Farsickness

“Joshua Mohr takes you on a gloriously imagined and delightfully demented trip through the looking glass to the heart of the human psyche… it is scary original and crazy fun.”—MARK HASKELL SMITH, author of Blown

“I wish this book was in hotel rooms instead of Bibles.”—ANDREW ERVIN, author of Burning Down George Orwell’s House

“This book is like driving a Ferrari through a funhouse and then smashing through the windshield into another realm of existence. In other words, it’s what a book should be.”—BEN LOORY, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

“Bonkers.”—RON CURRIE, author of Everything Matters!

“Farsickness is the book that would happen if Alice were a dissociative military vet and Wonderland were Scotland, or if Dante were seeking not Beatrice, but a purer self. With stark clarity and immediacy, it develops its own sort of bonkers logic and evolves as consistently as its grenade-eating queen, leaving you to question what story even is. As it pivots, delightfully, from absurdity to beauty, from rush to stillness, Farsickness begins to make complete sense—it’s about longing for a life one has never lived, journeying through a crucible to find a way home, a better version of oneself, a cleaner conscience. For what is home but a place of peace?”—SHANTHI SEKARAN, author of Boomi’s Boombox

FARSICKNESS

A Novel by Joshua Mohr

A HOUSE OF VLAD BOOK

© 2023 by Joshua Mohr

First Kindle Edition: September, 2023

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission—with the exception of brief quotations embodied in critical essays and reviews.

Book design: Percy Hearst

Illustrations: Ava Mohr

HOUSEOFVLADPRESS.COM

“He came home from the war with a party in his head…

and an idea for a fireworks display.”

TOM WAITS

FERNWEH IS “FARSICKNESS,” A LONGING FOR A PLACE YOU’VE NEVER BEEN.

1

There is a new voice in my head who won’t stop screaming.

I say “new” because we all hear a voice. It’s called thinking. But this new one is a bully, greedy with how he blocks the normal transmissions in my brain. I’m losing it all, my memories, my past—and without knowing what I’ve done in my life, there’s no way to know who I am.

I only know the voice: fernweh.

I only know what he wants me to do: He orders me to go home.

To Scotland. To a castle.

The catch is I’ve never been there.

Not to Scotland. Not a castle.

So how can you have a home in a place you’ve never been?

I’ll ask once I arrive at my new home, which is really my old one, according to these screaming sermons that only I can hear.

I can’t defy the voice, even though I don’t know if he’s a gift, a sickness, a drug. A neurodivergence, a god. If I try to ignore fernweh, the noise cranks to obscene decibels that buckle me to the floor.

It gets mad and electric in my mind.

It sounds like women in the throes of natural childbirth, speaking in tongues, casting spells.

So in the name of avoiding that sonic torture, I listen to the voice, follow his commands. He tells me to forget my job, forget my life.

Forget family and friends. I can’t even grieve these people because I don’t know who they are.

I forget paying bills. Forget every possession I own in wherever I live.

There is, more than likely, a car registered in my name.

I must, more than likely, have favorite things. Maybe a ballad that makes me cry every time I hear it. What’s my favorite Halloween candy? I probably had a job before I quit showing up, but all that’s vaulted away, and I’m left only with my orders, my mission.

Fernweh tells me to buy a one-way ticket from Seattle to Glasgow. As I’m shuffling through the TSA line at the airport, I try to memorize the address listed on my passport—the only relic I have of my old life—but, for some reason, I can’t commit it to memory, the information immediately melting, sliding off my brain like butter from corn on the cob.

When it’s my turn, the TSA lady asks me, “What’s taking you to Scotland?”

“I’m going home.”

She holds up my American passport. “Uh, where’s home, sir?”

“I don’t know exactly. A castle.”

“You don’t know where you live?”

“Not yet,” I say.

I don’t like the way she’s looking at me, but the security line is too long for her to give me any additional thought. I understand her position. I know what this sounds like—but I also know it’s real. 

And then on the plane, the voice tells me to look out the window, now, right now, you must do it right now. So I gaze straight into the sky. There is a man out there, holding onto the plane. He has fluorescent orange eyes.

I point to him: “Who’s that?” I say out loud to the voice in my head.

I’m in the middle seat, and the woman by the window—she hasn’t noticed the man—says to me, “Who’s who?”

“Him,” I say, “out the window.”

“Oh no, I’m not gonna look,” she says. “I’ve seen this movie, and if I look, I die.”

I get another few seconds seeing his fluorescent orange eyes, and then he lets go of the plane, falls away.

The woman by the window hits the call button. I explain to the flight attendant that I was only joking about a man out there, a bad attempt at small talk, but the woman by the window moves to another row anyway.

We arrive in Scotland, do the herd mush from the plane through customs.

“Welcome home,” I say to myself, and for whatever reason I can’t stop laughing while I wait for my bag to retch up in baggage claim.

“Be cool, be incognito,” the voice says. “Don’t get locked up in the looney bin.”

I pull it together, say out loud to the voice in my head, “Now that I’m almost there, will you finally answer my question? Are you fernweh?”

“Ding ding ding!” says the voice. “We have a winner. Call me Fern.”

“Was that you out the airplane window?”

“Airplane? No, I travel exclusively by zeppelin.”

“Never mind,” I say.

I get my luggage, though I can’t remember what I packed. I rent the car, feed the address into nav. It’s almost seven in the morning when we set off. Our journey will take four hours and eight minutes. I spend that time in a Red Bull trance with beef jerky breath. Two roadies. Tall boys. I’m the kind of tired that when an animal darts in front of the car, I can’t tell if it’s real or not, so I hit the brakes to be safe.

The sky is overdose-gray, pallid and poisoned.

Four hours and eight minutes later and it’s noon and I bump down a dirt one-lane road. Dense trees line it, hang over it. A kind of living tree tunnel taking me home. The dirt road opens onto a green valley.

The sky is pure blue, no longer diseased, no longer raw-prawn-gray.

Sun shining.

The valley is solid green. A perfect unity from grass to moss to fern to tree.

There is a big clearing up ahead.

The navigation says that we’ve arrived at our destination.

Fern says in my head, “We’ve arrived at our destination.”

I thump into the big clearing, look across the whole valley. And while it is beautiful, there is one small thing: no castle.

There is only the color green, only nature, with one exception: an old, sun-bleached double-wide trailer in the center of the valley. I can barely make out the faded red letters running across it, but it says Dalloway Castle.

Dalloway.

That’s my last name.

I have a first one, too.

Hal.

These two names are the only things I remember about me.

Is this what it feels like to be a baby, a brain completely clean of greasy facts?

I pull up in front of the trailer, hop out of the rental. There are no cars parked around it. The lights are off. The shades are drawn. Looks like a gigantic coffin.

Fern must now be reading my mind, because he says, “Why are you being Negative Nancy all of a sudden?”

And I hate to admit that he’s right. I’m disappointed. I’d been picturing a real castle, some palatial estate. “I’m trying not to be,” I say to Fern. “It’s just…you see…I thought…it was gonna be a real castle.”

“How do you know it’s not a real castle if you don’t go inside?”

“Intuition,” I say, “but mostly because it’s a double-wide trailer.”

“And I said,” says Fern, “how do you know it’s not a real castle if you don’t go inside?”

2

There’s a stink to something like this. Follow a voice to Scotland, to the trailer. I’m standing outside the door, figuring out what I’m supposed to do. I don’t want to go inside—something’s telling me that I won’t survive, that there’s madness on the other side—but the volume of that animal instinct is drowned out by Fern, the shriek clanging, my brain rattling like NASCAR, and I understand that the only way to quiet him down is to head straight in.

But before I do, I say out loud to the voice in my head, “Are you in there?”

“In where?” asks Fern.

“In the trailer.”

“I’m safe and sound. I’m right as rain. I’m in your head.”

“What I mean is,” I say, “I’m wondering if I’ll meet your physical form once I go inside.”

“Probably not.”

“So is this goodbye?”

“Probably not.”

I head up the three metal stairs. As I’m about to go in, Fern says, “Too-da-loo, Negative Nancy. You bought the ticket. Enjoy the ride.”

It’s dark in the trailer, and I fumble while looking for the light switch until, finally, the room flicks bright.

It’s freezing in here. Way colder than outside. I can see my breath.

Beige carpet and beige walls. There are no doors other than the one I just came through. Chandeliers made of antlers run down the middle of the room. They sway from side to side, in time, almost like they’ve been trained. Like they’re alive. My eyes follow their rhythm.

Near the back wall, opposite of where I stand, there is a desk. Behind the desk sits a young girl, ten or so, in a fancy swivel chair. She’s dressed for a shift at the DMV. Positioned behind her is a refrigerator that’s pushed up to an otherwise empty wall. Her desk has only one thing on it: a grenade.

“Are you Hal?” she asks, smiling from behind her desk.

“What is this place?”

“I’m waiting for some guy called Hal,” she says, “so are you him, or are you leaving?”

“I’m Hal.”

“I’ve never met a Hal before. It’s an appalling name.”

A flash in my brain!

From my old life!

A memory: My mother telling me how they’d picked my first name. Her face is pixelated, a lake of static.

And now I’m back in the double-wide trailer, and I say to the girl, “They named me after the computer from that Kubrick movie, 2001.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Hal,” she says, “even if they named you after a psychopathic computer.”

“Can computers be psychopaths?”

“You’d need to ask them. These days, it’s a slippery slope speaking on behalf of others,” she says. “It’s my job to welcome you to Dalloway Castle.”

“So where is it?”

She extends her arms out, palms up. “There is,” she says, “more than one way to get inside. You need—”

“How old are you?” I ask.

“It’s rude to interrupt people.”

“I agree. It’s just…you’re a child in a trailer with a grenade.”

“I’m eleven years old,” she says.

Do I know this girl? I try to place her face from behind the fog of fernweh. It’s like my old life is being hidden in an Alzheimer’s haze.

“Why do you have a grenade?” I ask.

“It’s for you,” she says.

“No thanks. I’ve never wanted one.”

“You’ll need it once you go inside.”

“You seem…” I say. “Have we met?”

This makes her start laughing, almost as hard as I hyena’d at baggage claim before Fern reminded me to be cool.

“You don’t remember your old job?” she asks me. “Like, not at all?”

I wrack this ruined brain, or what’s left of the plundered loaf: “I don’t remember. Honestly.”

I suddenly notice a bullet hole in her cheek. Because of the exit wound out the back of the skull, I can see through to the refrigerator behind her, like her head’s a spyglass. I hadn’t noticed that bullet hole before, but once I see it, that’s all there is—her whole face, her whole head, her whole being.

“Before you so rudely interrupted me,” she says, “I was telling you that you need to pick which way you want to enter the castle.” She points to a wall that miraculously has two doors—one yellow, one red. “You need to choose.”

I walk over and stand in front of the red and yellow doors. Maybe there’s danger back there. Wouldn’t there have to be? Otherwise, why would I need the grenade?

I gaze to the ceiling again, watch the gentle rhythm of those antler chandeliers swaying from side to side, almost as though this trailer bobs on the ocean.

Normally, I’d imagine a person would decide by selecting whichever color they found more pleasing, but I can’t remember what colors I love.

I take a step toward the red door, raise my hand to the knob.

“I wouldn’t go in that one,” she says. “There’s a fifty-foot snake in there.”

I take a step toward the yellow door, raise my hand to the knob.

“That one’s no good,” she says. “There’s a maniac in there with a claw hammer.”

I stand in the trailer with the swaying antler chandeliers, near a girl with a grenade, and Fern squeals in my mind, “Pick a door, do it, or I’ll holler so loud your eardrums bust.”

“Unfortunately,” I say to the girl, “I don’t like either one of these doors. Is there another way inside?”

The girl gets up from her desk and walks to the refrigerator behind her. “Then it’s door number three for you,” she says.

There are no shelves lined with food—no, this fridge is the mouth of a tunnel that stretches deep into the darkness, a straight throat going who-the-hell-knows. 

“What if I don’t choose?” I ask. “What if I just go home?”

“You are home. He called you here.”

“I can get in my car and drive away.”

“You’d die,” she says.

“You’ll kill me?”

“He would make the noise so loud in your head that it would be like your brain stepped on a landmine.”

And to illustrate her point, the noise cranks to retched decibels, livid and alive. The inside of my skull is a skate park for lightning.

I fall to my knees.

Cinch my eyes.

Begin Crying.

Heaving.

Seizing.

“I’ll do it!” I shout, and the assaulting concert stops. My head is quiet. It’s a pleasure I’d taken for granted before Fern showed up. A mind that has enough light to see the beauty of the world.

I gasp for breath, blink my eyes fifty times, try to see things clearly.

My nose starts bleeding.

“He wants me to tell you that you’re making a good decision,” she says.

