drawn. He hovers, two feet above his own head, looking down on his body. At strange hours, excitement comes over him, then crashes into wild anxiety. Even a ten-minute walk to the convenience store feels life-threatening.
Late on a Friday night, he ducks into the department to fetch his university mail. He can’t even calculate the last time he was in the building. It takes three tries to remember his combination. The mailbox is so wedged with flyers he must pry them out. The logjam bursts, and months of neglected junk spill across the mailroom floor. A voice behind him says, “Hey, stranger.”
“Hey!” he answers, too exuberant, before he even turns to see.
Mary Alice Merton, fellow All But Dissertation. Sweet farm-girl face and smile like a dental brochure. “We thought you died.”
The worst freedom courses through him. Not dead. But I helped kill someone. “Nope. Fellowship.”
“What happened? Where have you been?”
He hears his dead undergrad mentor quoting Mark Twain. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. “In the field. I seem to have gotten a little lost.”
She flicks his upper arm with the back of her fingernails. “Not the first, mister.”
“I have all the facts. Just can’t get them put down in a coherent way.”
“Completion anxiety. What’s so damn hard about turning in a diss? So it’s a mess. Screw it, and deposit.”
He struggles to kill his crazy excitement and retrieve the pitch of normal speech. To pass himself off as himself, not an arsonist and accomplice to manslaughter. Psychologists should be the greatest liars on the planet. Years of training in how people deceive themselves and others. The lessons come back to him. Do the opposite of what your felon impulses tell you to. And when subpoenaed to appear before the court of public opinion, dazzle with misdirection.
“Hungry?” He remembers to lift his eyebrows just a hair.
He sees the warnings going off in her. Who is this guy? Three years of nothing but business, borderline autistic, and now he wants to play at being human? But confirmation bias will always beat out common sense. All the data prove it. “Starving.”
He crams the months of mail into his backpack and they head for late-night falafel. Five years later, he has a folder full of respected publications on in-group idealism and is up for early tenure at Ohio State. Fifteen more beyond that—no time at all—he’ll be a noted figure in his field.
IT’S EASIER TO LIVE for months high up in the redwood canopy than to pass seven days at ground level. Everything is owned; a one-year-old knows that. It’s as much a law as Newton’s. Walking down the street without cash is a crime, and no one alive would imagine for a minute that things in real life might go any other way. Nick can’t afford to be picked up for anything—not for vagrancy, not for camping without a permit, not for grazing on manzanita berries in a state park. He finds a cabin, rented by the week, in a depressed little town at the foot of the logged mountains. His yard backs onto a stand of juvenile redwoods, straight and clear, only a foot and a half thick, but known to him. The closest thing left to kin.
He must leave this place, get as far away as possible, for banal safety if not sanity. But he can’t stop waiting, can’t give up on the chance of a message that might redeem even a fraction of disaster. He lived in this place, with her. Here, for almost a year, he knew what purpose was. Of all the places on this forgetting Earth, this is the one she’d return to.
He talks to no one, goes nowhere. It’s the rainy season again, the season that just ended. He falls asleep in a drizzle and wakes to a downpour. The roof comes alive with the assault of water. He’s up, listening, and can’t let go. No sooner does he fall asleep than he wakes in panic to daylight and the rain’s cease-fire.
He goes out back to check the culvert. It’s overflowing into an improvised creek through the rented porch. Nick stands in T-shirt and sweats, watching dawn pour down over the mountain. The hour smells moist and loamy, and the soil hums under his bare feet. Two thoughts fight over him. The first, so much older than anyone’s childhood, is: Joy comes in the morning. The second, brand-new, is: I’m a murderer.