Countdown City

1.

If I can find the woman, I’ll have the man.

Culverson’s right. When you look at it objectively, my plan is a long shot at best. It’s the plan of a rookie or a plum fool: going to look for a person in the one place in New England where it’s probably the hardest to find anyone. A woman for whom I have no physical description, just an age and a stale address. And why? Because this woman may or may not have had a relationship two years ago with the man I’m looking for now.

And the thing is, McGully’s right, too—I’m not unmindful of that. There is an aspect of my character that tends to latch on to one difficult but potentially solvable problem, rather than grapple with the vast and unsolvable problem that would be all I could see, if I were to look up, figuratively speaking, from my small blue notebooks. There are a million things I might be doing other than putting in overtime to make right one Bucket List abandonment, to heal Martha Milano’s broken heart. But this is what I do. It’s what makes sense to me, what has long made sense. And surely some large proportion of the world’s current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense.

That’s what I like to tell myself anyway, and it’s what I’m telling myself now, as I take off for Durham, biking by night, east-southeast on Route 202 with my madman sister for a sidekick, buoyed forward on a cloud of instinct and guesswork. It’s only about forty miles from Concord to Durham, an easy bike ride with no vehicular traffic going either way, just mild summer weather and the trill of night birds. Sometimes Nico rides ahead and sometimes I ride ahead, and we shout jokes to each other, small observations, checking in:

“You doing okay?”

“Yeah, dude. You?”

“Yeah.”

One time the headlights of a bus appear in the darkness like lanternfish, get close, zoom past. A mercy bus, running on some sort of rotgut fuel, jammed with singing clapping passengers, luggage racks strapped precariously to the top: off to do some good works somewhere in Jesus’s name. We watch the taillights disappear into the westbound distance, the once-familiar sight of bus headlights on a highway at night as unfamiliar and eerie as if a tank had just rolled by.

I’ve haven’t been to UNH, not recently. I’ve been before, in the old days, but not since Maia, and not since the bloodless “revolution” in January, when a group of students exiled the faculty and staff, took over the campus and rechristened it the Free Republic of New Hampshire. Supposedly the plan was to quickly forge a utopian society in which willing participants can live out the rest of time in communal harmony with their brothers and sisters, everyone contributing, everyone respecting everyone else’s freedom to spend life’s remaining hours doing what they saw fit.

Nico, as I had suspected, has been down there numerous times. Apparently, her little clubhouse in Concord has something of a satellite office in the Free Republic. And, most important, she claims to know exactly how to get me in. “Oh, yeah,” Nico said, grinning, when I explained my dilemma, delighted to be in possession of something I need. “I know the place. I know it well. All the signs and shibboleths.” And when I explained who the client was, that the man I was looking for was married to Martha Milano, that only sweetened the deal—Nico was happy to pack a bag and come help me navigate the terrain.

There was just one condition—and she said that, of course, narrowed her eyes like a gangster-movie tough guy and said, “There’s just one condition…” After the trip, when I had what I needed, I had to promise that I would sit down with her so she could explain what she and her friends are up to.

“You bet,” I told her. We were sitting in Next Time Around on two filthy beanbag chairs, speaking in low whispers. “No problem.”

“I’m serious, Hen.”

“What?”

“You have a way of saying you’re going to listen to something, but then when the other person is talking you’re up in your head having some sort of complicated policeman dialog with yourself about something else.”

“That’s not true.”

“Just promise that when we sit down, and I lay it all out for you, you will listen with an open mind.”

“I promise, Nic,” is what I told her, extracting myself with difficulty from the beanbag chair. Then I even looked her in the eye, to make sure she knew I was listening to her and not to any voices in my head. “I promise.”

And so now we’re biking along 202, through the forested counties, past Northwood Center and Northwood Ridge, talking sometimes, singing sometimes, sometimes just gliding in silence, listening to the distant thud and whack of trees being cut down for firewood. It was harder for Nico than it was for me, everything that happened, the series of catastrophic events that marked our childhood. I was twelve and she was six when our mother was murdered in a Market Basket parking lot, and our father hung himself with a window cord, and we were sent to live with our stern and disinterested grandfather.

It would be difficult for me to disentangle these three sequential and overlapping traumas, tease them apart and judge which affected me the most. I can say with confidence, however, that as painful as all of it was for me, it swept over my sister like an advancing wall of water—pulled her under and never let her up. At six she was a small flickering gem of a child: agile minded, anxious, curious, quick witted, chameleonic. And here comes this great thundering wave and it knocked her over and dragged her around, filled her with pain like water in the lungs of a drowning man.

Somewhere east of Epsom, Nico begins to sing, something I immediately recognize as a Dylan song, except I can’t place it, which is odd to consider, that she might know one I don’t. But then Nico gets to the chorus, and I realize it’s “One Headlight,” the number by Dylan’s son.

“Love that song,” I say. “Are you singing that because of Martha?”

“What?”

I veer in close, pedal up alongside Nico. “You don’t remember? That spring, she listened to that song nonstop.”

“She did? Was she even around?”

“Are you kidding? All the time. She made dinner every night.”

Nico looks over, shrugs. Invariably we refer to that grim doom-heavy period of our mutual memory as that spring, rather than by the more cumbersome formulation that would be more accurate: “the five months after Mom’s terrible death but before Dad’s.”

“Do you seriously not remember that?”

“Why do you care?”

“I don’t.”

She gives herself a burst of speed, takes the lead again, and goes back to singing. “Me and Cinderella, we put it all together…” Houdini is in the wagon hitched to the bike, among the supplies, panting, joyful, his weird little pink tongue tasting the wind.

It’s past midnight when we get to India Garden, the terrible restaurant just off campus that was, for some reason, Nathanael Palace’s dining selection when I was a high school junior and we came to tour the campus. Dim multicolored lighting, indifferent employees; abundant portions of barely edible food, strangely textured and overly spiced. I had zero interest in attending the University of New Hampshire anyway. You only needed sixty credit hours for the Concord PD, so that’s what I did: sixty hours exactly at the New Hampshire Technological Institute and then off to the Police Academy. I figured Grandfather would be proud eventually, once I was on the force, but by the time I graduated he was dead.

Nico and I kickstand our bikes and wander through the abandoned restaurant like visitors from a foreign planet. The sign’s been torn down and the windows and door smashed with a blunt object, but the inside is untouched, preserved as if for a museum display. Long rows of chafing dishes under long-cold heating lamps, rectangular tables tottering unevenly. The smell, too, is the same: turmeric and cumin and the faint resonance of mop water from the linoleum floor. The cash register, miraculously, has money in it, four limp twenty-dollar bills. I feel them between my thumb and forefinger. Worthless bits of paper; ancient history.

Houdini has fallen asleep in the wagon, nestled amongst my jugs of water and peanut butter sandwiches and Clif Bars and first aid supplies, eyes fluttering, breathing softly, like a child. I lift him out and place him gently in a bed of empty rice sacks. Nico and I roll out sleeping bags and arrange ourselves on the floor.

“Hey, what’s she paying you for this gig?” she asks.

“What?” I say, pulling the little Ruger from my pants pocket and placing it beside my bedroll.

“Martha Milano. What’s she paying you to find her deadbeat husband?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing really. I just…” I shrug, feeling myself get flush. “He promised her he would stay till the end. She’s upset.”

“You’re a moron,” says Nico, and it’s dark but I can hear in her voice that she’s smiling.

“I know. Goodnight, Nic.”

“Goodnight, Hen.”

The flag of the state of New Hampshire has been removed from above Thompson Hall, and a new flag has been raised in its place. It depicts a stylized asteroid, steel gray and gleaming as it streaks through the sky, with a long sparkling contrail flashing out behind it like a superhero’s cape. This asteroid is about to smash not into the earth, however, but into a clenched fist. The flag is enormous, painted on a bed sheet, rippling buoyantly on the summer wind.

“You shouldn’t be wearing a suit,” Nico tells me for the third time this morning.

“It’s what I brought,” I say. “I’m fine.”

We’re making our way up the long hill, overgrown with crab-grass and onion grass, toward the imposing castlelike facade of Thompson Hall. Houdini trots along behind us.

“We’re going to a utopian society, run by hyperintellectual teenagers. It’s July. You should have put on some shorts.”

“I’m fine,” I say again.

Nico gets a pace or two ahead of me and raises a hand in greeting to the two young women—girls, really—coming forward off the steps of Thompson to meet us. One is a light-skinned African American girl with short tightly braided hair, green capri pants, and a UNH T-shirt. The other is pale skinned, petite, in a sundress and a ponytail. As we get closer, past the flagpole, they both raise shotguns and point them at us.

I freeze.

“Hey,” says Nico, nice and easy. “Not with a bang.”

“But with a whimper,” says the white girl in the sundress, and the guns come down. Nico hits me with the smallest, sliest of winks—all the signs and shibboleths—and I exhale. This entire moment of peril has escaped the notice of my vigilant protector: Houdini is sniffing at the ground, digging up tufts of wild grass with his teeth.

“Oh, hey, I know you,” says the short white girl, and Nico grins.

“Yes, indeed. It’s Beau, right?”

“Yeah,” says Beau. “And you’re Nico. Jordan’s friend. You were here when we put up the greenhouse.”

“I was. How’s that going?”

“So-so. We got great dope, but the tomato vines will not take.”

The black girl and I look at each other during this exchange and smile awkwardly, like strangers at a cocktail party. We’re not alone, I’ve noticed: Hanging out on the stone wall that extends from the right side of the building are two kids, all in black, each with a bandana pulled up over the lower half of his face. They’re stretched out on the wall, relaxed but watchful, like panthers.

