Did the driver say Greeley? Something like that. Another place he doesn't know—another Kayenta, Shiprock, Salida. Thirty-three hours so far, a geography lesson on the sticks of the American West. The Greyhound bus pulls over at a solitary outpost with four gasoline pumps and a sign, Metatron Gulf, in stuttering orange neon. Mid-October dusk, stratus right on top of them like a lid. Elliott hears the crunch of gravel under the big tires, the sigh of weary brakes. The driver says, Fifteen minutes, folks.
A Colorado state patrol vehicle zips past them, strobes blazing. He watches the orb of red, blue and white vanish down the highway. The pregnant woman in the aisle seat next to him gives him a sideways glance, stands up, offers a strained smile.
I'm sorry I upset you, she says. Want me to grab your backpack?
He says no. She purses her lips, looks away, moves toward the front. He considers staying put, but his bladder aches, and since the toilet in the back of the bus is out of order, he pulls his backpack down from the overhead, follows the others out, steps down into the early black.
Wind bites his face. Some primitive stench comes and goes. He wears plaid golf shorts, a gift from three Christmases ago, and the T-shirt that says Intelligence Isn't Artificial beneath the company logo. Arizona clothes. He should change.
Guy behind him steps down from the bus, says, You can really smell the slaughterhouse tonight.
Passengers stretch their legs or head for the restroom. The pregnant woman who sat next to him since Denver buttons up her red woolen coat. Her face glitches again, shimmering static or rippling greywater, just a flicker of disruption in her soft, pale features and dark eyes. Elliott pretends not to notice this time.
I'll change seats if that makes you feel better, she tells him.
He ignores her, unzips the top compartment of his backpack to get his micro-fleece. The bag slips from his hands and the contents spill onto the gravel—the protein bars, the extra socks, his phone fully charged but turned off since the Phoenix depot, duct tape, Swiss Army knife, 4,000 dollars in paper money secured with a rubber band. The revolver. He looks at the woman. She looks at him.
Oh my God, she says.
He bends down, shoveling items back where they belong, gun first. In his haste some gravel goes into the bag also. When he looks up, the pregnant woman is already at the entrance of the store, moving fast for someone in her condition.
He turns in a circle, looking everywhere. His heart thumps like it wants out. Through the display window, he sees the pregnant woman under the wan florescent lights by the counter, pointing at him. She is in full glitch now, a snarl of distortion. The driver and two other men next to her poke their heads out. Hey buddy, the driver yells.
He runs, trips on the gravel, scraping his palms and naked knees, gets up, runs across the highway without looking, semi-trucks honking. He careens into the ditch on the other side and underneath the barbwire fence beyond, headlong into the gloom, stumbling over hard, uneven ground, hyperventilating now past a few indifferent cows, backpack windmilling from his arm, over a hill and into the sanctuary of barren country, the cover of falling darkness.
The first snowflakes, fat and icy wet, strike his face.
Source code.
They were on vacation in Newfoundland when they witnessed a murder. St. John's, early summer, late afternoon. Victim: unhoused male, drunk. Assailant: female, aggrieved, swinging a claw hammer. Six years living in New York City, and they had seen nothing so violent, so depraved, yet day two in Canada, sipping beers at an all-but-empty sidewalk café, it happened right in front of them. Elliott and Amanda Goodnow, four years married and in their late 20s, gave their statements at the constabulary. Mayhem was rare in this Atlantic province, and the scene at the station was confused. They sat in a small room for a long time. No one offered them coffee.
The only other decent witness sat in the room with them. He wore a Patek Philippe on his wrist. Like them, he was American—Zane Murphy from Wyoming, he said, a fake cowboy name if ever Elliott heard one, except this fellow was a blue-eyed oil-and-gas speculator here on business, perhaps ten years older than them, and he did seem to have a hint of buckaroo in him, considering how he cowed the woman with the hammer into sitting down in the middle of the street until the police arrived, which was more than Elliott had managed to do. The Wyoming man happened to carry a travel pack of moist wipes in his pocket, gave one to Amanda for her face.
