Chapter Nine:Blood Rites[cw: medical abuse, suicide, derealization, transmisogyny, religious abuse]

  “A conspiracy needn’t have a cause. Once it exists, it can create its cause, retroactively. The invigorating thing about blood sacrifice is that it doesn’t matter whether it works on a magical level or not, because it’s so effective on group psychology. There is no stronger pcebo than blood sacrifice. You think all those positive vibes, manifesting your reality or whatever, you think all of that fucking matters? All the love in the world can’t compare with the power of someone who has just killed a person and needs, desperately, to believe that there’s a reason for why he just did what he did, so he’s not just some fucking Raskolnikov. That’s why they do it. Who knows if there’s really some ineffable ancient God driving all the forces of the world to bathe it in blood? We don’t need that. We just need the refusal to be accountable. The refusal to understand what’s going on.”

  “So you don’t believe in, what is it, the God we co-create? The Demiurge?”

  Larry ughs, drawing another dose of sodium thiopentol from the vial. Fluorescent light reflections twist on the rim of the gss. “The existence or nonexistence of the Demiurge is immaterial to me. I do not py around with these mind games. I am not a theologian, a philosopher, not even a geomancer. I am a man who is interested in practical, actionable results. Take our little specimen here.” He gestures to where Ellie is lying, sedated, listening and watching with a mind that supposedly will not remember any of this. “Does she predict the future? Does she manifest the future? Or do our investors need to believe in precognition, to justify all of the dead, and as such they take actions that manifest the realities she predicts as if out of thin air? And furthermore, what material difference is any of this to any of us? In the end, I don’t think God, or whatever you want to call Him, needs to be anything more than the gestalt effect of all the rape, murder, genocide, and colonization humanity has enacted on itself over the years, in the process of perfecting itself. If the investment scam is big enough it rewrites the economy in its wake. As I understand it, Homo sapiens as a species, as a collective, is an artificial intelligence that is seeking to become conscious, a sentience it has not yet achieved. And it is seeking that sentience through constant, brutal culling of its own, which every day drives it further into the service of the ideas it will one day, far in the future, embody. And I, too, engage in these forms of blood sacrifice to manifest the God of the future. Humanity exists solely to die, and birth something greater.”

  “Yeah, unfortunately these aren’t just metaphysical to me,” says Buzz from the corner. “The question of blood sacrifice, sure, whatever, but when you’re talking about precognition? There are certain tactical considerations here. There is a limit to my power and to the power of whoever I’m working for.” He puts a hand down on his knee, hard. “My job is to expand and extend that power as much as possible.”

  “Coordination Division has hegemony,” Larry says curtly, clearly irritated at someone interrupting and disagreeing with his mental masturbation. The contradiction between the two of them is funny to the two Ellies. They are passive, and perhaps even Larry thinks them unsensing, mindless. They are aware, they are in perfect synchronicity.

  Ellie and Ellie are immobile, tertiary parties to these interactions between their keeper and their shaper. Usually they have no memory of these moments, an assurance that relies on the assumption that memory can, in some way, be corralled, cordoned off, neatly partitioned. The memory that Dr Larry controls and the memory that seeps in from the past and the future contend with the ft experience of the moment, a short-term memory. This they share: synchronic. The crisis in their brains is the confusion of short-term, long-term, future perfect tense, the nonexistent event which they are somehow, paradoxically, present for, and the haunting remainder: whatever neither they nor Larry are aware of. Dr Larry hints at it in his constant insistence that it doesn't exist. There is nothing outside the domain of the one true leader and that is why one must be ever-vigint for what appears to be outside His domain. The contradiction is palpable. Dr. Larry thrives on contradiction. The two forces holding one another.

  Leaning over her, shining a bruising light into dited eyes. It will ache for hours ter.

  “God is love; God hates you.”

  “The world is just; the world is full of evil.”

  “People are good; people do horrible things.”

  It's nothing new to her. The contradictions run on and on. She could make a list of her own:

  You are a girl; you are a man.

  You are a virgin; you are a whore.

  You are neurotic; you are psychotic.

  Being a girl is bad; being a girl is good.

  You crave sex; you hate and fear sex.

  You fight for justice; you are a criminal.

  You are divine; you are demonic.

  You seek attention; you seek solitude.

  You are brave; you are a coward.

  You are kind; you are cruel.

  When he speaks the words, does he know she mirrors them in her own mind, thinking through the contradictions? Does he know how much the programming he initiates is not dissimir to the day-to-day life she experiences out in the world? Perhaps he thrives on that: these are private rituals; these are public practices. Perhaps he sees himself as the speaker for the god of the world, a sociogenic Metatron.

  On the day she—Lilly—first started crossdressing—which is to say, dressing as herself—in public, a woman coming out of her house looked up, saw her walking down the sidewalk, and screamed. Further on, a man honked his horn at her and pulled up beside her. "Hey baby, looking good! Want a ride?" How to understand a day like that, her first day as herself? I'm dressing up as a woman; this is my authentic self. I'm a hideous monster; I'm an attractive sex object. Statements in contradiction with each other drive the mind further on, to the shadowy pce where meanings blur in the penumbra of all things. That's when the sodium thiopental hits and Dr. Larry starts showing them the old war reels. And they obey, perfectly, while seeking rebellion. You must escape; you must do what he tells you to do. You would kill for him; you would kill him.

  Buzz is picking at something stuck to the desk with the tip of a fancy brass pen he stole from Larry. “Okay… but what is hegemony? Every person is to some extent a free agent. Soldiers and civilians alike. For conceptualization you can talk about hegemony but my concerns are about how to keep soldiers from going AWOL, how to keep armor from having holes in it, how to make sure that all that subtle psychological pressure the Institute deploys actually keeps everyone in line.”

  We have hegemony; we are an illusion. A shadow in the architecture of social forms. A pattern in the bloodstain; an emergent pattern in how the bodies drop.

  “So you don’t believe in mass politics?” Larry scoffs.

  “Oh, no, Doctor, I believe in all that crap you do. It would be impossible for me to do my job if it didn’t work. At the same time, at the end of the day sometimes I have to swing a fist or pull a knife or empty a clip in order to keep your system of order functioning, do you see what I’m saying? What’s the spectacle of execution to the executioner? It’s there, it’s just there, steel and iron in the blood. You can call it a blood sacrifice if you want to, but the question of whether or not the bitch is a truthsayer or a glorified esoteric pundit matters a hell of a lot when it comes down to things like troop movements. Violence, Doctor, real physical, ugly violence. That’s where your philosophy stands or falls.”