“You’re working perimeter now?” says Nico to Beau.

“I am,” she says. “Hey, this is my girlfriend, Sport.”

“Hi,” says the African American girl, and Nico smiles warmly. “This is Hank.”

We all shake hands, and then Beau says, “Listen, sorry,” and steps forward, and Nico goes “Totally okay,” and they frisk us, one at a time, quick perfunctory pat-downs. They open the heavy duffel bag that Nico took with her from India Garden, unzip it, peek inside, then zip it back up. I’m empty-handed, just a couple of blue notebooks in the inside pocket of my suit coat; the handgun, Nico strongly suggested I leave back at the restaurant.

“Why are you dressed like that?” Sport asks.

“Oh,” I say, looking down and then up. “I don’t know.”

I can feel Nico’s irritation rolling off her. “He’s in mourning,” says my sister. “For the world.”

“All right, you guys are clean,” says Beau brightly. “As you know.”

“Oh my God,” says Sport, bending to pet the dog. “So cute. What kind of dog is she?”

“He,” I say. “He’s a bichon frisé.”

“So cute,” she says again, and it’s like we’re in one of those alternate dimensions, just some folks hanging out on the front steps of campus: green lawn, blue sky, white dog, a group of friends. Detective McGully has remarked on the gorgeous run of summer weather this year. He calls it nut-kicker weather, as in, “that’s just God, kicking us in the nuts.”

Good old McGully, I think in passing. Off and running.

The boys on the wall are not introduced, but their aesthetic and affect are familiar; the kinds of young men one used to see on the evening news, rushing through city streets in clouds of tear gas, protesting the meetings of international financial organizations. These two seem confident and calm, long legs dangling over the stone walls of the university, passing a cigarette or joint back and forth, strips of ammunition pulled across their chests like seatbelts.

“So, hey,” says Nico. “Hank is coming in with me, just for the day. He’s looking for someone.”

“Oh,” says Sport. “Actually—” She stops, tenses up, and looks to Beau, who shakes her head.

“You’ve been here before, so you’re good,” says Beau to Nico. “But unfortunately your friend has to be quarantined.”

“Quarantined?” says Nico.

Quarantined. Terrific.

“It’s a new system,” Beau explains. She’s a small woman with a small voice, but she’s clearly not timid. It’s more like she’s insisting that the listener pay attention. “The idea came from Comfort, but there was a whole Big Group vote on it. In quarantine, newcomers are instructed in the function of our community. Divested of their old ideas about living in the self, and at the same time divested of their personal possessions.” She’s fallen into a rhythm, here, she’s reciting a set speech. “In quarantine a newcomer learns the way thing are handled at the Republic, and to prioritize the needs of the community over their needs as an individual.”

“There’ve been a lot of people just, like, wandering in,” Sport adds more casually, and Beau scowls. She liked her official explanation better.

“What people?” says Nico. “CIs?”

“Yeah,” says Sport, “But also just—you know. Whoever.”

“And so in quarantine,” says Beau, reclaiming the conversation, “we learn that the Republic is a system of responsibility, not just of privilege. That there is no such thing as a utopia for one—it must be a utopia for all.”

Sport nods solemnly, picks up the phrase and murmurs it in echo: “no such thing as a utopia for one…”

Okay, I’m thinking. Got it. Let’s cut to the chase here. “How long is quarantine?”

“Five days,” says Beau. Sport winces apologetically.

Damn it. Julia Stone is in there somewhere, I’m sure of it, seated between the Doric columns of one or another collegiate hall, with Brett Cavatone laying his heavy head in her lap. In five days, who knows? I take a look at Nico, who still looks relaxed, all smiles, but I can see the unease flashing in her eyes—this quarantine business is as much a surprise to her as it is to me.

“But it’s easy,” says Sport. “Seriously. It’s in Woodside Apartments, the big dorm on the other side of Wallace? And in terms of the divestment or whatever, you can keep super-personal items. Family pictures and stuff.”

“Actually, not anymore,” says Beau.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Comfort just decided.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“I didn’t even know they were conferencing on it.”

“Yes,” says Beau. “No more personal or sentimental items. It’s rearview.”

She says the word “rearview” with a definite and meaningful emphasis, like it’s been lifted from the language and glossed with a shiny new meaning, one accessible only to those who’ve undergone five days of quarantine at the Woodside Apartments. I look up at the banner, the flapping bed sheet, the proud standard of asteroidland.

“Come on, guys,” says Nico. “Henry’s not trouble. Can we give him a pass?”

“Like a hand stamp?” says Sport, but her laugh is fleeting; Beau is quiet, stone-faced.

“No,” she says, and her hand drops back to the butt of her gun. “The quarantine is a pretty firm rule.”

“Well, yesterday—” starts Sports, and Beau cuts her off. “Yeah, I know, and they got serious shit for it.”

“Right, right.”

Sport looks at Beau, and Beau looks over her shoulders at the Black Bloc guys, the crows watching us from the wall. Nice egalitarian utopian society, I’m thinking, everybody making sure everybody else is following the rules.

“Listen—” I start, and then Nico turns a quarter turn toward me and stares, just for an instant, all the time she needs to tell me very clearly with her eyes and eyebrows to shut up. I do so. This is why I brought her, and I might as well let her do her thing; this is Nico’s element, if ever she had one.

“Look, totally honest with you? This girl that Henry is looking for? Her mother is sick. She’s dying.”

Beau doesn’t say anything, but Sport whistles lightly. “Sucks.”

I follow Nico’s lead. “Yeah,” I say softly. “It’s cancer.”

“Brain cancer,” says Nico, and Sport’s eyes grow wider. Beau’s fingertips remain on the handle of her gun.

“Yeah, she’s got a tumor,” I say. “A chordoma it’s called, actually, at the base of her skull. And because the hospitals are all screwed up, so many doctors are gone, there isn’t much they can do.”

I’m picturing McGully, of course, big vaudeville hands: six months to live… wakka-wakka. It was Grandfather who had the chordoma, though; they’re mostly seen in geriatric patients, but no one here seems likely to know that.

Sport looks at me, then at Beau, who shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “We can’t.”

“All he’s got to do is find her,” says Nico softly, “let this kid know her mom is sick, in case she wants to say goodbye. That’s all. If it’s not possible, we understand.”

“It’s not possible,” says Beau, immediately.

Sport turns to her. “Don’t be a jerk.”

“I’m just following the rules.

“It’s not your mom.”

“Fine,” says Beau abruptly. “You know what? Fuck it.”

She stomps over to the steps and sits down sullenly while Sport walks over to the two on the wall and whispers something to the one with the cigarette, jokingly plucks it from his hands. Sport and the anarchists crack up—one lunges for his cigarette, the other shrugs and turns away—Beau sulks on the steps. They’re just a bunch of kids, these people: goofing around, flirting, fighting, smoking, running their principality.

At last Sport trots back over to us, flashing a small thumbs-up, and I exhale, see Nico smiling from the corner of my eye. We get four hours, Sport tells us, and not a second more.

“And come out through this exit. Okay? Only this exit.”

“Okay,” I say, and Nico says, “Thanks.”

“She uh—” she angles her head toward Beau. “She told her mom she was gay. Because of the asteroid. Radical-honesty time, right? Her mother told her she would burn in hell. So.” She sighs. “I don’t know.”

Beau is still sitting on the steps, glaring at the sky. There are times I think the world is better off in some ways—I do—I think in some ways it’s better off. One of the anarchists slides down from the wall and ambles over, skinny and sloe-eyed, black bandana draped loosely at his collarbone. “Hey, so, four hours, man,” he says. He smells like hand-rolled cigarettes and sweat.

“I told them,” says Sport.

“Cool. And in the meantime, we gotta hold on to your dog.”

The skinny kid reaches out his arms. Nico looks at me—I look at Houdini. I scoop him up, rub his neck, hold him for a long second. He looks into my eyes, then shakes his body and pulls for the ground. I put him back down, and he resumes chewing grass under the watchful eyes of his captors.

“Four hours,” I say, and Nico heaves her duffel bag onto her shoulder, and we’re ready to go.

2.

Once, in high school, as part of a short-lived and ill-fated campaign to gain the attention of a “cool” girl named Alessandra Loomis, I accompanied some friends to a day-long popular-music festival hosted by the Manchester radio station Rock 101. This is like that, what I’m looking at now, standing at the rear exit of Thompson Hall gazing down the long slope toward the main quad. It’s like the rock-fest but to a factor of ten: brightly colored tents and sleeping bags stretch out in all directions, studded by what look like giant shipping cartons, overturned and transformed into baroquely decorated forts. Long snaking lines of drummers move through the crowds, dancing in rhythmic interlocking circles. At the center of the quad is a towering junk-shop sculpture painted in neons and pastels, built of car doors and computer monitors and children’s toys and aquarium parts. Puffs of cigarette and marijuana smoke float up, drifting over the crowds like smoke signals. It’s like a concert with no stage, no bands, no electricity; a concert that’s all audience.

Nico was right. I should have worn shorts.

“So great,” murmurs my sister. She leans back, throws her arms open and closes her eyes, breathing it in—the marijuana smoke, certainly, but all of it, the whole thing. And I am surprised to be feeling how I do, confronted with the massive and chaotic scene—not at all how I felt driving the long hour back to Concord after a day at the Rock 101 festival, my ears ringing alternately with Alessandra Loomis’s kind but unequivocal demurrals and Soundgarden’s egregious cover of “Buckets of Rain.”

