A thousand miles outside her son’s country, Gwen was driving in circles, crossing the frozen Potomac again and again.

Last night she had gotten out on O street, her own mouth an O at the thought of what she might do, and she had walked Connecticut past a homeless person lying on his back, arms and legs cocked like a cockroach, right there proving her point. President priss could probably see him right out the window of her Lincoln bedroom or whatever, big four-poster posts pointing up to God like her toes when her First Man secret serviced her, and her sons up all night talking smack on some smackchat, and what was she doing about it? She, supposed mother/ruler of the supposed free world, wasn’t even ruler of her own roost, and neither had Gwen been. See how her own boys turn out with a mother prancing around pretending to be boss like that.

She steered off the beltway and into the scruburbs and pulled to a stop. The car smelled of the crap they spray when they want you to think of pine trees instead of what had happened inside, but Gwen could smell it. Puke. She shoved the rental keys in her pocket. She had always liked cemeteries. Had trouble passing one without stopping. Time-tilted markers beckoning like fingertips from gravekeeper grass.

Her EasySoles made a sound in the gravel like corn chips. It made her think of her walks with Junior in a front pack, the little dust devils she kicked up with each step through a path of crushed granite. He used to be so small. It was hard to remember. Each day only millimeters bigger, hungrier, angrier.

And Damian Senior every day bigger, hungrier, and angrier too.

What was Gwen supposed to do?

(An owl hooted above her.)

(A patrol helicopter scissored above her.)

(Grave markers mocked the passage of time as she passed.)

(Elizabeth Morrison, his wife

Clarice Frip, wife of Gordon

Bernadette Larouche, wife and mother

and Anne, his wife)

See there? Even the headstones agreed with her.

It was a man’s world.

President priss had whatever Junior was serving up to her coming.

Who did she think she was, who did everyone think they were, blaming her?

It hadn’t been up to Gwen, for sure it wasn’t going to be up to some wannabe queen of what’s left of the world.

(Jonah)

In addition to the rat, the packing list included twenty-seven items, but some of these were up to individual discretion. Senior command recommended each of them bring a few items considered banned or Benefits in there. On the motel bed, JT laid a twelve-pack of airline minis, a bag of candy, a box of condoms, and four pre-eventuality tablets filled with titles no member would want to be caught trying to stream. He had downloaded these last night, shooting for a mixture of things he thought disenfranchised people would trade for and things he felt like watching in bed with a pizza, and in the flickering darkness the buffering fragments kept him from noticing the overlap and lulled him to sleep.

Everything fit in his internal frame except for the rat. The rat was in a biodegradable carrier he would bury after he safely crossed the border. It had slept most of the night in the dark of its box in his dark motel room, but now he could hear it scrabbling against the cardboard, ready to go. Some of the fifty had given their rats names during training, but JT had not. It was no good to get attached to things you’d have to leave behind.

He glanced at the TV. He had the news on mute so he could catch the headlines if anything looked new. Right now it did not: just the ghost of dust rising above the crater. The clock in the lower corner read 6:02. His entry point was in a national forest twenty miles from his first stop, and at night it would be ten degrees. The sooner he got started, the less likely he was to have to dig a shelter in the snow.

The rat scratched again at the sides of the box.

On the dresser next to his cell phone was a pair of scissors, a ripe banana, and a square patch bandaid still in its wrapper. The tattoo on his neck was recent, the skin still a little red: a dove with a wingspan no longer than the tip of his thumb. The drive to the border would only take half an hour, but on the way, he might have to stop. Even on the short hike to the fenceline, he might be seen. He unwrapped the bandaid and covered the little dove completely.

He picked up his cell phone to take out the sim card, and for a half second he was confused, as if his intention to destroy it had made it ring, but it was just his sister again. For the last six months she’d been calling almost daily. He ignored most of the calls, letting the messages pile up, and for the last week he had answered none at all.

