Jared barely made it to his office futon after the meeting with Ethan. Once there, he drifted quickly off to sleep. With fewer and fewer memories for his brain to access, the fewest possible neurons were firing; only those needed to control his most basic bodily functions were active. Jared’s sleep was as peaceful and deep as Crater Lake.
It was in this moment that Glio reached the nadir of his existence, the consumption of Jared’s seminal memory. All people have such a memory, the one moment in time that, more than any other, defines who they are and who they are to become. For most, it’s something that happens in the fourth or fifth year of life, after the brain has developed enough intellectual capacity to begin to comprehend the world, but not enough emotional capacity to process the new thoughts streaming along its synaptic pathways. For a few people, those able to overcome the circumstances of an unfortunate existence, it happens later in life.
Jared’s seminal moment happened just after his fourth birthday.
The sky was the color of the Caribbean Sea, a few clouds billowing through the ether like punctuation—ellipses and commas, not periods or exclamation points. The sun warmed Jared’s skin as he sat in the grass moving a toy cement mixer back and forth. His father, engrossed in a book, sat in a lawn chair a few feet away.
All of a sudden, little Jared began to blubber. Quick as a wink, his father was kneeling beside him—though in Jared’s memory, his father moved in slow motion, taking an entire age of man to cross the stone patio to his distraught son.
“What is it, Jared?” his father asked, his concern real but measured.
“Bug!” Jared shouted, and pointed at a grasshopper that had landed on his truck. “Bug!”
“Oh, well, we can fix that,” his father said. Glio expected to see the father shoo the grasshopper away, but he didn’t. He was astonished to see Jared’s father pick up the grasshopper and hold it out for his son to examine, the creature immobile in the gentle grasp of the man’s forefinger and thumb.
“You see, Jared,” his father told him, “whatever you’re afraid of is probably way more scared of you.”
Jared was just old enough to grasp this concept, and he let it rattle around in his brain.
“Really?” he asked.
“Really,” his father told him. “Just look at this grasshopper. You’re ten times his size.”
Jared smiled.
“No, wait, you’re a hundred times his size.” Jared’s smile crept into a laugh. His father went through a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, and a million until little Jared was doubled over in laughter.
He was scared of many things after that but never so completely frightened that he was paralyzed. That moment helped Jared see the world the way he was sure it was meant to be seen. The lesson followed him unconsciously through the rest of his life, giving shape to the character that would come to define who he was.
When Glio finished the memory, he swam through a sea of psychoses, largely calm waters dulled by the pain-relieving drugs Jared had been prescribed in the wake of the radiation. From there, he climbed mountains of regret, reaching their craggy summits with ease. On the other side was a kind of Shangri-la of mirth: memories of joy and abandon.
But through it all, Glio knew something was wrong. There was a foul aftertaste on the wind, the stench of disease. And Glio knew. He knew that he, or rather the corporeal he, the physical body, was dying.
Now that he had an identity and memories, Glio very much wanted to live. He also knew that death, unlike the grasshopper, wasn’t afraid of him, that it couldn’t be. But still, the memory of that day with Jared’s father gave comfort to Glio in a way he didn’t think was possible.
Glio was becoming Jared Stone. But he also now knew that Jared Stone was going to die. Glio didn’t know how, but he needed to stop that from happening.
In the meantime, he would continue his feast.
***
Two days before Life and Death was scheduled to return to the air, Jackie started collecting little snippets of video. Max told her to keep them short, under twenty seconds each.
“Excuse me,” she would say, interrupting a crew member, “I’m doing a school project on the show. Can I film you while you work?”
The entire crew was suffering from a mélange of guilt and posttraumatic stress over the murder of Trebuchet and would have done just about anything for the Stone family. Each one tripped over the next to help Jackie get some behind-the-scenes footage. They showed her how to light a set, taught her about the 180-degree rule for framing a shot, and gave her tips on when to use a close-up versus an extreme close-up.
At first, they mugged for the camera, smiling at Jackie, offering a small quip or bit of wisdom. But as that day and the next wore on, they started to forget Jackie was there. The irony of this—that the crew should have the same reaction to being filmed as the cast of Life and Death or Big Brother or Survivor or any other reality show, that they completely tuned out the existence of the cameras—wasn’t lost on Jackie. The project made her feel subversive, rebellious, and so very alive.