Call me Zane, he said. He handed them both business cards.
When the Goodnows left the station, choosing to walk rather than ride again in a police car, Amanda, perhaps unconsciously, clutched Zane's towelette in her trembly fist; it was gray and reddish in color now, having absorbed a few tears and some of her makeup. Elliott took her hand in a gesture of comfort, removed the wadded cloth from her palm, deposited it in a trash can on the corner. He only hoped memories of this day could be so easily discarded.
The next morning, they saw through the window of their bed-and-breakfast an iceberg floating on the blue harbor. It was the height and width of a Manhattan city block, moving with the current, blinding in the sun, silent. To behold such things was why they came here, yet in the shadow of yesterday's events, it felt unwelcome, ominous, as if they were being stalked.
Amanda picked at her poached egg, and Elliott stirred his coffee until it went cold. They cut their trip short, flew home to Queens.
Weeks later, Amanda's period hit wrong. Large clots, too much blood, disturbing colors and textures. Otherworldly cramps. She miscarried a child she did not know existed. They agreed it must have been the first night in Newfoundland, giddy from local ale and intoxicated by leisure and a strange location, all that Canadian moonlight.
The doctor told her she had retained products of conception, which required a procedure. Elliott doted on her, brought her soup, wouldn't leave her alone. For crying out loud, she said, I'm fine, go to work. So he did. But Elliott felt a lingering wound, as if something essential had been disgorged from him, too. He wondered at the vagaries of a universe in which life could be expelled so abruptly, from womb or street, by cramps or claw hammer.
His outlook had been jolted in some basic way. The passengers on the M train, Elliott's fellow commuters, smelled ripe, and any or all of them might have been insane, though none ever moved or looked up from their phones. At the office his colleagues bent at their work in a vaguely defensive posture, and their faces appeared flat, almost blurry, not quite real or perhaps masking some unspoken pain. Had they, like him, witnessed carnage, the sharp and sudden disordering of basic expectations? Nothing worked right. The bank's customer-service chatbot, of which he was in charge, and for which there was no budget for refinement, gave incorrect answers three percent of the time and kicked out to a live agent eight percent of the time, three percentage points higher than acceptable, not because of poor design—he resented the notion—but because many of the customer questions could not be addressed rationally by a therapist, let alone a machine.
How am I to live on this meager sum?
Should I switch to Euros?
Can you find me?
Elliott was a young man, would need to make his way in this mire for several decades more at minimum, and yet something felt wrong. He was lost. The train home screamed with mechanical rattles and human silence, a coffin car. And at home that night, why the same lifeless postures? Why did the evening pass in silence, only the television allowed to speak, his body and hers captured by invisible casings as if they were refrigerated sausages, and why did their eyes never meet?
Amanda appreciated the silence, preferred the hours when he was away, resented his presence at night for reasons that eluded her, made her feel cruel. Not so much that she wanted to be alone as she wanted time away from him. She said goodnight, went to bed, texted in the dark. When he tiptoed in, she slipped the phone under her pillow and pretended to sleep.
She did not really want to be a mother, certainly had not planned it, so why this heavy weight of loss and guilt? Why her annoyance at Elliott? After her procedure he suggested perhaps they could try again. The way he said the word again riled her somehow. How can you try again when you were not trying the first time? And what kind of father would he be? Look at the bad things that happened. Elliott did not cause those things, but he did not stop them, either. She slipped out of bed, checked the deadbolts on the front and back doors.
She saw in him a weakness she had not seen before.
In April of the following year, the artificial-intelligence startup in Arizona recruited Elliott. They wanted him to lead the UX team for a new investment-advisory engine. At last, a chance to work on something monumental, from the ground up. At last, purpose. At last, direction.
