night spent in silent lassitude, too ashamed to reach out to anyone for fear and dread of what she’d have to say, that she would have to contrive some explanation to account for her absence from college, too ashamed to have burnt out this early in the first place, and still scarred by what Peter’d said when she left, that he was going to kill himself, no, he wouldn’t, he wouldn’t do that— Ladies, ladies, Henderson says, pushing Rawlings and Hernandez apart, keeping them at arm’s length as they try aimlessly to shove past Henderson’s bulk to get at each other, Mother fucker! and C’mon go ahead let’s seeit less see it, go ahead!, Henderson looking sympathetically at Martin, whose onset headache was now largely forgotten, him sitting inert in his chair with his mouth agape, lost in indecision, remembering his first ex-wife back in the two-bedroom apartment in Milton, New York, who chastised him for his behavior when shit hits the fan, she said when shit hits the fan it’s like you’re not even there, tried to explain to her hey I’m not that guy, I’m not, like, the sort of guy that’s gonna punch someone at the bar if they hit on you, or the guy that knows exactly what to do if the car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, but of course that’s what she needed, though, that’s what she wanted at least and he had none of it in him, he was not a Man of Action, no, he was continually plagued by his own inaction and indecision, which left him torn at his seams, his whole life one big blank untouched canvas, the ignominy of his passivity which plagued him like a stink now rearing its head once more as he sat dumbfounded there to witness life in all its roaring color and fury beckoning to him through the sneezeguard, like a football visor like what they must see there on the field when the astroturf blurs through the plastic during a runningback’s sprint, the sound of your own breath deafened by the roar of the crowd’s violence and by the thunder of the clods hemorrhaging crumb rubber, the turf’s guts spuming amidst a tangle of feet, nonono, this was not for him, he was a spectator always, and if this illness didn’t end him he felt as though he would fade away, and he knew in his heart that not even Tania or his second wife, Aster, would remember him, both remarried with children, living their lives, ostensibly happy, while he turned sepia-toned here at the DMV, his hand on the receiver as he dialed 9, 1 one time it makes you a murderer, well you rape one time that makes you a rapist, that’s how that saw goes, he’d said to his friends once at a party, nursing a vodka soda and a disposable vape, but what am I supposed to do, walk around with my dick between my legs my whole life just because one woman ten years ago who I was already halfway fucking, if you count hand-and-mouth stuff, allofasudden says she wasn’t into it? I’m supposed to just think of myself as a bad person forever, then, yeah, all shame, no glory, not even a morsel of nothing in my future I can look forward to because one time things got serious when they shouldn’ta, go fuck yourself— Lucky she didn’t just turn you in to the cops. She wouldn’tve dared. Because she knew just as well as I did what happened was consensual. Coulda ruined your life. With a hand he swept aside a cloud of vapor, swept aside the statement. Well whatever, it’s over, it’s done. I just gotta focus on taking it one day at a time. On bettering myself. I got a vision for the future, here... and yet the feeling of ascension he so deeply craved, yearned for in the marrow of his bones, had never been granted him...no and he would know, he would know it when it came, would feel the gravity lessen around him, no not kidding, he would—after cycling boldenone for six months and messing around with some methandienone and upping his testosterone to 800mg/week (spread across four injection sites), after balancing everything out with his bloodwork and getting on anastrozole to fix his estrogen problems and dermaplaning to remedy any facial micro-wrinkles he thought he was developing around his eyes and taking tretinoin to preserve his skin’s glossy sheen and both topically and orally ingesting finasteride (and topically applying minoxidil daily in the shower) to thwart his hairline’s recession, which the thought of his hairline receding terrified him more than he could bear, and after starting MK-677, which purportedly stimulated IGF-1 to assist with gains and recovery, another daily tincture which tasted so foul that the first time he’d drank it he was convinced he’d been poisoned, after all of that and then the subsequent clenbuterol and retatrutide cycle to shed the excess weight he’d gained during his bulk, he still felt like nothing, like no one, like some shitstain, little man little man, couldn’t bench three-fifteen, a no one just like she’d said he was, no true strength, nor size, and no true beauty, no matter how contrived, would be his to claim, his head a giant contusion, his brain addled by combat, he’d never have expected to find someone who would love him, and hadn’t been looking for love when it found him—how