by Nick Wolven

Nick Wolven lives in New York City. His third story for Asimov’s takes a look at borders, psychological and political, that the future is likely to complicate.

The Feds come for me at dawn. Same old scene: I’m hunched over a plastic bowl of cornflakes soggy with soy milk, slurping some chicory-and-caffeine-additive from my resin cup—doing my bit for the agro tycoons—and waiting for the powers that be to pipe the day’s regimen of tasks and distractions into my terminal. And instead the powers that be choose to manifest on my threshold in full flesh and cotton-poly blend, and rather than socking my ego with last night’s juiciest international disasters by way of the AP wires, the little nano-emission screen that serves as my only conduit to the world of human affairs squirms with a low-res feed from the hall camera just outside the apartment, treating me to views of my parole officer’s bald spot and the hair treatments sported by two federal goons.

Seems like it’s happened this way a hundred times, though it can’t really be more than nine or ten. But there’s so little variation in my life now that I live every special event in hi-def and recall it in pristine detail, so that I can practically view the scene from any angle, can practically watch myself creaking up in my Looney Tunes boxers from the folding chair at my folding table, shrugging my jittery waste of a body into cargo pants and a V-neck T, shambling four steps—those well-known four steps—to the hall door, and punching my thumb into the intercom. Can practically look into my own limp pale face, my own listless gray eyes, and read my despair from the outside in.

They haven’t given me much space, the powers that be. I guess I don’t need much, since I consist mostly of bone and loose skin—and since I never learned to be a functioning component of society. And now they can’t have anything messing with the special junk in my head, can’t have my appliance of a mind compromised by all the world’s confusing data. Quarantine, they call it: psycho-quarantine. A term loaded with extra meanings. One of which is that I get only nine cubic meters of latex-lined space to call home sweet home.

But somehow they manage to cram themselves in with me, the two feds blocking off the door to the hall while my parole officer litters my table with his e-paper and data cards, serving up the usual rigmarole about terms of release and durations of contracts, explaining in his special constipated way that I’m in for another joyride in the service of the law. I barely hear it. I’m too busy remembering the scene as it was before, nine or ten or a hundred times, the same cornflakes turning to paste in a bowl of liquid tofu, the same deposits of stale sweat under the band of my boxers, the same sickening sense of expectation. Because I don’t just remember what’s happened or anticipate what’s to come; I feel everything, right here and now, all the way back and all the way up to the fatal rush of homicidal anger, the hot body writhing in my arms, the windpipe crimping under my wrist.

I don’t protest a bit as they wrap up the briefing and shove me through the door, ushering me toward my monthly dance with the errors and aberrations of society. I know what’s coming, and I know there’s no way to stop it.

* * * *

A warren of moldy halls and bare concrete stairs, a flash of glaring sun and UV exposure, and then the feds stuff me into the back seat of their Oldsmobile, behind and between windows of high-impact plastic, and climb into the front seat. We’re off. I can see the two agents through the divider that separates me from the front of the car. Agent Number One is a black guy, skinny and stooped like the rack for an IV drip, with a long nose sharp as an arrowhead. Agent Number Two is paler and fatter, with jug-handle ears, one of which intrudes on my view of the road.

We head from the government housing straight to the highway. A wise choice, if you’re not into potholes, burning trash, and warlord politics. Ghetto overlords carved up most of LA a few decades ago, just like they did New York and Baltimore and St. Louis. They call themselves community leaders, but they share the same view of urban development: what’s there is there for the taking.

At any rate, the Feds still run the highways, and we’re scooting out of the urban core—inasmuch as LA has a core—at twentieth century speeds. I watch the public residential towers give way to glassy shopping centers, the shopping centers fade into tract housing interleaved with dusty palms in dying gardens: the demesne of some private consortium, I would guess. I lean forward, put my face to the plastic divider. “Where we headed?”

The feds don’t turn around, but the jug-handle ear of Agent Two gives a twitch. “Tribal lands. Oxnard.”

Great. Instead of urban warlords battling each other under cover of construction contracts, we’ll be dealing with licensed contractors, agro-barons, and the ganglords of worker camps. But I don’t make a fuss. “What’s going on up there? Got to tamp down some rising wages?”