“I don’t want to go in the refrigerator alone.”

“Then ask me to come along.”

“Will you come along?”

“You should say please,” she says.

“Will you please come along into the refrigerator with me?”

“Oh, I’m just screwing with you,” says the girl with the bullet hole in her cheek. “I was always coming. I’ll even carry our grenade.”

And so we disappear into the fridge, pulling the door shut behind us.

3

What are we without access to our story? Our mythologies, our comings-of-age. Our trauma temples. Our self-righteous mausoleums. The whole scroll of blunders and aches. Sleeves of tattoos that tell our tragedies.

And if all those tales are lost, turning into negative space, then we’re left in the dark.

An eclipse of mistakes.

It feels like a good day, though maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is a bad day. I can’t remember. That’s the strangest thing I’ve ever admitted. I can’t cite specifics from the stash of yesterdays that can be sorted in batches of good or bad. But I can imagine—and I’d like to—that when you are in the middle of a good day, there is at least a moment when you shut your eyes and tilt your face toward the sun.

Even without Fern speaking, the noise in my mind is a monster. My head has the chaos of battle, a constant shelling, somebody always bleeding out from a gut shot. And yet the only way to get what I want, to learn what I need to know, is to follow the trail through the war, go deeper, go beyond my limits. That’s where the answers are, as far back in the dark as we can reach.

The girl and I walk slowly.

The ground is black brick. The walls and ceiling are packed dirt, have that great alive smell. A flashlight leads us deeper down the throat.

“This is how we get to Dalloway Castle?” I ask.

“Don’t you want to know my name?”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been under a lot of stress. Will you please tell me your name?”

“Daffodil—but people call me Dil.”

Then I hear it.

A growl off in the tunnel’s blackness in front of us.

The tunnel feels like it’s shrunk to the size of a doll house. That’s how the growl rips through me. I’ve never been this small.

The growl sounds low. Mean.

Almost idling.

Dil’s flashlight shows outer space in front of us, but there’s something there. We can’t see it, but its menace punctures the air.

Claws clatter on the bricks.

Walking. Toward us.

More growls.

“What do we do?” I say.

Dil turns toward me. “Put out your hand.”

“What?”

“Put out your hand.”

And I splay my palm toward her, and here is my reward: I’m holding the grenade now.

“Oh, no thank you,” I say to her, trying to give it back.

But the growls get more intense, the claws click on the bricks like rifle shots.

A flash in my brain!

From my old life!

A rifle. Yes. I had a rifle.

“I remember something about myself,” I say to Dil.

“Remember later,” she says, “because right now, you need to feed that grenade to her.”

“Her?”

“The Lacerated Queen.”

“Feed?”

“She has to eat the grenade.”

Her claws get this thing right to the edge of the flashlight’s beam, and the Lacerated Queen holds there, right out of sight. She is a suggestion, a shape, then we watch her emerge from the black, blossom like a horrible flower, and now she stands in a spotlight.

She walks on two legs, but they are striped like a zebra’s. Her body is scarred, pale, with some jailhouse tattoos. She wears a crown on her head, old and broken, over black hair.

“And why would she eat a grenade?” I ask Dil.

Growling at us.

Lowly, though.

Studying.

Clenching and unclenching her furry fists.

Slobbering down her chin.

She is so unconcerned about us, knows that if she wants to, we’d be dead in seconds.

“Because grenades are her favorite food,” says Dil.

The Lacerated Queen takes a few fast steps toward us, opens her mouth, pointing into it—like she’s some demented baby bird that I must feed, and, well, I guess that’s exactly the place we find ourselves.

I slowly move the grenade toward her mouth.

“Pull the pin,” says Dil.

I stare at her for a few seconds. “You’re saying pull the pin and she eats it?” I ask.

Queen shrieks another open-mouthed bird call. It’s so primal, unpleasant. And now I need to put a grenade in her maw.

“I’ll die,” I say.

“You won’t.”

“She’ll die.”

“She won’t.”

“How do I know you’re not lying to me?”

“I’ll stand next to you. We’ll all be fine.”

So that’s what we do. Dil and I are very close to Queen, who is still pointing into her growling and shrieking bird mouth.

Pulling this pin is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

I can fight a pterodactyl.

I can do the backstroke in lava.

I can surf on the roof of the space shuttle while it orbits the moon, God watching the show from his motel in the sky.

I can do all these things because I’m holding a live grenade.

I place it on Queen’s tongue, and she shuts her mouth and swallows hard, and I can see the shape of the grenade moving down her esophagus, like an elevator descending under the skin.

And the grenade goes off.

Its energy jolts all around Queen’s body, under her pale skin—and her lower legs glow, and it travels up her thighs, waist, torso, chest, and right as the glow gets to her neck, The Lacerated Queen’s entire head explodes.

One second she has a head, then she doesn’t.

Chunks of her fly everywhere, and because Dil and me are right in front of Queen, we get painted in bone, blood, and cartilage. One of her eyes ends up in my hair. I pluck it from the tangle, hold it right in front of my face, inspecting the thing. I have to give her this: she has a beautiful blue eye.

Strangely, the remainder of Queen’s body stands there nonchalantly. The body has its typical functions, seems no worse, post-decapitation.

Headless and happy, Queen shrugs her shoulders at Dil and me, not a care in the world.

We are three alive people and two heads.

“Didn’t you say we’d all be fine?” I ask Dil.

“We will.”

“I’m holding her eye.”

“Just wait a minute,” she says.

“You don’t really understand how insane it is to hold an eye until you hold an eye.”

“Here she comes.”

“What should I do with it?” I say, meaning the eye, but Dil is rapt watching Queen’s body, saying to me, “You won’t wanna miss this.”

“Miss what?”

Then this blubbering white paste begins pushing up from Queen’s exposed neck. The paste builds itself into a skull, then tissue sprouts from the skull, growing like pink moss, then all her facial features, and soon Queen’s head grows back into its original shape.

I drop her old eye on the ground.

Queen flexes her new mouth, tests the muscles, the lips, the jaw. Once she’s warmed up, she says to us, “It’s such a tragedy that humans will never know how good it feels to explode.”

Once she’s done talking, she about-faces and walks back in the dark direction from which she’d first emerged and had approached us growling like a guard dog. She’s no longer that animal, and whatever she is now disappears down the tunnel.

Dil points the flashlight at Queen, the sound of her claws clicking on the bricks leading the way, firing rifle shots in my brain.

“Oi,” Queen says back to us, “shall we get a move on then?”

4

The three of us hoof in a line down the black-bricked subterranean road. Queen’s claws continue to sound like rifle shots as we go, so many shots, and they’re doing something in my body. These shots feel like they’re hitting me and breaking through something, cracking that big division that barricades me from who I used to be.

“So,” I say to Queen, “you exploded.”

“I did—and I forgot to thank you,” she says. “So thanks. I really needed that.”

“Okay, yeah,” I say, “but you exploded.”

“I need to explode every few hours so I can reset. I slowly turn into a beast until I eat a new grenade. We change. We adapt. Galapagos. That’s life! Aren’t you?”

“Aren’t I what?”

“An entirely different person than who you used to be,” she says.

“I don’t know.”

The three of us continue in silence, save for the brick clicks, and then Dil says to Queen, “He doesn’t remember anything from his life. Even me.”

“He doesn’t remember you?!” Queen asks.

“I don’t even think he can help us,” says Dil, “but I’m being a good soldier. I’m following Fern’s orders.”

A flash!

From my old life!

A good soldier. Basic at Pendleton. Afghanistan. Tenth Mountain Division. Clearing caves. Fighting in the dark. The chambers of those caves were like big dry hearts. You heard shots in the dark, or you heard knives, or you heard boots, or you heard breathing, or you heard begging, or you heard screaming, or heard the squirt of wounds.

You used guns and blades and fists.

You used grenades and other explosives.

You plugged a friend’s chest, found limbs, called for help, held the hand of a different brother and watched him turn off. When I used to exit those caves, walk back out in the sun after our pitch violence, I felt like a vampire—and I’d hope to burn up in the light, scorched away, anything so I didn’t have to go in the next one. But I always heard the call to clear the next cave.

I had to fight unseeable monsters.

It’s a life sentence in a haunted house.

And now I’m back here in the tunnel, following the Lacerated Queen down this thin passageway. “I remember something else about me,” I say to Dil, who picks at the bullet hole in her cheek.

“What?” she asks.

“I was a soldier. Is that how we know each other?”

“No,” says Dil, “we met once you got back.”

Queen stops walking, shushes us. She scratches at her halter, and I notice that one of her jailhouse tattoos across the top of her spine is a big barcode. “We’re almost to the moat. Let me do the talking,” she says to me.

“Moat?” I ask.

“We mean it,” Dil says to me. “He’s not too friendly.”

“Fern?”

“No. The master of the moat,” Queen says. “He takes his job very seriously.”

“And he hates you,” Dil says.

“Why? What did I do?”

“He doesn’t know which one you are,” says Dil.

“Which one what?” I say.

“Let me do the talking,” Queen says.

The black-bricked tunnel curves some, and once we’re around it, the tunnel opens onto an underground body of water. Even though it’s completely enclosed in this humungous cave, the moat isn’t calm at all. Somehow this room has weather, pouring rain, making the moat into a rollicking sea. White caps. Wind howling. Thunder and lightning.

We’ve walked into a secret storm.

There are no people around and we just stand on the freezing shoreline. The moat is so large that I can follow it all the way to the horizon.

Then some bubbles begin fizzing and popping about thirty feet from shore, then the eye of a periscope pokes out of the water. The eye looks around, settles on us.

Slowly, a whole submarine surfaces on the churning waters.

Slowly, somebody emerges from a hatch on top.

The figure is tall, thin, and wears a gasmask. Dil and Queen fetch a stashed rowboat, and we fight through the squall. We climb the sub’s ladder toward the hatch on top. The man makes no motion to remove his gasmask, standing in the storm, talking to me: “Logically, you’ll understand I’ll need you in special accommodations aboard.”

“What kind of special accommodations?” I ask.

“The kind with steel bars.”

He finally removes his gasmask. Skin is long-haired, mangy. He has two straight razor tattoos running like sideburns down his jawbone. A look in his eyes like he’s on PCP.

“Logically,” says Skin to me, “you’re a prisoner until proven otherwise.”

5

I’m led into the sub, down into the maze of corridors, like an MC Escher painting, this staircase leading over here takes you to a hatch in a completely different part of the sub, this ladder first, then that ladder, wait, haven’t we been here before? no, take a left, right, left, another one, weaving and leading me deeper into the labyrinth, until we reach the room that has the cages.

Skin puts me in a cage. I’m alone in it.

There are three other cages, all are empty.

Skin walks out, then returns carrying a naked, unconscious man with a bag over his head.

He gets thrown on a bunk in one of the other cages.

Skin says to me, “Now things get interesting,” before sprinting right back out of the room.

He runs possessed. Runs scared.

I’m left alone, hoping to hear from Fern. This can’t be part of the plan. Why am I in jail?

Then I hear some wheezy breathing.

Someone’s breathing in here, and it’s not the unconscious guy.

It’s coming from up near the ceiling.

I look straight above me and don’t see anything, and so I scan the ceiling, follow the sounds of the wheezy breaths.

There.

There it is.

It’s right above the nude, unconscious man on his bunk.

Gargoyle-looking. Big. Black wings that wrap around the front of the body so I can’t make out a form. Besides the breathing, it’s barely noticeable—but then its wings slowly open, like a huge hairy Venus flytrap. The body is bat-shaped and man-sized.

The wings gently pluck the sleeping naked guy from his bunk and then bring him up toward the bat’s drooling mouth. The fangs hungrily slurp, and the man folds in on himself, like a Capri Sun, as his innards are guzzled. Once the bat’s done snacking, it throws the deflated corpse to the ground, landing with a gooey splat, looking a lot like a used condom.

The bat creeps back to the top of the cage, encloses itself behind those massive black wings.

“I see you met Boris,” Skin says, coming back in. I’m enamored with his straight razor tattoos on his jaws. He’s coming close to my cage. Those PCP eyes. He is the sort of man who can carve your heart from your chest while you’re alive, and he’d sleep soundly that night, dream of something sweet, like, say, the first kiss between young lovers.

“What is that thing?” I ask.

“Logically, that’s Boris.”

“What’s Boris?”

“Boris is one of a kind,” he says, “and that’s my problem with you. There are just too many of you. Dil and Queen seem to think you’re different than the rest. Fern, too. But my job is to be skeptical of such theories.”

“I’m Hal.”

“I’ve met hundreds of Hals,” says Skin, “and it’s never nice to meet you.”

“I’m sure what you’re saying makes sense to you,” I say, “but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You’ll catch on quick,” Skin says. “I have no doubt about that.”