could he be? The whole of his life was mired in failure, especially then, so soon after he was cast out of Rolling Rock with half his ribs broken and his elbow hyperextended and his eyes swollen, chin bruised, horribly depressed and unable to pull himself out of bed, literally, physically unable to get out of bed, pissing in a bucket in his room and drinking water from the tap and returning to bed to lie there in pain staring up through mildewed windows at the patch of sky as it brightened and darkened, invariably gray, black, gray, black, when finally his friends came to drag him from this sty—Heard you been down, lately—get out of bed, you ape, let’s get you some real food, not this shit you’ve been throwin in the microwave, what, you can’t be eating this three meals a day, can you?—and take him for a bite, which is where he’d met her, Marie, who’d sat at an adjacent table and had stared at him in obvious horror upon his entrance, and he flinched at her reaction to his unsightly face, whose bruises were green-yellow in their recession, and she told him I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—and before she could finish he said, no, it’s alright—you should see the other guy, and she laughed nervously, and he said I’m kidding, and his friends said: he’s not—he’s a boxer, and he said, quickly, no—I’m not anything, which she liked, that was when she decided she liked him, which she told him in retrospect, because she could see in him as clearly as Efraim could the things he himself had refused to see, either out of fear or delusion, but the things he was both ashamed of and the qualities he didn’t know he even had she could see plain as day the first time she’d ever talked to him, which was that he was not a fighter—could never be a fighter—that it was not in his spirit to fight, which is why she loved him, and her clarity was why he loved her, he loved her because she could see these things in people which he never could, and understood him better than he ever could himself, that first time even then in the diner when he’d met her he was drawn to her, embarrassed by his condition and depressed by his recent failures but drawn to her nonetheless, because, he posited, something in the soul knows—something in the soul knows what it wants before the mind or the heart can ever react— Like Rawlings, who saw that picture of himself in college, had stumbled across it going through his old belongings, a printed 4”x6” glossy creased and folded into a little square which he opened with great delicacy, his heart aching as he studied all those disappeared faces, those people he once knew, and he saw himself amidst his bygone friends, smiling with a lampshade o’er his head, a handle of Jack Daniels raised in one hand, his other hand clasped round a girl’s waist—this girl, she was the one who he believed had fellated him in the car while he was lecturing her on the merits (or lack thereof) of radical skepticism...O, those memories, enough to make his eyes water...yes, he was once beautiful, once had not required the aid of an Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra to inspire confidence in his own appearance—had once had a face which did not sag at one end, which he doesn’t remember how he even noticed his face was asymmetrical in the first place, but once he had seen it he couldn’t stop seeing it, and it bothered him relentlessly—but she never saw that in me, he says, thinking of her, wondering, where is she? Maybe—maybe I should—maybe I could find her—but no, for her to see him in his state today, he would rather die—and so instead he ceased to think but for look at that confident young man, there, brazen and brash, young and dumb and full of cum, and how could this boy metamorphose into the man he was today...? And, half-hidden by the picture’s bottom right-hand corner, he recognized the woman who he’d hit on, the one who’d pointed out his facial asymmetry, which was so traumatic to him he’d unconsciously repressed his memory of their interaction—she was there, her visage bisected by the frame as if her image itself wished to avoid him, her avoidance and disinterest in him being all he vaguely remembers about their encounter, and he stared at her for far too long—she was beautiful—what was her name...? And eventually he stopped trying to remember her name, sat on the floor with the picture held close to his squint, and he focused on this girl’s beauty, which was apparent even through the filmgrain, and he felt all at once true pain, the truest pain he’d ever felt—felt, then, that his life had been for naught—that his pursuit of intellectualism had been for naught—that all that mattered to him now was what should have mattered to him then, a sense of aesthetics, a head for money, should have abandoned all that philosophy bullshit, much good it did for him anyway—and he knew, then, a new truth: that true pain is the death of meaning—and true hurt is the desecration of purpose... And a stray hand cuts through the crook of Henderson’s elbow to strike Rawlings where he stands, his mouth widening into an incredulous O, the recoil of Hernandez’s