When they called him with the offer, he had only just arrived from work to his front stoop, head wet from the rain, one of those chilly spring evenings that typically had a depressive effect on him. The elation of being wanted, pursued, felt absolute, as if he had seen the world all wrong before now. This rescue came none too soon, for today the bank's box-wine-budget chatbot lost its mind for hours, merely parroting word for word whatever it was asked, as if to mock the customers, then bricked itself. It took them two hours to reboot it.
Written confirmation of the job offer arrived via email with a bip on his phone as he stood in the entryway. These people were not messing around. He found Amanda in the kitchen, handed her the phone.
Amanda took in the words, saw his hopeful smile and the way he ignored his dripping hair as a boy might, saw him in that moment as the recruiters must have regarded him, bright and full of initiative, and she wanted to believe in him, too. She didn't like the idea of moving. Both their families, all their friends, everyone they had ever known, were Eastern Time Zone all the way. She worked at home, editing video for several advertising clients, could do it anywhere, but what was in Arizona?
She liked their neighborhood here in Queens, the way the morning light hit their kitchen window. The rotations of the earth were friendly to her here. When she walked to the corner bodega, the Dominican owner greeted her by name, and she knew the names of nearly a dozen neighborhood dogs, if not the names of their owners. The girl who cut her hair taught her some Ukrainian words that sounded when spoken like hard candy smells and tastes—ko-hannee-ya, for love, and polu-nee-yeets-ya, for strawberry. The city was a colossus, but she had her place in it.
How much should one person be willing to change her entire life for another person? She could not think of a reason to say no. She did not want to say yes.
After Elliott said goodnight, after she had brushed her teeth, she sat for a time in the wooden chair by the window looking out on the street with its puddles and late-night couples strolling arm in arm along the sidewalks. She texted Zane about this new crossroad, her uncertainty. His response arrived sometime as she slept. She read it at first light.
Maybe this is your chance to be happy.
In June, one year since Newfoundland, they drove across the country to spare the dog an airline crate. In green and hilly Ohio, Elliott stopped along a deserted stretch of highway so both he and their spaniel Tay-Tay could urinate. Amanda got out and stretched. Elliott looked at his wife's bare legs, thought her beautiful in her jean shorts and Mets T-shirt, detected a restoration of youth and health in her face. She spied some cows in the field, called to them, and they trotted over. She spoke baby talk to them, petted one on the nose. In the car, she declared them too beautiful to eat, a kind of noble and sentimental joke for which he ascribed to her great decency and tenderness, and he held this affection quietly in his chest, even when she ordered a cheeseburger for dinner. The move would be good for them.
And yet he grew nervous. America morphed the further west they travelled—landscapes hallucinogenic, red, brown, dry. The chain stores had names he didn't know. People at rest stops were sunburned, their accents a muddle. Entire stretches of states rolled by empty. Somewhere on the Texas panhandle they saw a storm approaching on the blank horizon, and it took many minutes cruising at 80 miles per hour before the first rain drops hit the windshield. All at once, sheet rain pounded the Subaru, lightning cracked all around. Something happened, a trick of light and electricity. He saw through the blur of torrent and frantic windshield wipers a vast iceberg on the highway dead ahead. He slammed the brakes—the car hydroplaned, rotated. Amanda screamed, or maybe they both did. The car came to a rest.
She was furious. What the hell is wrong with you? Why did you do that?
No other cars in either direction, just the din of rain hammering the roof. He breathed hard, clutched the steering wheel, eased his foot down on the accelerator, resumed their journey.
Amanda slapped the dashboard. Stop! Wrong direction!
It hit 112 degrees the day they drove into Arizona. At a truck stop, Elliott leashed the dog for a pee. They saw a miserable cow lope up over the swale of an arroyo in the empty lot next to the station, its face covered in cactus needles. The asphalt burned the pads of Tay-Tay's paws—she whimpered in the car the rest of the way. Amanda scolded him because she had read about this and yet Elliott did not purchase the protective dog booties.
I burned my fingers on the car-door handle, she said. Like that was his fault, too.
Dogfooding.
She asked him, Are you ever going to get your nose out of that laptop?