They don’t even pretend not to laugh. “Human predator,” says ArrowNose, “on the loose. Got out during processing at the county joint. We figure he’ll run up here, back home. Scene of the crime, you know. Or crimes, that is. Five people dead. All from the camps. Execution style.”

“You’d like the guy,” says JugEars. “Seems like a real sick bastard. Just your type.”

Now it’s my turn not to react. And I don’t. “Since when do you guys care about undocumented workers? Doesn’t seem like five guys would be a big hit to the labor force.”

“Not just guys,” says ArrowNose, cool as fruit. “Kids.”

That gives me pause. But at least I know, now, why the feds are interested. Because even undocumented people can make the news. When sufficiently colorful tragedies happen to them. When children die.

“So what’s the profile?” I say, a little subdued now. “A pervert? Or some paramilitary thing?” There are a lot of communities in the area who come down on the tribal lands. A lot of angry young white men out there.

“Hell, no.” ArrowNose. “One of their own.”

“One of the workers?”

“You got it.”

“So what’s his problem?”

“Isn’t that what you’re supposed to tell us?”

And I suppose it is. My role, my primary function. The reason they keep me alive.

Technically, the Tribal Lands aren’t any such thing. More of a no-man’s-land, really. You could say they’re still part of the U.S., but the fact is, as with so many places, the census workers don’t go there, the teachers don’t stay there, the doctors don’t profit there, and the courts don’t function there. So what’s left? Just plywood, cinderblocks, tarpaulin, and a feudal economy. The big firms contract work out to the sharecroppers, and the sharecroppers contract labor to the ganglords of the Mexican camps.

From the federal highway you can see it all. The decaying remains of suburban developments originally constructed on annexed ranches, with their cheap housing built right up to the guardrails; a few diehard franchises persisting among the shopping centers and weedy parking lots, squeezing the blood of pocket change from the stone of a permanent impoverished underclass; the service stations along the highway walled off from the land like foreign embassies. It’s all theirs now, inasmuch as they can be said to own anything. The old system, with its guest-worker programs and its cross-border traffic—that all ended with the Mexican collapse. Used to be Americans talked about sealing the border with Mexico, to keep the immigrants out. Now, Mexican drug lords guard the border, and they keep the immigrants in. What we have, essentially, are refugee camps. No one, neither the Mexican despots nor the American culture warriors, cares to assimilate these people. And so the agro-barons come in and use them as so much peasant labor—hammering out hasty arrangements with the American legal system, and paying the immigrants a pittance for backbreaking work.

Between the towns—if you can call them towns—you’ve got the farms. Broccoli, lettuce, lima beans, sugar beets. It all looks the same to me: row after row of low green plants and brown ditches, as though someone dragged a giant rake through an endless field of undergrowth. And of course, there are the strawberries. Who would think the world could need so many strawberries? You see big faded signs set up here and there by the road, targeting the profligate classes who used to drive through this region before America unofficially consigned the land to its immigrant underclass. Have You Kissed a Strawberry Today? And, Life is Short. Make it Sweet. Pick Your Own. And my personal favorite: Strawberry! You Know You Want To. . . .

After about the tenth ad, the feds pull off the highway and follow a crumbling road between the fields. We come to a gate of metal slats overlaid with chicken wire. They pull up and Agent One takes out his phone. While he’s occupied, Agent Two waggles an ear at me. “All right, Junior. Quiet time.”

I know what that means. I slide obediently out of the car. He cuffs me, wrists and ankles. Then comes the hood. He slams it down neatly over my head like he’s capping a pen and Velcros the collar tight around my throat. I can’t speak, can hardly breathe. Sounds are muffled, smells are filtered, and through the black fabric, the world looks like a half-remembered dream. I feel hands on my shoulders. The agent shoves me back into the car.

Jouncing, engine noise, muffled voices. I tense my neck against the collar, work out the ghost of a question. “Where we going?” No one answers. The car stops and they manhandle me out of it. I stumble over uneven asphalt. A door creaks. The agents guide me forward. Cool air tickles my shins and forearms. The rough hands of the feds shove me down into a chair.

More muffled voices. I assume the agents are speaking with my first interviewer. Interviewer! What cynic came up with that term? Why not just call the guy what he really is: my torturer.