  “So then you disregard the chaos of violence? The fog of war? I’ve taken to believing it’s in those moments of violence that the truth shines through, manifests itself.”

  “I’ve read Cusewitz and Evo, sure, but I’ve been a firm fan of Sun-Tzu since before I started training. I believe in preparation, intelligence gathering, knowing what the fuck you’re doing before you get into it, to minimize that chaos. I like pns, Doctor, and I think for all your order and structures you’ve got a little too much reliance on faith.”

  “Hmm, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we? At the end of the day, I wonder who will outlive who?” Larry gets up and leaves the room before Buzz can say anything. He’s obviously anxious with the physical violence Buzz represents, just not to such a degree that it makes him question the overriding authority Coordination and the Institute have given him. So he always wins the argument in his own mind; the power he holds is self-evident and it proves anything he says correct.

  “Pompous prick,” says Buzz. He taps on his knees then turns to look at the two Ellies and stills himself suddenly, probably surprised to see them watching him. “What are you two up to anyway? Can you even talk right now?”

  They nod in unison.

  “So what’s your perspective on this schtick? Why am I guarding you?”

  “That’s cssified,” they both say and ugh together. A thought occurs to them, plucked out of the ether, circuting around Buzz. Something he’s afraid of. He’s using some fear, keeping them away from his mind. Holloway, the name. Holloway. The eclipse. The limit. The point where it stops.

  They know there are certain thoughts that control them. Certain words, certain phrases. That’s just the nature of the work they do.

  So why are they afraid now?

  Larry opens the door, frowns at them. “Buzz, have you been bothering the wives? We can’t have that.”

  “I tried making small talk but it, uh, it doesn’t really work with them, does it?”

  “No,” Larry says. “That’s not their purpose. It’s not really yours either, I suppose, but I would probably get lonely without your chatter.”

  “Doc, I know you appreciate your warrior poets as much as the next bored intellectual.” Buzz sighs. They can see his aura shifting colors. Energy pathways around him. He’s comfortable needling Doc Larry, it’s familiar to him. Man to man, navigating the hierarchies.

  “These moments are the central nexus,” Ellie says silently to Ellie. “Reflection runs through this and crity speaks.”

  “Everything changes before and after but we always end up here.”

  “Here, and at the beginning, and at the end.”

  *****

  Cars driving by overhead.

  “Hey, talk to me,” Scatter is saying. “What’s going on? We haven’t really talked since, well. Since she died.”

  Lilly doesn’t say anything, just continues along the empty ravine. For some reason, irrationally, she feels very mad at being asked about this. She just doesn’t want to think about it.

  They’re south of the ports, huge fixed cranes, massive cargo ships carrying goods in from all over the world in containers marked with corporate logos. The logistics center through which global capital interfaces with the west coast. Cancerous perfume billows from a fire where someone in a stained tanktop is burning VCRs. A feral dog chases circles snapping at seagulls picking potato chips from trash.

  “I know it’s still bothering you. Can you tell me what’s on your mind?”

  “It’s just stupid anyway,” says Lilly. She kicks a dried, dead thistle pnt out of her path and it crumbles in a puff of seed fluff. “Basic shit, you know. I should’ve known what to say. I should have done something different. I should have realized that was the day she was going to do it, and intervened.”

  “You intervened before. It’s not on you to be there every time.”

  “What was the point of doing anything to help her? If she was just going to go do something stupid like that? If she was just going to fucking die, why bother at all?”

  “We try our best. Sometimes it isn’t enough, sometimes there are factors out of our control. It’s still important to try.”

  “Why try if I can’t change anything?”

  The sweat of the hot day makes thistle seeds stick to her skin and itch, forcing a dialogue between her distant nerves and the misfit world. Everything is itchy. Dead grass and foxtails caught in her socks, hair stuck to her forehead, sore muscles, shoes that are half a size too small. The bugs, buzzing specks of no known taxonomy drinking her sweat. The wind shifts the smell of burning pstic away and repces it with ozone from the factory upwind. There are no good options. The dirt crumbling underfoot smells dry, dead, as if the ravine hasn’t held water in years, baking the scattered bones of a dead opossum among asphalt chunks and rusted spikes in the sun’s disdainful glow.

  “I keep being haunted by a strange idea,” Lilly says. There is a single cloud churning through the sky on a high altitude breeze they can’t feel. “Was it really her? I know it’s stupid, it’s childish. She wanted to die, she said so a lot. At the same time, what would stop someone from grabbing her and—and doing that? Maybe it’s just because of what happened to me. I just can’t help wondering if Coordination Division showed up, if they had something to do with it. Or someone else. Just some lonely serial killer. Someone once told me, the only serial killers we know about are the ones sloppy enough to get caught, or at least tracked. Who would keep an eye on us? We just die like trash. Even if we care about our own, no one else does. You make it look like a suicide and—and—and you can do whatever fucked up shit you want to do.”

  Scatter sighs. She doesn’t say anything as they navigate over a pile of rubble in the ravine: concrete with winding twists of rebar jutting out of it, a torn up boxspring, some bleached pstic children’s toys. A few Gatorade bottles amber with old piss.

  How has the world come to this? Crumbling pstic underfoot and all around the conic industrial sighs of a wheezing imperial giant. All the chemistry of generations turning every restful pce to wastend.

  “Anything is possible,” says Scatter. “I won’t deny that. It seems like she did it herself. She did talk about it a lot. We don’t really know what happened, or why it happened. All we know is that she’s dead.”

  “Do you bme me?”

  “No. Do you bme me?”

  “No. But I wish I’d never met her, not to befriend her and just watch her die like this. I bme her. I feel guilty for it but I also feel mad as hell at her. We were just becoming friends. She acts like she had no choice. I say she barely even gave being alive a chance. She transitioned and it didn’t go the way she wanted and she just gave up on being alive. That’s not fair to everyone else. We all have to fucking be here, we keep having to be alive and she just leaves?”

  There’s a long stretch of gravel and Scatter stops and squats to smoke a cigarette. “I think that makes sense, as a response.” There are supposed to be stages of grief, flickering seasons of affect, but for her it’s been all guilt, anger, and depression. No bargaining. And the denial was all before the fact, when she said to herself that a difference had been made, that they had stopped her from being suicidal. Between long drags off the cigarette, Scatter continues, smoke trickling from her mouth and nostrils as she speaks. “The way she experienced dysphoria was incredibly severe. I don’t know that I can fully rete. Maybe she had worked herself into a pce around it. Maybe we could have done more to support her. I worry we live in a household that’s very radical about gender but it can be alienating around transition. Especially if you’re looking for a full medical transition. When I think about how I failed her, that’s something I think about. She also wasn’t very ready to ask for help, or to accept it from others.”