We make our way down the slope and into the crowd. I unknot my tie and take it off. Nico laughs. “There you go, Starsky,” she says. “Deep cover.”

“Shut up,” I say. “Where are we going?”

“We gotta find my man Jordan,” says Nico. “He’s got this place wired.”

“Okay,” I say. “And where’s Jordan?”

“In Dimond,” she says. “The library. If his committee is sitting. Follow me.”

I follow her down into the wonderland, trotting a few paces behind as she picks a route through the crowded tents and revelers. Nico pauses here and there to say hello to people she knows, ducking into one tent to hug a fine-boned girl in a miniskirt, jog bra, and elaborate Native American headdress.

At the far end of the main quad the crowd thins and we pick up a narrow winding path and follow it into and out of a stand of thin sapling elms. After a few minutes of walking, the noises of the drums and the singing have faded, and we are wandering through the campus, passing nondescript low-slung brick academic buildings—Geology department, Kinesiology, Mathematics. After ten minutes or so we come out onto a plaza where there’s just a single drummer, tapping away all on his own, wearing sweatpants and a Brooklyn Dodgers jersey. The chiseled brick cornerstone says PERFORMING ARTS, and a sandwich board is propped up at the base of the wide steps, between the columns, advertising a lecture: “The Asteroid as Metaphor: Collision, Chaos, and Perceptions of Doom.”

Nico peers at the sign.

“Is this where we’re going?” I ask.

“Nope.”

“Do you know where we’re going?”

“Yup,” she says, and we keep walking. I’m picturing Brett Cavatone making his way through the campus in his heavy policeman boots, looking for Julia Stone just as I am now. How did he circumvent the perimeter guards, I wonder? If I had to guess, his stratagem was more tactile than mine, more direct. He would have cased the campus, selected the least-defended of the various checkpoints, and employed overwhelming but nonlethal force to get past one of these skinny twenty-somethings playing tough guy.

I keep following Nico, who is still lugging her heavy duffel bag, deeper and deeper into the bewildering campus. The paths roll back on themselves, the woods grow thick, then thin out again. On a volleyball court outside the athletic complex is a row of young people clutching Civil War–style bayonets, practicing their form: someone yells “Charge!” and they charge, sprinting full bore, lunging with bayonets extended, stopping on a line, laughing, retreating.

I’m growing more and more concerned about Nico’s sense of direction every time she pauses at a forking path and chews on her lip for a moment before plunging forward.

“Here, wait,” I say. “Here’s a map.”

“I don’t need it,” she says. “I know where I’m going.”

“You sure?”

“Stop asking me that.”

It doesn’t matter; the map, when I look closer, has been imaginatively graffitied, the place names all crossed out and replaced: “Perdition.” “Deathtown.” “Dragons Here There Be.”

“We’re fine,” says Nico, taking a seemingly arbitrary left turn onto a narrower path with a light handrail. “Come on.”

We cross over a brown, bubbling creek and pass one more building, a dorm, with loud insistent music pouring out along with a series of modulated groans. There’s a man on the roof, naked, waving to passers-by as if from a parade float.

“Holy moly,” I say. “What are they doing in there?”

“Oh, you know,” says Nico, looking down, blushing, uncharacteristically. “Fucking.”

“Ah,” I say, “right.”

And then, thank God, we get to where we’re going.

In Dimond Library, on the way to the basement stairs, I see a pale boy hunched over the desk in a carrel, sipping from a Styrofoam cup, surrounded by books, reading. His face is gaunt and his hair a greasy mass. On the ground beside him is a clotted leaking pile of discarded teabags, and beside that a bucket that I realize with horror is full of urine. There’s a tall stack of books on one side of him and a taller stack on the other: out pile, in pile. I stand for a second watching this guy, frozen in place but alive with small action: muttering to himself as he reads, almost humming like an electric motor, his hands twitching at the edges of the pages until, with a sudden flash of motion, he turns the page, flings it over like he can’t consume the words fast enough.

“Come on,” says Nico, and we continue down the hall, passing four more of these carrels, each with its quiet intent occupant—earnestly, frantically reading.

In the basement, Nico slips in through a pair of green double doors marked BOOK REPAIR and I wait outside, until a moment later she emerges with a friend behind her. Jordan, presumably. In the few seconds before the door swings closed I glimpse a big workshop with the tables pushed to the sides, people sitting cross-legged on the floor in loose concentric rings. As the door opens, someone is saying “Agreed, with reservations…,” and the rest are raising their hands in the air—two hands up, palms out—and then the door closes all the way.

“So this is the brother, huh?” says Jordan, sticking his hand out. “I seriously don’t think I’ve ever met a real cop before.”

“Well,” I say, shaking his hand, and I’m going to say that I’m not a cop anymore, actually, but then he says, “What’s it like to shove a nightstick up someone’s ass?”

I let go of his hand.

“I’m totally serious,” he says. And Nico says, “Jordan, don’t be a moron.”

He looks at her, all innocence. “What?”

I just want to find my missing person. That’s all I want. Jordan and Nico lean against a wall in the hallway, and I stand across from them. He’s short, baby faced, fatuous, with a pair of Ray-Bans pushed back high on his head. Nico pulls out a cigarette and Jordan gives her an expectant expression, and she lights one for him, too, on the same match.

“How’s Ars Republica?” she asks.

“Boring. Stupid. Ridiculous. As usual.” Jordan looks over his shoulder at the BOOK REPAIR door. “Today it’s immigrant policy: take ’em or leave ’em, basically.” He talks fast, taking quick little puffs of the cigarette between choppy sentences. “Crowd mood is definitely take ’em, especially now with this quarantine jazz. How’d you get him in, by the way?”

“We told a story.”

“Nice.” Then, to me, “Like that outfit, by the way. You look like a funeral director.” He keeps chattering, hyper and self-important. “Not that many of ’em are making it up here. The CI’s I mean. Coasties must be doing a bang-up job of rounding ’em up and taking ’em camping. Oh, wait, not camping. Internment camp. My bad.”

He smirks, then leans his neck one way till it cracks, and then the other way. “Okay, what do we need?”

“I’m looking for someone.”

“Aren’t we all.”

“Someone specific, jackass,” says Nico, and sticks out her tongue at him.

If it turns out that my sister is romantically involved with this man, I might actually have to murder him.

“A former student here,” I say. “Would have been a senior last year, when all of this started up. Whatever this is.”

“‘Whatever this is’?” Jordan’s face becomes serious. “I’ll tell you what this is, asshole, this is the apex of civilization. Okay? This is what democracy looks like, real democracy, you fucking Nazi cop asshole.”

Jordan stares at me and I grope for some sort of placating language, wishing more than anything in the world that I didn’t need help from this particular person—and then he drops the stone face and giggles like a hyena.

“I’m jerking your chain, man.” He points back over his shoulder at the committee meeting. “These dingleberries are in there for forty-five minutes arguing about toilet paper rationing, even though the world is about to explode. It’s fucking retarded.”

“I see,” I say, speaking slowly to control the anger in my voice. “If that’s how you feel, why are you here?”

“Resources. Recruitment. And because I happen to know that the world is not about to explode. Right Nico?”

“Damn right,” she says.

“The woman that I’m looking for is named Julia Stone.” I give him the campus address that I have from the file: Hunter Hall 415.

“She won’t be there,” he says. “Nobody’s stayed put.”

“I figured. I need to know where she is.”

“You got a picture?”

“I do not.”

He whistles, jogs his head back and forth, blows out a plume of smoke.

“Well, Nico’s brother the cop, it shan’t be easy. Everything is scrambled like an egg around here. I’ll do what I can.”

“Okay,” I say. I’m thinking of Brett slipping away, further and further into the future—thinking, too, of the four hours I’ve been given by my new friends at the entrance to Thompson Hall. That dog has suffered enough already. “How long?”

“How long?” Jordan turns to Nico. “Is that how policemen say thank you?”

“God,” she says, laughing, shoving him lightly in the chest. “You’re such a prick.”

“Meet me in the grub tent in an hour and a half,” Jordan tells me. “If I don’t have something by then, I never will.”

Around the corner from Dimond Library is a cluster of residence halls, each shaped like a parenthesis and arranged around a shared courtyard, where, at present, there’s a dozen or so young people playing a game. A kid in some sort of Victorian derby hat shakes a Styrofoam cup to spill dice out onto the sidewalk with a loud clatter, and the other players cheer and then start racing around the courtyard. A chalk sign says ANTIPODAL VOLCANISM WORKING GROUP.

“Do you know what that means?” I ask Nico, and she shrugs, lights a cigarette, disinterested.

The players aren’t just running, they’re drawing, stopping to make marks on a massive game board that’s been drawn out on the pavement. The kid with the hat gathers up the dice, puts them back in the cup, and hands it to the next player, a homely girl in a flowing skirt and Dr. Who T-shirt. These kids remind me of certain people in high school I was never friends with but always liked, the ones who played D&D and worked backstage: scruffy, unstylish, ill-fitting clothes and glasses, deeply uncomfortable outside their small group. The girl tosses the dice, and this time everyone yells “ka-boom!” I take a step closer, and now I can see that it’s a map of the world they’ve drawn, laid out on the hot unshaded pavement of the courtyard, a big blown-up Mercator projection of the earth. Now they’re unspooling long loops of ribbon along the map, tracing trajectories somehow keyed to the numbers that came up on the roll of the dice. The ribbons go off in various directions, out from the impact site: one wave of destruction rolling over southern Europe; another through Tokyo and on across the Pacific. A dark-haired young man is squatting over cities, one after another, joyfully marking them with big red X’s.