For the first time she could remember in a long while, she was in the mood for him. But he spent most his time at work. At home, too, he worked, and she had to watch him struggle. It would be one thing if he showed a little confidence. Nearly a year in Arizona and he still had his New York pallor. He was going to pieces. His hair had thinned.
Elliott sat on his rump, dangling his legs in the shallow end of their so-called swimming pool. He stared at his laptop screen with that fidgety mask of unease, which had, it seemed to her, become his permanent face. Their pool measured 12-by-8 feet in surface dimension, so small Elliott dubbed it the refreshment pod as a joke, not exactly refreshing because it was so damned hot in this city. She took a dip after sunset, long before Elliott got home, and even in the comparative cool of the evening, it still felt like a warm bath.
This is a startup, Elliott said. We're in a race, okay? Gotta put Graham through his paces.
Graham is a bunch of code, she said. Graham can kiss my ass.
Elliott huffed, kept his eyes on the screen. Yeah, well...
He took one of his hands off the keyboard long enough to pat the ivory-colored coping, inviting her to join him. She had nothing better to do, took off her robe, sat next to him in her bra and panties, dangled her legs in the water like him. He gave her a kiss on the cheek. After ten minutes he had not looked at her again, so she stood up, stripped naked and slid into the tepid water, frog-swam two strokes to the other side, turned, kicked off the wall, and glided back. She stood on the pool floor right in front of him, torso dripping above the waterline, pulled her hair back with both hands, wrung the water out. Elliott frowned at his screen, tapped a few keys.
What's Graham saying tonight? she asked.
Jargon. Way too much jargon.
Graham is a billion-dollar bore? That's funny.
Well, he's obsessed with the yield curve right now. Client eyes would glaze over. That's the point I'm trying to make to the team. It's a lot more than a billion, by the way.
Give him some charm, why don't you?
Trying.
Some balls, maybe.
Haha.
Hey doofus look at me, she said.
I'm looking, believe me. Why don't you dry off and get us both a glass. I'll be there in a few minutes.
She went to the bedroom with two glasses of wine, closed the door so Tay-Tay couldn't come in, set one glass on his nightstand, sat cross-legged and naked on her side of the bed, took a sip, waited. After her wine, she fell asleep. At some point he came to bed in the dark and spooned her, naked and ready. She scooted away.
Train left the station, boyfriend.
He said nothing in reply for what seemed a long time, and she started dozing off again when she heard him say, in that wounded boy's voice she despised, Well, maybe next year.
When she woke at 6:30, he was already gone to work. Tay-Tay slept next to her. She got dressed, leashed the dog, took her for a walk before the heat hit. The endless white-stucco dwellings with adobe-colored tile roofs looked as if they had been built in the same year, each like the other, with desertscape yards of rock and cacti, some with patches of artificial turf for putting greens. She saw no neighbors. A few cars sat in driveways or curbside. The street hummed incessantly with air-conditioning units. An inhuman noise for a place not fit for humans. She missed the noises of Queens: the cacophony of rich accents and foreign languages, the horns, the music. She wondered how long it would take people here to die—to roast alive—if the power grid ever went out. Already she could feel the temperature rising, went home as soon as Tay-Tay did her business. She sat down at her video-editing workstation without a reason. Forgotten by her clients back East, she might as well not exist. She had nothing to do, nowhere to be. All she had now was her life on the phone. It had been so for longer than she cared to admit.
Elliott unfolded his arms long enough to motion Grumio over to his desk, then warmed himself while he waited for his co-worker to drift over. The air-conditioner current came right down on his neck, practically cryogenic.
What's wrong this time? Grumio asked. He was in his mid-20s, shaggy black hair, neck tattoos. He wore fuzzy earmuffs in here, for a joke. There were 60 programmers on this floor, Grumio one of the better ones.
Look at this, Elliott said. This is the kind of thing I'm talking about. He gave Grumio his chair, stood behind him, zipped his fleece all the way up.