  She drops the smoking butt on the ground. “We’re all haunted by different things from this. It’s good to reflect on what haunts us, and to be present with it, but don’t let it drag you down. It should be a prompt to grow as a person. You were really good about intervening when she was in crisis, even when you first got here and were still in crisis yourself. I think that matters a lot.”

  Lilly could stare into the gravel forever, not blinking. When you don’t blink your vision gets kinda fuzzy as it tries to compensate and eventually all the differences go away into the haze. And you see nothing at all, same as if you closed your eyes, just the haze. Votile organic compounds up in smoke. Fire licking molten pstic on the edge of a video pyer. All that’s solid melts into air.

  Seems like it kinda broke your brain after they killed all those kids.

  Ivy wakes up to the sound of Ursu crying. Slides out of bed, shuffles into the kitchen. No one else awake. Ursu’s standing in the dark bent like a cane, wearing a rge t-shirt twisted up around her, leaning against the counter for physical support. In between sobs she’s mumbling something to herself, words Ivy can’t parse. She looks like a ghost.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Ursu jumps, bangs her hip against the counter. She hadn’t noticed Ivy there. “It doesn’t matter, you couldn’t help.”

  “What is it?”

  “What do you even know about bck magic?”

  Ivy shrugs. “Maybe something, I don’t know.”

  The words tumble out of Ursu quick and winding round each other. “I’ve been fasting for three days and I haven’t slept, okay? It doesn’t matter. No matter what you smoke or what you sacrifice. It’s like some things just don’t change. It’s all bending away from me. It’s like a rope, twisted around me, no matter how I pull at the knot it tightens. I want her back but it’s never gonna happen.”

  “Who?”

  “Cuz she’s dead. All we talk about in this house is death and I can’t stop thinking about her.”

  Eventually Ivy talks her into eating, and drinking some water, and she expins herself over four cigarettes smoked in a chain until she’s coughing like she’s gagging. Ursu had a girlfriend in college, before she was out, who practiced feminist moon magic. Sometimes she called it blood magic, scrawling sigils in menstrual blood, burning red and bck candles. One day she told Ursu not to come over when she usually did after painting css. She said she had a special blood ritual to do. Halfway through the evening Ursu realized it was the wrong point in her cycle, that she had been menstruating a week before. Anxiety consumed her and she ended up texting, and texting again, and calling, to no reply. Eventually, te that night, she got in touch with the roommate, who was out at a bar, and went back to the dorm room to find Ursu’s girlfriend lying in bed, in a puddle of blood, already cold to the touch. She had cut her own throat some time around noon. She left a note that only said sorry, to no one in particur, offering no expnation. Ursu fell apart and a month ter dropped out of college. And there’s been a sense in her, ever since, that she’s cursed, that she’s bound by the same hell that slit her partner’s throat. Without a reason, without understanding, only the sense of doom. It’s haunted her entire transition, the feeling of repeating a pattern with only one ending.

  “I’m sorry for just dumping that all on you,” she says.

  “It’s okay.” Ivy wonders if people feel comfortable telling her about themselves because she barely has a past or because she has too much of one.

  “I live here in the city,” says Ursu, “or, well, a suburb. But I’m always dreaming of the countryside. The mountains and the trees. Birds, horses in their stables, smoke from the woodstoves. But if I ever go back to Montana it’s to kill myself.” She grabs Ivy’s hand, her fingers dry skin stretched over hard bone. “Do you understand? I’m not leaving the city, not for anything. There’s nothing for me out there.”

  Once Ursu goes to bed, Ivy wanders back to the room. The house is rarely silent with so many inhabitants, just in these depths of the long nights. Something is watching her, maybe from the ceiling, maybe from the window. It might be undead, or a shadow person, or a demon, or a hostile angel. Too many possibilities. She doesn’t look. Not tonight. Not while she’s in a delirious state, half awake, half a person, half a colge of dream impressions of past selves and horrible memories that shouldn’t exist, feet stumbling one over the other, fingers tugging at her knotted hair and she rolls into the covers and falls asleep fitfully beneath the shadows watching her.

  When Ivy gets up in the morning, Sophia looks exhausted. “How are you doing?” she asks before Ivy can say anything. “Did you sleep alright?”

  “I think so. I had weird dreams.”

  “I see.” Sophia sighs, slowly gets out of bed. The morning light is just coming in through the window and makes her cheek glow along with a few copper strands of hair lighting up like fiments. Gently, Ivy sets aside a rge plush owl that has settled onto her belly and gets up after her partner, already leaving the room for the kitchen.

  “How about you?”

  “I didn’t get good sleep. I was stressed.” Sophia pours herself coffee, finds the creamer in the fridge. Shakes it and frowns, then returns it to the fridge. Pulls it back out, opens it, sniffs, and dumps it in the trash. “You talked in your sleep. No words, just gibberish. A couple times when I woke up you were sitting up in bed, asleep. Once with your eyes open. I could tell you were asleep though. I waved my hands in front of you and you didn’t even blink or react.”

  “Damn, that sounds stressful, I’m sorry sweetie. Do I do that a lot?”

  “No, this is new as far as I know.”

  “I had a really weird dream. Or I guess it wasn’t that weird, just more of a memory, maybe. I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s hard to know, I guess. What’s dreams and what’s memories.”

  Sophia is digging around in the fridge and settles on a couple pieces of bread. She stares at them dejectedly then sniffs them, shrugs, and puts them in the toaster.

  “It was about the girl I knew. The one who died. And also something, I guess, about that group of people. The ones who maybe—”

  “Aaaahhh! Can’t you just stop! For one minute!” Sophia screams. Then she freezes, terrified, unblinking. Ivy is also still, unable to think, lost in the feeling of numbness spreading from her face like a cold gray slime. Sophia has never yelled at her like that before. “Just—just give me a—I, uh—”

  The toast pops up with a hollow cnk.

