He was the boy raised with a mindset that the black helicopters were coming, that needles were how the one world government implants the microchip. The boy who thought it was normal to run bug-out drills in the middle of the night, who learned to set booby traps and trip wires, who knew to aim for the head.
As far as Avon DeWitt was concerned, God was an American and he was pissed. Pissed that the global elite had undermined his American freedoms, pissed that good-hearted, hardworking, honest citizens had been enslaved, brainwashed, lied to. Avon resolved that he would become a weapon of retribution, and his son would be a soldier of righteousness. So, they drilled. They trained.
A year later the boy chose a new name. He painted his invisible face with face-colored paint. He gave his voice a voice. Samson DeWitt died that day. Felix Moor was born. Or born again, his sins washed clean, his complicity removed. He was a tiger that escaped the zoo. A Manchurian candidate who flew the coop. He moved to Austin, using a dead kid’s birth certificate and high school transcripts to get into a state college, met a nice girl. A beauty from New York City.
In this way he became real.
The nightmares still come. The smell of cordite and the sound of the F-150 peeling out, and his daddy’s voice—hot damn, hot damn. But when he wakes, Felix tells himself those are someone else’s dreams. A stranger’s. He is a new man now, guiltless and free.
If we can deny our own death, we can deny anything.
Today is his twenty-fifth birthday.
Felix has come to Marfa, Texas, to save his sister from a Wizard.
They are parked outside the Hotel Paisano, he and Story. She of the summertime smile and the Yankee jeer. Story Burr-Nadir, the judge’s daughter, who once sang in a clear high voice—Oh, say can you see.
A county ambulance loiters on the corner beside them, rear doors ajar. As they watch, paramedics wheel a body on a gurney from the hotel entrance. The body is covered with a sheet. Hanging, the girl at the café told them when they got their coffee this morning. The third one this week. They nodded and asked for whole milk and sugar. Around the world the global death toll was ramping up. Wanton acts of self-destruction.
Pedestrian and inventive.
Self-immolation.
Suicide by cop.
It started with cigarettes. Where it will end, no one knows.
Beside Felix, Story rattles the ice in her cup. For her coffee is an excuse for chilled vanilla flavoring. She’s thinking about her mother again, Felix can tell. Story gets this look in her eye, a slight squint with the left lid, pupils cast down. Remembering. Worrying. Guilt. He’s talked her out of calling at least a dozen times in the last three weeks. It’s too risky, he tells her. A federal judge, given the connection of money and politics. They don’t call him the Wizard ’cause he wears a funny hat. He’s got power. The power to make his problems disappear. To make people disappear.
“You sound like your father,” she tells him. And by father she means the fictional father he has invented for her, dead now five years. The Fox News junkie and golf-casual supporter of the God King. Not a white supremacist exactly, but no friend to the Black man. This version of Felix’s father falls within acceptable parameters. A gun owner, yes, but not a man who fires explosive rounds at paper targets printed with the image of federal agents. The reality of Felix’s youth is too radical, too foreign, like a report from some distant killing field. And so, Felix has kept the truth from her. The truth of his identity. The truth of his lineage. The truth of his crimes.
“You can’t call her,” he says, reading her mood.
“I’m not—”
She glances over.
“—get out of my head.”
He made the mistake of switching on the radio on their drive over from the campsite this morning. The Supreme Court nomination for Judge Margot Nadir is entering its second week, the reporter told them. Felix lunged for the dial, but Story slapped his hand. Supreme Court? she said, stunned. That’s how deep a hole they’ve been in. No TV, no internet, no news for three weeks. And then the radio talked about the judge’s missing daughter, Story. It spoke of their home in Austin, abandoned mid-meal, of the bags packed but left behind. Was Story Burr-Nadir dead? Was foul play suspected?
Felix turned off the radio. He could tell that Story was feeling panicky. For her mother. For herself. She’s not used to roughing it. To shitting in the trees. For his part, Felix knows how to stay off the grid. You pay with cash, avoid places with cameras. No motels. No phone calls. He knows how to distill fresh drinking water from saltwater, to fashion a tourniquet and compress a bullet wound.
“Do you love me?” he says.
She looks at him, focusing. Behind her the paramedics load another suicide into their rig.
“You know I do.”
Felix takes her hand. “Well, I have to do this. Save her. But you can go. I’ll understand. Just don’t tell anyone where I am. Okay?”
Story closes her eyes. They’re trying to be adults here, to make responsible choices, but this whole thing feels so crazy. Ever since his sister, Bathsheba, called him that night in Austin and told Felix she’d been kidnapped and was trapped in the desert. Ever since Bathsheba told him that they monitored what she ate, kept her locked in a tower. Ever since she said she’d been impregnated—that’s the word she used, impregnated—and then told Felix the name—E. L. Mobley, a politically connected billionaire—and said he couldn’t call the cops. Well, ever since then she’s felt like Alice down the rabbit hole.
“Let me at least tell my mother,” Story said that night. “She’s a federal judge. She can call the attorney general.”
But Felix was adamant. No calls. No emails. He asked Story if she knew how much Mobley had donated to get the current president elected, how connected he was in political circles.