“No! Not San Francisco!” says another, a girl with an awkward pixie haircut, snorting laughter. “That’s my old apartment!”

At last I let Nico lead me away, follow her back through the paths of what used to be UNH. Again I find myself imagining O. Cavatone, if he really was here, picturing him navigating these tortuous paths. What did he make of it, the tents, the kids, the antipodal volcanism working group? The tough and righteous state trooper in the land of the permanent asteroid party? Then I stop myself, shake my head. What do you think, Henry? You think that if you imagine him hard enough, you can make him appear?

All the food in the grub tent is free and hot and delicious. There is a no-nonsense woman in a stained yellow apron, serving tea and miso soup and gooey chocolate desserts from a long table. Dinner rolls and cups of tea are help-yourself. I look down the buffet line, daring to hope—it’s a different world, a different infrastructure, you never know—but there is no coffee. People drift in and out of the tent, pushing back the flap and saying “hey” to the cook and grabbing food and trays; most of the citizens of the Free Republic are of college age or even younger, although there are a handful of grown-ups. In fact, there’s a middle-aged man with a long gray beard and a potbelly seated next to Nico and me at our picnic table, wearing a loud-print bowling shirt and shooting what I presume to be heroin into the veins of his forearm, having tied off above the elbow with an extension cord.

I try to ignore him. I break my roll and open a small foil packet of margarine.

“So,” I say to Nico. “Jordan. Is he your boyfriend?”

She grins. “Yes, Dad. He’s my boyfriend. And I’m thinking about going all the way. Don’t tell Jesus, okay?”

“That’s hilarious.”

“I know.”

“Well, just for the record…” I dab on the margarine with a plastic knife. “I don’t like him.”

“For the record, I do not care.” Nico laughs again. “But, to tell you the truth, I don’t like him much, either. Okay? He’s part of my thing, that’s all. He’s a teammate.”

I lean back and bite into the roll. This whole time Nico has been lugging around her mysterious duffel bag, large and ungainly, and now it is slung on the bench beside her. The potbellied heroin addict at the end of the table makes a low grunt and depresses his plunger, grits his teeth, and throws back his head. There is something horrifying and mesmerizing about him doing this in front of us, almost as if he were performing a sexual act or a murder. I look away, back to Nico.

We chat. We catch up. We tell each other stories from the old days: stories about Grandfather, about our mom and dad, about Nico and her screw-up friends from high school, stealing cars, drinking beer in homeroom, shoplifting. I remind her of our mother’s zealous and misplaced encouragement of Nico’s early-life interest in gymnastics. My comically uncoordinated little sister would do some poorly executed somersault, land painfully on her tiny butt, and my mother would clap wildly, cup her hands into a megaphone: “Nico Palace, ladies and gentlemen! Nico Palace!”

We finish our soup. I check my watch. Jordan said an hour and a half. It’s been fifty-five minutes. The heroin addict babbles to himself, murmuring his way through his private ecstasies.

“So, Henry,” says Nico, in that same tone of voice that Culverson always used, fake casual, innocent, to ask if I’d been in touch with her. “How are you?”

“In what sense?”

“The girl,” she says. I look up. The roof of the grub tent is not properly joined; there’s a diagonal slash of open air, blue sky. “The one who died.”

“Naomi,” I say. “I’m fine.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Nico sighs and pats me on the back of the hand, a sweet simple gesture glowing faintly with the ghost light of our dead mother. I can imagine my sister and me in some future that never will exist, some alternate dimension, Nico appearing on my doorstep on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas Eve, whatever dipshit husband she ended up with still parking the car, my beautiful sarcastic nieces and nephews tearing through the house, demanding their presents.

“Random question,” I say. “Do you know the name Canliss?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“It’s not someone we went to school with?”

“I don’t think so. Why?”

“No reason,” I say. “Forget it.”

She shrugs. The chef in her apron is singing, opera, something from Marriage of Figaro, I think. A new group wanders in, three boys and two girls, all of them in matching bright orange shirts and sneakers, like they’re some sort of athletic team, and they’re arguing, loudly but not angrily, about the future of humanity: “Okay, let’s say that everybody’s dead but ten people,” says one of the men. “And let’s say one of them opens a store…”

“Capitalist pig!” interrupts one of the women, and they all crack up. The heroin addict’s forehead hits the table with an audible thunk.

“Hey. You should come back to Concord with me,” I say suddenly to my sister. “After I settle this case. We’ll hole up in Grandfather’s house. On Little Pond Road. We’ll share resources. Wait it out together.”

“Wish I could, big brother,” says Nico, amused, eyes dancing. “But I gotta save the world.”

Jordan slips through the flap of the grub tent right on time, as good as his word, Ray-Bans and shit-eating grin firmly in place. He’s written Julia Stone’s information on a tiny slip of cigarette paper, which he slides into my palm like a bellhop’s tip.

“She’s on R&R,” he says cheerfully to Nico, who says, “No kidding?”

“What’s R&R?” I say.

“One of the—whatever they call them. One of the grand committees,” Nico says.

“Okay,” I say, looking at the paper. All it says is what he just told me: Julia Stone. R&R. “So where is she?”

Jordan looks me over. “Do you have some kind of philosophical or moral objection to thanking people for things?”

“Thank you,” I say. “Where is she?”

“Well, it’s tricky. R&R meets in a series of rotating locations.” He lifts his sunglasses and winks. “Kinda top secret.”

“Oh, come on,” says Nico, lighting a fresh cigarette.

“Why are you looking for her?” asks Jordan.

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Really?” he says. “You can’t? You came this far for this tiny piece of information, and you’re not prepared to barter for it? How are you gonna do when it’s cannibal time, and you’ve gotta negotiate with Caveman Stan for a bite of the baby?”

“You’re such a dick, Jordan,” says Nico, exhaling.

“No, no,” he says, “I’m not,” and he turns on her, suddenly serious. “You come to me for information, because you know I can get it. Well, how do you think that happens? Information is a resource, the same as food, same as oxygen. Geez Louise!” He throws his hands in the air, turns back to me. “Everybody just wants, wants, wants. Nobody wants to give.” He drops his cigarette in the dirt, jabs me in the chest. “So. You. Give. You’re looking for Julia Stone. Why is that?”

I stay silent. I keep my arms crossed. I’m thinking, no way. I’ve got most of what I want, and I can figure out the rest on my own. I stare back at him. Sorry, clown.

“There’s a man looking for her.” Nico, mumbling, looking at the dirt. “A former state trooper.”

“Nico,” I say, astonished. She doesn’t look at me.

“The trooper is in love with the girl. My brother is trying to find him. For the guy’s wife.”

“No kidding?” says Jordan thoughtfully. “See? That’s interesting. And… and…” He looks me up and down, his mouth slightly open, eyes squinting, like I’m a manticore or a griffin, some exotic species. “And why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know,” I say. I’ve had enough of this. I’m ready to go. “Because I told her that I would.”

“Well, well.”

He gives me the rest of the information I need: R&R stands for Respect and Restraint, and they are meeting in Kingfisher room 110, a big lecture hall. They’re meeting “right this exact second,” as a matter of fact, so I better hurry up. I stand and Jordan takes Nico by the elbow and murmurs in her ear. “You’re staying with me, right? Because we have big fun things to discuss.”

“Henry?” Nico’s eyes are bright again. She reaches up and pats me on the cheek. “See you in a few?”

“Sure,” I say, swat her hand away.

I’m close—I’m this close. I start to go, and then I stop. “Nico? What’s in that duffel bag?”

“Candy,” she says, and laughs.

“Nico.”

“Dope.”

“Really?”

“Handguns. Human skulls. Maple syrup.”

She cracks up, they both do, and then they’re walking away arm in arm, the two of them slipping through the front flap of the grub tent and off into the crowded campus. Nico Palace, ladies and gentlemen. My sister.

3.

Lining the approach to Kingfisher Hall are stately oaks, flanking the pathway, upright and orderly as a praetorian guard. They’re strung with banners, primary colors and simple bold fonts, each announcing an extinction or near extinction: the Justinian Plague, 541 A.D. Toba supereruption, 75,000 years ago. The Permian Extinction. The K-T Boundary Extinction… on and on, a parade of pandemics and catastrophes and species genocides festooning the approach.

In I go, into the building itself, into a spacious and sunlit atrium with a vaulted ceiling, then down a long hallway lined with bulletin boards, somehow untouched, still offering grants, scholarship money, internship opportunities for engineering students.

When I push open one of the big double doors to room 110, my immediate impression is that here we have another party, an auxiliary of the ongoing festivities on the main quad. It’s a big lecture hall, packed and noisy, citizens of the Free Republic relaxed and at ease in their varied costumes, from track suits to tie-dye to what appears to be an adult-sized set of My Little Pony feetie pajamas. People hollering or engaged in intense conversation or, in one case, stretched out over three seats, asleep. As I pick my way as inconspicuously as possible up the raked tiers of seating in search of an empty spot, I count at least three ice-packed coolers, full of small unlabeled glass bottles of beer.

It is only when I have found a seat, in one of the very last rows, that I can focus my attention on the front of the room—and the young man standing with his back to the crowd, naked to the waist with his hands tied behind him with a length of bungee cord. Across from him, seated at a folding table on the shallow stage, are two men and a woman, all of approximately student age, all wearing serious, intent expressions, huddled together and whispering.