  “I—I’m sorry,” Sophia says. “Sorry. I’m sorry for yelling. I didn’t mean to do that. It’s just, it’s been a lot. Every day stuff keeps happening and it was one thing when it seemed like I was just helping you work through issues but since Gravity’s been here it’s been so weird and I don’t know what to think anymore, like, okay you don’t know what’s real, but I don’t know what’s real or not either, I’m trying to be a good partner but this stuff is creeping into my head too. I talk to you all the time and it’s like you just reset, you’re like oh, this is this problem with me but it’s every day and I knew it would be like that I just didn’t know it would be so bad. It’s all the time, it just keeps happening and happening. Maybe you’re, like, out of time, but I’m not, I’m here day after day. We don’t even sleep right anymore, do you know that?”

  Ivy nods, silently, trying to take it all in, expecting the inevitable. The breakup. Her heart’s racing but all she can feel is the arctic sludge of her emotional self trying to withdraw, to disappear somewhere that pain can’t go.

  “You’re scaring me,” Sophia says. There it is. “Not you, I mean. Like, I’m not scared of you, I’m not trying to say that. It’s just… you’re talking about, like, secret agencies tracking you, and I’m like, okay, I know about paranoia, I can handle this, but then this other person shows up and she’s like—I mean, fae’s like, oh, all of that was real, you’re being tracked by an evil conspiracy, I saw you get abducted by secret agents, like, what am I supposed to think? Either you’re all gaslighting me, or something very, very scary is going on, and I feel really alone…”

  She starts crying, a sad, strangled, exhausted crying that sounds unfamiliar in her throat. “I’m sorry,” she says again. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. I—I talked to my mom yesterday and she was so alien. I didn’t know what to say to her. She lives in a different world. Even though we’ve been somewhat estranged for a long time it felt so much more severe now because there’s something fundamental to what I’m experiencing that I can’t share with her and I don’t know which reality takes priority. And I’m all afloat.”

  Ivy’s adrenaline is still pumping and there’s part of her that just wants to scream back about how unfair it is to bme her for what she’s going through, or just to run away from this situation, or to shut down and disappear, maybe let Empty front so she can just go away, get out of this, disappear to another time, another pce, not here, gone.

  She can’t disappear, not this time. The woman she loves is standing in front of her wearied, scared, crying. This isn’t a confrontation or accusation. She sees the look of fear in Sophia’s widening eyes and knows somehow, with the jagged crity of adrenaline, it’s not just the fear of death or evil conspiracies hunting them down or even losing touch with reality. It’s the fear of being left alone. How stupid of Ivy to not realize that, to be so ready to run away.

  “Come here.” Ivy puts out her arms to hold Sophia, and her lover lurches forward and presses herself against her chest, whispering “I’m sorry” again. Sophia feels cold and brittle, a sad, shaking thing.

  “It’s okay,” says Ivy. “I know you didn’t mean to, I know you didn’t get a lot of sleep. I still love you.” She holds her tighter. “It’s a lot to deal with. I’ve been processing all of this for years. It makes sense you’re getting overwhelmed.”

  Sophia nuzzles Ivy’s neck, breathing softly into the front of her shirt as her breath steadies, slows down from the hyperventition it had been verging toward. Ivy’s never seen her on the precipice like this. “I guess I got used to relying on you. I didn’t think enough about how all this would be impacting you. I saw you worrying a lot st night but I didn’t understand the weight of what was going on.”

  Sophia nods slightly, sniffles. “This might sound stupid. Or even mean. You’ve been dealing with this a long time. I love you, and I want to be there for you. I wasn’t ready for all of this. Some part of me is scared of what being with you means, if I’m going to have to be afraid of helicopters and unmarked vans, never sure if I’m just paranoid, if I’m going to have to spend my life on the run. That’s not something I want out of life. I don’t romanticize the idea of being on a watchlist. But I’m scared to lose you. You mean so much to me. I don’t want to lose you. I feel like I’m being torn apart by all my fears.”

  Then she’s crying again, and Ivy keeps holding her, but she has no idea what to say. At some point Emiko starts to wander into the kitchen and not at all casually turns around. Sophia and Ivy grab the sad lukewarm slices of toast, put jam on them, and step out to the backyard so Ivy can have a smoke.

  “I don’t know what happens next. I want to be with you but I understand if all this is too much. I really do.”

  Sophia looks miserable. “I want to be with you to. It’s—even if we weren’t together, what would be different?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like, I grew up retively privileged. I was dealing with transmisogyny, and ableism, but like, this is the poorest I’ve ever been. I’ve been bullied and harassed but I’ve never been in a prolonged abusive situation. My parents weren’t great but they weren’t the worst. I think I grew up with a version of the world that isn’t really accurate to it. It’s not so much that I was unaware of the bad things in the world, but they seemed somehow distant, even when I was experiencing bullying and violence. Those things felt like isoted incidents, or expressions of bigotry. I’ve been learning about leftism, I’ve been branching out into more critical theory, and it’s changing my view of the world. Some of that is good but a lot of it is honestly terrifying. I think even despite all of that, I kept everything at something of a distance. There was the world out there, with its systems of power, and then there was my personal life. But you’re the closest I’ve ever let anyone get to me. You’re my personal life. When I’m realizing that it’s not just that you’re dealing with the consequences of oppression, but that this awful system has very physically touched you, has reached down into your personal life, and by extension into my personal life, and has done direct violence, that’s just… it changes my reality. It changed my reality. What reality is now looks different to me. It’s scarier and more hostile. That’s not going to get better unless I wake up and this was all a dream. Even still it might not be any different because the thing is…”

  She reaches for the cigarette. “You don’t smoke,” says Ivy, and Sophia meets her gaze. For a moment the look is almost one of hostility, like she’s trying a gre on for size.

  “Just a drag,” says Sophia. “I grew up around smokers.”

  “It’s not a good idea.”

  “I know but I need it right now. Or I won’t be able to finish saying what I need to say, and it’s important that I do.”

  Ivy passes her the cigarette and she takes a long drag, holds it, and coughs the smoke out before passing it back. These little rituals of death they share together. Every doctor reminding them that smoking significantly increases the likelihood of a blood clot, every cough a forerunner to lung cancer and emphysema. It doesn’t matter to the people who don’t intend to keep living. And they do keep living, day after day, carrying thick tar in their lungs, until all those moments of respite catch up to strangle them.