Without warning, they rip open the Velcro fastening and whip off the hood. A man stands before me. I know him instantly. I don’t know how or why. An identification flashes in my mind, and I search for words to pair with it. They come in a chain: Big Man. Boss. Foreman. Sharecropper. He’s a fat wad of sunburned flesh in slacks and imitation leather, with a blotchy face like a well-marbled steak. But I’m not worried about appearances. I’m already past that. I know in my bones: this man is bad. It’s not a conclusion, not even a fact. It’s simply an experience, like pain after a blow.

Before I know it I feel myself lurching forward. My muscles tense so hard they nearly cramp. My pulse beats like a piston in my head. This man is bad and evil. This man deserves to die.

He staggers back, his blotchy face folding in pink folds and creases around a rictus filled with enormous false teeth. He puts a hand on a desk behind him, leaning back, his huge belly threatening to bust his shirt. “Hello!” he says, then, “Jesus!” The current hits me, and I freeze, tremble, fall.

For a moment, everything’s blurry. All I can think about is retching. Four federal hands lay hold of me and I’m dragged back out into the heat, thrown back into the car. One of the agents slides in beside me. He’s still got the shockwand in his lap.

The windows of the car are dark now, tinted to opacity. It’s just the two of us, sealed in a dark box.

“So,” he says, touching his thumb to his chin. He reminds me of the prison shrink who used to sign me up for meditation classes and poetry workshops. His next words confirm the impression.

* * * *

“Tell me what you’re feeling,” he says.

Tell me what you’re feeling? That’s what they always want to know. The research assistant asked me the same thing, before he put his worms in my brain. “So, Mr. Kocijansky. How do you feel right now?”

What do they want to hear? I feel violated. I feel oppressed. I feel bad. And yet I always find myself giving an answer that sums up all those things. “I feel the same.”

I was a rough kid. They say I grew up in a “toxic environment.” I remember impressions, not explanations. I remember the day four kids from the upper grades cornered me in a bathroom stall, beat me into a stupor, and packed my mouth and nose with used toilet paper, how the panic of suffocation restored me to my senses. I remember the day I got revenge by choking one of them half to death. I remember which of those days felt worse.

By the time I left school I’d put two kids in the hospital, stolen a car, and kicked a lady teacher. The first time I made a mistake as a free adult, the psychologists showed up, crowing about my juvie record and APD. I’d thrown my meth dealer down the stairs. I thought the two of us had an understanding about such things, but the fall damaged his left-frontal lobe, gave him a penchant for negative thoughts. That’s what the ME said, at least. Negative thoughts. I assume that’s why he let himself bleed to death from internal injuries a week later, sticking me with a murder charge.

The authorities seemed to think that I had brain damage as well. The research assistant at the federal clinic described the neural dimensions of my bad behavior.

“The essence of a criminal, we think, is emotional dysfunction. Either emotional learning is inhibited, as in the psychopath, or maladaptive emotional responses are learned in a harsh environment—an uncontrollable hatred of authority, for instance. Either way, understanding a criminal is never about analyzing his actions in a rational light. It’s about simulating his emotional responses, his subjective view of the world.”

He seemed old for a research assistant, paunchy and gray. Probably embarking on a second career in forensic neuroscience after burning out on a police beat. Though he addressed me by name, he faced my lawyer as he spoke, and it was she who answered.

“Simulating?”

The research assistant rearranged the three empty coffee cups on his desk. “Channeling might be a better word.”

“What you propose, as I understand it, is to turn my client into a sort of . . . radio for bad vibes.” My lawyer laced her voice with irony, but the research assistant broke into an earnest smile.

“Yes, actually, that’s the gist of it. Except that when you say ‘radio,’ you probably think of a broadcast media. Our system is the inverse, more like remote archival. Currently we have four thousand paroled criminals streaming affective data—their emotions, if you will—to our servers. We hope eventually to include all violent offenders. In order to read that data—in the case, say, that a perp breaks parole—we have to feed the emotions we’ve saved up to a receiver who can interpret them. To a human brain, in effect. That’s the function your client would perform.”

At the word function my lawyer smiled. “And in return for performing this ‘function,’ you’re willing to change the sentence?”

“Well, that’s up to the state. But from what I’ve been told, he’ll basically be under house arrest. While participating in the study, that is.”