Grumio adjusted his black-framed glasses, scrolled through the long discourse on Elliott's screen, scrolled back, read it a second time. Seems okay to me, he said. The diction is good. Strategic outline is comprehensive. Latency... 3.3 seconds? This is rizz, man. Where's the glitch?
Look at the profile. My hypo here is a 65-year-old widow on Social Security with a hundred thou in insurance money and a $260,000 mortgage.
So?
Graham is telling her to short media stocks.
Solid, you ask me. Media stocks suck. Besides, why are you feeding him hypos like that? Aren't we aiming higher than widows?
Everything you just read is six grades above the profile's implicit risk tolerance, Gru. Why is Graham disregarding the parameters? And is it just me, or does it get colder in here every day?
Grumio looked bored. What do you want me to say?
Elliott wanted a real answer, stared him down. For a split second, Grumio's facial features rippled as if from some subdermal shockwave, and the entire room tilted like a picture frame knocked crooked. Elliott closed his eyes, tried to keep his composure. The dizziness would pass. Always did.
Are you listening to me, Gru?
Eyes still closed, he heard Grumio stand and walk back toward his workstation, answering as he went.
Graham's the brain. Ask him.
Product launch.
The snow piles up fast. Elliott cannot run anymore—the ground is too slippery, and his lungs can't take it. He bends over for air, nicked palms on grazed knees. Stopping even for a moment leaves him at the mercy of what he could not outrun anyway—cold like needles and fire, real physical misery. Violent trembling. His tennis shoes are wet, and his toes throb as if in a vice. He does not want to be in his body, wants to fly away. How could this happen in October?
Must change clothes. He opens his backpack, rummages for the blue jeans and the microfleece. He strips off his T-shirt and shorts, wet and semi-rigid with ice, and in his near nakedness the wind and snow feel like whips, so much worse than a moment before. He feels a deep, mortal regret. Did he just kill himself? He struggles into the jeans, must sit down in the snow to get them over his shoes, throws his shaking arms into the sleeves of the microfleece, zips it up to the neck.
Now he will freeze less quickly.
In every direction, whirling white and stubborn black. No lights, roads, or buildings. He does not know where he is or from which direction he came. His footsteps are already erased by wind and snow.
Thinking of the pregnant woman with the accusing finger, he reconnects to the initial fear of being pursued. He removes the revolver from his bag, winces at the biting cold of the wooden grip. Smith & Wesson Model 686, six-inch barrel, .357 magnum. Wheel gun, they called it. Cowboy gun. He never fired a weapon in his life. Passed the background check. Bought it, packed it. Watched a YouTube video to learn the basics. He wraps his discarded T-shirt around his gun hand since he brought no gloves. He picks a direction—he wants the wind at his back, not in his face—and begins to walk, no other option.
A brown-and-white spotted cow approaches from behind, gaunt and bony, her skinny legs plodding through the deepening snow.
He says Shoo, waves her away. The cow stops, blinks at him. He stumbles on and when he turns once more, he sees the cow is still following him. He walks faster but soon must stop to rest. Maybe he should just lie down, give up.
The cow is right behind him. She appears to be starving. Her shoulder joints stick up like tombstones.
Get the hell out of here, he says, waving his gun hand.
The cow takes two more steps toward him, looks him up and down. Her face glitches in a blink of time, almost matching the swirling snowfall before returning to normal cow face, and she speaks in what he recognizes to be the voice of Avatar 6.
Oooooo, sweetheart, you blew it. You're the saddest one, I swear. Look at your fingers, honey. You're going to lose them. You're going to die.
Elliott screams and yanks off four wild rounds into the howling maw.
Release Candidate.
They started the evening at Shooter's World, the Unlovables did, pairing off, occupying six lanes and burning through hundreds of rounds of ammunition with rented pistols. Penelope from marketing chose a Glock, which, she said, looked like it had been fashioned from charcoal-colored Lego blocks, something from a space movie, something to pair well with a Cybertruck. Bad-ass, she said in her Southern accent.