slap flinging Rawlings’s head in a comically wide arc, his hand shooting up to grab his stinging cheek—and Hernandez’s smile widens into a laugh, a short, shrill laugh which is abbreviated by a fist, as Henderson sucker punches him in the gut, sending him tumbling to the floor— Now I’m sorry, but you can’t be going around slapping people, Henderson says apologetically. You can get up when you calm down, okay? I don’t want any more trouble... No fighting! No fighting!, Martin shrieks—The police are on their way! No fighting! Holy shidd, dude—Hernandez gasps—where’d you learn to punch like that... You—you fucking—!, Rawlings yells, guttural, his foot swinging in a pendulum arc to meet Hernandez’s head, a roughly thrown soccer kick lacking in both precision and speed which nonetheless catches the stunned Hernandez square across the midface— Mother fucker!, Henderson says, once again turning to subdue Rawlings, pinning him against Martin’s sneezeguard so that all Martin can see is the top of Rawling’s asscrack pressed tight to the smeared plastic, which, strangely enough, reminds Martin of his ex-wife’s cleavage bared through the frosted glass of a shower door— No fighting! No fighting!, eyes pulled forcefully from Rawling’s ass as he stands, shouting again and again, No fighting! No fighting! for lack of anything better to say, or do... Aughb, Hernandez says, pinching a bloody nose between two fingers, you gigg lige a gurr-hull...fagg-hudd...and he wobbles to his feet... I’m gonna go, Jill says, standing suddenly. But it was nice to meet you— Wait—I’m gonna get outta here, too, Alex says, standing with her. But I was thinking—I was thinking maybe, uh, if you wanted to get a drink, or dinner, you know...if you’re free...? Uh—Jill considers it for a second, hates being put on the spot—knows that she won’t enjoy Alex for his company, other than a quick screw, maybe, which is probably all he wanted out of her, too—and what would it hurt—what did she have to lose, anyway—sure, she says, acquiescing—right now, then? Alex grins. I’ll tell my secretary to clear my schedule—and Jill laughs, that ringing laughter again, too much for Peter to bear— And suddenly, he stands, clears his throat. Jill. —chill! Chill, Calvin Markson VII says to Qing Su-Yen, who shrieks as VII narrowly misses a pedestrian while swerving in a wide right turn— That piece of shit, he didn’t have the right of way! No! He had cross walk signal! It is you, you are not paying attention! Oh—frowning slightly—well— Where are you taking me? I guess I didn’t really think that far ahead, Calvin says, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. I mean, I can drop you off at your house, or something... Su-Yen shakes her head vigorously. Drop me off some where else. I will figure it out. I can not have you coming to my house. Husband works remote. He expects me home much later in the day. If I come home now...she falters. I do not want to disturb him. Ah, Calvin says. Like if I drop you off, uh, now, and he sees me, he’ll get the, uh. Wrong idea, or sumthin...he’s cut off by the sound of distant sirens, and he perks up—Wonder if that’s for them... Where are you going to go? Su-Yen asks. Me? Oh, I guess, after I drop you off I guess I’ll go to the cops...I’m sure they’re gonna want some sort of explanation for how I knew, Calvin says. But I don’t know what I’m gonna tell em. I dunno... Why? What even happened? Can you really tell me, now? I don’t know. I just know, my dad...Calvin clears his throat. I already told you. I just, I do not understand. Yeah, no, well I guess it doesn’t make a whole lotta sense, does it. He coughs, clears his throat again. I suppose it boils down to something pretty simple: I don’t trust myself and I don’t trust how I feel. But I trust my dad. And I know, I know I saw him...I’m not just, not just crazy...well, I guess I am, but, I know I saw him, I don’t know...like, his ghost, or like something like that...and he told me, RUN, y’know, told me to get outta there...and I knew then that whatever he was warning me about was real, y’know, cuz you know my dad, I don’t know, I know he wouldn’t lie about stuff like that...and like I know like I get it, I sound like a dumbass... Come on. I am listening to you. I mean, that’s it, that’s what happened. Okay. And, you are not a dumb ass. I do not think that about you. Oh, well, thanks, Calvin says, smiling faintly. I really appreciate that, thank you. But no, I am, I’m a dumbass and, like, I mean I, uh, even this I fucked up, like I messed up in evacuating the place, cuz I shoulda got more people outta there, but I only got you, and—his voice cracks—umm— Su-Yen looks over at him as he wipes his eyes, the action causing his errant hand’s movements on the wheel to veer them dangerously into the neighboring lane, an intrusion sharply corrected by a peal of horns— Shit—sorry, Calvin says, fucking sorry, see, I can’t even fuckin drive right— You are not a fuck up, Su-Yen says, as gently as she can while ignoring the indignant shouting from the car passing them. You are not—you are very nice—you are a good clerk— No, no, no, I’m not a