They looked at me at the same time, telegraphing the eternal question. How do you feel, Mr. Kocijansky, about becoming a bad-vibe radio? I thought I might have become one already. I could feel the hatred radiating from them, their disgust toward a body that would soon serve their legal system as a function-performing machine. But perhaps it was only projection on my part. I had read so many brochures, watched so many informative videos, that I often imagined I’d undergone the treatment already—felt the itch of self-assembling nanowires branching through my dendrites, saw them wagging like wheat in the shifting field potentials of my thoughts, heard my amygdalae throbbing like twin hearts and the crackling of electrodes in my hippocampus and the rush of emotion down cervical fiber optics to a transmitter at the base of my neck.

The research assistant tilted a coffee cup and searched it for consoling phrases. “We’re not exactly sure, yet, how your brain will interpret this data, of course. Chances are you’ll have a mix of sensory impressions, mood shifts, triggered memories of your own past. Certainly nothing like clear telepathy. You’ll have to think symbolically about what you experience. We do expect, however, that the strongest signals will take the form of negative responses.” He practiced a sympathetic frown on his coffee cup and then lifted the frown to me. “Bad vibes, as you say.”

“How does this sound to you?” my lawyer asked.

I could feel it up there in my brain, their wacky science and my wacky past in unpleasant admixture, dendritic and potential like unwritten history. “It sounds familiar,” I said.

* * * *

The agent is pouting at me, trying to seem patient. “You seemed pretty bent on that guy,” he says.

“Well, yeah.”

“Think you might want to. . . ?” He spreads his hands.

I know what he means. I shake my head.

“Sure?” His eyes narrow. “You wouldn’t come after him? Wouldn’t want to track him down? Hunt him down?”

“It’s not that kind of anger.” His eyes widen with skepticism. I sigh. How to explain it? “It’s not a hunting kind of thing,” I say. “It’s not a desire. It’s a . . . a reaction. Not motivational. More like . . . situational.”

He fastens on the part he understands. “Not a motive, you’re saying?”

I try to sort my thoughts. But it’s hard. Because in my mind, it’s all mixed up. I’m not thinking of that sharecropper in the farm office anymore. I’m thinking of my dad. And a phrase keeps running through my mind, the first words I thought of when they whipped off my hood and I saw that sumbitch’s fat red face. Big man. My dad sure did think he was a big man. The boss, big shot, the man in charge.

He was bigger than me, at least. That’s what always counted.

But there’s no point in trying to explain. I tell the agent the only thing he’s equipped to hear. “He won’t go after that guy,” I say. “Your felon. He’s looking for something else. Someone else.”

“You sure of that?” he says. Then, before I can answer: “Who’s he hunting? Where?”

I just shrug, send back another question. “What else you got for me?”

* * * *

Mid afternoon. I’m standing in a strawberry field, the two goons behind me. I stare off down the green rows, smelling dry topsoil and the faint scent of the berries. What do you feel, Mr. Kocijansky?

But it’s not a feeling so much as a memory. I remember soil on my fingers, the fabric feel of the strawberry leaves like flannel against my skin. I remember the sight of bruised and wounded berries, the fruit-flesh purple and ragged around a crimson wound. I remember pain in my back. It all comes to me not in intricate detail but in scattered impressions cohered by a conviction of familiarity, like memories of kindergarten.

I remember my father, his disappointment, his rages. I remember the day I came home from school and told him I’d throttled a kid in the boys’ room: waiting there for judgment, retribution, for his response.

“Is that so, huh? Well, there you go.”

That was all he said. I see him sitting there in his old desk chair with the broken pneumatic stand, hunched around his can of Fosters. “Is that so, huh?” As though what I’d done were neither good nor bad, neither weak nor powerful, neither triumphant nor depraved, but simply what the world expected.

“How’s it going?” JugEars stands beside me. The hood flutters in his hand. “Picking anything up?”

I stare down the monotonous green rows to the clouds piled on the horizon. “This isn’t the scene of a crime.”

“No, we think he worked here, once. This is the last place we traced him before he started jamming the signal. A fresh scent for you, in other words.”

He smiles in a way that tells me he doesn’t believe in me any more than he does in fortune-tellers. And I am a sort of fortune-teller, in that the trail I follow is always cold, reduced to marks of strain and wear like the lines in a palm. Maybe spirit medium is a better term, repository of stale emotions that I am. For what is a ghost but a recorded emotion, attached to a location in defiance of time?