I settle into my seat, cross my long legs with difficulty, and watch the stage. One of the three at the table, a man with glasses and a head of wild curly hair, looks up and clears his throat.

“Okay,” he says. “Can we get quiet?”

The man with hands tied shifts nervously on his feet.

I look around the room. I’ve seen plenty of trials—this is a trial. The curly-haired man asks for quiet again, and the crowd settles down, just a little bit.

She’s in here. Somewhere, in this crowd, is Julia Stone.

“So we’re down with the decision to proceed?” says the woman at the center of the little triumvirate on the stage. “Can we go ahead and just by voice vote reaffirm the provisional authority of R&R over maintaining safety and peace in our community. Everyone?”

She looks around the room. So do the other two judges, the one with the hair, and the third, the one farthest to the right, who has a small pudgy face and a turned-up nose and who looks to me no more than eighteen years old, if that. Most of the audience seems to have little interest in the proceedings. People keep talking, leaning forward in their seats to poke a friend or back to stretch. From where I’m sitting I watch a man rolling what will be, if completed, the largest marijuana cigarette I have ever seen. Two rows up from me a couple is vigorously making out, the female partner shifting as I watch into a full straddle atop her companion. The guy on my right, a sallow figure with hairy forearms, is absorbed in something he’s got in his lap.

“Hello?” says the young woman on the stage. She has sharp small features, black horn-rim glasses, and pigtails. Taped in front of her is an eight-by-eleven piece of paper reading CHAIR, a slap-dash designation of authority. “Are we okay to proceed?” The crowd, those paying attention, half maybe, make the under-arrest gesture I spotted earlier in the library, hands in the air with palms up. I take this to be some understood signal of assent, because the young woman nods, goes, “Great.”

The defendant cranes his neck around nervously, scanning the crowd. I whisper to my seatmate, “Who is he?”

“What?” he says, looking up blankly. It’s an iPhone he’s got in his lap, and even as we talk he runs his thumb over the blank dead screen, absently, over and over.

“The defendant?”

The guy scrunches his nose, and I realize too late the word defendant might be considered significantly rearview. “What did he do?”

“I don’t know, actually,” he says, peering down at the shirtless shivering man at the front of the room as if for the first time. “Something, I guess. The next agenda item after this is the nudity policy. Pretty sure that’s why it’s so packed today.”

“Oh,” I say, and the guy turns back to his iPhone.

“So, okay,” says the chair, addressing the defendant directly. “We should start by apologizing to you, as a member of our community. We understand there was some unnecessary violence involved in your, uh, your detention.”

The prisoner mutters something I can’t hear, and the chair nods. The other judges have notebook-paper signs, too. The curly-haired one’s sign says VICE, and the pudgy-faced boy’s says VICE TO THE VICE.

“If you couldn’t hear, everyone,” says the vice, “he said it’s cool.”

Scattered laughter from the crowd.

“Oh, great,” someone yells sarcastically, and everyone turns to see who it is: a great big fat dude in overalls and a painter’s cap. “It’s cool, everyone. He’s cool. Don’t worry.”

More laughter. More people seem to be paying attention now. Someone from a distant corner, by the door, shouts “Thank God!” The couple making out a few seats up pause in their exertions for a moment, glance in the general direction of the stage, and then get back to business. During all this back and forth, I’m trying to work out a plan, trying first of all to figure out how many people are in this room: maybe a hundred rows of seats, maybe fifty to seventy-five seats per row, maybe eighty percent occupied, maybe fifty-five percent female. I have no photograph of Julia Stone, no physical description of any kind: no race or ethnicity, no distinguishing characteristics, no distinctive mode of dress. All I know is that she is a female between twenty and twenty-four years of age, and I am seated in a room with between one hundred seventy-five and two hundred people matching that description.

“Okay, so,” the chair is saying. “Theft from the community of the Free Republic is among our most serious infractions. It’s a big fucking deal. There are a lot of things we might do to handle this sort of situation. But it’s obviously important that everyone gets a chance to give their input and have their feelings on the subject heard.”

I look around the room, trying to narrow down somehow who Julia might be. If I were Brett, who here would I fall in love with? Who would I follow to doomsday? But I’m not Brett. I’ve never met him. Forty-five minutes until I’m supposed to be back at the Thompson Hall exit, collecting my dog and getting out of here.

“And—sorry, were you done?” says the vice, glancing respectfully at the chair, who nods, shrugs. “And so anyone who wants to say something is invited to do so at this time.” A handful of people are already making their way down the aisles, raising their hands to speak. The third judge, the vice to the vice, turns up his chin and watches them come. He’s quiet, watchful, little beady eyes scanning the room over and over. He has yet to speak.

There is a woman with red hair, dark red, so dark as to be almost brown. She’s three rows up from mine, across the aisle, and she seems to be taking notes or minutes on a pad of paper balanced on her bare knee. She’s wearing a very short black skirt, black boots. Brett, I think, would have found her attractive.

The first speaker to offer his input is a small man in cargo pants and a plain red T-shirt. He stands in one of the aisles and reads rapidly, almost agitatedly, from a stack of index cards. “The whole idea of theft from a communal store is itself a reflection of capitalist thinking. In other words, the crime of theft cannot and should not exist in a postcapitalist society, because property”—he leans into the word, his voice charged with disdain—“cannot and should not exist.” He flips to a new card; the vice to the vice looks irritated. “Our vigilance is required against attitudes that reflect not only explicit capitalist dogma, but vestigial reflections of same.”

“Okay, thanks,” says the chair. The little man looks up from his cards; clearly, he wasn’t finished.

“Thanks,” she says again, and someone says “Point of order” from the back—it’s the fat man in the overalls, and the chair acknowledges him with a nod. “I just want to say, in regard to what that guy just said: That’s stupid.”

The vigilant anticapitalist looks around the room, doe eyed, wounded. The chair smiles softly and nods for the next speaker. Small lines are forming in two different aisles of the auditorium. I keep my eye on the dark-haired woman three rows up. What is my move here? How long do these meetings last?

The next speaker is a woman with long matted dreadlocks, who wants to propose a complicated redemption-based system, wherein those accused of rule breaking would engage in a dialog with the community about the nature of their transgression. This idea the vice chair gets excited about, nodding vigorously as the woman speaks, his curls bouncing. It goes on like this, speaker after speaker: someone wonders if today’s proceedings might in fact inspire further infractions; a man asks politely if the public-nudity policy is still on the agenda, and the affirmative answer from the vice draws cheers; a young woman with earnest eyes and a single thick braid running down her back rises and says that she’s been carefully noting the speakers at this meeting, as well as the six previous R&R meetings, and can report that people of color are participating at a ratio of just one in twelve.

“Huh,” says the vice chair. “Maybe because radical movements have always been the province of the privileged?”

“Maybe because we’re in fucking New Hampshire,” says the class clown in the overalls.

In the laughter that follows, the woman with dark red hair looks around and sees me watching her. She does not look down: Instead she meets and holds my gaze. It occurs to me that I could pass her a note, and the idea is so absurd that I very nearly laugh out loud. Are you Julia Stone? Check this box if yes.

“Okay,” says the chair. “I think that’s enough. Just in terms of time?”

The vice looks surprised, but the vice to the vice nods. The defendant shivers, hunching forward, glancing from side to side. Male shirtlessness can in the right circumstances be powerful, leonine, but it can also make a person seem exposed and helpless, the knobs of the spine quivering and fragile like surfacing fish.

“I’m sorry,” I say “Excuse me.” I stand up. This is stupid. This is the stupidest thing I could possibly be doing right now. “What is it he is accused of stealing?”

A room full of people turn their heads toward me, the man who fits in least with this crowd now drawing the maximum amount of attention to himself.

“It’s not really relevant,” says the vice, after glancing respectively at the chair for permission to handle this one. “Our protocol says, given limited time and resources, to focus on outcomes when the cause of action is relatively straightforward.”

“Yup,” says the chair. “Bingo.”

The vice vice’s beady eyes are fixed on me, birdlike and unpleasant.

“But he has the right to know the charges against him,” I say, nodding my head toward the defendant. The crowd has settled into near silence now, drawn out of their chatty genial atmosphere by this novelty. The guy next to me, with his iPhone, scootches over a little in his seat, putting some distance between us. My presumptive Julia Stone, the attractive woman with dark red hair, is staring at me with the same frank interest as everyone else. A wash of nervousness passes over me. This really was idiotic, but I’m still standing, so I go ahead and press my case.

“He also has the right to face his accusers,” I say. “If someone is saying he stole something, he gets to confront them in open court.”

The defendant cranes around, then glances anxiously back at his judges, trying to figure out if this mysterious interjection is aiding or hindering his case. I’m not sure, my friend, I tell him telepathically. I honestly don’t know. Somewhere in the room, someone opens a beer bottle with a pop and hiss. On the seatback in front of me is graffiti, RON LOVES CELIA, etched by some bored undergrad in days gone by.

“It’s not that we are unaware of the rules of evidence,” says the vice, shifting back in his chair and squinting at me. “I went to law school at Duke, okay? But those rules are moot in this context.”

“But how can you pass sentence—”

“We don’t call it ‘passing sentence’—”

“—without a fair trial?”

“Excuse me?” says the third judge, the vice to the vice, speaking at last and loudly, his voice high and reedy and charged with anger. “Who are you?”