good anything, Calvin says, blubbering—I’ve never ever been naturally good at anything, and on top of that, I’m a coward, and a bad, a bad person, hiccuping as Su-Yen pats his back, and oh, just tell me where to pull over, where should I go— Anywhere is fine, she says as he accelerates into another turn lane, running the red to take a left into another faceless, featureless officepark—yes, this is fine, I guess— I should go back, Calvin says—I should go back, see if I can help—see if I can— You should not do anything, Su-Yen says. And you are not a bad person. Okay—sniffling—like, that’s nice of you to say, and no offense or anything, but like how the hell would you even know? You don’t really know me, man...you don’t know all I’ve done... It is okay, she says. What ever it is, it is done. It is gone now, over with. The only thing to worry about is what is coming up, in the future. What is past is past. Bad in the past, is bad in the past. Can only be good now, good in the future. Do you understand? Uhhuh—ughhh. Ahughhhh. You are okay. Here, here. Augh—like oh my God, Calvin says, as he uses the hem of his shirt to wipe up his snot—that actually, that makes sense, you know what I mean? What you’re saying, that’s like, really just the nicest, best thing you coulda said to me—like, you’re really good at talking to people— Thank you, she says, and she purses her lips. Think about it. Okay? Okay? Are you all right? Okay. Well then I am going to get out of the car. All right? Yeah, he says. And hey. Thank you, his voice growing quieter as she steps out, tightening her shawl against the wind, shutting the passenger door before he burns a donut into the asphalt, his tires smoking in a banshee’s howl to push him back out into the evening traffic, his engine’s roar a treble din overwhelming the mild susurrus of the highway... Then she looks around, considering her options. She could go home, make up some sort of excuse as to why she’d arrived early, without her car...or she could take the bus back to the DMV, pick up her own car, drive it back home...but she’d still arrive at her house too early, which would instigate questions... What are you doing here? I followed you, Peter says, chest bared, breathing rapidly. Alex blinks in confusion. You, uh, know this guy? Alex says. Jill doesn’t respond. She stands frozen there between Alex and Peter, unable to move— Baby, Peter says. Baby, love of my life, I love you so much, don’t you know? Haven’t I told you enough? To think I’d let you just...to think I would, just, give up on you...did you really think I could do that, that I’d have it in me... Alex puts a hand on Jill’s arm, which causes Peter’s eye to start twitching. Hey, look, we can get out of here, alright? C’mon...Alex whispers before turning to face Peter, smirking...Listen, buddy, I think you’re scaring her— I’m going to give you one more chance, Peter says, ignoring Alex. You can come with me now, or it’s over. And when I say it’s over, I mean it’s really over. I’m fine either way. But you won’t be, you won’t be fine, depending on what you choose. So I’m giving you one more chance... You’re fucking insane, Jill says, barely audible, a thin whisper: you’re fucking crazy, okay? And you’re ruining my life. Can’t you see that if you love me the way you claim to, you would know how miserable it feels, how— Oh, shut up—just shut up! You’re not listening to me, Peter hisses—so much purported love in the world, and yet none of it’s here, all of it’s false—no one who says they love something actually means it, no one knows what it really means, it’s a completely fungible word, a word you see every day, so often you’re blinded to its truth and so the word becomes meaningless, and so you go around blathering it like it’s some harmless little thing, you tell me you love me as easily as you’d say the sky is blue, well, it means something to me when you say it...and it should mean something to you when I say it, because I actually know what the fuck it is I’m saying... Uh, Alex says, bro, brother-man, back up, back up— ...because I would die for what I love, Peter says, the tears gathering and falling from his eyes unhindered as he reaches down into the backpack, her mouth agape as he unzips it and retrieves the beaker and the bowl from its innards, uncapping the beaker, raising the bowl with unsteady hands... Peter, what are you doing...Peter, what the hell is that... What I am holding in my hands is a victory. Are you seeing—is he, hard, or...? This is your last chance, Peter says, the circumambient customers now all looking up from their phones, some of them videoing, others standing up and gathering their things and heading for the door, Alex unsure what to do, Jill frozen again in fear, Martin still screaming for Hernandez and Rawlings and Henderson to stop fighting!, Kaitlyn just now exiting the bathroom, redeyed but composed... Do you love me? I mean, I— Yes or no? Jill... I— He waits a few seconds before nodding. It’s okay, I understand...but I want you, want you to know that I love you. I love you, so much. What—

*** Eric Angal is a writer from Seattle. %date%