“You’re alone, R—. You’re the only person. All these things walking around you might look like people, but they only exist in relation to you. They are what they do for you and how they make you feel. For all you know, they might disappear whenever you’re not looking at them.”
The blood is already cold. The man who shared this tiny cube with me for more than three years is fading from existence before my eyes. He’s transparent; I can see the concrete through his inconsequential heap of meaty debris; I am already forgetting what little I knew about him.
“It takes us a lifetime of confusion and struggle to realize what animals are born knowing,” my grandfather says in his smoky growl. “That there’s nothing to know. That we’re searching for meaning in an empty room. That the purpose of life is to live as long as you can, eat as much as you can, fuck as much as you can, to spread your genes and your ideas and turn as much of the world as you can into you.”
He grins, showing those crooked brown teeth. “And you know what? It’s fun. Once you know what life’s really about, it’s fucking fun.”
A shudder runs from my sticky toes through my groin and up into my skull. “What do you want?”
“I want you to work for me.”
“Doing what?”
“Times are changing. Commerce is dying. Everyone’s running for the hills to grow corn and wait for the Rapture, but I won’t stop.” His grin has stiffened into a fierce grimace, lips tight on his teeth. “You hear me, R—Atvist? I’ll never stop. The end of the world is an opportunity. We just have to figure out how to seize it.”
I look around at this prison where I spent the better part of my youth. I became an adult here. I shed my teenage skin here, stepped out of it muscled and scarred and powerful, and then I remained in this cell, staring at these bars, brooding over the rules of a fictional universe while the real one outside moved on.
I have never touched a woman. I have never tasted a beer. But I have killed a man and I have razed a city.
“I’ll help,” I tell my grandfather. “I have ideas.”
His grin returns. His breath wafts through the gaps in his teeth, tobacco and stale coffee. “Can’t wait to hear them, kid.”
He pulls a keycard out of his wallet. He swipes it over the cell door, the lock clicks, and I’m free. I step into the hall and follow Mr. Atvist out of the prison, leaving a trail of red footprints on the concrete.
I HAVE KILLED MANY PEOPLE. I have eaten their flesh and drank their memories, men, women, and children. I will never deny or forget this, but I will accept it. I did monstrous things because I was a monster, driven by unfathomable hungers and barely conscious throughout, lacking name and identity and moral framework. I have mourned this dark chapter, learned what I could from it, and turned the page. I have forgiven my second life.
But what about my first? There is no fanciful plague to blame for this. My original self is not an absurd ghoul pulled from pulp fiction. He has a name; he has a mother, a father, and a grandfather, and he made his choices in the same mundane way anyone makes them.
Who is that man? I inhabit his body and possess his memories, but he is alien to me. I feel more kinship with the mindless corpse than this bitter, rudderless, world-blaming wretch. But somehow, through some obscure alchemy of time, those two elements merged . . . and became me.
I open my eyes.
Steel bars. The stench of sweat and mildew. Am I still in the dream? I’m lying flat on my stomach, so I pull myself to my knees and attempt to look around, and then the pain hits. My fingers move to touch the epicenter; a huge, puffy bruise rises from my forehead like a tumor.
“Always the late sleeper,” says a soft voice that definitely doesn’t live in the prison of my past. My vision clears on the face of a beautiful woman. The bruise on her forehead matches mine. A dry chuckle creeps out of me.
“Your head . . . Did we . . . ?”
Julie offers a melancholy smile. “Looks like it.”
“Kissing contusions,” Nora mumbles. “Serves you right for being disgusting.”
The floor under my hands is stiff commercial carpet, its mottled beige designed to be the sum of all stains, victory by preemptive surrender. The room is bare, and all of David Boeing’s passengers sit on the floor, leaning wearily against the walls, except for my kids and Julie’s mother. I have a moment of panic before I see them in their own room across the hall, visible through barred interior windows. Audrey paces in a circle, snapping her teeth, and Joan and Alex huddle in a corner, hiding from her. The buzzing fluorescent lights turn our faces the same sickly gray as theirs.
“You’re lucky, though,” Nora continues. “You slept through a fun interrogation session. First of many, I’m sure.”
I scan her for injuries and have a moment of shock at her missing finger before remembering that happened long ago, in another life that even Julie is left to wonder about. Nora has a few scratches, but these are probably from the rough landing. When Axiom moves from convince to coerce, it doesn’t stop with scratches.