I open my mouth but say nothing, cycling rapidly through a series of possible answers, sharply aware of the insufficiency of them all. They could kill me, these people—I could truly die here. The Free Republic of New Hampshire, for all its easy egalitarian spirit and New Age trappings, is a world unto itself, beyond the reach even of what little law remains; as the man said, certain rules are moot in this context. I could be murdered here, easily, if the mood of this crowd should change; I could be beaten to death or shot, my corpse abandoned in the dirt of the quad, my sister and my dog left to wonder why I never emerged.

“Well?” says the vice vice, rising from his chair. And then the chair says, “I knew it.”

“What?” says the vice.

“I knew someone would be coming to find him.”

She stares at me from the table on the stage—arms crossed, glasses, pigtails—and I stare back at her.

“Excuse me?” The vice vice says, glaring and confused. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

But Julia Stone is unconcerned with his bafflement, with the confused attention of the crowd. She gazes cooly at me.

“I told him they would come for him. That’s what your kind do, right? You come for people.”

The low murmur of the room is beginning to bubble up again, people leaning across one another to whisper and nudge, people exchanging questioning expressions. I ignore them, keep my eyes locked on Julia Stone.

“Um, yes, point of order,” says the vice, while the vice vice stands stonily, arms crossed. “What are you talking about?”

“This man has entered our space on a false pretense,” says Julia, and points at me with one steady finger. “He’s not here to take part in our community; he’s here to infiltrate it. He is on a mission to hunt down another human being like a pig or a dog.”

Silence, then, the room suddenly alive with tension, everybody staring at me or at Julia or back and forth, me to her. I feel it again, the dread gut-level certainty that these people could kill me: that I might die here, in this room, and no one the wiser. And at the same time, nevertheless, I am feeling these wild waves of excitement, looking at the woman for whom Brett named a pizza, the woman who drew him from Concord and from his wife, the woman I went looking for and found. I want to take a picture of her and send it to Detective Culverson and say, “See? See?”

“You don’t understand where you are,” Julia tells me. “This is a new world. We have no room for police-style tactics here.”

“I’m not a policeman,” I say.

“Oh, yeah?” she says, “But you are police-style, aren’t you?”

“What is going on, Julia?” says the vice vice, and he takes an aggressive step toward her around the back of the table, and the vice rises to stop him with one hand pushed against his chest. “Whoa.”

Julia keeps her eyes on mine. “You’ll never kill him,” she says.

“Kill him?” I say. “No, I—his wife sent me.”

“His wife?”

She stands breathing for a second, taking this in, deciding what to do with it, while I’m thinking: Kill him? Who would be coming to kill him?

“Sorry about this,” says Julia to her colleagues on the tribunal, and then turns to address the room. “I call for an extraordinary postponement. I need to speak to this man alone.”

“Oh, come on,” says the vice vice petulantly. “You just asked for an extraordinary postponement yesterday.”

“Yes, well,” she says drily. “These are extraordinary times.”

Julia Stone steps down over the lip of the stage and motions for me to meet her at the door. As I pick my way over legs down the tiers, the kid with his hands tied sits down, confused, and the vice chair moves that the meeting advance to the question of public nudity. Everybody cheers and raises their hands, palms up.

4.

The woman Brett loves, like the woman he married, is not beautiful, not in any conventional way. But where Martha Milano’s plainness is redeemed by a sweet radiant quality and warmth of spirit, Julia Stone’s small thin body and dark features are attractive in a whole other way. She doesn’t speak, she pronounces, talking fast with her black eyes flashing, each word charged with energy.

“There,” she says. “Those kids. On the roof. See?”

I look where she’s pointing, to a cluster of busy shapes atop one of the dorm buildings off in the distance. “Exercise machines. Maybe twelve people up there now. Sometimes we get thirty or thirty-five. Bikes, treadmills. This is an example. You join us here, you do what you want, as long as, A, your action does not interfere with the ability of others to do what they want, and B, whenever possible, your action offers some concrete benefit to the community.”

Julia pauses and stares at the air in front of her, as if scouring the words she has just said, satisfying herself of their soundness before plunging forward. We’re on the roof of Kingfisher Hall: steam pipes, a wilted rooftop garden, a weather-beaten sofa someone lugged up the concrete stairwell and out the trap door.

“We have a team of engineering postdocs who rigged those machines to capture the electricity generated in a central battery. So that, for example…” She swings her arm until she’s pointing at another building, much closer, where on the first floor the curtains are pulled shut tightly. “… those people can watch movies. A French New Wave festival at present. Then they do Tarantino. And so on. They vote on it. There’s a committee.”

“That’s interesting,” I murmur, still trying to get a read on her, on this conversation. Where is he? is all I want to ask. Where’s Brett?

“Interesting?” Julia says. “Sure, it’s interesting, but that’s not the point. I’m answering your question from downstairs. How can we pass sentence on someone who might be innocent?” She glares at me through the thickness of her glasses. “Wasn’t that your question?”

“Sort of.”

“No, it was, that’s what you asked. Don’t backtrack. He didn’t do it, by the way.”

She thrusts out her chin, waiting for astonishment, anger, argument. And in fact I am a little astonished; I can see him clearly, the shivering nervous defendant, barely out of his teens, hands bound, waiting for the punishment of the mob.

But I hold my peace, I just raise my eyebrows, go, “Oh, really?”

“Yeah. Really. I set him up.”

She’s pushing, she’s feeling me out, and I know exactly why. She thinks that she hates me and she wants to make sure. I come to her tainted by my association with Martha, with “the wife,” and Julia Stone would therefore prefer to tell me to fuck off back to copland or wherever I came from. I therefore need to play it slow, hang back, save my questions until I think there’s a chance she’ll answer them.

“All I meant is that the kid deserved to be treated fairly,” I say. “I didn’t say he was innocent.”

“Oh, he’s not innocent,” says Julia, “he’s just not a thief. He’s a rapist. Okay? Don’t ask how I know, because I know what goes on here. I know. And I want him out of my community. But if I had him brought up for rape, then Jonathan—the vice to the vice? Remember him?”

I nod. Piggy eyes, flushed face, the sneer of a spoiled child.

“Jonathan would demand a hanging. Not because he gives two shits about violence against women. Because he wants to hang someone. I know he does. And once the hangings start—” She shakes her head, seeing the future. “Forget it.”

I rub my forehead, finding the queer little divot in my temple, remembering when Cortez assaulted me in the elevator. Seems like a million years ago, a different lifetime. Julia is looking out over the campus again, brow furrowed, hands moving while she talks.

“Radical social theories when put into practice have a notoriously short half-life. They dissolve into anarchy. Or the people’s power, even when carefully delegated to provisional authorities, is seized by totalitarians and autocrats. Can you think of a single counterexample?”

Julia flicks her gaze at me.

“No,” I say. “I guess not.”

“No,” she says. “There isn’t one.”

Her passion, her confidence—I can see clearly how these qualities must have sung out to Brett Cavatone, whom I have come to see as quiet, quick-minded and intense, a philosopher in the thick tough body of a policeman. How, I wonder fleetingly, did he and Martha Milano end up together in the first place? How long did it take before he knew he had married the wrong sort of woman?

“We have this opportunity,” Julia says. “We’ve struck this elusive balance between safety and personal liberty. This balance always gets fucked up, but now there’s no time for it to get fucked up. We just have to keep the Jacobin shit at bay, keep from tipping over into Lord of the Flies for seventy-four more days.” She’s talking faster and faster, the words rattling along like train cars. “This is literally a unique opportunity in the history of civilization, and the preservation of public order trumps the specific form of justice doled out to one individual. Right?”

“Right,” I say.

“Yes. Right. Is she paying you?” She turns to me, crosses her arms. “The wife?”

“No.”

“So why are you doing it?”

“I don’t know,” I say, and give her a quick little half smile. “Although people do keep asking me that.”

“I’ll bet.” And then she smiles back, just the tiniest secret hint of a smile. There’s a small gap between her front teeth, like a rascally ten-year-old.

“You thought before that I had been sent to kill him. Why would someone be trying to kill him?”

The smile disappears. “Why the fuck should I tell you?”

“Are you in love with him?”

“Love is a bourgeois construct,” Julia says immediately, but nevertheless she turns away from me, gazes out over the rooftops and treetops of the transformed campus. I wait, allow her a moment alone with whatever memories she’s replaying. And then I gently push forward, talking softly, telling her the story she already knows.

“Brett arrested you a couple years ago, in Rumney, but you gave him an earful from the bars of the holding cell. You made him see the justice of your cause, and he came to respect you. You talked him out of testifying. You developed feelings for each other.”

Julia gives me a quick sour look at the word feelings, and I nod in acknowledgment of the fact that feelings are a bourgeois construct, but I keep going.

“But he wouldn’t leave his wife. That wasn’t in his character. So at the end of the summer you went back to school, and he left the state troopers and moved to Concord, and that was that.”

She’s not saying anything, she’s not even looking at me now. Her eyes are fixed on her campus, her people: the exercisers, the movie watchers, the undulating swarms on the central quad. But neither is she interrupting, neither is she saying no. I keep talking, just a guy in a suit on a rooftop telling a story on a summer’s day.

“But then the asteroid comes along. The countdown begins, and it changes everything. You think, well, maybe now. Maybe now Brett and I get our shot. You wrote him letters, told him all about the Free Republic and what you had accomplished here. You told him he should come and play chess and hang out with you until the end.”

Now Julia raises a single finger, still staring straight ahead. “One letter. A couple months ago.”

“Okay,” I say. “One letter. And then yesterday, suddenly, he shows up.”