“Where are Dil and Queen?”

“They’re getting some chow.”

“Can I see them?”

“No.”

“Can I have something to eat, too?”

“No…later…maybe,” says Skin. “Logically, I’m going to get to the bottom of who you are. You’re not really going to enjoy this next part.”

He struts over toward the cage where the condom guy seeps on the floor.

Then Skin asks, “So are you going to tell me what I need to know about you, Hal, or should I put Boris in your cage?”

6

“Let me be clear,” I say to Skin, “you do not need Boris.”

Skin says that he thinks I’m right. “Who needs Boris when we can handle this situation like gentlemen?” He says it with a wry smile, the PCP glimmer in his eyes makes him harder to read than a slot machine. It’s the kind of instant and surprising agreeability that you know you’re being set up for something far worse, but if this other option has less Boris in it, that seems like an okay thing.

Skin splits and comes back dragging another man with a bag on his head. This one wears clothes and is very much conscious, kicking, fighting, gagged but yelling macerated sounds.

Skin opens my cage and dumps the hooded man on my floor, locking us in together.

His hands are tied behind his back, but the knots aren’t that tight, and he works them, tugs them, struggles them apart.

He’ll soon be free.

“Who’s that?” I ask Skin.

“You are asking the same question that I’m asking of you,” he says, wagging his finger at me. “Who is this I’m looking at? Logically, just who the hell are you?”

“Just because you don’t like my answer—that doesn’t mean I’m lying,” I say. “I don’t know who I am.”

“Logically, you understand I can’t believe anything you say,” he says.

“So what’s the point of us talking?”

“Logically, there is no point,” Skin says, “but lucky for us, we’re only small talking. We’re killing time. We’re just the opening act until he’s free.” Skin points and claps at the hooded man who works the knots behind his back, stretching them almost to their breaking point, screaming behind the gag. “Logically, the enemy might try a Trojan horse.”

“I’m not a Trojan horse,” I say.

“Logically,” Skin says, “the enemy might try and work that angle. Sneak one of you inside the castle. Murder us. And logically, I can’t let that happen.”

This is when the hooded man bursts through his knots. This is when he yanks off his gag. This is when he pulls the hood from his head.

And this is when, for the first time in my life, I’m staring straight at myself.

He blinks like mad. His face is beaten up. His hair is shorter than mine, almost a crewcut, but he has my face.

“Brother,” he says, excited to see me, “today we devour the soul.”

“You know me?” I ask.

He’s all nervous energy, slamming around the cage, ricocheting, talking too fast. He says, “There’s no going back after today. The castle falls, and we never have to remember what we’ve done,” and that makes him howl in celebration, makes him rattle the steel bars. “We’ll be free from what we’ve done. For all time.”

A flash!

Civilian life!

Back home after deployment. Swat. Sniper. The shot. I can’t see the shot; I can only hear it, can only feel it. The shot. I took the shot.

The memory moves too fast, won’t slow, forming for a split second before liquefying to rumor. And a head full of rumors is a head full of ghosts.

And now I’m back here, in a cage, in a submarine.

Trapped.

“Actually,” I say to him, “I think I want to remember.”

As soon as I say it, he stops working the bars, turns to me. He postures up. There’s hazard coming from him.

“Brother,” he says, “remembering—that’s the last thing we want. That’s what we’re here to stop.”

“No,” I say, “I don’t think that’s why I’m here.”

“Please don’t tell me that, brother. Let’s not fight. Let’s break free. Let’s join our comrades and devour the soul.”

“That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then we’ve got a problem,” he says.

“Logically,” Skin says to me, “now we’ll find out whose side you’re really on.”

This other me lunges and wraps his hands around my throat, choking me. I may not remember my past, but there is muscle-memory, training, a code of violence in me that activates. Most people, when they’re being choked, bring their hands to the wrists of their assailants. It’s instinct. Trying to work their hands, get some air. But that’s a mistake, a waste of energy.

There are vulnerabilities to be exploited while he bears down around my neck.

He has ears and eyes. Those exposed ports.

I swing my open palms, hard and fast, and box his ears until he lets go of my neck.

I take my thumbs and dig them into his eye sockets, up to my knuckles, and he shouts and takes a couple steps back, but I move with him. I throw a hook, sweep his legs, fall on top of him, straddling his torso. I smash his face with hands first, follow that up with slicing elbows, again and again and again to his nose, his forehead, shattering both cheeks, ribboning him to red trenches. He’s knocked so senseless that he’s not even trying to defend himself anymore, so I crank his neck to the side, try to turn it backward, break it—

I’ve killed me.

Skin, our spectator, starts clapping. “Logically, that shows me some things, but what to make of them? On one hand, yes, you’ve murdered him. You’ve proven that, when the chips are down, you’ll do what must be done. But I have another hand, and it’s on the fence about you—” He holds up and shakes one of his palms like it’s a maraca. “Yes, my hand is on the fence—and it,” he says, flicking at one of the straight razors on his jaw, “feels as though this is exactly the sort of behavior a Trojan horse would display. Kill only one from his ranks as a trick. Lure me into letting my guard down. Logically, then, you’d snap my neck, too.”

“I don’t know who this man is,” I say.

“He’s a Hal.”

“I’ve never seen him before.”

“This is why Fern made me master of the moat,” Skin says. “I’ll do the dirty work. I’ll do the dark things most men won’t.”

“Fern called me home,” I say.

“And this all brings us full circle. I’m going to ask you one question, and if you get it right, you win. You’re the good Hal. You’re here to help. But if you don’t answer correctly, I’m going to feed you to Boris.”

Skin goes over and unlocks Boris’s cage.

The big bat flips down and slime-walks out of the cell, dark wings covering his body, slowly moving, hissing.

It takes time, but the monster slinks right up next to Skin and stands there, looking at me, salivating, waiting for word to dig in.

Skin opens the door to my cage.

I take a few steps back.

Boris bounces in place, excited.

In between his hisses, he makes a noise like he’s smacking his lips while anticipating a delicious meal.

“Go ahead, Boris, go get close and introduce yourself,” Skin says.

Boris throws open his wings, and the huge, hissing bat shambles into my cage, up to me, just a few feet away. He flexes his mouth at me. Sniffs. Bites at the air. Smacks those lips. Gets a foot closer to me—and Boris’s breath smells like gasoline and blood. His fangs are inches from me, and he hisses and hisses, chomps those massive jaws.

“If you are who Dil and Queen say you are,” Skin says, “then you were already visited by somebody from our side. You describe him to me accurately, you’re good. If not—”

Boris’s black wings snatch me up, pull me into his body. I try and fight, but the wings close around me, squeezing me, trapping me right up to his face.

He does those smacking lips.

His spit hits all over me.

“Call Fern!” I say to Skin. “He told me to come here—to come home! Please!”

Boris offers more hisses.

More gas breath.

More lip smacks.

Skin says, “This person who visited you has unique features. You either saw him, or you didn’t. This is cut-and-dry territory. Tell me about his eyes.”

And then I’m back on that airplane that had brought me to Scotland, and there is that figure out the window, those fluorescent orange eyes, glowing glowing glowing—

“Bright orange eyes!” I say to Skin.

I remain inside Boris’s big wings, not hearing anything other than these huge hisses coming from a monster’s mouth, my face inches from it. Like I’m trapped in a coffin that’s somehow alive. One that’s hungry. I can hear Boris’s heart, fast and agitated.

I can hear his eyes blink, squishy.

I wait to feel the fang, the suck, the syphon.

I wait to drain.

“Sorry, Boris. Let him go,” Skin says.

Boris opens the wings.

I fall to the floor, gasping, while the big bat retreats into his original cell, crawling to the top of the cage, closing his wings.

I’m drenched in Boris’s mucus, which also smells like gas, and yet I’m happy. I went in Boris’s wings, then came out on the other side.

Both Dil and Queen enter the room from the hall.

“Can I get a towel?” I ask Skin. “I’m covered in Boris.”

Dil makes a big show of smelling me: “Boris-juice stinks.”

“You killed the other Hal,” Queen says to me.

“Self-defense,” I say, not intending it as a joke, but Queen laughs.

“Everyone watched,” Skin says, pointing to cameras around the room. “We had to know you’d fight. And we had to make sure you weren’t one of them. But you saw the orange eyes on the airplane. You’re the right Hal.”

“I would’ve told you about him under normal conditions,” I say to Skin. “Why did you wait until I was in Boris’s wings to ask?”

“Pressure busts pipes,” he says, “and pressure has nothing on Boris. I needed to see you take some heat, watch your reaction.”

“So who is the man with orange eyes?” I ask.

“Electric Henry,” Queen says. “Fern’s trusted council. You’ll see Electric again once we’re at Dalloway Castle.”

Dil points at me, holds her nose. “I’ll take him to shower up,” she says.

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” says the Lacerated Queen, “but I could really chow down on a grenade right about now.”

7

Dil leads me through the sub. The MC Escher maze of corridors and chambers is disorienting. We spin open hatches and march the metal ladders. This is an easy world to get turned around in.

“I want to ask you a question,” I say to Dil, “but you might not want to talk about it.”

“Ask away.”

“Well…I’m just curious…about what happened…to you.”

Dil fingers her bullet hole. “Why, whatever are you referring to, Hal?”

“I shouldn’t have even asked,” I say. “It was rude.”

“I can show you.”

“Show me what?”

“What happened to me.”

We’re walking down a narrow gun-metal gray hall, and she stops in front of a closed door. “It’s in there,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“If we go through this door, we can travel to that day.”

“There is a time machine in there?” I ask, pointing at the closed door.

“We are the time machines,” she says. “That’s just a door.”

Then, out of nowhere, my heart sounds like Queen’s claws on the bricks. My hands shake. My mouth goes to dirt.

Take a deep breath and hold it.

Exhale after a four count.

I bring my sweaty palm up to the doorknob.

The periphery of my vision wiggles.

“I’m having a panic attack,” I say.

“Moment of truth,” she says.

Take a deep breath and hold it.

Exhale after a four count.

Take a deep breath and hold it.

Exhale after a four count.

And right as I’m about to twist the knob and head inside, Dil says, “Wait, Hal, wait. I have an idea.”

I let my hand fall from the knob. “What?”

“Before you see what really happened to me, let’s go through this other door first.” She walks over to another one, about ten feet off.

I follow her over: “Why that one?”

“Let’s go someplace that we’ve never been to. Let’s spend a little time in a fantasy.”

“A fantasy?”

“Would you like to go somewhere and feel happy with me right now?” Dil asks me.

“And it’s a fantasy?”

“Pure make-believe. Come on.”

She opens the door to someplace happy, holds it wide for me.

I haven’t moved. I keep thinking about what she just said—“Would you like to go somewhere and feel happy with me right now?”—and it might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.

Dil shakes me, says, “Let’s go.”

Once we cross the threshold, the door takes us to an amusement park. It’s set right on the Pacific Ocean. It’s a beautiful day, upper seventies. The smells on the boardwalk are cheap and lavish. Sugar wafts and makes me salivate, fumes of funnel cakes—and I can taste the ocean on the air and someone’s smoking marijuana and the walkway is filled with so much human laughter that it’s obscene.

“This way,” Dil says, grabbing my wrist in her small hand and leading me toward a rollercoaster, the biggest on the boardwalk. She marches us right to the front of the line, and nobody even squawks; this ride had been waiting for us to sit right up front, to raise our hands in the air, to feel the click click click of the metal chain as the coaster nears the top of that mammoth first drop.

Dil and I look at each other, elated and silly.

From up here, we can peer out over the boardwalk, out toward the ocean.

The coaster’s nose pokes over the big drop, and everybody’s squealing with anticipation—we know what comes next: that intoxicating velocity, our stomachs in our throats, the heat of being out of control, the freedom of speeding so fast that you can’t worry about the past, you can’t conjure anything that might muddy this up, no, the rollercoaster streaks down the drop, flying, shaking from side to side, our hands staying straight up in the air because we’re having the time of our lives, yes, we are two people racing around the tracks, yes, the sunlight warms our skin, and I’ve never even been in a cave, no, and Dil’s never been shot through the cheek, no, we don’t know anything about those things, yes, we are two happy animals in the front car of a rollercoaster, yes, and we are surging toward a loopty-loop, yes, now we’re upside down, yes, now we’re right side up again, yes, now we’re alive and nothing will ever change that.

8

It’s my first shower in who-knows-how-long. I stand under the stream. It isn’t only the shower that’s making me feel so clean. It’s the fantasy, riding that rollercoaster, doing the loop in the sky with Dil on the lip of the Pacific.

“You’re almost home,” Fern says, barging into my brain. “The prodigal Hal.”

When he says home, the word sounds hollowed out.