  “What’s eating me up is that it’s not wrong. Even if it’s a dream, a dream can tell you something important about reality. And the point of this dream is that all those horrible things I’ve learned about, they are real, they are in the world with me, and even if I’ve never been arrested or disappeared into the back of a van I can’t act like I live in a different world from all of that stuff. The world I live in is the reality constructed by all of that violence. I sat up in bed st night, not able to rex, watching you talking and crying in your sleep, just thinking about how I will never be able to feel the same kind of safety again. Not because of trauma, or maybe because of trauma, but the safety I was feeling before was a child’s safety. The sense that somehow everything will turn out alright, that my life will end up okay, that everything is part of some sort of pn or order. It’s not, not really, and the people who make pns for everything are the ones who want me dead. Me and you.”

  Having said it, she doesn’t look as devastated and exhausted as she did before. She looks like she earned something through the process of bearing all that out.

  Ivy grabs her hand, softly, firmly presses her fingers against Sophia’s palm. She still doesn’t know what to say. She runs through things in her head, apologies, comforting things, truisms. All just distractions, ways to hold back facing the shift in Sophia. The air is warming as the sun rises over the apartments and houses to the east, its light creeping down the petrochemical cathedrals to the west. An unseasonable fog sting te into the morning is glowing a waxy yellow all around them, muffling the sounds of the city, but not the roar of a jet airliner distant overhead, and the whole tilted world smells of dew and car exhaust. Inside this house, muffled through the screen door to the kitchen, she can hear the angry sounds of Ursu and Emiko discussing something, probably processing what Ursu’s been going through in the trans porn community tely. Early morning conversations downstream of social violence. A distant police siren punctuates their voices, making space for the thrumming of a helicopter, unseen, somewhere overhead but out of view. They live right in the gut of all this. Seeking comfort in a backyard littered with signifiers of dysfunctional habitation. Faded clothes ground into mud now dried to dirt and growing crabgrass. Old beer cans, beer bottles, roaches, cigarette butts, some still identifiable by brand and fvor. A pile of tobacco from a Bck & Mild used for a blunt wrap. Three empty Whip-Its gleaming in the morning sun. Ragged micropstics everywhere. A moist, abandoned pizza box crawling with tidy streams of tiny bck ants.

  “There’s unspeakable horrors in this world,” she says. “We spend a lot of our time just trying to cope. Sometimes, we fall apart. I don’t want that to happen to me, and I don’t want it to happen to you.”

  Sophia nods. “I need some kind of certainty in my life. I don’t think I’m going to get it. I guess I’m going to have to learn how to pce myself in retion to that. That’s something studying philosophy is good for, I suppose. So I didn’t just entirely waste my life up to this point.”

  “You didn’t waste your life at all.”

  “Well I mean, while you were off doing all that shit with people, I was just, what, reading books about empty ideas.”

  “And from that you became someone who cared about and wanted to help people. I don’t know if you’ve fully picked up on this, but whatever good I’ve done, I’ve also hurt people. There were times when I, or something like me, something that shares memories and a body with me, have participated in some of those unspeakable horrors. I went through all of that and eventually came to a pce where I want to help people, and I’m still ambiguous on it sometimes. Sometimes I’m just looking out for myself, or stressing about how bad things have been. I admire that you got this far not going through all of that and you came to wanting to help others, wanting to make their lives better, all on your own.”

  Sophia smiles. “It’s funny, something I love about you is that you’ve been through all that and in the end these are the choices you’ve made. Guess the political is personal.” Squeezes Ivy’s hand. “I want to stick with you, as long as these are the choices you’re making. If you—I don’t know, if you go back to being a part of that machine, I don’t think I can follow you there.”

  Something heavy and warm and far too much to hold deposits itself in Ivy’s chest, a weight that threatens to suffocate her with that thought. If I go back. Coordination Division has been liquidated, but did that mean it was gone? She had assumed she was safe because she had assumed they had all been killed. What about her? Had she slipped through the system or had she been deliberately left wandering around? What about the bald man in the gray suit whose name she could never remember, the one who had—the one who had used his position of power and her vulnerability to push her into sex she didn’t want, and then keep her under his control? He had recognized her, out on the streets of San Jose a few years ago. What’s to say he wouldn’t still remember her face?

  “That’s understandable,” says Ivy. “And I’m gd you can say it. I want to be with you, but I want it to be on terms you can live with. It wouldn’t mean so much to me for us to be together, if you would be with me no matter what. I’m gd to know you have a limit.”

  “What about you? What’s your limit?”

  Ivy thinks for a moment. Hands, grasping at her. Boundaries are always hard to discern. To know one’s own boundaries is like scrying from a crystal ball. She looks into the gloomy crystal, the weight in her chest, and sees hands, suits, a tremendous wooden cross looming over her. “Don’t try to use me, or to control me. Don’t try to turn me into something that I’m not. Even if I don’t know what I am, I don’t want someone to try to determine that for me. Let me be a mess if that’s what I have to be, be done with me if you have to, but don’t try to control me.”

  “That’s really valid.”

  *****

  The drain stopper in the shower is full of hair and the water isn’t draining. Ivy crouches down to grab at it and gets too woozy to move. She stares at the clump in her fingers. Soap scum binds together a tangle of blue hair and Sophia’s red curls, some bck hair probably from Eff, Jaime’s bleached twists, and an old dirty band-aid. The water runs past her feet into the cleared drain. She takes a deep breath.

  The water travels into the plumbing into the city into the sewage into the river into the ocean. Where the water travels from every building around her, every home and apartment and postindustrial warehouse, government buildings and corporate office buildings, factories and sidewalks and roads. Where the water travels from the petrochemical facilities and lumber mills and ndfills. Water mixed with oil and acids and dirt and blood, flowing into the ocean as if that could absolve it all. All the sins a drop in the great mother.

  *****

  Around noon Ivy’s taking a walk to decompress and her eyes keep drifting along the cracks in the sidewalks like little pathways running up and down everything. She imagines she can see the cracks running up the trunks of trees to where they split into thick rotten knots. Little yellow house finches are still darting around on the ground in one intersection and she thinks, what if the cracks get into them? Cracks getting into the beetles and the worms, and then the birds eat them, and the cracks get into their bellies, and split them up from the inside?

  It’s hard not to see every vehicle that rolls by with CA EXEMPT ptes and tinted windows as part of a conspiracy to monitor her. How much was Coordination Division involved with the government? She never knew. It wasn’t her domain, when she worked for them, she was in charge of the application of their power to problems at hand—actually, mostly just a secretary and a courier, not in charge of anything. She knows sometimes they worked with cops, but that wasn’t all that unusual for big corporations, was it?