And this is the freshest ghost, the scene of our perp’s last recorded mood, before he slapped on his lead cap and cut radio contact. A week ago? A day ago? It feels as real as the present: bruised fruit bleeding juice down my fingers, a skinny body fighting my grip, the shame of who I was and am.

“Feel anything?” JugEars asks.

I give him the answer he expects. “Not a thing.”

* * * *

They tell me we have one more stop. I know where we are even before they take the hood off. I don’t know how I know it. No visual cue has tipped me off. No odor has alerted me. No sound has alarmed me. But I anticipate the change of scene, apprehend it in a way that precedes cognition.

“No,” I find myself saying. “Don’t do this.”

It’s a gray building, dull and nondescript as a bomb shelter, in a corner of the farm grounds, near the administration center. I’ve seen buildings like it before; I know their purpose.

“Come on,” says ArrowNose. “This is standard business. You know how this works.”

“It doesn’t work.” I’m babbling, rambling. “There’s no point. There’s no point to this.”

They prod me forward.

“Your doctor swears by this,” JugEars tells me. “Says this part always works.”

“You really think that? I’m telling you, you guys have got it all wrong. It’s not like what you think it is. I can’t read minds. I can’t—”

“Come on.” They shove me into the building. The coroner is already waiting for us. He doesn’t look like a coroner. He looks like a paler version of the foreman. Bald. Large. Weather-beaten.

And apprehensive. “This the guy?” His eyes run over me in a visual pat-down. “You’ve got him properly restrained?”

“He’ll be all right,” ArrowNose says.

The coroner doesn’t look happy, but he leads us out of the building office, down a glaring hallway, into the morgue. “I don’t know what you expect to get from this. She was shot at the base of the skull with a 41. Not a lot to go by, in there.”

The body lies covered on a metal table. He plucks at the sheet. I see pale fingers underneath. That’s all it takes. I turn away, blinking furiously. ArrowNose leans in close.

“You got something?” I’m doubled over, and he bends too, trying to see my face. “This is his latest one. You picking something up?”

I wave him away.

“Look again,” he urges.

I go on shaking my head. But it doesn’t matter whether I look again or not. The damage is done.

The coroner pulls the sheet back from her arm, her chest. She’s wearing jeans, an aquamarine top with a floral print. “All right,” I say, before things can go any further. “All right. I’ve got it.”

They lead me back to the morgue office. I’m shaking like a flower in the wind. The coroner turns to his computer. I grab his wrist. He turns slowly, managing to look both scared and irritated. I have to swallow several times before I can speak.

“What do you know about this woman?”

He jerks his arm free. “What do you mean?”

“I mean records. Background. Family.”

The coroner glances at the feds. “We turned it all over. When this first happened.”

“And this felon. You said he was picked up for killing children?”

JugEars speaks behind me. “That’s right. Had himself a little spree. Two kids, two older guys. And this young lady. The farm folks caught him after he took her down. Ballistics and M.O. tied him to the others.”

“What kind of guys were they?”

No answer. When I glance back at him, he shrugs.

ArrowNose chimes in. “Workers. Undocumented. We ID’d them from the farm records. The victims, the felon.” He looks away, embarrassed and dismissive at once, like a teenager. “Right now, that’s all we have to go on.”

I turn back to the coroner, who shrugs. “It’s true. Just what the LC tells us.”

The LC: the labor contractor. “So what about family records?” I press on. “Relations?”

The coroner shrugs again. But it goes without saying. That kind of info can only lead to trouble. Everyone knows the contractors make it regular policy to break up families and keep coherent alliances from forming. But the farmers want to pretend they don’t know that happens. So all that knowledge stays off the books, under wraps. What you get is not a name, but a handle. The IDs in the farm files are effectively barcodes; they reveal nothing about what most of us think of as a person’s identity.

“You must know something,” I insist. “Who’d he spend time with? Who’d he see on his hours off? He did get hours off. . . ?”

The farm coroner gives me a withering look. “This felon you’re looking for wasn’t even on our workforce. Only the latest victim.”

Only the latest victim. An oblique sort of reference to the other victims—including the children that have died.

And yet it’s coming together. It makes sense. I’m racking my brain for a new line of questions, when JugEars steps forward.

“Anybody come to see. . . ?” He waves at the morgue.