I can picture the scene, Brett Cavatone slipping into the back of that crowded noisy auditorium as I had, and suddenly Julia spots him from her chair on the stage. Her jaw drops, her commanding pose of leadership wavers momentarily like a blurry TV signal as Brett smiles up at her, self-contained and formidable and affectionate. “He tells you he’s here now, there aren’t many days left and he wants to spend them with you.”

“No,” says Julia abruptly.

“No?”

At last she turns away from the rail and looks at me straight on, lips pursed with emotion, and I don’t care if love is a bourgeois construct or not, I’ve seen love once or twice before and this is the face of a woman in love. She loves him and bitterly regrets what she says next.

“No, he did not come because there aren’t many days left and he wants to spend them with me. He came for guns.”

“He came for—” I blink. “What?”

Julia laughs then, once, a harsh bark, as I stare at her, open-mouthed with bafflement.

“Come on,” she says, and flings open the trapdoor to the stairwell. “Let’s take a walk.”

Jeremy Canliss was right. Brett had a woman on his mind. But it was neither lust nor love that brought him to the University of New Hampshire to find Julia Stone; it was the lure of the weapons she had proudly described to him in that one letter, a couple months back.

Julia Stone leads and I follow, a pace or two behind, down the path leading away from Kingfisher, under the gauntlet of extinction—Permian, K-T Boundary, Justinian Plague—and off across campus. We don’t speak, we just go, my nervous excitement making itself known in the loud rattling of my heart in my chest, my understanding of this case revolving slowly like a wall of books in a haunted mansion, revealing the hidden staircase behind. I have questions—more questions, new questions—but I just walk, allow myself to be led, Julia offering muted greeting to nearly everyone we pass on the twisting trails.

Our destination, as it turns out, is a compact concrete shed with a flat tar roof, built along a chain-link perimeter fence separating the UNH facilities buildings from College Road behind them. The shed sits in the shadow of the hulking power station, now defunct, its coils and towers silent and cold.

Julia opens the padlocked shed and leads me inside. It’s a single room, a perfect box: flat floor, flat ceiling, four flat walls. The sunlight filters in dimly through the low dirty windows. The walls are lined with hooks that are hung with guns: pistols, rifles, automatics and semi-automatics. On a shelf near the floor are a dozen boxes of ammunition, neatly arranged. The revolutionary Free Republic, Julia Stone explains, appropriated all this gear from the UNH ROTC program at the time of the “revolution.” What Brett told her was that he needed “serious weapons”; he asked for a pair of high-powered rifles, M140s with bolted scopes. Julia gave him the guns and pinned their disappearance on the rapist.

“Not that the guns were mine to give,” says Julia, shaking her head bitterly. “They belong to the community. I don’t know why I let him talk me into it. He’s just…”

She opens her hands, trailing off. But I know what she wants to say. I’ve heard it before: He’s just Brett.

We step outside and Julia locks the door and we lean against one of the concrete sides, facing the power station, and I fight back a wave of anxiety, an intense consciousness of what’s in the shed. The destructive capability of just this one tiny building, this single small room in a world full of them. Because I’ve seen rooms like this before, since the asteroid’s slow approach became known. By now there must be millions of them, basements and attics, sheds and garages, lined with weapons silently waiting to be used, a world of tinderboxes ready to bloom into flame. I look at my watch and I am late—the deadline given to me by the guards at Thompson Hall has passed. I offer up a silent apology to Houdini, wondering whether those two girls or the guys in the black shirts would actually do anything to harm the dog.

I circle back around to my initial question.

“Julia, what is going on? Who is trying to kill Brett?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe no one.”

“Is he in danger?”

“Danger? I mean, danger doesn’t even…”

She shakes her head with bitter amusement. She’s going to tell me, I realize—she’s already started to tell me. For the first time I feel it with a wrenching ecstatic certainty: I’m going to find him. I’m coming, Brett—I’m coming.

“Julia?”

But her affect changes; her face gets tight with anger. “Why the fuck should I tell you?” she says, spitting the words. She wheels away from the wall of the shed, glaring. “Why should I tell you shit?”

I respond not to the anger but to the question. She wouldn’t be asking if she didn’t want an answer. She wouldn’t have taken me to the guns. “You care about him. Whatever passed between the two of you, it meant something to you. Perhaps you don’t love him, but you wish to keep him from harm. If I find him, maybe I can make that happen.”

She doesn’t answer. She pulls nervously on one of her pigtails, a small human gesture.

I’m coming, Brett. Here I come.

There’s a motion by the chain fence, some animal or stumbling citizen of the Free Republic, moving in shadow. We both turn our heads, see nothing, and then look back at each other. I watch Julia intensely considering, weighing factors, deciding whether to reject the truth of what I’ve said, simply because I’m the one to have said it. I watch her weighing her loyalty to Brett, her anger at him, her desire to see him safe from harm.

“I won’t tell you what he’s doing,” she says at last. “He made me promise to tell no one. I can’t betray him.”

“I understand,” I say. “I respect that.” And I mean it. I do.

“But I will tell you where he is.”

5.

I’m sorry, Martha.

I can hear myself saying the words, imagine them hanging in the bright empty air of her kitchen, when I make it back to Concord, knock on her door like a cop with hat in hand to give her the news.

I’m sorry, ma’am, but your husband will not be coming home.

Had I been right, and had I found Brett Cavatone as I briefly imagined him, reclining on the thick grass of the quad, head in the lap of his long-lost love—or had I found him in a whorehouse or at a fuck-it-all beach party, staring up at the stars with something wicked sluicing through his veins—and had I then delivered Martha’s message, reminded him that “his salvation depends” on his return… had it all played out that way, there might still have been some small chance of success, some sliver of hope, that he would remember himself, hang his head, and come home.

But now what I know is that he’s out in the woods with two rifles. And whether he’s plunged himself into some terrible danger, as Julia seems to fear, or he’s performing some great act of end-days nobility, as Martha wants to believe, it is in all scenarios harder to see him having much interest in home.

I couldn’t find him, I could say to Martha. Neither hide nor hair of the man.

But I’ve always been a terrible liar. Maybe the best thing to do is never report back to my client at all. I could stay here in Durham, or return to Concord but never to her house on Albin Road, let the final months roll by for Martha in hopeful silence. Let her die on October 3 with that small diamond of possibility still pressed in her palm, that Brett might return, turn up suddenly to hold her tightly as the world explodes.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say, panting and out of breath. One of the anarchists in the black T-shirts looks up and goes, “Oh, what time is it?” and there’s Houdini, perfectly fine, bounding around on the sloping lawn under the flapping flag of the Free Republic while Beau and Sport toss a Frisbee for his amusement.

“For God’s sake,” I say, and exhale. The girls’ shotguns lie carelessly on the steps like pocketbooks; the Black Bloc guys are sitting languorously on the dirt by the wall, bandanas off, faces warmed by the sunshine.

Houdini barks in recognition as I come into view but does not, I note sourly, come racing for the lap of his master. He’s having a great time, leaping delightedly between his captors, delivering the battered yellow Frisbee to each in turn. Beau crouches as if to protect him from returning to my ownership, and Sport waves merrily.

“Oh, hey,” she says. “Check it out.” She points to my dog. “Sit.”

He sits.

“Roll over.”

He rolls over.

“That’s great,” I say. “Wow.”

This a clear case of canine Stockholm syndrome, and I explain this to Houdini as he reluctantly falls into step beside me and we trot away back toward Main Street and India Garden.

I eat a Clif Bar and a peanut butter sandwich, pour out a cup of kibble for the dog, reviewing my obligation in my head, my contract with my client: I will do what I can to find your husband…. The problem now is that I know where he is. The problem now is that I could be there on the ten-speed in an hour. The problem is that I want to go. I’ve come this far and I want to deliver my message. I’ve come this far, and I need to see the man with my own eyes.

The door rings brightly. “Hey, can I get a palak paneer, please?” says Nico pulling up a chair. “And a thing of naan bread?”

She’s smiling her crooked clever smile, a cigarette hanging in the tough-girl style from the corner of her mouth, but somehow I’m not in the mood. I stand up and hug her for a long time, pressing her face against my chest and resting my chin on her head.

“What the hell, Henry?” she says when I let her go. “Did something happen?”

“No. I mean, yes. Not really.” I sit down again. “You smell like beer.”

“Yup,” she says. “I drank a bunch of beer.” She runs a hand through her spiky black hair, then flicks her cigarette butt into the corner. Houdini glances up disapprovingly from his food, sniffing at the smoke.

“So?” says Nico. “Did you find her?”

“My witness?” I say. “I did.”

“What about Martha’s husband?”

“Not yet. But I know where he is.”

“Oh, yeah? Where?”

“Maine, south of Kittery. At a place called Fort Riley. It’s an old state park.”

Nico nods blankly, helping herself to a bite of my Clif Bar. This is as far as her interest goes in my ongoing investigation.

“All right,” says, when she’s done chewing. “You ready?”

I rub my forehead with one hand. I know what she means, of course. I promised that if she guided me to and through the Free Republic of New Hampshire, then I would listen to all the sordid details of Nico’s Magic Plan to Save the World. I just wanted a couple more minutes. Just a moment or two of small normal happiness, a brother and a sister and a dog. I’m not ready, I want to say. Not yet.

But I promised. I did promise. “Okay,” I say. “Fire away.”

I cross one leg over the other and lean slightly forward and focus my energy on Nico, admonishing myself as she begins talking to listen with patience and good grace to whatever Hail Mary last-ditch song and dance I’m about to hear.

“The United States government,” Nico begins, and I clap one hand over my mouth, “if it wanted to, could detonate one or more near-surface nuclear explosions in the space surrounding the approaching asteroid.”