She had the news on in the background at her house, the same news he was watching without sound; he could hear the helicopter rotors beating; her outrage shifting with the shifts on her screen. The rat box jittered on his dresser. At the base they kept their rats in wire cages, but they loaded them into these boxes to carry them outside to train. JT tried not to let it bother him, but it did. These rats were big. The size of house cats. The boxes were too small. His bunkmates loaded them a few different ways, most of them just shoving, but JT always cradled his underneath like a water balloon you’re afraid you’re filling to breaking. It wasn’t part of the training to give it a pinch of banana after you got it into the box, but he did it anyway, clicking the clicker like he was doing it to make it easier for himself next time, yet still his rat resisted, and still JT wanted to give it the banana. His sister was still talking, reckless parents, political hypocrisy, acceptable risk, military necessity, his schedule, his dating life, pseudo-science, all of it rage at the loss of her illusion of control over the fates of people she loved. JT neither understood this expression of grief, nor recognized his in his desire to hang up the phone. The clip of the membership youth squad came on. Then the troupe of dancing nurses in sexy Santa dresses. He switched his TV off.

When he lifted his backpack, she sensed it.

“Wait!” She was like a beagle. Or the Stasi. “You still haven’t told me where you are or where you’re going.”

“Say hi to Brad for me.”

“Or answered my question from last time, you can answer that one at least.”

He might have pretended not to know what she was talking about, but it was getting light out. He pictured her worried eyebrows and her memory-foam slippers and felt a familiar and uncomfortable mix of things he never put a name to, which were irritation, guilt, and compassion. He knew all of his reasons would disappoint her, but still his mind shuffled through them. On her TV he could hear people cheering. A woman’s voice said 5 more days!

“Think how happy it would make mom,” she said.

“Mom isn’t thinking about me. She isn’t thinking about anything.”

There was a long pause then that he knew meant he had made his sister cry, and again JT felt a churning ocean of unexamined feelings atop which floated this barely seaworthy boat of thought: I’m right. His sister was kind, and tough in her way, but wrong a lot. Wrong husband. Wrong job. Wrong emergency guardian for her baby. Wrong about the number of people at risk in there – not acceptable. Wrong about the minefield – not uncrossable. And Paxton did have a weak spot. They could defeat him. They’d been planning it for months, practicing scenarios until the white flash of armbands in the dark and the cool feel of the metal doors invaded his dreams. She was wrong about the single mom from her mom’s group too. This was all he needed.

As soon as he got going, he felt better. And his rat was quiet. Quiet crossing the parking lot. Quiet as he started the engine of a car he would abandon. Quiet pulling away from a motel he’d never return to. Quiet traveling an empty highway. Quiet passing between tanks, and juddering up a deserted ranch road, and parking next to a dead man’s tractor, and being lifted up and over a low barbed wire fence studded with warnings it could not see. Its fur was soft and hot when he opened the box flaps, and it didn’t struggle when he lifted it. Didn’t struggle when he clipped the fishing line to its collar and set it down on the snow. Didn’t struggle against the short tether or the tight quarter, back and forth in swaths five-feet wide, switchbacks no deeper than six inches. The expanse ahead of them was uneven and trackless, dotted with the tops of stones and the black trunks of pines, but the rat’s vision was poor and it didn’t see this. It just snuffled along, snuffled along, inching, inching, and when it got the scent of a little TNT, it scratched with a tiny star-shaped forepaw until he snapped the clicker and it lumbered back for a pinch of banana. Its hearing was better, but it was too focused on its goal, so it paid no attention to the sounds around them either. Wind in the trees? Ignored it. Creaky tree bough above them? Ignored it. The soft squeak of his boots compressing the snow? Ignored. So JT was not surprised when it did not pause at the snap of a twig.

He didn’t have to turn at all to see her. She was right there, on the other side of a bush they’d been nearing, just fifteen feet away from him now: a white-tailed doe. He remembered from hunting with his dad that there was something strange about the difference between a deer hiding in plain sight like that and the ones he’d see stuffed at the mount shop in town. Not a trace of motion here, liquid eyes unblinking, but still there was so much life in her she almost hummed. He could almost feel her heart beating. JT held still, but his rat kept moving forward, just hungry for food, and his only hope was that when it caught her eye, she would bolt backward to escape it, but she did not bolt backward. Her arc was high, her back legs kicking up a last spray of snow, and when she narrowed the gap between them, the ground beneath her exploded.

LDTN Monday

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In the summer, the grass above them is dry, and the dry wind blows it as it grows, and a man on a riding mower cuts it short. He is not thinking about the people who died there. He is thinking of how he will get bread, how the rolls at the next party will be warm, and there will be another cigarette, and there will be music, because the speaker on the stereo in his trailer died and now all he has is the music in his head, which is better sometimes (isn’t it?) than the music we’re allowed to hear.