The coroner purses his lips, stubborn. But ArrowNose steps forward also, and the coroner breaks down. “Yes. Rosamar. That’s what we call her here, at least. She worked for us a few years ago. I remember her. A very . . . active woman, very vocal in the worker community, hard to forget.” For a moment, he actually seems chagrined. “She came to visit the body yesterday. She said she was the mother.”

JugEars: “And where do we find—?”

“At Carlyle’s place. That’s where she is this season. The older workers, we don’t put them on strawberries anymore. Too slow and stiff, no control in the fingers.”

ArrowNose makes an impatient gesture.

“It’s a little place,” the coroner reveals, “lettuce and celery, just up the highway. About half an hour from here.”

“That’s it,” I say. “Let’s go.”

“How—?” ArrowNose begins. Then he changes his intended question. “Who—?”

“His mother,” I say. “Your felon. Rosamar is the perp’s mother.”

“And how do you—?”

I point down the hall, to the morgue. “Because that’s his sister.”

Before the coroner can regret his revelation, we’re on the move.

* * * *

They don’t bother with the hood, now. As we’re racing down the highway, following the navigation system to Carlyle’s celery farm, Arrownose turns and speaks through the plastic divider. “So.” A bulge forms in his cheeks: his tongue rolling over his teeth. “What’s the deal with this guy?”

“I could tell you,” I said, “if anyone had kept records on him.”

“Oh, we’ve got plenty of records. Ballistic reports. Autopsies. Crime scene photos. Psychological profile. You better believe we’ve got records.”

“Right. A psychological profile. How’s that working for you?”

He gives me the ignorant, dead-eyed sort of look that cops put on when they lose ground in a conversation. “What’s he doing? Killing his family members? Why?”

“Why not? Is it so surprising?”

He frowns. “We’re not talking a crime of passion here. We’re talking a system. He’s been killing children. His own children, apparently. And his sister, his brothers. And who knows who else.”

“You wouldn’t know any of that,” I say, “if it weren’t for me. You wouldn’t know there was a system. Wouldn’t know he had a family. Wouldn’t know anything except that a few bodies turned up with bullets in their heads.”

“Yeah, so?”

I shrug. “I’m just saying. Why should it be so hard to understand this guy? He’s the picture of sanity. It seems to me like he finally started seeing things from the rest of the world’s point of view.”

We see the smoke well before we reach Carlyle’s place. One of the farm directors—maybe it’s Carlyle himself—meets us at the gate, pacing and twitching like a kid on Christmas Eve. “Christ, you guys are fast,” he says, when ArrowNose flashes his badge. “We just called it in.”

“We didn’t get a call.” Arrownose pushes past him, takes a few steps up the main road of the farm grounds. From the car, I can’t see much. Just the fields, outbuildings, a big blossom of white smoke. Wood smoke. ArrowNose has walked out of earshot by now, but I see him turn and say something to the farm director.

The director replies, “Yeah, we got a fire in the workers’ quarters. We figured a cigarette, a camping stove. We brought everyone out, put ‘em in the hydroponics plant for now.” ArrowNose says something inaudible. The director shakes his head and barks in his loud voice, “No, we didn’t do a headcount yet. I just don’t want to see this thing spread.”

ArrowNose comes back to the car. “Neither do we.”

After some quick negotiations, we drive on up the road to where we have a good view of the building. It’s what in days past I might have called a barn: big, simple, wooden. White smoke tumbles out the windows and doors. The smoke smells nice, spicy and sweet.

We park behind a stack of crates and the agents call for backup. And then we sit and wait.

“So what’s up?” I say. “When do we race to the rescue?”

ArrowNose looks at Jug Ears. Jug Ears looks at ArrowNose. They laugh.

“This isn’t a video game,” ArrowNose says through the divider. “We did our part. We’ve got to wait for the hostage guys, the siege team. It’s their game now.”

“You’re kidding. So you just let the place burn?”

“The fire service’ll be here, soon.”

“And then what?”

ArrowNose smiles. “They’ll wait for the hostage guys, the siege team . . .”

I roll my eyes. “What if he’s got someone in there? Rosamar? Another kid? What if—”

“What if, indeed,” ArrowNose cuts in. “We don’t know. That’s why we’re waiting for the hostage guys and the siege team.” He opens the car door. “Hell, man, all this smoke makes me want a smoke.”

