voices, but they’re muffled, as if his ears are crammed with earth.
At the foot of the steps, he bends over and grips his knees to cough his hardest cough—and something snags halfway up his throat. He tries to suck a breath and can’t, and suddenly he’s suffocating. Something tough and fibrous has caught in his gullet. He opens his mouth and sticks a finger in to force himself to gag and finds wiry threads sticking out of his throat. He grips them between thumb and forefinger and pulls. He makes watery, sick, choking sounds as he hauls out what appears to be a root: brown, hairy, dusty. He pulls and pulls, and it goes on and on, and then suddenly the last of it is out—the stem of a plant with a few greenish pods at one end and a string of his spit hanging off it.
Jack tosses it aside in revulsion, turns, and flies toward the kitchen. He is in a panic to find help and desperate to get the taste of soil out of his mouth, and as is often the way in dreams, he runs through parts of the house that don’t exist. He runs through a room where the floorboards have been removed to show the dirt beneath. Someone has been digging graves here. He runs through a room where Beth reclines naked in a claw-footed tub, soaping one pink leg in the steam. She’s not using a bar of soap but a flower of soap. A geranium, Jack thinks, the idea landing with a bewildering occult force. A geranium! She asks if he wants to get in with her, but he keeps running. He slaps through the swinging kitchen door and rushes to the sink and throws on the tap. The faucet leaps, jerks, doesn’t produce anything—and then begins to bubble rusty-colored water. He stares. The water darkens and deepens in color, becoming viscous. It stinks not of blood but of fresh-turned earth.
“Wash your face,” his mother says gently, and takes him by the hair and shoves his head into it.
Cold water wakes him.
He sways at the sink in the kitchen, catching clean, fresh, icy water in the bowl of his cupped hands and then splashing it into his own face. With each handful of water, he rinses away a little more of the night terrors. When he’s in the middle of one, it feels as true as life—truer, in some ways, more compelling. But they melt as fast as snowflakes against bare skin. He drinks right from the tap, and by the time he stands straight and wipes his mouth, his heart is no longer racing and he feels sleepy and untroubled. He knows he’s been night wandering because he can’t remember coming downstairs, but he recalls almost nothing of his confused fantasies except Beth roasting her naked body pink in a hot bath. The clock on the oven reports it is just three minutes after 1:00 A.M.
As Jack fills a glass of water—he is still thirsty, his throat feels dusty somehow, and he wonders if he’s been in the backyard eating dirt again—low male voices in the dining room catch his attention: his father and Connor. They have not heard him shuffling around. Jack crosses the dark expanse of the kitchen to the swinging door, which gapes open, held ajar by an antique doorstop, a cast-iron ear of corn. Jack is about to say hello, then shuts his mouth. He remains in the darkness of the kitchen, peering silently at his father and his cousin.
Hank’s laptop is open, and the screen shows an image of the federal building in Oklahoma City, after Timothy McVeigh’s bomb collapsed the whole front of the structure. Jack has heard his father say, more than once, that Oklahoma City was the first move in a long game, but when Jack asks what game and who’s playing, his father only pats him on the head and smiles fondly.
Hank has a hand on his nephew’s shoulders. Connor leans over the table, his back to the kitchen. They’re looking at maps. One is a printout of an urban area. Another is a hand-drawn diagram of a building.
“—is the easiest way to get a pass to enter the garage. Park on level A-1, leave the keys in it, and walk.”
“ATF is the top floor?”
Hank’s right hand makes little circles on Connor’s back. “And there’s an IRS office in the same building, on four. A small one, but still tasty—like the cherry on