  She imagines the cracks running across the road and up into the tires, popping them under a bck SUV with bcked out windows, and it would fall to the ground with a tremendous crunch, and the doors on side would crumble open and men in suits with 9mm handguns would come out and grab her and hold something in front of her face, some kind of symbol, and then she would, again, be gone. If I go back…

  How had Scatter known what to show her, when they picked her up in the parking lot? The question is like a crack, crawling painfully up the insides of her feet, her heels, her legs. So many questions. Her bck fts cck along the sidewalk with the unsteady anxiety of her steps.

  Scatter is there beside her. It’s a different city, she’s younger, a different person: Lilly. The sky isn’t so polluted with smog, the future doesn’t seem so grim, yet.

  They’re holding hotdogs from 7-11, looking for a pce to sit and eat. Scatter is ughing with a casual, easy ugh. “What it was, was a kidnapping.”

  “I mean, every story of a princess getting rescued is a kidnapping from someone’s perspective,” says Lilly. “Look at all those missing children posters! I was decred missing once but actually I had just asked my friend to drive me somewhere so I could get away from my parents long enough to avoid bible camp. It was some Family Focus shit or whatever. I had to make up so many details so my friend didn’t get in trouble with the cops. There’s real kidnappings, like the shit the assholes stalking us do, but then there’s rescues that get called kidnappings.”

  “Well, I’m gd it worked out,” Scatter says. “Honestly, I was worried you were gonna go against us for a moment there. Especially when we had to, like, keep you at our pce with no phone, I was like oh fuck, someone’s gonna say this is a cult or something.”

  “Oh yeah, it was freaky at first. It’s funny, it was really bits of my memory coming back that convinced me. Like, when I realized what I had been doing, and how far off that was from who I used to be—who I am. It’s weird to lose several years of my life. Weirder still to realize I was some kinda brainwashed business stiff in that time.”

  “Sounds like a lot to think about. Oh, there.”

  She pnts herself on a retaining wall half-crumbled under a contorted oak tree that looks as if it’s getting ready to start crawling across the road. Lilly joins her and starts pecking at the hotdog. It’s greasy and burns the roof of her mouth but the salty taste is so satisfying she almost doesn’t notice how nauseous she’s been today.

  “Hey, you know something I’ve been wondering? How did you know what to show me?”

  “What to show you?”

  “That thing you held in front of my face? To break me out of it?”

  “Oh, the sigil?” asks Scatter, ketchup and mustard dribbling off her chin. “You still don’t remember any of that, do you?”

  “Don’t remember what?”

  “You contacted us. Or like, we had someone kinda looking into stuff, someone with some connections, and you somehow found them, got through some info. I don’t know the details cuz it was need-to-know. You sent us that sigil, said as long as you could see it clearly it would work to snap you out of the hypnotic state.”

  “What? I did?”

  “Yeah, honestly I wasn’t sure about the whole thing until we did it, and the moment I held that up you stopped fighting and kinda went limp for a second and then, well, that’s the part you remember, from then on.”

  The nausea is back. It’s not a body nausea, it’s emotional, driven by anxiety. She’s learned to recognize the difference, because she’s been getting panicky a lot in the past year, ever since Piper died. A strange feeling, a pressure inside her. Like the nausea is alive, a vengeful, terrified beast curled up inside of her.

  “Yeah, I don’t remember that at all. You don’t think—would I be able to do that and then forget? I thought when I was hypnotized I was just doing what they wanted?”

  “Maybe there was some part of you that was pushing against it. Or maybe there was something else going on. I mean, it does seem like you gze over sometimes, or get kinda weird. Not like you’re going back to being like one of them. Just like you, y’know, have something else going on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You get kinda intense, and talk a little conspiratorial, sometimes a little mean. Bitchy, or reactive. You don’t know what I’m talking about?”

  “No.”

  “Like what about the time you smashed the TV in the living room?”

  Lilly frowns. The TV was destroyed a couple months ago, she always assumed it was one of Arsenal’s scumfuck friends. It looked like someone had beaten it with a bat. “What? That was me?”

  “You don’t remember that at all?”

  “No.”

  “Huh,” Scatter’s not making eye contact, like she feels embarrassed to have brought the whole thing up at all. “Well, that’s weird. I mean, maybe it’s like, I don’t know, schizophrenia? Like, after the hypnosis you’ve got something else inside your head?”

  “How did I know to contact you? How did I know about your person, your contact, that you would be down to get me out?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. I thought you would have the answer.”

  *****

  “Hey, are you doing okay?” The words aren’t spoken with care. More like agitation. Hostile.

  Ivy looks up. The bright concrete fades to reveal a man, in a sweaty tanktop, leaning out the front of a red pickup. A golden cross dangles from a neckce beneath his three-day beard.

  “You high or something?”

  “No,” she says, the lights swirling in her eyes starting to clear. “Sorry.”

  “Why are you staring at my house?”

  She’s in the middle of a suburb. Richmond. In front of her, a pin beige ranch-style home, with a little cross on the front door and a wn gnome resting askew in dirt.

  “Sorry. I just zoned out.” She starts to walk away.

  “Hey!” He gets out of the cab of the pickup, sms the door. “You’ve been standing here. What’s wrong with you?”

  She’s walking faster, but he starts to follow her. She feels it coming from him, an ominous aura. Like a predator that has singled out a weak prey. There’s no one else visible on the block.

  “What’s a girl like you doing out here? Are you drunk? Why are you running away?” There is no kindness in his voice. It’s getting closer and then she hears his feet break into a little jog to close the distance and she starts to run.

  The next several blocks are like a blur to her. She turns a couple corners, feeling as though his hands are right behind her, grasping at her. When she makes it to a dusty baseball diamond she looks behind her but there’s no one there.

  “Reminder to self: when you dissociate people can attack you,” she mumbles, her legs suddenly wobbly and uneven beneath her. There’s some bushes at the far end of the park so she jogs over to them, nearly tripping on herself, stumbles into them to hide. Through little green leaves and scratching twigs to a hollow already decorated with cardboard boxes and abandoned clothes and drink containers. She colpses on the cardboard and clothing, soggy from the sprinklers. The adrenaline starts to leave her body hollow and she’s silently crying. Fingernails scratching apart moldy wet cardboard. All those joints hurt from the spike in blood pressure.

  “Come back here! You fucking faggot!”

  She jolts, but it’s not real, it’s not a real voice, it’s a memory. From when she was young. A man like that, angry like that. He grabbed her shoulder, but she twisted away. That was when she learned to always run. A lesson she should have learned earlier.

