He’s done all right for himself the past five years at the Bureau, racking up top secret clearances like poker chips. Indeed, Wayne’s current assignment, Operation Bombshell, is his own brainchild. Though he’d had help from the Development and Fabrication team who’d built her—even weaving human hair collected from wives and sisters into a wig they’d bleached and, later on, deep-conditioned with a fragrant hot-oil treatment. And there were the guys in Robotics, of course. They’d had a hand in developing her language and mobility functions. And Marc from Explosives. He’d been a big help. Still, everyone at the Bureau generally agrees that she, Operation Bombshell, belongs to Wayne.
And here they are in the Montana woods, she and Wayne, down the road a small stretch from a cabin that belongs to one of the most wanted criminals in all of America. Wayne’s been on his trail for so many years now that few at the Bureau believe the guy will ever be caught. That’ll be fun when Wayne brings this sucker’s charred remains into the lab for dental and DNA analysis. He’ll show those hot-dogging agents who joke behind closed doors. He’s heard them. He’s a surveillance expert, for criminy’s sake. “There goes Wayne, down the drain,” or “Operation Bumshell,” or worst, he’s heard his name, “Wayne,” followed by an explosion of giggles, his career the punch line.
A branch ticks and scrapes against the roof of the van. Wayne studies the dark speedometer. The van has been made to resemble a pool cleaner’s work van, but outside of the surveillance equipment stashed in the back, there is little in the way of high-tech luxury. Wayne rests his feet up on the hard plastic console between the driver’s and passenger’s sides. He sticks his heel down into the cubbyhole made to hold hot beverages. Leaning back in the van’s captain’s seat, he rubs at a small swatch that he keeps in his pocket. It is a bit of her skin, a square silicone sample. He raises the skin to his nose, tickling a number of wiry nostril hairs. He inhales her faint plastic scent, recalling moments of bliss, some that transpired mere hours earlier in this van as he smiled and selected an outfit for her to wear, helped her test the charge in her battery pack, stuffed her body cavity full of explosives, and then saluted her as she signed off on her first and last mission with a quick nod and the word “Sir.” He’d taught her to be a proper soldier. With remote viewing switched on, he watched her knock on the door of the cabin.
*
“We don’t want any!” Ted screams through the bolted door. But Ted isn’t a “we.” He’s just an “I.”
In the cabin there’s one small window from which he often peers out across the valley, startled by how steadfast the mountains can be. Ted waits for the mountains to move or exhale or erupt. He’s got all the time in the world. He could wait all day and nothing would ever happen besides the mountains changing colors with the sun at night. Ted tries to achieve such stillness himself and would be able to if not for an itch he always gets right where his hair parts and the grease of his scalp dredges up a dull ache so that he must scratch the itch or be driven insane.
Ted’s been alone for a very long time.
Some nights, as the sky turns pink at sunset, he lies on his back staring out the window. The trees’ limbs become a darker shade of black, outlines that resemble huge dendrites of nerve endings against the sky. Some nights he will lie there until there is no light left at all, until one shade of black swallows the subtleties and he is alone lying on his back staring at the square window as though it were a dead TV set.
Other nights he’ll spend his time building small bombs, some that are thin enough to slip into the open arms of an envelope.
The knocking hasn’t stopped. “We don’t want any!” Ted screams again to no effect. He cannot believe someone is knocking on his door. He is a million miles away from any civilization. But there it is, steady and rhythmic; the knocks fall like the footsteps of an approaching giant. There is a joke in this somewhere, Ted’s sure. What dedication. The knocking continues at a regular pace for thirty, thirty-five minutes. No kidding. He almost can’t believe a passion so unparalleled. This knocker is no quitter, or else, he thinks, this knocker is a robot. Ha! He laughs, finding the joke. A robot in the wilderness of Montana. It’s not a very funny joke, not really a joke at all, but he laughs anyway.
“Go away!”
The knocking continues. Ted lies on his back smelling the pine from the floorboards. It is a plague of knocks, a Chinese water torture of knocks. He turns his cheek down to the rough boards. The corner of his lip touches the wood. He curls his body and counts the seconds between each pounding, waiting for the following thud to arrive so that the sliver of silence, the moments between each knock, swells into a room where long, long years of thought are stored, warehouses filled with stalled breaths.
He tries to remember the last time he encountered a human being. Late last month? I believe so. I went to town for batteries and Fruit Roll-Ups and the woman behind the cash register said, “Will that be all?” and I nodded my head, meaning yes.
Knock.
Ted doesn’t really like people. He prefers the woods, the cabin, and the long dirt road one has to take to get here. The road is overgrown in part with berry bramble that scratches at any vehicle. In some places dead branches fall across the road and he just leaves them there rotting, blocking passage. Such a road is necessary to feel the way he does—that society, if it has to exist, is best kept far, far away, some sort of rare outcropping or singular species of palm tree or hermit crab or saltwater estuary—something that is, but just isn’t here, not in the Montana woods.
Ted opens his eyes. The last rays of the sun shine in through the window. The knock comes again. Who is it? He can’t imagine. It isn’t a postman because he doesn’t receive any mail. He makes sure of that by not having a mailbox. Why should the United States government be allowed to come to his house every day except Sunday, to deliver strychnine printed in four-color?
Knock.
No one even knows he is here except for his brother and his brother would not knock.
America moves so quickly it blurs itself into a coma. Ted moves slowly and nothing gets past him. He lifts his spine from the wooden floor like a cobra lifting its head, one vertebra at a time, alert.
Knock. The curiosity’s the killing part. He hoists himself up off the floor. He does a quick duck and roll over to the door and, peering through a crack, he sees something that surprises him. He slides back the bolt. He answers his door, something he’s never done before.
“Finally,” she says, and grabs at her chest as though they are pillows she is trying to fluff. “I thought you had died.”
“What?” he asks, and nothing else.
“Well,” she says, beginning to explain. “You’re not going to believe this,” she says as he starts to close the door on her, regretting having opened it. “Wait, please.” The door continues to close. “WAIT!” The door stops.
“What?” he asks again.
“They’re chasing me. Please.”
“Who?”
She looks over her shoulder. “The bad guys.”
“Why?” he asks.
“Because I’ve been a very naughty girl,” she says flatly, sincerely, no innuendo.
Ted is puzzled. He is curious. “What’d you do?”
“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.”
“Huh?”