Elliott didn't shoot, said guns were not his thing, offered to take pictures of the others. Penelope teased him. Peacenik, she said. No fun, she said.
Even with ear protection, Elliott felt concussed in the shooting bay. He flinched at every trigger pull. Thunder shook his guts. He managed to get pictures of everyone on his phone, shot some video. Penelope got his attention. Record this, hon. She emptied her magazine rapid-fire at the paper target ten yards away, set down the Glock, turned to him, raised her arms above her head. Wooooooooo.
Afterward, drinks at a nearby club. Three booths of Unlovables, side by side. Elliott swallowed the dregs of his latest Rosita, leaving the lemon twist at the bottom of his glass, sliding it across the sticky table to the growing cluster of empties, then slouched back into the vinyl cushions. Electronica blared all around them— he could barely hear what the others were saying.
Before Christmas, mark my words, said Dave from data integrity.
Jewell from human resources said something about options vesting.
That's all anyone talked about on these outings. Elliott didn't believe the company would go public anytime soon. The market wasn't right. Even Graham said so. Graham of late seemed a grouchy prophet, warning of $315 trillion in global debt, equivalent to 340 percent of global GDP. Sovereign defaults imminent in several countries, overripe derivatives markets, war and hyperinflation waiting like storm clouds. Aging populations, shrinking workforces, growth prospects grim. Hoard cash. Load up on gold. Hedge with bitcoin. Graham was not bullish on IPOs.
Everyone at this table—everyone at the company—worked six or seven days a week, and when they did finally escape, they talked about work and how Graham would make them all rich soon. They talked about Graham, but never about Graham's advice. More and more, Elliott worried no one was really paying attention.
Their server arrived, passed around fresh glasses. Elliott took a sip of his fresh Rosita, couldn't remember how many came before it. Penelope from marketing sat to his right. She stirred her tequila Manhattan with a cocktail cherry and stared at him.
You are the saddest one, I swear, she said, close to his ear. She hailed from Alabama or maybe Mississippi—he couldn't remember which one she said—and her voice had a husky twang, indefatigably cordial.
I'm fine.
The saddest of the Unlovables. The very saddest one. How come, honey? Beyond the obvious, I mean.
In the first months after Amanda left him, Elliott abandoned any pretense of a social life, but eventually he got recruited for the Unlovables, a growing cadre of employees whose marriages had imploded during the project. Needy Graham was, by all evidence, lethal to marriages. Every week it was a different outing. Bowling, or live music, or Diamondback games. Sometimes 20 or 30 people.
He told Penelope he was tired, not sad.
She put her arm around his shoulder. Oh, the sweet liars of this realm. So sweet, so sad, so full of it. You give me a little mercy tingle, Elliott. You need a momma.
Haha.
Listen to my big news. I threw my hat in the ring, honey, you know, for the voice persona thing, and they told me today they're going to use me. Well, probably they will. I'll be recording baseline phonetics all next week.
Congratulations.
You're sweet.
Voice assist was Graham's function for the visually impaired. They programmed it to sound a little like Morgan Freeman, but company executives in Hong Kong and New York, people Elliott never met and probably never would, wanted more. Give users an array of options, voices they felt comfortable with, could trust. They wanted 25 personas by full commercial launch.
I'm Avatar 6, Penelope said.
Nice, Elliott said.
Doesn't it sound bad-ass?
Very.
I can't stop thinking about it. My voice, giving people the best investment advice in the world, I mean come on, I'm marketing, I'm brand ambassador, I went to Florida State. I'm no Warren Buffett, okay? I barely look at my 401k. You know what's weird? I could use my own avatar, take advice from myself. That would be wild.
Elliott nodded, tried to do it with enthusiasm.
She said, I love the idea that I could really help people, you know? I feel—this is weird, but I feel like I will be immortal in a way. A version of myself, a better version, a great version who people want to listen to, alive forever. God I'm drunk.
It's exciting. It's great. You should be proud.