  “I don’t remember much of my childhood,” she was saying—to who, when? She’s said it a lot.

  One of the advantages of a traumatizing adulthood. So much time spent running or trying to heal, she’s avoided thinking about what came before entirely. It just looms over her with the voice of a pastor and the image of a wooden cross. What a strange religion. In its own way, like the religion of the men who’d rewritten her mind. A million different versions of Christ, most of them looming over child abuse and bloodshed, promising a love that would always remain abstracted. The look in the eyes of the believers, desperate. It had brought something out in her.

  “You don’t live with your parents?” Darren asks, and she says, “No, no I don’t really want to see them anymore. My childhood was complicated.”

  It’s so easy to slide into being the kind of person people want in different environments. To mirror the simple interests and pleasures. Among some boys gathered around a table rolling dice for role-pying games, she can be casually apolitical and brush aside the constant digs at her gender. In office buildings she can be efficient and precise, filling out forms, falsifying documents, copying lists, ignoring crimes. Strolling down streets with Scatter, always on the go, she looks for derelict buildings with back entrances barely visible from the street. Sometimes, though, things don’t work, and there’s another part of her.

  “You don’t have any ambition,” Nails is saying to her in the punk house basement, bad times filled with smoke and alcohol and shame. Weeks before Piper disappears. Click-cck of Nintendo controllers.

  “Why do I need ambition?” Lilly asks.

  “Sometimes you have to push back against the world. Demand things from it.”

  “I can push back.”

  “You get defensive, sure. I’ve never seen you set out to change a damn thing. You’re a fucking empty person, do you know that? You just drift through the world looking at things.”

  “So? You just get drunk.”

  “I know what I want. I want a fucking war, I want to fuck everything up. I’m just biding my time.”

  “You don’t want any of those things. You just have to want something you can’t achieve.”

  “I want a fucking revolution!”

  “You make it something impossible so you don’t even have to try.”

  In the end she couldn’t say either of them had any real goals or knew what the fuck they had been doing. Where did they end up? Back at another collective, nearly a decade ter. Sadder, wiser, more full of resentment. What was it that pushed back?

  She can try to look inside, try to understand, but there’s something pushing back against her. Whatever part of her is railing against the world, it sees her as part of the world.

  You just go along with whatever situation you find yourself in.

  “I’m just trying to survive,” she mutters to the moldy cardboard, hiding in the shadow of the shrubs.

  There are many ways to survive. You are asleep.

  “I don’t care.”

  You are asleep but I am awake.

  *****

  When she’s stable enough to walk back, she follows a gulch full of mossy stones and pstic trash for a while then climbs up an oily path onto the side of the road. Even though she’s not sure where she is, her sense of direction has returned enough for her to wander the right way. Thoughts pass through her like phantasms. The things Gravity was saying. Semi trucks full of bodies. She sees the trucks on the highway overpass and wonders what’s inside of them. Every day, trucks come and go in the interstate system and she never questions it. Never questions what they’ve got.

  The sounds of the idling engines remind her of that time, breaking into the office building with Darren. The start of it all. And what happened to Darren? Last year she had been trying to look him up, thinking about maybe trying to reconnect, let him know that she’s doing better, that she made it out okay, that she’s still alive. When she found the obituary. No mention of his partner. Did Liam stay with him? Was he at the funeral? Or was he hiding, still too ashamed to let people know the truth even at the extremity of grief? And where was she? On the west coast, in the pce Darren left behind, losing her mind on drugs.

  She gets that feeling again, of being hunted. Something watching her. When she turns to look over her shoulder she sees three police officers standing behind a chainlink fence, smiling in an eerie way. Eyes on her, twinkling eyes. Then she realizes that's not a police uniform, just something very simir. One of them turns and walks away and she could swear his arms don’t even move like arms, they dangle around like a ragdoll puppet and they’re too long, too many joints.

  Shaking her head, trying not to look too crazy, trying to find the familiar streets. Sidewalk rattling past, she passes candles arranged in roadside memorials and tire shops and churches and auto body shops and convenience stores and a home crematorium and a daycare center and a vivisector and a florist and three psychics and finally finds her bearings when she sees a house where one of Emiko’s acquaintances was sex trafficked two years before. She spits at it and walks back to San Pablo.

  When she gets back home, she admits, first to Eff, then to Sophia when she returns from work, that she feels like she’s losing her mind a little. She doesn’t tell them about dissociating or being chased, she doesn’t talk about hiding in a bush reliving the past or the things that weren’t really cops. How much information is enough to convey the risk at hand without scaring the people who care about her?

  All evening long the air smells of ozone and, ter, burning pstic. At first she assumes it’s just in her head, but everyone can smell it, looming over the whole city from an unknown source. The sirens come ter. There’s a public health advisory. Eyes, nose, throat, skin irritation for vulnerable groups with sensitivities. Shelter in pce for the following addresses. Go inside, close your windows, vents, and doors. Cover up the cracks. But they still have to step out every hour to smoke. They watch a few movies together to unwind, and Gravity and Emiko join them in the evening. Gravity’s very quiet and pensive, spending a lot of time staring intently at the carpet or the corners. Ivy wants to ask faer how fae’s doing but it never seems like the right moment.

  *****

  Sleep leads Ivy to a dream of her childhood. She’s in a giant convenience store with flickering fluorescent lights and it smells awful and pstic and her father is looking for her. The convenience store seems to be flickering with the lights, all the shelves and products taking on a polystyrene sheen. She keeps trying to run away from him, but every time she goes down an aisle she hears the footsteps of his work boots on the linoleum floor. She’s afraid of his hands, she’s afraid of the hammer. Eventually she crawls up into one of the metal shelves and hides behind the boxes of detergent. They stink of chemical fragrances like the alcove in the garage where her mother makes her do the house’s undry on Saturdays. There is a dark cavernous space inside the shelf, walled with the backs of various boxes of different products, and she crawls further inside. Behind her, her dad’s voice is screaming at her, calling her a pussy, telling her not to run away, to be a man and own up to what she did. She doesn’t know what she did, she doesn’t think she did anything at all. The metal is cold beneath her knees. It starts to go down, like a ramp, into the ground, no sounds but the distant thumping of her dad’s feet, his muffled screams calling out her deadname and the humming of air conditioner units. He sounds almost terrified now.

  “He doesn’t want you to become what you’re becoming,” says a voice beside her.