When he says home, I hear a phantom limb whimper.

A home is held together by load-bearing memories, both good and bad beams, and all I know about my life amounts to twigs.

So I’m following Fern to fix all that.

When I’m home, I’ll know who I am.

“Where have you been hiding?” I say out loud to the voice in my head.

“Did you hear what I said? Prodigal Hal. That deserved vigorous laughter.”

“Where have you been?” I ask Fern.

“I’m definitely not hiding,” he says. “My ducks are in a row. How are your ducks, Hal? How would you describe your current duck situation?”

“I want a straight answer,” I say.

“Oh, how I’ve been making home improvements while you fritter your day away. I’m basically a whole new man. I’m buzzing with anticipation to tell you all about it. That’s a pun, but you won’t get the joke for a little while still. Face it, Hal. You’re not in the know. You’re a man without a country.”

“Why did you call me here?”

“I had high hopes,” he says.

“For?”

“I have ducks, many ducks, all of which are in a row,” Fern says, “but my high hopes are long gone. Flew the coop. My high hopes don’t need you no more.”

“Straight. Answer.”

“Where’s the fun in that?” says Fern. “But fine. I called you home because I thought that the castle was going to be destroyed, and we needed you to prevent that from happening.”

“Destroyed by who?”

“The other Hals,” he says. “The ones who will do whatever it takes. They’ll tear down this whole place…so they never remember.”

“What don’t they want to remember?”

“It’s ancient history.”

“What if I want to know what it is?”

“You don’t.”

“If you’re at war with the Hals, Fern, they have a side of the story,” I say. “I want to know their side of this.”

“You should have given a vigorous laugh when I said Prodigal Hal.”

“I want to hear their side.”

“No,” says Fern. “No, I don’t think I’m going to let that happen.”

“Then how can I know who’s right?”

“You’re not listening. You’re behind. You’re worried about the wrong things. I said that they were going to destroy the castle. Past tense. I said that we needed you. Past tense. Turns out, they’re not destroying anything, and we don’t need you at all. No. Now, ladies and gentlemen, you’re old news. I’m what the doctor ordered. I’m what we need.”

The hot water is quickly disappearing.

Soon, it will be warm, then cold, then freezing.

Soon, I’ll lose it.

“You don’t want me to come home anymore?” I ask.

“There’s been a change of plans, Persona Non Grata. You’re no longer welcome.”

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.”

Fern laughs, really laughs, like you do when your electric chair malfunctions. “What should you do now?” he says. “Oh, that’s easy.”

“Tell me.”

“Easy as pie,” he says and starts laughing.

“What is?”

He’s hysterical now. “Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.”

“Say it.”

He gathers himself before speaking: “What was the question again? Hmmm. Right. Yes. You wondered: What you should do next? Since we’re old friends, I’ll tell you the truth. What you should do next is hold onto something.”

“Why?”

“Because, silly goose, contingencies, backup plans, understudies.”

“Spit it out.”

“This is goodbye, Hal,” he says. “I’m about to torpedo that sub.”

9

I’m still just standing in the now-warm-but-soon-to-be-freezing shower. I brace for impact, that moment before an asteroid hits a spaceship. I’m waiting for that rumble, that rupture in the safety of this home. I’m waiting to be killed by the forces outside.

And if I’m not an astronaut, I’m an unborn child. My time in this protected place is almost over. Time to leave here, to be birthed, to be removed from a womb and plopped into the next world. 

Then I feel it: an impact.

But faint.

So subtle that maybe I might have imagined it.

But no.

Now, a quick jerk in the water.

Now, I hold my breath to listen as closely as I can to the ambient noise.

Trying to sense any disturbance.

Clean seconds.

No new jerks or noises.

Then—

Creaking, stretching, groaning, bending.

Maybe this is what it sounds like when Leprechauns pound their rainbows into shape.

The buckle of steel.

Alarms blare on the sub.

I use the wall to support myself, stagger to my clothes, get dressed.

There’s no rushing water in the room I’m in, probably not up to this deck of the sub yet, working through the lower ones, but soon I’ll be flooded.

Then the equilibrium of the sub goes sideways.

Loses its gravity. Loses its shape.

Everything goes wonky and bent.

Everything goes mad.

The entire submarine is a funhouse.

No such thing as direction.

The sub is rolling, slowly, over and over.

A rolling, sinking sub.

A sub on a rotisserie.

The ocean doesn’t care about physics.

The ocean has never even heard of Einstein.

And math can’t swim.

The sub takes on all that additional weight of the water, onboarding like gluttonous tourists, and it sloshes and falls and ricochets, everything looks warped as we roll and roll and roll, as the water goes everywhere, dragging us down—

Dil and Queen run into the room, spilling and slamming into walls as they come in. Both have scuba masks and tanks, and Queen carries a rig for me, helps me put it on as fast as we can—with seconds to spare—and right as the respirator pops into my mouth, right as I take in my first successful breath of air from my tank, that’s when the water barrels in.

A flash!

From my old life!

I see someone pull in their own first breath of air.

It’s a boy.

I have a son.

I cut his cord.

His cries discover new chambers of my heart, uninhabited caves in me that I didn’t know existed.

I kiss his forehead, taste blood and afterbirth. I will do anything it takes to protect this child.

And now I’m back on the sub—and now the grand pressure of the rushing water tears the submarine in half like a stale baguette, and the gravity malfunctions again, weight and balance flip topsy-turvy as the half of the sub we’re in begins to sink faster, careen differently with its new, reduced mass.

The bulkheads begin shuddering, banging, sounding like old propellers. This whole place will be ripped apart soon.

Dil has the end of a rope in her hand, thrusts it at me until I snag it. The line is tied to something on its other side so that we can use it to pull ourselves out of the room, into the hall, into the swirling folly of a sub’s hallway that’s turned into the banks of a furious river. We work hard not to be swept up in the maelstrom, ushered off to die. So we fight. So we swim with all our might, against the rush of water, relying on that line to hold—I’ve never worried so much about a piece of rope—needing those fibers to stand strong.

I can’t see where we’re going.

The waters are too rough.

I follow the rope.

I follow Dil and Queen.

I have a son.

I have a voice in my head.

I have a rope in my hand.

This sub is sinking.

There is a castle that needs me.

It’s like we’re in a cave. Like I’m back in Afghanistan. Like I don’t know what lurks around the next corner, in the next shadow. Who is waiting to kill me now?

Then the rope goes limp in my hand; the line has been cut in front of me.

I’ve lost my tether.

Whatever it had been connected to is severed now.

And Dil and Queen don’t seem to be close—or I can’t see them. The chaos. The foaming, raging waters.

I’m alone, holding a piece of rope in my hand that looks like a droopy stem.

I don’t see it, only feel it, something in the water smashes into the back of my head. Blood leaks freely. A bass drum throb goes off in my brain. Has a certain rhythm to it. A blues song.

I am so lost in this maze, and there is no such thing as gravity, and we are sinking faster, but man, I love these blues.

I can’t see straight. I can’t think straight.

I have a son and I cut his cord and I kiss his forehead.

I try the sub’s doors but can’t get through them. I try ladders but can’t get my footing, can’t swim against the current of barreling water. I probably shouldn’t have come home from the war. Maybe dying in this underwater cave is the way it should work out for me.

It’s what I deserve.

A soggy funeral.

In a drowned church.

My dead body and the pews full of sharks.

But there’s Boris, grabbing me by the arms and pulling me into his big wings. I’m trapped inside, and he swims fast, and I peek through a gap in his wings with one eye, like I’m spying through a keyhole. I watch Boris dart us through the maze, this way, that way, up and down, left and right. Boris is a navigation expert in MC Escher paintings. He speeds the two of us straight out of the sinking sub and up through the water, toward the surface—

My head thumps so much that it feels like the worst kind of brain freeze—a savage winter screaming through my mind, like somebody has jammed my ear under a soft serve machine. Ice cream sliding into my head, coiling itself like a sundae, packing the whole skull with frigid weather—

10

I don’t know if I’ve been unconscious for five minutes, five hours, or five days—but when I finally wake up again, Boris is a boat.

He opens his wings as wide as possible, lays one down on the water, flat, forming the bottom of the boat. His body is balanced on its side like the wall of a lean-to—and his other wing stands straight up into the sky, a kind of sail, which is what propels us to skim across the water.

It’s a bright day as I look around. Sunny, very few clouds. When we’d entered the sub, there was a storm warring on those underground waters, and now we float on Boris on open waters, and it’s a fine day.

I’m not alone on the wing-raft. Skin, Dil, and the Lacerated Queen are cozied up on it, too. I sit up, pat my hair, wince.

“How’s your head feeling?” Dil asks.

“It hasn’t been a great year up there,” I say, fingering the new wound on the crown of my skull from whatever crashed into me on the sub, needing stitches. “I’ll be fine.”

Skin speaks to Boris: “Can you give this thing the gas, Boris? Logically, we need to get there yesterday.”

When he says there, I can’t remember where we’re going. I really hit my head.

The raft now cranks and speeds like a hovercraft.

Queen must not have gotten that grenade she’d been craving earlier because her features are turning more animal again. She really needs to explode. Her words are beginning their slur toward growls. “I’m glad you made it out of the sub alive,” she says to me.

All the drama and danger come back. The sub. He sunk the sub. He wanted to kill us all.

“It was Fern!” I say to them.

“What was?” Skin asks.

“He did it.”

“Did what?”

“He torpedoed the submarine,” I say.

Speaking at the same time, Dil says, “No way,” and Queen says, “Yeah, right,” and Skin says, “Impossible.”

“He told me.”

“He told you that he was going to torpedo the sub?” Skin says. “Logically, that’s not logical.”

“But that’s what happened,” I say.

“Why would he try and hurt us?” Dil asks.

“He said he didn’t need me to come home anymore,” I say. “Said that he can save the castle from the Hals himself.”

“Oi,” says Queen, “it can only mean one thing.”

“What?” Dil asks.

“No way,” Skin says to Queen. “That’s impossible.”

“He tried to kill us,” she says. “Why else would he want us all dead? And where else could he get a torpedo?”

“So he’s with them now?” Dil asks.

“Them? As in the other Hals?” I ask.

Queen nods at that. “Fern’s turned.”

“Logically, that’s the only reason he’d take us out,” Skin says.

“And if that’s the case,” Queen says, “we don’t know what we’re walking into,” and her voice is going animal again, sliding away from human. She tries to keep talking, but her words melt into growls.

Queen pantomimes to Dil: will you please feed me a grenade meal?

“We only have two left…” Dil pulls one from her bag, yanks the pin, sets the grenade in the Lacerated Queen’s mouth.

A few seconds later and her head is gone and I’m again covered in goo.

We wait while a new head blooms, bulbs up from the neck, sketches itself from the inside out.

Once Queen’s face forms, she speaks to Dil: “Give me the other grenade. I’ll stash it. Just in case.”

“Stash it where?”

“You know where.”

Dil winces. “Oh, no. Gross. Really?”

Boris makes a sudden screeching noise before using his wing that’s acting as our sail to point straight ahead. I follow the direction: land, with a finger stretching into the sea—and on that spit, the castle.

I’m finally to Dalloway.

This isn’t the moment I’d expected it to be. I thought this would be about getting to Fern, to my answers. I thought I was here to regain access to my memories, my life. If Fern isn’t going to help me remember, I should walk away. I haven’t come here to die. There’s no reason for me to keep going.

Home shouldn’t kill you.

Home should lift you up.

This was supposed to be the place to quiet the slamming noise in my brain.

My time in war is over. I’ve fought my fair share. It should be the era of peace and quiet.

When will I get some peace and quiet in this madhouse head?

But there is something else going on inside of me, too, and it’s brought on by seeing the castle itself. I feel an unbearable fist of joy seeing it.

Joy!

Why?

Because it’s only a technicality that I haven’t been to this castle before.

Fern might’ve turned to the other side, gone against us, but he is right about one thing: this is home—where I’m supposed to be.

Though I don’t know if I should keep going toward it. Maybe I should flee, now that Fern has tried to murder me.

All these feelings don’t fit together: I’m happy to be home but I’m also scared of Fern, of what he and the Hals might do.

I want more than anything to get to the castle, and yet that’s the last thing I want.

I want to remember my life.

And these fists of joy—they feel beautiful.

Have you ever been hammered on by fists of joy?

I fight the urge to cry.

This is the greatest beating I’ve ever taken. 

Violence, for the right reason, is one of the most loving things you can do for another person.

11

Boris the boat slows down as we get close to shore, say fifty yards off. From the far side of those hills, even from where we are on the water, I can hear agitated voices over the edge, like an animated, drunken crowd filling a stadium.

“How many Hals are on their side?” I say.

“We don’t know exactly,” says Queen.