Sometimes his front bumper grazes one of the wooden crosses, and if he remembers, he will right it before he goes, but he doesn’t always remember. In this way, by thinking of bread and cigarettes and music, he consigns himself to the status of perpetual enrollment candidate. He will never graduate to mowing the graves of the identified in the field across the street, sprinklered green, marked with granite which glints a little in the sun, and surrounded by crowd cams so people can be seen paying tribute to people who were trapped by beliefs that were not their own. Such a habit to breathe in those words before we have words, and make them thoughts, a thought worm, decomposing us while we are still alive.

Under the wheels of his mower, bodies inside their boxes puff and bloat, leaking enzymes, releasing gases, doubling from the pressure of these things we carry inside, and then the flesh is eaten by the worms beneath our feet, the ones we make children cut in paraffin trays to teach them, and unearth with diggers to erect buildings that will someday fall, and toxicologists feed pathogens to study the virulence of smaller things. If you cut a worm in half, the upper half doesn’t die. The child who escaped the church fire had a vision once of herself falling to pieces from the waist up, and the feeling was one of ecstasy. No more thinking, just a gut to follow. The worm brain was gone.

In the graveyard the man will never be allowed to mow, lie her parents. She has never visited them, not once, why would she go after she got away from them, but oh how good it would be for her to lay down on her belly on their graves and scream, release a single wail from her diaphragm, out from inside her like a snake, the scales scraping her throat, up and out and into the world where she can cut off its head and then cut and recut and recut it until it is nothing. Her father used to beat her in front of the other children and afterward take her into his bedroom and tell her she was good. Good girl he would say. She was a good girl for what she never asked of him. For being an example, an outlet, a sink for his anger, a thing he could obliterate, a showcase for his power, a warning, compliant, for letting him see she was his, for letting him call his misery love, for feeding the hole inside him, being a thing he could take and use however he wanted, and see how she hated herself for. It was the transfer of hatred he loved. Look how she takes that part of me inside herself every time. Never says no. Bends over (did she bend over?) Pulls her pants down (did she? did he? did her mom?) When he was six himself, his own father took his face and smeared it in the urine pooling at his feet. He had done this many times, his young head sometimes bouncing on the concrete, and his last thought when he died was of the float of some woman’s arms like an angel flying across the parking lot to save him, and of his belly tensing with the foreknowledge that this would only make his father hit him again. He did not remember what made him pee as his last pee left him, maybe nothing, maybe it was fear of the look on his unhappy father’s face, maybe just at his joy, a thing his dad had no access to anymore in his own body, so he wanted to snuff it out.

The church’s expatriate rarely thinks of the things her own frightened parents said to her. She has banished most of them into a lockbox of dissociation she cannot not unlock with any key she can find. In high school at the halfway house, she would be amazed when she’d try. She would picture her father’s face at the commissary table, but when she tried to picture him hovering over her in the place where he beat her, or in his bedroom where he laid with her later, she couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see herself there either. Could remember only dreading going to meet him there when she had done something wrong (what was it?) Could picture, perfectly, the carpet fibers of the rug beneath the stool. The wavering label on the juice box he gave her to reward her with in his bedroom after. But she could not remember herself, or him pulling her pants down, or the air from his hand moving to strike or touch her where later she would try to let someone love her if only her brain would unlock the memory and let her see it. If she recognized the voice she hated herself in all day as theirs, she might have been able to exorcise it, but she doesn’t know. If you sliced open the brains of most people, it would just be thought worms arranged in the shape of gray matter, mother-father-teacher-culture, feeding on whatever separate thing tries to grow.

In winter, in a hooded parka, the tender of unmarked graves walks a pattern that looks like baskets. His snowshoes are old, made of gut and wood, and as he rights the tips of the wooden crosses in the December snow, he is not thinking of the people buried beneath him either. He is not thinking of the tribes who fished nearby with baskets shaped like his shoeprints. He is thinking of rolls (warm) and cigarettes (lit) while he sways beside a glittering tinsel-strewn tree to music that portends some kind of Christmas. This week there is a party he believes he’ll be allowed to go to. He does not know that by Sunday, the locus of authority over his movements will once again have shifted. That every seven days, he-and-everyone-he-passes godlike builds a world that is an atom of the world we all live in. That every mind in these disputed territories tells itself a story that takes us somewhere new.

LDTN Prologue

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