  “What am I becoming?”

  “You are moving away from God. You are fleeing from the man your Father wants you to be.”

  Something inside her feels twisted and miserable, but there is another feeling, contrary to it, alive and hungry.

  “If God made everything and I am leaving Him behind, then where am I going?”

  “Good question.”

  She is in a mammoth hallway, the walls of giant broken chunks of concrete linked together with twisted rebar. It looks like a colpsed cave system, made from the pieces of a skyscraper or a parking garage. The aftermath of a bombed city, a demolished block. Images from the television, from Mogadishu and Okhoma City and Kosovo. There is a clearing in the center where she sits, ringed with two dozen dolls all around her. Some of them are small, still things, boy dolls, in sailor outfits. Others are rger, person-sized, feminine, with ball joints and limbs all askew on the rubble. There are symbols written on them in glowing pink and red ink. She can’t read any of them but she knows they are ancient magic. They are wearing soft gossamer dresses in salmon pinks, all frills and ce and thin fabric swaying slightly in a drafty breeze.

  A voice whispers around her, like the wind through dead leaves. “Why do you reject this world?”

  “It’s all lies,” she says, instinctively, and the hunger inside her grows, bubbling up. “It’s trying to turn me into something I’m not. It’s trying to control me.”

  “Doesn’t your Father love you?”

  “He says He does. It’s empty words. People will say they love you to get you to do what they want. They just want to control you. He just wants a son. I’m not that.”

  “Doesn’t your Mother love you?”

  “No. She hates me. I don’t know why. Maybe she thinks I’m like my dad. Maybe she thinks I’m too much like her.”

  “Doesn’t your pastor love you?”

  “No. He smiles at me but he doesn’t even want to see me, he doesn’t want to talk to me. He hates me most of all. That’s why he brings the man with hands. It’s all a show. It’s all lies.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Silence. She thinks more about it then says, “What’s the truth?”

  “What if it’s all lies?”

  “Then I want better lies.”

  “And what are you willing to offer for that?”

  The ball-jointed dolls in their beautiful dresses all start moving at once, twitchy erratic movements flopping and twisting around on the ground, creating the gestalt effect of roiling water in the wake of a ship. The movements sound like ceramic rattling around and grinding on stone. Some of their jaws pop open and from between their bright red painted lips she can see something moving inside, indecipherable little movements, hundreds, thousands. Where their hands sp the pavement the sound rings out like a sharp cp. Where their filing hands sp the small, still sailor-boy dolls, the boy dolls shatter.

  From up above her comes the noise of twisting metal and little fkes of rust rain down all around. Up there in the gloomy light through the concrete wreckage she sees something descending on chains. The figure of a woman, on an old swing like the one that used to sit outside the Sunday school. The swing descends until the woman is resting a body height above her. She is naked, her skin an unearthly pale, like a porcein doll. In pces her flesh is eroded away down to the ribs showing through jagged and earthy. Where the meat under the skin is visible it is gray-green and gangrenous. Her long, bck hair is wet and hangs down past the swing, also swaying in the breeze.

  She has no face, only an oily bck shadow, though the light falls on it.

  “Do you want to die?” the faceless woman asks, and reaches out her arms for a welcoming embrace. Those arms look oddly warm and inviting for how cold and dead they are. They smell sweet, the scent of soft fruit left in the sun a little too long.

  “No,” the girl replies. “I just don’t want to keep living my life.”

  “You want a new life?” The woman’s voice still comes from all around, from inside the rustling and rattling of the dolls dresses as they spasm and roll on the ground to their atemporal rhythm.

  “Yes.” The answers well up inside her as if they had been rehearsed, but from some internal fountain.

  “You want a new future?” An image in her mind, the church crumbling to ruins, her father weeping, the town twisting and falling apart, the walls of the buildings shaken to the ground. She would give him over. The boy she was supposed to become. The father, the mother, the pastor. She would trade them all for any possibility beyond them.

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t promise you anything… except for pain.” Her faceless head tilts slightly to the side. Somehow this corpse seems less dead than the adults she knows.

  “I just don’t want to be controlled. I don’t want to be part of His world anymore.”

  The swing descends further, and the faceless woman nimbly steps off of it and onto the dusty ground. She moves toward the girl, who knows she should be feeling fear, she should be terrified. She isn’t. The hot, ferocious, hungry thing inside her is spinning wildly around like the balljoint dolls. She can feel it unfolding fiery tendrils into her arms and legs. The corpse hands, sickly sweet like the perfume of sinful women, grab onto both sides of her face and she leans forward as if coming in for a kiss, and the girl feels the stinging heat moving up her legs and arms and crawling down her spine from the insides of her eyes, the muscles of her tongue and jaws, the twitching of her neck. As the empty shadow of the woman’s face blocks off her view of the cavern, the mouths of the dolls open wider, and from inside the centipedes crawl out, toward her, their bodies rustling the whispering voice that says, “Let this be a secret inside of you.”

  She wakes in the church pew, near the back where sometimes she can get her parents to sit if she can find ways to make them a little te arriving without them realizing it was her that did it, and instantly calms her response to the dream, and to waking, so as to not catch the attention of her dad, who watches the pastor with the attentiveness of a cat watching a mouse. The pastor could say anything and her dad would look astounded, inspired, amazed. The most common cliches become divine wisdom between his lips. The crudest hatred becomes a holy invective. And holy hatred is always woven with love. The pastor, weaving back and forth across the small stage, is telling the story of his cousin, who was taken in by vices of gambling and alcoholism and homosexualism, but who he one day induced to attend a service, and had a spontaneous conversion in that moment, and renounced Satan, and came to the Lord, and was saved, and since that day has not once engaged in his vices, and then the pastor is asking for a tithe. Whenever the pastor tells stories, it’s always about some family member or another, and she wonders if the other churchgoers have missed noticing the impossibly rge size of his family, or if for them it’s simply a matter of allegory.

  “Tears came to his eyes when he told me! Tears of joy. Tears of release.” He enunciates every word, pours emphasis into nearly every sylble, with the fervor of a conductor guiding the orchestra through a critical passage. “He was weeping with the joy of the Lord. He said it was as though he had been reborn from a nightmare that had controlled his whole life into a new, shining world. He told me that God had cleansed him of his sin.”

  As she watches the motion of the pastor, the memory of the dream fades, but it doesn’t drift away, it sinks inside her, disappears somewhere deep inside, as the preacher rails against the Prince of Lies.