“I asked Fern what they want, but I can’t trust his answer,” I say. “Do you know what they are after, Queen?”

“They’ll do whatever they have to…so they never remember.”

“Remember what?” I ask.

“What did Fern say they want?”

“Same thing that you said—and you never answered my question.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t notice that.”

“What don’t they want to remember?”

“I won’t be the one to tell you that, Hal. You’re not talking to the right person.”

The castle is made of bone, which becomes clearer the closer we get to Dalloway. The whole structure. There is a lone huge tower sticking up from the center that looks like a huge tooth, and because everything is bone, everything is solid. There is no way to see inside the fortress.

But one striking detail: The exterior walls of the castle have skulls plastered into its form. These stripped faces. These old, fallen souls. Their faces all frozen into one final pose of suffering. Their skulls a warning to all who seek to enter the castle uninvited.

“Whose bones?” I say. “Whose are they?”

“Ancestors, friends, enemies. Those are the bones of everyone we’ve ever known who is dead,” Queen says, which makes me look directly at Dil.

“Your bones are there?” I ask Dil.

“What do you think?” she says.

“I think I’m sorry for whatever happened to you.”

“Yeah, you’re sorry, and I’m dead.”

“Should we turn around?” I say, not just to Dil, but to the whole gang. Something’s not right. Something’s off. Feels like we’re walking into a trap. “He can’t kill us if we leave.”

“We have to fight,” the Lacerated Queen says.

“This is our home,” Skin says.

“We need you, Hal,” Dil says.

“I don’t want to go to another war,” I say. “I don’t want to keep fighting.”

“That castle is our home,” Queen says. “It is all of our home. And if we go out defending it, that’s a righteous death.”

“Agreed, logically,” says Skin.

As Boris the boat nears the dock, we see the first few Hals crest over the top of the far green hill. It’s just a handful of Hals, and a crush of them follow, and soon there is a huge snake of men who look like me slithering down the hill, toward Dalloway.

Versions of me, like villagers storming Dr. Frankenstein’s castle, all these Hals wield torches and pitchforks, invaders, all with my face.

“Here come the Hals,” Skin says, the first one of us to hop from the Boris raft and onto the dock. He helps Dil, Queen, and me step off.

Boris flaps his wings to dry them, then circles above us as we march toward the shore. He spies a corpse on the ground, next to a rifle. Boris rips the rifle in two, uses its barrel as a big straw, jamming it in the dead body, sucking the blood and innards, the head collapsing in on itself as he keeps gulping.

Our feet leave the dock, plop on the rocky beach. The sound of our feet crunching through the pebbles is like a giant eating cereal.

“Logically speaking,” Skin says, “let’s assume Fern knows we’re here—and that means he’s already hunting us. Remember our training. Be on your guard.”

“That’s good advice. You don’t want to be another skull lacquered into the castle’s bones,” says Dil. “Trust me.”

I don’t like that Skin just told us to remember. He isn’t trying to be mean. He’s scared, too, heading into battle.

Losing my memories, losing me, it makes the idea of a future feel cruel. A clean slate is only a gift if you don’t want what’s been erased.

We lose so much being alive.

We lose so much.

We lose.

But it’s the only way we know we’re still here. If we’re lucky enough to be alive, we eventually lose what we love.

“Is there anyone else on our side in the castle?” I ask.

“We won’t know until we sneak in, talk to Electric Henry,” Queen says. “We might be a hundred strong, might be a handful. Might be…”

“Us,” I say, “just us.”

“Yeah,” says the Lacerated Queen, “we might be the last line of defense.”

12

We enter through the lowered drawbridge. The castle is empty, at least as much as I can see once we’re in the main courtyard. Things look abandoned.

If this had been people’s homes, they’re long gone.

All, save for one poor soul. I recognize this dead man. He hangs from a noose, mostly nondescript, except his fluorescent orange eyes, frozen open. This is Electric Henry.

There is a hand-written sign hanging from his chest: By orders of the king.

“He’s calling himself the king?” Queen says to Skin.

“Logically, he must’ve figured out how to open the box. It’s the only explanation.”

“The box?” I ask.

“If he’s opened it, then he’s probably in the skull now,” Queen says to Skin.

“‘The skull’ is what we call the throne room,” Dil says to me.

Some chickens peck on the street. The only sign of life. Beaks and clucks. The grim rhythm and creak of Electric Henry’s body swaying from the rope.

Queen puts her hand on Electric’s limp foot. “You were a nice person. You had tenacity, and I always admired that about you.”

Skin puts his hand on Electric’s limp foot, too. “I always liked you. Logically, I’d say we were fast friends and I bet we drink a beer or six together on the other side.”

“That’s enough of the nice stuff,” says Queen.

“Yes, it is,” Skin says.

“Let’s do something about the fact our friend got killed. Let’s avenge him.”

Queen sneaks off, and we follow her inside the castle, into a massive hall. High-ceilinged and sleek. This room, too, is made of bone. The walls shine, give a fake teeth gleam.

Being around all this bone—the castle doesn’t feel like a place; it’s a person.

One more opulent door between us and the throne room.

Queen whispers to us at the door, “Element of surprise,” then steps back and kicks the door open. “Where are you?” The question echoes around the big space as she stampedes in.

Dil reaches out, holds my hand tight. We smile at each other. She and I rush in next, and Skin brings up the rear, Boris flying above us, ahead of us, patrolling the room’s sky.

The throne room is covered in candles, hundreds of them burning in the musky space, all different shapes and sizes. There are whole cities of dried wax layered over the floor. Hues mixed and melted together in this mad space. There are colors in this room that have never been named.

On the far side is a tarnished throne, brass-looking, empty, and next to it, a black rectangular box the size of a coffin that stands upright.

“Where is he?” Dil says, and we continue to walk toward the rusty throne.

“He’s around here, logically,” Skin says. “He has to be.”

“Oh good, the gang’s all here,” says a man’s voice, one I recognize because he’s been belting it out in my head for months.

I’m finally going to meet him.

He’s here, and I’m here.

“Fern!” I say.

He’s been hiding behind the big rectangular box, and now he comes out into the open. He’s an old man, eighties, give or take. And Fern doesn’t have any eyes.

What I mean by that is—where his eyes are supposed to be on his face is skin. He’s not the victim of some heinous eye accident, scarred and marbled. This isn’t a birth defect. No, his face simply isn’t designed to have eyes on it.

“Forgive my appearance,” he says. “I didn’t know what time you’d show up—so I haven’t put my face on yet.”

“Oi, we need to talk!” Queen says to him.

“Hold on, drama Queen, you’re always so emotional,” Fern says. “Perhaps you need pharmaceutical reinforcements. Happy pills. Joy juice.”

“Tell me you didn’t sink the sub!” Queen says.

“I’m not saying anything without my eyes—that simply wouldn’t be civilized behavior.” Fern reaches into his pocket and pulls out an earring box. He retrieves a pair of pin drop earrings, almond-shaped, each a dull black stone. He puts one in each of his lobes.

They sway.

Then they blink!

They. Blink.

These are his eyes!

Yes, those are his big green eyes dangling from his ears.

The eyes blink, orient, focus.

Fern stares straight at us. “Ah, I can see things clearly!” he says, those eyeballs of his blinking wildly before finally focusing on me. “Let me take a good look at you, Hal. I want to see you from head to toe! I want to see you in all your glory!”

His eyes blink, stutter, stare.

He opens them as wide as he can, and his irises are such deep, dark green that they look like dragon scales.

“Why did you try and kill us?” Queen says.

“You won’t believe me,” he says. “You’ll think I’ve flipped my lid. That I’m cooking the books. So instead of the truth, I’ll tell some entertaining fictions. Real quality stuff. The New Yorker.”

“Don’t screw around,” says Queen.

“I used sonar to locate the sub,” he says.

“We’ve never had a sonar system,” she says.

“Fine,” Fern says, “you kill joy. Then I saved my allowance and bought us a radar station from the radar store.”

“You’re gonna tell us the truth!” Queen says.

“Logically, you’re about five seconds away from being food for Boris,” Skin says to him.

“You’d eat me, a time-tested colleague?” Fern says to Boris, who nods, shrugs. “Okay, fine,” says Fern to us. “I’ll tell you the truth: I used my women’s intuition.”

“Why betray us?” Queen asks.

Fern points at me dismissively: “He just walks out on us, and I’m left doing the best I can to hold it all together. That almost sounds like the kind of thing you should thank me for.”

“Walk out on you?” I say.

“You should all fall on your knees and thank me through megaphones,” Fern says to Dil, Queen, and Skin. He dramatically flaps his huge green earring-eyes. “I’ve solved all our problems. We thought we needed that Hal.” He points at me again. “We thought we needed him to protect the castle, protect us. But we don’t.” Fern motions to the big rectangular box the size of a coffin. “You all still think that this Hal is the only one who can access our secret weapon, right?”

Skin, Dil, and Queen all nod.

“Is someone in there?” I ask, pointing at the big box.

Skin’s eyes go wide, forehead wrinkling up. “You can open the box?” he says to Fern.

“Sometimes,” says Fern, “we just don’t know what we’re capable of in this life.”

“The box. That’s why you’re just sitting there, not worried at all that we’re here,” Queen says.

“Worried? Worried? Do you say worried?” This makes Fern laugh tremendously hard. He stretches his big earring-eyes open as far as they can go. It makes him look like he’s holding his breath.

“Here,” he says, “I’ll show you.” Fern closes his eyes and folds his hands in prayer in front of his face.

Then the big coffin starts buzzing. Like powerlines.

And it sounds like how the noise in my head had started before I found Fern’s voice buried in those deep space crackles and coughs.

Slowly, inch by inch, the front of the coffin begins to open.

It grinds on the floor.

It throws sparks.

My heart has those rifle shots.

My feet go numb.

It feels like something horrible is about to happen.

Like something is about to crawl out into the room and destroy us all.

And now the big box’s door swings fully open, and I see.

I see, but it doesn’t make sense.

I see, but I don’t understand.

“So Hal,” Fern says to me, “would you like to remember what you did at 7-Eleven?”

13

A flash!

From my old life!

And that son whose cord I cut and whose blood and afterbirth-slick forehead I kissed—now he’s older, six or so, and I’m back home from the Afghan caves, trying to live a normal life, trying to get to know my son after years in the dark.

We’re at 7-Eleven, buying Twizzlers before heading our way down to Green Lake. While I lock up our bikes, my boy looks at a man standing by the entrance. He isn’t homeless but lives a hard lifestyle, which I know because I used to live one, too.

“Hello,” my son says, and the man screams, “What the hell do you want?!” and my boy’s eyes go wide: What’s happening, Daddy, am I safe, will you protect me?

There are three cars in the lot, people watching us through their dirty windshields. I point at the man who’d scared my kid and say, “You don’t get to talk to him. You talk to me.”

My son stares at me: Who is this guy?

Good thing, too, his eyes fixating on me—a dad who’s about to devolve—because this is when the man flashes the knife at us.

Pulling up the front of his shirt.

Showing the blade handle tucked between his jeans and drawers.

Smiling at me, teasing me, daring me.

And I become a chimp. Or a monster. Or a monster-chimp.

Once he swears at my son, once the knife is revealed, I feel something called Unevolved Anger. It won’t matter to me if he’s five men or five hyenas. I put my fists up and approach him. And he flinches even though I haven’t thrown a punch. I know right then that he doesn’t know how to fight.

And so I wrap my hands around his throat.

And so I choke him.

I’m going to end his life for my son.

That’s how much I love him.

Technically, this would be considered an overreaction. But there is no such thing as a technicality to a chimp.

My hands are around his neck, and his eyes bulge. He’s given up already, doesn’t even make a move to snag the knife. No, he’s forgotten all about it once I constrict his windpipe.

I steal a glance at my boy as he watches.

The people in their parked cars also look on, like we’re a YouTube clip.

Another technicality: This is probably not good parenting. I know that—of course I know that—but after seeing the knife so close to my son, how am I supposed to let go of him? How do you turn off years of training? Isn’t this man the enemy? Isn’t he threatening what I hold most dear? Isn’t this me doing the right thing?

I don’t have any answers; I’m a monster-chimp with my hands around someone’s throat.

I hate doing this in front of my son. But the Unevolved Anger isn’t a choice. I want to swing in a tree, carry him, my baby, on my back, away from danger—

The man’s a sickly red color now.

Take your hands off him, Hal.

Take your son away from here.

Don’t tell him you love him so much, or that affection makes murder easy.

Don’t put this on him.

These are your fingers tightening, your knuckles cracking. And why do you like that emptying look on his face? What about this are you enjoying?

Stop.

I don’t know how.

You have to.

Let go.

No.

Let go.

It’s love in my veins, not hate.

It’s my love squeezing his neck.