“I can’t believe—”

I don’t finish the thought. Something pops up from behind the stack of crates beside the car. With a bang, the front seat becomes a container of noise and blood, like a roast exploding in a microwave. Another bang throws a wet red smack against the divider. I crouch down out of sight.

After about a decade of listening to my teeth chatter, I lift my head. I’m getting so many flashbacks I feel like a film projector. A meth merchant tumbling down a flight of tar-papered tenement stairs. A woman bowed beneath me, screaming. Echoes in a steel space, the smell of burning nitrocellulose, pain in my forearm . . . teeth in an open mouth . . . the pulp of smashed berries . . . my father’s leer of a smile . . . and the grim conviction that it’s all somehow right and necessary, that these things need to happen, that they’ve been handed down like a prophecy from a remote place . . .

I try to push my way out of the backseat, but the doors don’t open from the inside. I panic like a trapped animal, hurling myself from side to side. When I calm down, stunned by pain in my shoulders, I notice that the divider is laced with cracks. A few blows from the meaty side of my fist, and it comes apart in big plastic chunks. I’m able to worm my way through into the mess of the front seat.

It all feels like something that has happened before, that happened many times over a long while ago. The sticky remains of a dress shirt, the strange weight of dead flesh, the shock of lifeless eyes. It makes a strange kind of sense.

I find myself sitting propped against the front wheel of the car, holding a government-issue nine millimeter pistol in my lap. Sure: this is the way it goes. I get up and walk steadily into the burning barn, duck beneath the smoke and heat and crawl on the concrete floor. It’s déja vu all over again: the oil stains, the empty soda cans, the cigarette butts and empty matchbooks, the broken headphones trailing wire—and the man crouched on a damp mattress beside a supine woman.

I watch him. He watches me. As our eyes meet, the last partition in my personality gives way, and I see the world as it is, the grand scheme, the universal truth. Of course it doesn’t come to me as a philosophical statement but as an image, fields running out forever to clouds of white smoke on the horizon. I see the grave of the first child I buried, the one that was an accident, the one I didn’t even intend to save. I see that child, a baby still intrigued by the mysteries of speech and balance, going on beyond the horizon and the clouds to the home he truly deserves. I see them all, the saved ones, the delivered ones, every member of my family marching through green rows out of this world, right on down to that skinny boy I choked in the boy’s room years ago when it all began: when I learned what it was like to give back what you got, felt the justice, the rightness, of a windpipe crimping under my wrist, when I went home expecting punishment and my father told me, with his eyes and his laughter and his indifference, what I could expect from the world.

I lift my gun, steady it. And I fire two bullets into my face.

His head rocks back, but the rest of him falls forward. He flops down over the woman, sprawls in her lap like a boy prepared for a spanking. She lies still, staring into the vague white void of the smoke. After a moment she reaches down and strokes his face.

I get her out through the rear of the building. It’s only when the fresh air hits me that I realize how much smoke I’ve inhaled. For a while we lie side by side in the grass, choking and looking up into the sky. Something in the disordered wreckage of my mind insists that we’ve got to move, leave, run somewhere. I roll over and put my hand on the woman’s cheek, then on her shoulder.

“Rosamar? You all right?” Am I speaking Spanish? English? I can’t tell. Something has happened in my mind, something that makes all the wreckage and disorder meaningful—at least, more meaningful than order ever was. “Hey? Rosamar? We’ve got to leave.”

She squints up at me, face darkened by smoke. “Gabriel?” Her voice rises, wavers. “Gabriel?”

“Close enough.” I help her to her feet. We stumble away, through the buildings and the fields. There isn’t much security on the perimeter of the farm, just a metal fence that we manage to clamber over. Really, I think, why would anyone try to escape? What other world is there for them to run to?

What other world, indeed. . . . From a slight rise outside the farm, Rosamar and I can see the police setting up their perimeter around the burning barn, the firemen arguing with the captain of the siege team, the crime-scene team fussing over the car where two feds lie slumped together in a sticky heap. So much fuss and bother, so many plans. Sad, in a way, to think there’s nothing for them to find down there. Not anymore. The truly significant mystery has been solved.

I take Rosamar’s hand. She doesn’t resist. It all feels right, calm, inevitable—even pleasant, in a way, to look down on that distant activity. To stand, for a moment, right smack on the horizon, on that invisible wall that divides us among our many worlds.