Maybe this is petty, but hey, take that Marco. My husband, my ex. Take that, little britches.
She took a long swallow. Her eyes watered. Liquor dribbled down her chin. She wiped it off with her hand.
His girlfriend is 20 years old. She's a student at Paradise Valley freaking Community College. I met her at Zumba, invited her over to our house for drinks. I introduced her to Marco, that's how stupid I am. She has super-long legs.
I'm sorry.
She squinted at him. What happened to yours?
Elliott asked himself the same question constantly. Best he could figure, their marriage died that morning in Newfoundland, the day after the murder, when they sat at their table in the bed-and-breakfast and Amanda broke the silence with her accusation, softly spoken: You didn't do anything.
The other guy is loaded. He has a plane and everything.
That's terrible.
Elliott agreed it was. Penelope gave him a long look, leaned in, mouth on his ear: I have a little coke. Wanna follow me to the bathroom?
How old school of her. Most everyone at the company favored ketamine.
I shouldn't.
You are the saddest one, I swear.
She excused herself, grabbed her purse, made the others slide out. He watched her stumble away beneath the laser lights. Minutes later, she returned, told the others to make way once again, scooted in all the way over until her leg rubbed against Elliott's.
Miss me? Her eyes were wild.
She took his hand under the table and moved it to her leg. She kissed his ear. It's okay, she said, moving his hand higher. I want you to.
When he did nothing, she said, This is all I can do, honey. I have kids waiting for me, I can't take you home.
When he still did nothing, she said, Please touch me, Elliott, I am dying to be touched, I don't feel human anymore.
He did as she asked, and she closed her eyes, straightened her shoulders, tilted her chin up as if feeling the sun.
After a time, she removed his hand and gave him a peck on the cheek. Don't be sad, she said. When we go public, you can buy a plane, too.
Later, alone in his bed, he dreamed he had a son. They were both refugees in a vast city under military siege. His son was a young man, tall and strong, and together they fought in The Resistance, to keep people free. They became separated for a time, he wasn't sure why, and he searched in the dangerous streets and rubble for his son. He came upon a large industrial building or factory in which hundreds of refugee families hid on a secret floor. One young boy of six or seven latched onto him, would not let go, and he realized somehow time had moved backward. This boy was a younger version of his son, vulnerable and brave, and Elliott was filled with wonder and spiritual joy. How was this possible? Would he grow younger also? Then an attack. They had to leave on buses, some to flee, some to fight, but his son could not get on the bus with him, had to go on another one, and through the logic of dreams, Elliott realized with piercing sorrow his beloved son had never lived, and so they would be separated forever. Then he woke up.
He did not see Penelope on campus, not even in the employee cafeteria where he typically bumped into her, nor at the next gathering of Unlovables, at a chili cook-off. Likely she was busy recording her phonetics for Graham. He pondered her joke about buying his own plane after the stock offering, and it occurred to him he had never once entered his own financial profile into Graham. So he sat down at the kitchen table with his laptop and entered all the true things about himself—his age, background, salary, savings, legal expenses from the divorce, prospects for advancement, his hopes for the future. He hit submit, and Graham with a latency of 2.2 seconds did what he was created to do, scanning live market data and trends from every global exchange, every equity, mutual fund, commodity and debt instrument, consulting mountains of actuarial tables, ingesting and interpreting world events as offered by thousands of newspapers and social media posts in multiple languages, applying all this to Elliott's circumstances to produce a short- and long-term strategy. But instead of the customary 20-page outline, Graham offered him a list of states and countries where government-assisted suicide was legal.
Elliott forwarded this outrageous answer to Grumio: What the hell is this?
About 20 minutes later, Grumio replied. What's the problem? I'm missing whatever you're complaining about.
He looked at the answer again. Graham's reply, 20 pages, recommended more aggressive mutual funds, a taste of crypto, and a hedge of tax-free municipal bonds, as well as less life insurance, since he was now single. Nothing about suicide.