I’m supposed to loosen my grip, lower my hands.

But I don’t.

I keep squeezing.

This isn’t supposed to be the way this all works out. My boy and I are supposed to snag the licorice, bike down to Green Lake, the dock—

I keep squeezing.

We’re supposed to slip our feet into the cold water and peep a few ducklings swimming like drunk drivers.

I keep squeezing.

And I’m supposed to say to my son, “Let’s try and stay here. Let’s hide on this dock as long as we can, you and me on the edge of this dock forever.”

I keep squeezing.

And I’m supposed to say to him, “Let’s gnaw on licorice. If we stay on this dock, the world won’t do to you, son, what it does to all of us.”

I keep squeezing.

I’m supposed to say to my son, “If we stay here, my boy, the world won’t slowly annihilate you.”

But we’re not on the dock at the lake.

We are here in a 7-Eleven parking lot.

I keep squeezing until the man with the knife is dead, and my son stands there watching.

14

With the coffin-like size and shape of Fern’s big box, I expect a figure to stagger out. Another Hal, maybe. Another me. Or that man I killed in front of my boy. But it’s never that easy here. I’m finding that whatever I expect to happen, life leads me to another dark cave.

Then bees buzz out of the coffin!

Yes, bees speed out of it.

But these aren’t the sort of bees that we typically see. No, these aren’t naturally occurring pollinators. These bees are made of solid glass, and their tiny bodies buzz around the throne room, the candlelight dancing in dazzling refractions through them, little fireworks flying around.

“How can you open the box?” Queen says to Fern.

“Oh, you all haven’t seen the best feature yet,” says Fern. “I’m still getting the hang of it, but I’ll give it the ol’ college try. Fingers crossed. Wish me luck. Rub your rabbit’s foot. Watch this.”

Fern still stands with his hands folded in front of his eyeless face. The glass bees follow his commanding finger as it leads them in synchronized patterns around the room, zooming them into a swarm that shimmers like a tornado of sardines.

He switches the gestures with which he conducts their movements, and now the glass bees move into a big single file line, like a midair marching band making shapes.

They form the Statue of Liberty.

Then a rifle. Then a tombstone.

I watch their pageant with astonishment.

Now the bees are skywriting something: Hello—

And we chuckle, shake our heads in wonder.

And the bees spell out another word: Welcome—

Then they spell Here we go—

The bees form themselves into a funnel cloud, moving fast, creating wind—

“Aren’t they delightful?” Fern says. “Aren’t they the cat’s pajamas?”

The bees keep torquing their speed, their refracting bodies, these bending bugs of light.

“Bye-bye, Boris! Dasvidaniya! Catch you on the flip side,” says Fern, loud, too loud, and he snaps his wrist, points in Boris’s direction.

The bees assemble themselves into a new shape—

They first form a handle, and now the others form a blade, and they are a sword.

“Oi, Boris! Look out!” Queen says.

The sword speeds toward Boris.

The sword splits Boris’s chest into a canyon.

The sword exits outs his back.

Boris drops dead on the waxy, colorful floor.

Skin charges toward Fern, who flicks one of his fingers, and the glass bees switch course, forming an ax and arcing toward Skin.

“This is going to hurt,” Skin says, scratching at his straight razor tattoo.

In a bludgeoning swing of their ax, the glass bees cut off Skin’s head

Dil runs over and kneels beside Skin’s body. “I can’t believe you did that to him,” she says to Fern. “He loved you. We all did.”

Two of us have died in the last minute.

That’s all I can think: Two of us were not dead, and now we are.

Once Fern’s demonstration of power is done, the glass bees collect into a swarm and swirl right above his head, churning there like a trained storm cloud. And if you can control that kind of weather, you control the world.

“What can I say?” Fern says to Dil. “I’m one of the kings that it’s impossible to please. I demand the most from my subjects. Otherwise I get cranky.”

“How could you do that to Electric Henry?” Queen says. “After all we’ve been through together. All those tough days.”

“He had too many opinions that didn’t line up with my vision of our future,” Fern says to us. “The Hals’ mission to make sure nobody ever remembers? They might have pulled it off. Made sure our Dark Age goes on forever. But that was when I learned to control the bees—winning the war before it started. I have the power. So the Hals are my loyal subjects. As are all of you. Yes, we are one big happy family in our sick kingdom.”

“A family?” Dil asks.

“They love me,” Fern says, “and if they ever stop, I’ll slaughter them all. And don’t make the mistake of thinking that doesn’t apply to you mutineers, too.” Then Fern gets a paranoid look in his earring-eyes. “I have bad news,” he says. “Those Hals outside the gates with their torches and pitchforks? They aren’t the only ones.”

And here they come—from their hiding places throughout the throne room—a whole bunch of them, charging at us from around the candlelit space, surrounding us, penning us in.

Fern claps his hands: “The world is lousy with Hals!”

He comes over to us, the swarm of glass bees staying right above him, protecting. “I promised some of the Hals that they can have you. They want to kill you in a customized way. I’ll leave that between you all. It’s really none of my business.”

The Hals rush us from the throne room.

“It turns out,” Fern calls to us on our way out, “all our castle needed was a strong leader. A Sensei. A general. A warlord. Somebody who would never ever abandon us on our darkest days.

“It turns out,” he says, “all we needed was me!”

15

We’ve been locked behind a door.

Still, I can hear some Hals outside in the hall.

“So any more ideas for how we should kill them in creative ways?” says a Hal. “Let’s cast a wide net.”

“It needs to be extravagant,” says another.

“Iconic.”

“Kosher.”

“Killer.”

“Gucci.”

“Viral.”

“Zeitgeisty.”

“Studied for years.”

“Translated into many languages.”

“Why do their deaths need to be those things?”

“These days,” says another, “if you want something to be infamous, it has to be loud.”

“Has to be craven.”

“Dahmer-approved.”

“What if we make them eat bees?” says another.

“The glass bees?”

“No, regular bees.”

“Are we sure that would kill them?”

“Fine. How about scorpions?”

“Or Demerol casserole.”

“We sound hungry.”

“And mean.”

“Are we hungry?”

“And mean?”

“Maybe they drink venom.”

“Drink pesticides.”

“Or feed them toxic toads.”

“We don’t have any of those.”

“Electrocution.”

“Lightning strike.”

“Sinkhole.”

“Peanut allergy.”

“Prawns.”

“Meat grinder.”

“We are definitely hungry.”

“And mean.”

“We don’t have any of those.”

“We could freeze them.”

“The prawns?”

“A good old-fashioned poisoning.”

“Polio.”

“A Firing squad.”

“A Polio firing squad.”

“Are we just saying things now?” a Hal asks.

“Botulism.”

“A cave-in.”

“A car accident.”

“Attack dog.”

“We don’t have any of those.”

“Drown them in the toilet.”

“Sic some cockfighting roosters on them.”

“Roosters?”

“They wear razorblades on their beaks.”

“Now we’re talking.”

“Sling shot.”

“Ninja.”

“Black ice.”

“Plane crash.”

“Piranhas.”

“Euthanasia.”

“Bad clams.”

“Aneurysm.”

“Bomb cyclone.”

“Shipwreck.”

“Auto-erotic mishap.”

“Train derailment.”

“A hockey puck to the temple.”

“Lance.”

“Wait. Like a guy named Lance will kill them?”

“No, like a jousting lance.”

“Gotcha.”

“Hypothermia.”

“Quicksand.”

“Fentanyl frittatas.”

“When was the last time we ate?”

“These ideas are useless,” a Hal says. “They’re all just wishful thinking. We need a way to kill them with what we have on-hand here.” 

“We still have some rope,” one says. “What if we hang them like Electric?”

“Old school.”

“Tried and True.”

“Pure spaghetti western.”

“Why mess with the classics?”

“Sure, I’m pro-hanging.”

“This is a promising angle.”

“Let’s greenlight this puppy.”

“Good,” a Hal says. “Hals really make magic when we put our heads together.”

16

We wear nooses around our necks. Dil, Queen, and me. We wear nooses and have our hands bound behind our backs. We are all balanced on rickety buckets, on our tiptoes. It’s near impossible to stay stabilized, t0 stay standing, to stay alive.

If we slide off, no more air.

Our ropes are thrown over and tied to eaves, cutting through the room like ribs—and maybe they are whale ribs, considering this castle is made of bones.

But I guess we are all castles made of bones.

It could take a while for us to die once we slip off.

There is no drop, no gravity to break the neck, no, this will be a creeping death, lethargic and cruel.

There are some Hals standing in front of us, studying our bodies on these buckets. Watching our tiptoes try and balance.

“Let’s go get some libations,” says a Hal. “Let the good times roll.”

“We can’t all leave. One of us needs to stay here and make sure they all die.”

They pick a Hal to stay behind—he is not happy to be excluded—and they give him a sword. To keep us in line. Just in case. And once his pals shove off, he stands guard over by the door, the sword now leaning against the wall beside him, and the three of us perch on our toes, on our buckets, hoping to stay alive.

“The stash,” whispers Queen.

“What?” I say.

“The stash.”

“Can you reach it?” Dil whispers to her.

“I think so,” says Queen, whose hands, like ours, are tied behind her. Queen tucks her hands down the back of her pants, jimmies one of her palms down in the crack. After some effort, she plucks the grenade out.

Clutching it in her palm, behind her back, Queen whispers to us, “Now comes the hard part.”

“What are you going to do?” Dil says.

“I’m going to catch it in my mouth.”

“The thing that was in your butt?”

“This is,” says Queen, “what heroes fucking do.”

The Hal barks at us to be quiet.

“Well, then, I guess it’s time to explode,” whispers the Lacerated Queen as she pulls the pin from the grenade.

With considerably nimble skill, Queen pitches the grenade up over her shoulder.

Now in midair, about five feet above our heads, the grenade makes a relatively straight plummet into Queen’s positioning maw.

And that’s when the Hal looks over, sees the action, and snatches the sword—

That’s when he starts running, saying, “Hey hey hey,” as he cooks toward us.

My eyes pop between Queen’s mouth and the angle of the falling object. Her stretched jaws look like they might snake-dislocate at any second as the grenade tilts and shifts dramatically before executing a perfect landing.

Right as the Hal arrives. Right as the sword is cocked back, ready to lop, about to swing—

“I know I’m not supposed to talk with my mouth full,” she slurs at the Hal, “but long live the queen!”

Then Queen’s head explodes.

She splatters all over the Hal. His sword clanks to the stone floor as he wipes Queen’s brains from his face.

“Who does that to their own head?” the Hal says.

He isn’t really asking the question—he’s certainly not talking to me—but if he had been, I’d say that we all blow up sometimes. At least with Queen, you can see it.

The rest of us go mad in our own caves.

Queen’s headless body, now free from the tight noose, hops off the bucket and starts throwing blind punches.

The Hal, in disbelief, tries dodging his decapitated opponent’s shots. “How is she alive without a head?!” he shouts to us.

We are standing on our toes, on our buckets, the ropes chafing our throats.

Queen keeps swinging until, finally, she catches the Hal clean, right on the chin, wobbling him.

Then she dumps him on the floor, falls on top of him, choking him with two hands, this headless angel.

She chokes him to death right there.

Queen, after pawing around on the floor, finds the sword, then trundles toward Dil and me, doing the best she can without any eyes.

Our buckets teeter.

Queen reaches for my noose, her hand fumbling up my body, trying to gauge the distance, before taking a step back and readying herself to swing the sword.

“Just wait a few seconds!” I say to Queen. “Wait until your head grows back!”

Then I gaze at Dil in horror: “I guess being headless, she can’t hear me. Ears and all.”

And right before Queen can take a headless hack, the sludge gurgles from her neck, pale bubbles percolate from the stump, and quickly the bloom of her skull, the flower of her face, a vine of hair, and there’s Queen, fully formed head, looking perfect, smiling, turning that sword toward my rope, about to set me free.

17

Once our necks are free, and once we’re back on solid ground, Dil tells me to climb inside my bucket.

“Huh?” I say.

“Look in it,” she says.

So I do, and there is no longer a bottom.

All I see is a pit stretching who-knows-how-far-down into blackness.

“We’re out of time,” she says, “and it’s the only way you can beat him.”

“What’s the only way?”

“You need to remember what you did.”

“At 7-Eleven?”

“On that day. With me.”

“Is this going to break my heart?”

“Climb in the bucket, Hal,” she says.

“I don’t want to.”

“This is your last chance to know. If you don’t remember, Fern will kill you.” Dil points into the pit and says, “That’s the day we meet.”

I forget how to bring air into my lungs.

I’m suddenly so hot, my body, this castle, this city, this planet—they’re all the temperature of one humungous Afghan cave. And if the whole world is a cave, how can we ever get out of the darkness?

