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You’re 17 and having a panic attack on a beach in Miami. The air is thick and bright and hot, swallowing you whole as you manage to press your fingers to the pulse point on your neck, watching the waves break in irregular patterns. You try to breathe; can’t.
It’s the result of a job gone wrong - your first. You’d flown thousands of miles to this godforsaken place – too much sun, too many people - only to find that the drug trafficker you’d been blackmailing had managed to shed all traces of his identity and smuggle himself out of the country. There was a hired man with a gun waiting for you. You managed to pick a lock, find an escape route – but it was a close thing, and the fact that this gave you pause at all unsettles you deeply. You’re not afraid of death; even less afraid of dying alone, unknown. It won’t happen again.
A year later, you’ll empty this man’s bank accounts and put a bullet in his head for the trouble; but you don’t know this yet. Now, your body is attempting to recalibrate itself, adjusting to the notion that people can manage to out-predict you. It’s an awful feeling, and a relatively foreign one; a too-human one. It won’t happen again.
You’re acutely aware of the group of teenagers loitering on the beach, staring at you, at your awkward, crouched silhouette, the little gasps of air you’re managing to suck in. They gawk; snicker. It doesn’t bother you – they’re so drearily predictable. You wonder if you’re the sort of at-risk-youth they learn about at the under-funded public school they probably spend most of their pathetic lives at. Probably not; you don’t think this country’s educational system could dream you up if they tried. Still, there is a vial of acontine burning a hole in your pocket, and although you haven’t yet resorted to casual homicide, you briefly entertain the idea of cozying up to them just enough to slip the substance into the bottle of booze they’re poorly disguising as Coke.
The moment passes. The watch on your wrist beeps and your stomach growls, reminded. You opt for a pack of cigarettes rather than the protein your body probably needs, the beginning of a brief habit that gets promptly broken when, one day, you catch your reflection in a window, all strung out on caffeine and sucking on the end of a cigarette in a way that reminds you too much of your mother. You quit cold turkey right then and there.
It’s like the time you were 13 and found your mother passed out in a pool of her own vomit, again. When you’d looked at her, all limp and inoperative, you vowed to never become anything resembling that sort of human wreckage. To really drive the point home, you snatched the remainder of her vodka, forced yourself to finish it off and spent all night retching in the middle of the trailer park. You wanted to get all that bad code out of you in one go, to realign the variables. Your mother found you the next morning, all shaky and inert: there, there she’d said, and, don’t say I never gave you anything.
A year later, she was dead, and you were left with a decade-old car you can’t recall ever running, a wad of cash you’d found hidden in an air vent, and a pistol with no bullets.
Then, you’re 22 and you’re looking back on that day with a sort of ineffable nostalgia – not for the place, or the circumstance necessarily, but for the girl who left home and never went back. For the trailer she burnt to the ground without so much as a second thought. Well, you suppose, perhaps this counts as a second thought.
“What are you thinking about,” asks the girl from between your legs. She’s on her knees, staring up at you.
You’re in a library at MIT, taking a break from hacking into the university’s mainframe. She probably thinks you’re a student, too; you didn’t ask. Your fist in her hair pulls tighter.
“Nothing,” you say harshly, “I didn’t say stop.”
She puts her mouth back on you and you keep your eyes open. The ancient texts surrounding you stare back, indifferent, and you let yourself come undone only briefly, only with fingernails digging into scalp. Sex has never been a priority for you. And you hardly ever see the point in fucking anyone – you rarely come across women willing to indulge you in your more sadistic proclivities, once you realize you have them, and besides, you can get yourself off alone just fine. You often prefer it, losing control when no one is there to look.
You were bored though. And this girl, with her long hair and her too-trusting eyes, reminded you of the girl who used to be interested in people, rather than continuously disappointed by them. Just enough to make you press her up against the shelf of books when she’d asked if you needed help with anything.
“You forgot your book,” she tells you, after, when you’re turning to go. She presses the paperback into your hands, the one with the picture of the mouse on the cover, the one that will be dropped into a mailbox later that afternoon, sent off to Bishop, Texas, that place you haven’t been certain is real, or just some universe you dreamt up, for nearly a decade. “Right,” you say, “thanks.”
You’re 28 and doing a half-assed job at patching up a bullet wound on your forearm. You’re in Seattle, at the first piece of property you ever bought. You were 19, and it was mostly pointless. You’ve never been afforded the luxury of staying in one place for long periods of time and you only bought it because you could – stupid, really; you’ve never even stayed a full night here.
Better late than never, you suppose, finding a single blanket in the linen cabinet (it must have been here when you bought the place). The walls of the house remain bare; there is a futon in one corner, a pristine fireplace against one wall, and not much else. You don’t let yourself imagine the sorts of frivolous things you could fill the place up with if you were so inclined: the pretentious art you could hang, the scented candles you could light, the reliant pet you could feed.
Stupid, really.
You fall asleep on the lumpy futon, blood soaking onto the fabric, the only proof anyone was ever there at all.
You’re 39 and you’re having a panic attack on Brighton Beach.
There is a bottle of anti-anxiety pills that Sameen put into your bag and which have, and probably will, remain unopened. The Machine is quiet. The waves are loud. The beach is cold. You can’t do much else but focus on the immediate, the absolute.
A bullet nearly lodged itself into Sameen’s head. Your bullet. It missed - but it was a close thing. On your right, She’d said, but you hadn’t been listening, had misheard Her. You’d made a mistake. Shaw had ducked, clipped your missed target, and said, bring the van around front, as if nothing had happened. As if you hadn’t just almost killed her.
And now you’re sitting on the beach across from the warehouse, suffocating at the thought of it. At all the endless accidents that the universe is made up of. You think of ones and zeroes; it doesn’t help.
Bear comes trotting up to you, pausing worriedly when Sameen calls out verblijf, from a few paces behind. He circles you curiously. “Root,” Shaw says and gets on her knees behind you, puts her hands on your shoulders, moves them up and down in a way that’s meant to be soothing.
“Breathe,” Shaw says.
“Breathe,” the Machine says.
You can’t. You don’t know how to tell them what you’re afraid of. There is a loft in Manhattan with a dog bowl and a king sized bed and bookshelf. There is a fridge full of food and guns. There are cameras and microphones and a voice that She’s developing for Herself. There are two marked graves that you go visit, every once in a while.
There is also an empty house in Seattle, and a piece of empty, scorched land in Bishop.
You don’t know how to tell them that seeing someone and knowing them and watching them die, is much worse than dying alone and unknown. You don't say anything at all.
The Machine plays you pacifying tones, a consant beat. Sameen remains pressed up against you, a steady pulse that you can feel. They are both real and alive and infinitely unpredictable.
You breathe.