The next day at work, Grumio took one look at him and said, Dude, you need to take some time. Fly to Cancun or something.
Elliott ignored the comment, took a long gulp of coffee. If he dared to take vacation, he might never return.
He asked Grumio, Have you seen Penelope, lately?
Who?
Returning from work around midnight, Elliott found a letter in the mailbox, postmarked Cheyenne. He recognized the handwriting. Two pages inside, front and back.
Dear Elliott.
Near the end, it said, I'm pregnant. Please be happy for me.
He went to bed and woke up weeping. He thought about everything, their years together. He didn't know what to do. How much did one person have to lose for the happiness of another? He thought about Newfoundland and her accusation: You didn't do anything.
He got up, went to the kitchen table, drank a beer. It tasted like metal. He was cold, so he shut off the air conditioning, opened the windows, sat at his table in his underwear and closed his eyes, waiting for a breeze, real air. After a while, he opened his laptop and entered Amanda's hypo into Graham's query template—her age, her circumstances, the money she got in the divorce. He had to guess about Murphy's wealth but mentioned the Cheyenne acreage, the second home in Jackson, his energy company, and the plane. When he hit enter, Graham blinked longer than usual, then offered its reply.
Kill that bitch.
Amanda wakes with a feeling she cannot describe, as if the world has changed somehow, overnight. The sun is not up yet. She puts on her terrycloth robe, rubs her swollen stomach. Tay-Tay follows her. The dark hallway and carpeted stairs muffle her steps and Tay-Tay's nails. She navigates the staircase with due caution, the motherly instincts she did not know she had until recent months. The open floor plan downstairs with its big windows offers some illumination from the moonlight and snow, produces well-defined silhouettes of all the furniture, a clear shot to the kitchen, where the refrigerator's ice dispenser glows. On the bare kitchen floor, Tay-Tay's nails click as she sniffs around the baseboards. Amanda pours a glass of fortified orange juice, vitamins C and D and calcium for the girl who grows inside her. Vitamin B9 for cellular growth. The things she pays attention to, now. She takes a sip, walks into the great room, trying to pinpoint this feeling of sudden change.
The Cheyenne house, big and quiet, was built in the 1960s, smells old, and this odor, not unpleasant, is the home's primary characteristic in the dark. She imagines long-past blooms of fleabane, generations of grassland pollen, the scent of half a century of mule-deer ruts, all the things that preceded her, embedded in the walls, strong walls, protecting them from the elements yet bearing witness to nature and the passage of time. Here is the home she never expected, the unlikeliest of places, the deep surprise of belonging. The house is not as nice as the second place in Jackson, where they will fly today, weather permitting, but it suits her. Thanksgiving is only a few weeks out, and she considers the decorating possibilities. The things she cares about now, the changes in her body and mind and heart. She scarcely recognizes herself some days.
I'm having a baby, the world is going to change, everything will change.
But that's not quite it.
From the window looking south across the back acres, she studies a bluish-white carpet of deep snow. She touches the pane, feels the killing freeze on the glass. Before she went to bed last night, the television weather man said ten inches had fallen already, an October surprise. It has blown past them now. The sky is a bowl of stars.
Something made a trail through the snow, cutting in toward the house, then away from it—pokey holes as from paws and long legs, surface indentations as from a low-slung belly, a four-legged animal of some kind. At their house in Jackson, she would guess a wolf, but there were none in this part of the state. So, a dog, or most likely a coyote, some lone scavenger, attracted to the house in the dead of night, the mortal cold. Arrived and departed. Something has changed.
She puts her juice glass in the dishwasher, returns to her bedroom. Tay-Tay curls up in her dog bed by the window. Amanda disrobes and burrows under the covers against Zane's body. He is warm, smells of yesterday's hearth fire and last night's lovemaking. Zane spoons her, holds her stomach. She places her hand over his, feels blood pulsing through a vein on the back of his hand. She is overcome by peace, dozes off. When she opens her eyes, the sky is pink and bright, a perfect day to fly.