I tighten my grip over my mouth, clamp it closed, forcing myself not to speak.

“The effect would be to superheat the surface of the object, initiating what’s called a back reaction and altering its velocity sufficiently to keep it from impacting the planet.”

I shut my eyes now, too, and tilt my head forward in a position that hopefully looks like deep concentration, but is in fact a desperate attempt to keep myself from leaping to my feet and away from this monologue. Nico goes on.

“But certain officials, high in the government, have decided to suppress this information. Make it sound like it’s too late, or impossible.”

I can’t take it any longer, I remove my hand from my mouth. “Nico.” Just that, quietly. She doesn’t hear, or chooses not too. Houdini smacks his lips in the corner.

“Those with the knowledge to perform the operation have been jailed or made to disappear.”

This is talking points. I can smell it. I try again. “Nic?”

“Or, in one case, murdered.”

“Murdered?” I’m done. I stand up, lean forward across the table. “Nico, this is crazy.”

She leans back from me and says, “What?”

“This is the big secret? A nuclear explosion? Blast it from the sky? You can’t do that. It turns the one big asteroid into a million smaller ones. You haven’t heard that? There was a National Geographic special about it, for God’s sake. It was on the cover of the last issue of Time magazine.”

I’m speaking loudly. Houdini looks up for a moment, startled, then returns to his kibble.

“That’s not what I said.” Nico speaks softly, crossing her arms patiently like a kindergarden teacher, like I’m the child, I’m the fool. “You’re not listening.

“We went to war to prevent Pakistan from shooting a nuke at the thing. Thousands of people died.” I can still see the pictures; it was all in the Monitor before the paper went out of business: drones, air strikes, firebombs, the rapid annihilation of nuclear capability and concomitant destruction of civilian areas. There was quite a spread on Pakistan, too, in that same issue of Time, their farewell double issue. Cover headline: “And Now We Wait.”

“I didn’t say blast it from the sky.” Nico rises from the table and leans against the buffet line, digs another cigarette from her pocket. “What I said was a nuclear explosion or explosions, near but not on the asteroid. This is called a standoff burst, as distinct from a kinetic impactor, which would be a ship or other object smashing into the surface. A standoff burst has the advantage of creating the desired velocity change while minimizing surface disruption and the resulting ejecta.”

More talking points. I feel like she’s going to hand me a pamphlet. I get up. I pace.

“A standoff burst. And you guys think no one has thought of that?”

“I knew you wouldn’t listen,” she says with sadness, shaking her head, tapping ash onto the floor. “I knew I couldn’t count on you.”

I stop pacing. Of course she knows exactly what to say; she has had a lifetime of making me feel bad for castigating her in the face of her outrages. I take a breath. I lower my voice. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Please. Tell me more.”

“As I said, it’s not that the government—I should say the military, it’s really the military, not the civilian government. They have thought of it. They even commissioned people to figure out how to do it, years ago, when this kind of danger was purely hypothetical. There has to be a nuclear package in a new shape, with a new kind of fuse, to deliver the payload in space.”

“Right. But they never built those.”

“Well.” She smiles, winks. “That’s what they want us to think.”

“Jesus, Nico. This is crazy.”

“You said that already.” Her expression suddenly transforms from wry and knowing into kind of serene intensity—this is the part she’s been waiting for. This is the kernel of the lunacy. “Certain conservative elements in the international military-industrial complex welcome the asteroid, Henry. They’re psyched. The opportunity to rule over a decimated, miserable population? To consolidate the remains of the world’s resources? They can’t fucking wait.”

I start laughing. I lean my head back and bark laughter at the ceiling, and now Houdini really jumps, skitters away from his dish. The absurdity of this, the whole thing, sitting here talking as if we two tiny people in this bombed-out Indian restaurant in New Hampshire happen to have privileged information about the fate of the universe.

Nico talks for a while, and I listen as best I can, but a lot of it just washes over me, a lot of it is just words. There’s a rogue scientist, of course: Hans-Michael Parry, an astrophysicist formerly associated with the United States Space Command, who knows exactly how to do it, knows where these specially constructed fuses are housed and how they are operated. Nico’s organization has found Parry in a military prison, and they’re going to get him over to England, where sympathetic elements are ready to try this deflection maneuver with British bombs.

“Oh,” I say, during this exegesis, over and over, just: “Okay.” I pat my lap and Houdini clambers up. I scratch him behind the ears, mutter “that’s a boy” before he escapes to chase a stray bit of kibble across the room.

There was a part of me, I realize as she’s speaking, that wanted to be surprised. I wanted her to say something that would make me say Holy moly! She’s right! But of course that was never really possible, was it? That, of all the people in the world, my sister is going to happen to be the one with a solution. No one has a solution. No one sitting in India Garden, no maverick astrophysicist rotting in the bowels of the U.S. Army prison system. It’s all nonsense, so plainly so that it would be hilarious if I didn’t know of at least one person who had already been sacrificed to my sister’s belief that it’s real.

“So what?” I finally ask. “You and your friends are going to spring this scientist from the pokey?”

“We did that already,” Nico says, ignoring the sarcasm in my question. “Not me, not the New England group. Another team, in the Midwest, they already found him and secured his release. And now Jordan and I and the other New Englanders, we’re just waiting to recon with the team.”

I mouth the words disbelievingly. Recon with the team. All this B-movie dialogue. How many times, over the course of our lives, have I seen Nico’s beautiful quicksilver brilliance dimmed: by grief, by alcohol and marijuana, by association with foolish minds.

“How can you believe any of this, Nico?”

“Because it’s true,” she says. She reaches into the warm refrigerator and pops the top on a mango soda. Summer rain taps against the glass and on the pavement outside.

“But how do you know that it’s true?

“Because it is.”

“That doesn’t work,” I say. “That formulation. You sound like Jesus Man.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do.”

Jesus Man was the bright-eyed codger in the next bed over from Grandfather, in his last month or two, the final round of radiation before they gave up on Nathanael Palace and we took him home to die. Jesus Man had the light of the Lord, and there was no pain or discomfort that he couldn’t bear smilingly through God’s grace. He was practically celebrating it all, welcoming every new misery as a step on the road to paradise. Grandfather hated him—almost, he told me once, whispering loud enough for the other man to hear, as much as he hated the cancer itself. Once Jesus Man told Nico and me, while Grandfather slept, that he hoped we had accepted the Lord in our hearts. I didn’t say anything when he said that, just nodded politely and looked at the TV. Nico, age seventeen, smiled and said, “Thanks, mister. I’ll think it over.”

Now she shrugs, stands up. “That’s the whole story, big brother. I can’t make you believe if you don’t.”

“Nope,” I say. “You can’t. When are you leaving? To recon with the team?”

“Soon. Jordan says they’re on the way now. Tomorrow or the next day, a helicopter is going to land in Butler Field to scoop us up.”

“Nico, I love you,” is what I say next, and I’m surprised to hear the words coming out of my mouth; she looks pretty surprised, too. She crosses her arms, and I press on. “I do. And I made you a promise.”

“I release you from that promise,” she says immediately.

“You can’t.”

“We were kids.”

“You were a kid,” I say quietly. “I was fifteen. I knew what I was saying.”

“I release you.”

“No,” I say, suddenly regretting my tone, my skepticism, regretting everything about the conversation. Don’t go, I want to say, don’t do it, just stay, come with me to Maine, come with me to Concord, Nico, don’t go. Houdini is done eating and has found a place to lie down. In the silence, his snoring fills the room.

“Good luck with your case,” says my sister.

“Good luck,” I say, the start of a sentence, but I can’t think of anything to finish it. That’s all I’ve got. “Good luck.”

Another scene from childhood. A few years after that spring, a few years before Jesus Man. Nico was nine years old and already she was sliding in and out of situations: insulting teachers, shoplifting small items. Stickers, cans of soda. A girl gave her beer, an older girl, probably as a joke, but Nico drank it all and was drunk—ten years old and drunk, and in her still-forming brain the alcohol was acting not as a goad to more bad behavior but as a truth serum, and she was muttering and sputtering, processing all kinds of anger toward me, toward Grandfather, toward everyone. “You will, though,” she said, when I tried to hug her, lift her, carry her home. “You will go away like they did. You’ll die. You’ll disappear.”

“I won’t,” I said to her. I said, “Nico, I will not do that.”

The rain has exhausted itself, for now, and the sky is clear and untroubled, the stars twinkling in their familiar places. I try to sleep but can’t; I can barely keep my eyes closed, lying restless on the floor of the India Garden, sprawled out uncomfortably with my backpack for a pillow. At dawn I will get back on the bike, get Houdini situated among my emergency supplies and water bottles, and leave for southern Maine.

Willfully I focus my thinking, put Nico and her friends and their tactics on a shelf in the back somewhere, pull a blanket down over Grandfather, who for some reason has been traveling with me all day today, emaciated and furious in his hospital bed with death crouching at his shoulders. I turn my head from everything and zero in on my case, my trip, my tomorrow.

So why are you doing it? Julia asked, as Nico had asked, as McGully had demanded of me. There are undoubtedly other ways I could be spending my time, performing actions of more tangible value to myself or others. But an investigation like this has its own force—it pulls you forward, and at a certain point it’s no longer profitable to question your reasons for being pulled. I stay up for a long time, blinking into the darkness of India Garden, thinking about Brett Cavatone.

He’ll ask me, too, if I find him, out there in the woods with his rifles. What are you doing here? Why have you come? And I don’t know what I’ll say, I really don’t.