All I’ve wanted was to remember, but what if knowing impales me?

Maybe I’m not strong enough.

Maybe this has all been a mistake.

Maybe I need to leave, now, right now.

Maybe.

“How is knowing what I did going to help me?” I ask Dil.

“Who said it was supposed to help you?”

“So I should make my own life worse by remembering?” I say.

“How is it your life if you don’t remember what you did in it?”

“I lived it, so why does it matter if I remember?”

“Here’s what doesn’t matter,” Dil says. “It doesn’t matter anymore if you want to know—or what knowing will do to you. You’ll only get what you need to fight Fern once you remember. You need to understand this, Hal—if you don’t see what you did to me, Fern will run the castle forever. Fern will run everybody. Fern will run you.”

“Run me?”

“He’ll think for you, talk for you—he’ll be the last Hal.”

“The last Hal?” I ask.

“Just get in the bucket!” Queen screams at me.

My feet, once they are inside, find ladder rungs running down one wall of this extended corridor, this pitch tunnel headed straight down. I stop after about ten feet of climbing, look up to see who’s coming next.

Queen pokes her head over the side of the bucket: “This part ain’t for me. It’s only the two of you.”

She recedes before I can say anything, so I call to her—“Queen!”—and she pokes her head over the bucket again.

“Thanks for blowing up for us back there,” I say to her. “That was nice of you.”

“Don’t screw the pooch, Hal.”

For Queen, those will have to do for kind words. It’s probably difficult to remain friendly after so many head explosions. I can’t even imagine all the malfunctions that must go off in her wiring. My head has never detonated, and yet I have trouble keeping everything straight.

Dil hops into the bucket, starts her climb.

We can barely see each other. We are simply feet banging on a ladder. We are voices that cut through the black and rumble through the tube as we descend.

“Are you scared of the dark?” Dil asks, then laughs so hard that all the reverb in the bucket-tunnel makes it sound like there are a hundred Dils in here.

“I’m scared of the light,” I say.

My feet hit something solid, sounds like steel. It’s a hatch. I spin it open, and we walk into the past—

We stand on a shabby suburban block. It’s the middle of the day. It’s hot as hell. Nobody is on the street.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“This is where I live,” she says, pointing at a rundown house.

“I mean—where are we? The other us.”

She points up the block—to nothing—on this hot-as-hell day: “You’re about to tear ass toward us.”

“Where are you?”

She points to a garage, off to the side of her house, cinched up tight. “I’m in there,” she says. “With him.”

“Him who?”

“The man who stabbed my dad.”

Then police and emergency vehicles speed toward us. Sirens.

“Should we hide?” I ask.

“They can’t see us.”

We’re standing in the street as these cars come straight at us.

“Should we think about getting out of the way?” I ask.

“They can’t touch us here,” she says.

And she’s right, these vehicles, five of them, speed right through us as we stand like desert mirages in the middle of the road on this hot-as-hell day. They all skid to stops. A SWAT van opens from the rear, and they pour out, moving to predetermined positions. Everyone’s wearing serious gear, and I can’t see anyone’s face.

“Who’s who?” I ask.

She points at one running toward the garage. “That’s you,” she says, “and you must go with him. You have to do this with him.”

“What?”

“Go into his body, Hal!”

Dil slaps me across the face, hard.

And then I’m not standing in the road.

And then, somehow, I’m in him.

Somehow, I am him.

I’m in uniform, running up to the garage. There’s blood all over the walkway. I have a throw-phone in my hand. I smash out a window, toss the phone in so the negotiator can make contact.

The call-out had only told us this: armed, barricaded subject with a hostage.

That’s all we know when we get there.

Over the next two hours, we learn that the man inside stabbed the owner of the residence over a gambling debt. The men had been on a speed binge. It wasn’t a premeditated crime, and once he killed his friend, which was an accident, things just got rough and rougher—he needed us to understand that it was an accident—but once he was on the hook for the murder, he lost his mind, panicked, grabbed the guy’s daughter, hid in the garage. The girl was on his lap. The girl was a shield—he needed us to understand that she was a shield—and he kept saying that awful word over and over, “She’s a shield, a shield, a shield,” and we knew that it was getting near time to go in.

Now how hard we’re gonna charge is still being determined, but one of the factors is whether anyone from SWAT has a shot.

Now, do I have a shot?

I’m around the back of the garage, climbing on the roof of a cheap gardening shed. I can’t see the man through the window I’d broken to throw the phone. I need to reposition. I hop up onto the roof of the residence, and I have line of sight. There he is. Leaning against the far wall, and he has the girl pulled on his lap. He hugs her close to him, hiding his head behind her back.

She’s a shield.

He has a big knife in his hand. The girl doesn’t look stabbed, injured.

Dealing with somebody on a speed binge isn’t a conversation between members of the same species. It’s like talking Nietzsche to a piece of cheese.

But there’s a catch to my line of sight.

It’s not a clean shot.

It is compromised by two crucial factors.

First, I have to jam myself up against the chimney to see him cleanly, angle myself up against the chimney. It’s the only way to center him. Being jammed up on the chimney means that I can’t use my rifle for the shot. I have a gas-operated HK416, but there’s not enough room for the barrel in such a tight space. Ask any cop: If we need to kill somebody, we want to use our rifles. Sidearms aren’t as reliable, but if that’s the only tool I can use in this circumstance, I’ll still take the shot.

The other problem that compromises this is the bigger deal of the two. Because of the chimney, I can’t place my right hand in the necessary position to get the shot off—so I’m going to have to take it with my off arm.

Lefty.

I’m going to have to take the shot using my off arm.

Now.

Do I know how crazy that sounds?

Yes, I know how crazy that sounds.

But I am trained. Elite. There’s a reason I’m sniper team-leader. If that shot needs to be taken—a trigger that we all hope never to pull—I’m the one you want taking it.

Full stop.

That’s not my ego; that’s my record.

The man on the meth bender keeps calling the kid a shield. He has a knife and he’s already killed somebody today. The whirr of domestic war, the only job I was ever fit to perform. But I’m not fit for anything. I never left those caves. I brought them to that 7-Eleven parking lot. I brought them into my marriage until I was told to go. I brought them here today.

And so I do the only logical thing.

I line up the shot.

I have him centered.

The girl sees me through the broken window.

The girl points a long index finger at me, and she screams, she thrashes—

She’s in the shot. She’s out of it.

She’s in the shot, and she’s out of it.

Now that he knows where I am, what I have pointed at them, have I put her in even deeper jeopardy? Does that mean that I now have more of an obligation to take the shot?

She’s in, she’s out.

In, out.

She’s.

Or I can play it safe, quiet. I can decide to take the easy way out, which, in this case, is doing nothing. Which is the thing that I don’t know how to live with. Doing nothing. Left to always wonder, freebase those cheap drugs woulda, coulda, shoulda.

Isn’t doing nothing basically telling this girl that she’s not worth saving? Isn’t it looking a girl dead in the eyes and saying, through your inaction, that this is a world so majestically crippled that people will leave children on the laps of murderers and do nothing?

She’s in the shot, and she’s out of it.

She’s in, she’s out.

I don’t want to be the sort of person who doesn’t care about her.

She’s in she’s out.

She’sinshe’sout—

She’sinshe’sout—

She’sinshe’sout—

She’sinshe’sout—

And here’s how much I care for this girl: I care so much that I take the shot. I take it despite how she yells and bucks on his lap. I take it despite using a sidearm and my left hand. I take it because I can, and because I should, and because I think I can save this young girl from a madman.

That’s the day I first hear Fern.

His noise, his junk, his heresy, his music.

Fern begins building the dam in my brain, between my memories and me.

He takes over my soul.

18

And then I’m back. Standing beside the bucket. In the room that the Hals tried to hang us in.

Queen’s there, eyeballing me.

“How did I get here?” I ask her.

“Are you serious?”

“I don’t remember.”

“You climbed back out of the bucket.”

“I did?”

“Like three seconds ago.”

“Huh. I don’t remember that.”

“I figured that based on this conversation,” she says.

“Where’s Dil?”

“She hasn’t come back yet.”

“What?” I peer into the bucket, which now it has a solid bottom again. “Where is she?” I say to Queen, panicking, cracking a sweat.

“How should I know?”

“Dil?” I say into the empty bucket.

Its bottom crumbles away, and though I can’t see Dil down there, I can see the great tube that stretches into the past, that darkness.

That’s when I hear Dil’s voice rumbling up the tube—sounds tinny, like an astronaut calling earth from outer space. “I’m not coming back,” she says.

“Yes, you are. I need you.”

Now I can see her face come into focus from the black, down by the bucket’s bottom.

“You don’t need me. You need something else now,” she says.

“Need what?”

“Watch this,” she says.

One single glass bee buzzes from out of the bullet hole in Dil’s face and then hovers right in front of me.

“You were only trying to help me that day,” she says to me.

I’m entranced by the bee. “All I wanted to do was save you.”

“I know,” she says.

“I’m so sorry.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know how to forgive myself.”

“I know.”

“What should I do?”

“Don’t let Fern win, Hal. Come back for good.”

“How?

“You were gonna help me, and I’m going to return the favor,” she says. “Stand back.”

I take a couple steps and the bee comes with me. I’m controlling the glass insect. We stand next to Queen, and I ask her if she knows what’s coming next.

She doesn’t.

It begins as a sound. Buzzing like a didgeridoo at first, that distorted lo, that death rattle, then the roar of a motorcycle, and then all these bees fly up the bottomless bucket, swarming, forming a kind of demented symphony, snarling and grumbling.

They streak with great speeds, the buzzing even louder now.

So many of them that they make the room look pixelated, broken.

I can’t see the space in its entirety, there are so many glass bees thundering their noises, flying in laps, light flashing through their see-through bodies, like electricidal currents.

They tornado around me.

I am in the middle of their whirling energy.

I am in the center of their storm.

I am the center of their storm.

I am their storm.

Their center.

I wish Dil had told me ahead of time that she wasn’t coming back. I could’ve said a proper goodbye down there, on that suburban block, on that hot-as-hell day. But she doesn’t want that from me, I guess. Doesn’t want the drivel of obvious apologies.

Guilt, with all its tailored suffering.

Guilt, that dirty monarchy.

The only castle to punish yourself in.

“You heard her, Hal!” Queen calls from outside my reverberating tornado. “Now go beat Fern!”

I raise my hands like an orchestra conductor, testing my control of the glass bees, my musicians, my SWAT, my subjects. I hold out my forearm, fold my hand into a fist—and the bees take the shape of a sledgehammer that smashes the door from its hinges, turning the whole solid shape of wood into flying kindling with a single swing of their glass hammer, the door exploding like it was hit with dynamite.

We are down the hall fast, toward the throne room. I am a man who has a horde of glass bees racing in a kind of storm cloud over my head, their buzzing cumulonimbus rage, and we are ready to go to war.

And the bees smash the door to the skull, too.

More wax waterfalls as the bodies of Skin and Boris remain on the floor.

Fern sits on the throne, and his bees are in their coffin.

He’s alone. Vulnerable.

And I’ve been baked in a cave.

Seeing me, Fern immediately raises his arms, tries reviving his bees so that they speed from the closed coffin.

But we’re not going to let that happen.

“For Dil,” I say to the bees, whisper the plan to them with my conductor’s motions, and they all nod, know what to do, form themselves into two squads—

Fern’s bees wake, begin buzzing in their rectangular home, the structure shakes back and forth, quaking from the buzz of the glass bodies being called from slumber.

Half of my bees immediately speed toward the hive of their adversaries, get to their big black coffin before it can swing open. Some of my bees form themselves into nails while the remainder make a hammer.

Fern’s bees must be bouncing off the walls of their home, the rectangle rocking wildly, seems like it might fall over at any second, but the space inside their home is so tiny that his bees can’t generate enough energy to break through the walls.

My glass nails hit the coffin, and the bee-hammer comes right behind them, pounding these nails in, trapping Fern’s swarm inside their home, soon to be a tomb. He’s a general without any soldiers to command. They can’t push the door open, can’t outmuscle my bees, the glass nails trapping them inside.

The half of the bees that don’t make the hammer and nails, this squad of bees gets to Fern before me. Some of them snatch Fern’s eyes from his earlobes by lopping his lobes right off.

His lobes fall to the ground.

They look like wads of chewing gum.

Fern screams in agony while grabbing at his bleeding ears. Blood pours down his forehead, slobber leaks from his mouth. “My eyes!” he says, rocking back and forth on the throne. “My eyes! Give me my eyes back!”

But the bees fly the eyes to me, drop them in my palm.

The rest of the bees that are with Fern form a glass noose around his neck. If he moves a muscle in any direction, he’ll cut his own throat.

He’s trapped, can’t move. He’s mine.

Eyeless and mine.

I’m about twenty feet away from him.

He holds his hands to his bloody ears. He fights through the pain. “Hal, how’s my Negative Nancy?”

I let his earring-eyes fall to the floor. They land with a tinkle.

“What was that noise?” asks a blind Fern.

I answer him by grounding his eyes to dust with the heel of my boot.

There must be some kind of biological connection between Fern and his eyes, even though they aren’t physically touching, because as I wiggle my boot back and forth, he screams in agony, trying to stay still in the glass noose.

“Why are you trying to kill me?” I ask.

“Not kill you. Rule you. We need me sitting in this fancy chair. We need me making the tough decisions.”

“What do you mean ‘not kill you’? You torpedoed the sub.”

“And you’re fine.”

“You’re done, Fern,” I say. “Get off that throne.”

“You’re the one who left us, Hal,” he says. “Never forget that I’m the hero, and you’re the bad guy. Never forget that if it wasn’t for me, we would’ve never made it back from the war. I was the one driving us in those caves. I was the one who kept us alive.”

“We’re home now,” I say, “and we don’t need to be like that anymore.”

“What about 7-Eleven? I came in handy when I saved our son!”

“No,” I say to Fern, “we don’t have a son.”

“Yes, we do. He could’ve died that day, but I’d never let that happen. I’m the one who keeps the people we love alive.”

Suddenly one lone fact flies into my brain, like that first glass bee to escape the bucket. I get one fact, and it’s my favorite syllable ever created.

“I have a son, Fern,” I say. “Me. Not you. Not we. And his name is Kyle,” and as that perfect syllable leaves my mouth, the glass bees forming the noose around Fern’s neck slice his head clean off, guillotine smooth.

The head leaves his body, and it finally happens—

My mind goes quiet.

I can’t hear a thing.

Quiet.

It’s like a needle lifting from a record, vinyl slowing its spin, and all that conquering music stops squawking. It is serene in my mind.

Yes, it’s true—I can’t hear a thing.

Quiet.

And that means I can hear myself again. That means my memories, which have been held hostage from me, are finally returned. I remember my parents: my mother’s big green eyes, the color of cucumber peel, and my father’s obsession with Batman comics. I remember falling to a knee in front of my girlfriend and asking her to be my wife, remember looking up at her and thinking, Thank you for seeing something in me. I don’t know what you see or how you see it, but thank you. I remember taking the sister of somebody we both loved to lunch, someone who didn’t make it out of the Afghan caves, and she and I both cried over never getting to see him again, never getting to hear his appalling puns. I remember taking my son for ice cream, the first time he’d ever licked it out of a cone, and I said to him, “Did you know you can eat that, too?” and I tapped on the cone, and Kyle’s eyes turned curious, and his little lips nibbled a small fleck of cone, and he said, “This is good, Daddy,” and he held it out to me, so I could take bite, too. “This is good,” I said back to him, though I don’t know if I was talking about the ice cream cone.

I think all this as Fern’s head hits the floor with a sickening, mushy sound.

I feel peace.

Quiet.

I remember me.

Here is another thing: I have an aquarium with an eel that spends most of its time in the caves of coral at the bottom of the tank, with just its little head poking out to see, staring out into the dark waters. I always forget to clean the tank, so there are algae blooms growing on the glass walls in greens and browns, like jungle camouflage.

Fern is a decapitated body sitting on a throne.

I feel peace.

Quiet.

I remember me.

Here is another thing: I love running.

Long jogs. Road work. Twenty miles at a time. Never running fast. Never trying to get anywhere, except to that runner’s high.

I can see it all so clearly.

I remember me perfectly.

I don’t like a lot of what I recall, but Dil had been right: I need to know what I’ve done, to see those memories that feel like capital punishments.

That’s right: Remembering can kill us, but do we really have another choice?

I look at the thumping head as it comes to a stop, and now something has happened: It isn’t Fern’s face on the loose head any longer.

It’s mine.

Yes, that’s my face staring up at me from the floor.

That is Fern, and Fern is me.

A flash!

From my old life!

I’m wandering around a dark apartment. It doesn’t have any lights. I don’t mean it doesn’t have its lights on. I mean, there are no lightbulbs welcome on the premises.

I know that because I live here. I live here because Nancy throws me out. She should’ve, I guess. After Afghanistan. After working too many sniper shifts. After 7-Eleven, her last straw. I shouldn’t have told her about hearing the voice.

We all want to fall in love and tell somebody our secrets, but what if our mistakes make them hate us?

And how do we ever get out of these mazes?

Then I accidentally killed Dil, which was my last straw. So a certain fernweh began bubbling in my head—swampy, aquatic at first, faint for a few days, then turning into the charred warble of radio static—and soon it was louder than an entire planet of coked-up bees.

I couldn’t look at what I’d done, and so I left.

In this apartment, I walk around in the dark constantly, little shapes, shadowboxing, on patrol.

This apartment is my cave. It is my natural habitat. It is the only cave that I’ve been in that I don’t know how to clear—and that’s because it’s filled with ghosts.

I have a bit of Boris in me. Life makes more sense in the darkness.

And then I’m beamed back to Dalloway Castle.

The throne room.

The skull.

My new home.

My old home.

Queen comes up, stands behind me, puts a comforting hand on my shoulder. I can’t see her, and I’m not sure I want to turn around and face her.

“So he’s a Hal?” I say to Queen, who I cannot see, who is mercifully behind me.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“We all are,” says the Lacerated Queen.

“Even you?”’

“Even me.”

“When did I leave the castle?” I ask her.

“After that day with Dil,” she says. “You just couldn’t bear to see. And so you shut your eyes and left.”

If that’s a saying, I’ve never heard it before: You shut your eyes and left.

That’s how you make yourself into a cave.

“So most Hals didn’t want to remember,” I say, “but a few of you did?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you a favor, Queen?”

“Yes.”

“When I turn around and see you, you’ll look like me, too, right?”

“That’s the plan.”

“If I get a vote, you’ll stay looking like you. Do I get a vote, Queen? Please. Please look like you. I want to turn around, and I really want to see you. So please say that I get a vote—and please, stay yourself. Please, I need you to be yourself.”

“Yes, Hal,” she says, laughing at me, “I’ll be myself.”

19

I leave the throne room and head outside to the castle’s ward. My bees swirl in front of me, my assassins if I need them to be.

My angels.

Spotty cloud-cover comes in and hangs over the castle. 

The whole courtyard is filled with Hals, congregated and waiting. Some still have their pitchforks and torches, and now they come face to face with me.

“It’s him!” a Hal says, pointing. “The rememberer! Attack!”

But I signal the bees, and they make a cage around me. The Hals come close to the cage, hiss at me. Their faces are my face. Their mouths scream at me. Their eyes hate me.

A couple Hals decide to test their luck on the bees’ cage, and the Hals try to punch through the glass bars, slicing through skin, bone. One loses his entire hand, which lands with a thud and looks like roadkill.

He stoops to retrieve it, mystified, an expression on his face that must mean: This is my hand holding my hand and that’s not supposed to happen.

“Why are you so upset with me?” I say to the Hals.

“You’re trying to kill us!” one says.

“How am I doing that?”

“You remember, we die—that’s what Fern said.”

“You can’t trust him,” I say.

“And because you want to kill us,” a Hal says, “we’re going to kill you.”

A few more Hals decide to throw fists at the glass bars of my cage, and there is a fresh collection of severed hands on the ground.

“We’re here to devour the soul,” says another Hal. “That way, no one can ever remember again.”

They don’t get it. They don’t understand. And I don’t know if it’s something I can even explain. If I try and articulate it, it’s this: You can’t get out of your cave until you kiss the monster.

They won’t listen to me anyway. Not a chance. Not with all that hate in the eyes watching me from the other side of my glass cage.

Their side, my side.

“I already remembered,” I say. “I already know what we did to Dil. And none of us are dead.”

“You’re trying to trick us,” a Hal says. “We can’t believe anything you say.”

There’s no reason they should trust me.

There’s only one way to play it, so I signal the bees and the cage crumbles.

I tell the bees to fly away.

I don’t need them right now.

They don’t want to go; they want to stay and protect me.

But I must do this myself.

I need to be with all the Hals, unprotected.

They say they want to devour the soul, and if they want to put their hands on me, hurt me, murder me, conceal us in the dark forever, this is their chance.

A few put their fists up, tuck their chins.

A few are ready to attack.

But before they can, one asks me, “Do you really remember?”

“I saw the whole thing.”

“And we’re all fine.”

“Yes.”

“And it was awful?”

“Yes.”

“Why did Fern lie?”

“He just wanted to control the skull,” I say to the Hals. “He wanted to run us.”

“That wasn’t nice of him.”

“He’s not the best of us.”

“Where is he?”

“I’m back,” I tell the Hals. “For good.”

“Where’s Fern?”

“I cut off his head.”

“So you’re in charge again?”

“I am.”

“We don’t want to remember,” a Hal says. “Please don’t ever tell us what happened.”

“I won’t,” I say.

“What happens now?” another Hal wonders.

“Do you want to live here at the castle?” I ask them.

The last remaining Hals to still wield pitchforks and torches throw them down. “Some of us would like to stay here in the castle.”

“Then they are welcome.”

“What about the rest of us?”

“You’re all free to go. Do whatever you want. Head home. Or go walk the realm, seeking adventure.”

These infinite possibilities stymie the Hals. They look around, perplexed. “Walk the realm, seeking adventure?”

“Yes, walk around and see what the world has to offer,” I say.

They all huddle up, the entire load of them.

They whisper amongst themselves, and then the one speaking for the whole batch says to me, “It turns out that all of us would like to set out and seek our adventures, assuming that offer is still on the table.”

“Yeah? All of you would like to go?”

“We want to see everything.”

“Then that’s what you should do.”

“Bye, Hal,” they say to me. “Sorry we were going to kill you, but it’s mostly Fern’s fault.” They all shrug their shoulders. “Hey, we’re Hals. We have a temper.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to know what our secret is?” I ask the Hals. “Are you sure you don’t want to hear what we did to Dil?”

They all cover their ears, croon la la la la la—

A Hal says, still covering his ears, “We want to stay in the dark!”

“It’s fine if you don’t know,” I say to them, knowing they can’t hear me. “I remember enough for all of us.”

And so they turn and march from the castle, covered ears and all, an infantry of Hals heading off into the noise of unknown adventure.

20

This is eight months later—

This is the eleventh supervised visit with Kyle. And since everything’s been going as planned—hitting my markers, my meetings, my medication, the counseling, the community service—today is a special occasion.

These supervised visitations are normally at my ex’s. I get to play in my son’s bedroom with him for an hour. Or we kick the soccer ball around the alley behind the house. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful for the time with him. But it’s hard being in my old place. When I’m there, I’m surrounded by all the things I’ve lost.

But that’s not what I want to talk about right now. No, I don’t want to waste any air complaining. This isn’t the time for that. Why?

Because we’re alive.

Because we’re outside.

Because we’re together.

My son and I are at Green Lake. We have our Twizzlers. We kick off our shoes and head to the dock. We let our feet feel the wonderful cold of the water.

The day is in the upper eighties. People don’t know that the weather in Seattle is perfect in August. The locals certainly don’t say anything about it.

We’re in direct sun, but we won’t be here long enough that we need to worry about getting burned.

Me, I’m just happy that I’m not in a cave, a sub, Boris’s wings, a castle, a noose.

Me, I’m just happy that I’ve finally made it home.

Can you see us sitting on the dock? Can you feel that smile on my face? Can you understand the fantastic heat in my chest?

“It’s nice being here, huh?” I say to my boy.

“I’m getting hot,” Kyle says. “The sun, Dad.”

I’ll think about this dock on my deathbed. I’ll think about it and know that life is never better than eating licorice with your feet in the water with someone you love.

“Okay,” I say to my boy. “We’ll go. But a few more seconds, please. I need a few more seconds here with you.”

Yes, a few more seconds.

Yes, a few more rays of sunshine.

Yes, here, with you.

I made it home. I’m with my boy.

And we’re in the light.

JOSHUA MOHR is the author of the memoirs Model Citizen and Sirens, as well as five novels including Damascus, which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.” He’s also written Fight Song and Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as Termite Parade, an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times. His novel All This Life won the Northern California Book Award. He is the founder of Decant Editorial.

Also by JOSHUA MOHR

Model Citizen

(2022, FSG/MCD)

Sirens

(2017, Two Dollar Radio)

All This Life

(2015, Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press) 

Fight Song

(2013, Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press)

Damascus

(2011, Two Dollar Radio)

Termite Parade

(2010, Two Dollar Radio)

Some Things That Meant the World to Me

(2009, Two Dollar Radio)

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THANKS FOR READING.

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