Fiction

It has been raining and there has been thunder and lightning for the past week. When it dies down, you can smell ozone in the damp air. In the evening the air feels clearer, less swampy, and I like to sit in my chair and listen to the radio. There are a few stations that still broadcast over AM, for and by people like me who need a place to hide, outside of time. When did history end? Anticlimax. I drive past houses now where the windows are all staring inwards at themselves. The hyperreality machines don’t throw off any light and you see none from out the windows. It is an odd feeling that I get. People cross the highways on foot now too, you see them, under the sodium lamps. Sad and shuffling through the dark.

The transformer on the corner needs to be replaced, I can see it in the blue glow of that light on the corner attached to its pole. The power company won’t replace it until it explodes on its own. It doesn’t matter what I tell them. When the storm kicks off again I should just shoot it through the attic window with my rifle—that would get them out here, fixing it. I would but the tenant would hear. It’s just that soon they won’t know how to replace it. It’s an old model, it has no internal diagnostics chip, can’t be dialogued with remotely. It is too simple a machine for them to understand.

The grid has changed. It used to live at the very end of itself, cascading off of its own edge, every joule of current mingled, being generated and distributed all at the same moment. The power had nowhere to go besides out into the world, and its only storage, the only place power which could not be used went was the massive concrete flywheels, like great mills, storing power as glacial momentum. The system which turned on every lamp and washing machine, every computer and air-conditioner, any power that hummed through the wooden crucifixes on the sides of the road, it had been alive in a way that it no longer is. Now they have the batteries inside the houses and every watt is metered by algorithms which map its distribution to curve out spikes. The system has become efficient, and when you call for power to turn on your bedside lamp in the middle of the night, no dormant power-plant in New Jersey will have to turn itself on just for you. Your energy is mediated by a massive battery in your house. The system runs cooler and easier, flows like osmosis through the counties. The system was a breaking wave with no end to its crest, the system was caught in a perpetual climax.

I remember when they started installing the batteries, ours went in the garage. It sat in the corner next to the red plastic storage bins we’d got from Target. It was totally silent. Like old topsoil. It is the buffer between the house and the grid. It mediates our connection. This neighborhood alone, the charge from all the batteries could power a single house for a month.

The garage has almost the same smell as it did ten years ago, warm and dry, dusty. I was happy once, I think. She used to move through these hallways and rooms and I think they remember her as a fine blur. In entropic time systems decay, energy can neither be created or destroyed, all things serve the beam, etc. . . I have been alone for a long time now, and I feel sometimes as though my life is happening somewhere else, without me, and I can only hope to one day find myself inside of it again. The grid has changed.

There is a theory I have read which is metaphorical and states that oil is alive, that oil wears the world economy like a glove. This is a deep and powerful idea. I had a deep and powerful idea once, staring up at a pylon, one of a chain cutting a swathe through the wilderness, that the third largest event in history, after the creation of life and the dawning of consciousness, was the discovery of petroleum. The earthly avatar of capitalism’s spiritual being—capitalism, which is of course simply the codification of a stronger organism destroying a weaker one. Monolith rises out of the earth. Power, eternal. A system to control the body and another to bind the soul, church and state. In entropic time systems decay. It is thoughts like these I think about lying in bed at night, knowing as I do where all the wire in my walls run, and I wonder what it is my house is thinking about, what dark dreams it dreams. I have heard that electricity is neutral, it only wants to go home, back into the earth. I have also heard power corrupts. I do not know if the high-tension wires rust but I know the spars of their towers do.

For instance, just to show you as an informative image—behind my house, behind my neighborhood, there used to be a block of houses. They sank into the earth one night. Just like that. What kind of a world is this? In the middle of the night, they were gone, all of the families inside. There had been a cavity in the earth, deep in the earth. A gaseous bubble, goes the theory. Sinkholes like that, you would hear about farther out, closer to the Marcellus fault. From the deep, high-pressure natural gas wells evacuating their slurry into the groundwater. No one talks about it, it’s been years since it happened. It never really got cleaned up and you can still go back there, find pieces of plastic siding or insulation. Water sits in it now, the cavity, it doesn’t drain well. I was down there the other night as it was getting dark. Trees hang over the crater, and inside is covered in dead leaves. You can see the trees reflected in the water. I stood on the edge and looked down into it, into the cavity. There were lights, I realized, in the water. Blinking softly, dead lightning bugs. Dying. Dozens of them, floating in the pools of water. I stayed at the edge of the cavity until the stars came out, and they were reflected in the pools of water, and their light and the lights of the fireflies mingled.

OK, sir that’s done the install. We’ve put in the scanners here, here, and here, all along this wall, and in the corners of all the rooms, as well as the magnetic wall striping according to the geographical meridians of the house and its particular resonant signature. You can view the holo-renders from any device but obviously you will need a projector for the full effect. As an employee of the Federal Government the question of whether or not you inform the other occupants of the dwelling is up to your discretion.

Great. Fantastic. Great work here guys. Really. Thanks so much. I can take it from here. This all looks great. We feel much better now. Thanks, really. Thanks so much. I’ll walk you all out. Really great. Wonderful.

The sunset over the tops of the houses in the cul-de-sac dispersed orange in the scrub-pines behind, clouds protruded horizontally over. Special Agent Litmus Braithwaite sat parked in his 2019 white Kia Sorento, not going inside his house, just watching the sunset through his windshield. He noticed the way the pines moved a little bit in the breeze. He closed his eyes and rubbed his face with the palm of his hand. He opened his eyes. It was dark now, the sky was purple. His wife was coming out of the front door of their house and walking across the lawn, not following the brick which sloped into the driveway on the side of the house, but across the grass itself, out to his car. He opened his door. The dome light turned on. The car began to bing bing out into the darkening asphalt of the housing development. He reached back in and took out his key from the ignition and shut the door. The dome light dimmed but would stay on for another few moments. He walked to the front of the car. She reached out to embrace him in front of the car and he embraced her.

Honey, it’s happened again. Look, look. Wake up. Look. They’ve been marking the trees down in the run again. Those kids. I heard the sounds of dogs again last night. Lucky was scared. Lucky slept under our bed all last night did you know that? I wanted to let him up on the bed but I know that’s not allowed no matter what the situation is. Here. Look at this picture of the strange markings. Isn’t that strange? And the sounds of the dogs. Can you call them today honey? The dog catchers? Can you call the dog catchers today honey while you’re at work? Those wild dogs are becoming a problem down in the run, and the neighborhood kids, the bad ones, I know they go down there to huff glue. I love it there, below the cul-de-sac, before the sun rises, walking Lucky. You know how much I love it. Can you do something about it? Do you want me to yell over the sound of the shower? You want me to stay in the bathroom with you while you shower? Can you please call the dog catchers today while you’re at work? I think you should. I really think something needs to be done. We should talk to the homeowners association.

Litmus, how is the case coming? We haven’t received a progress report in weeks.

Litmus Braithwaite found it easy to make eye contact with his superior, Agent Jayce. Was it because she was a woman, or because he technically outranked her? She was only provisionally tasked with supervising his investigation after the previous advisor had quit due to complications.

I’m sorry, he said, there have been a lot of complications with the case. Its information structure is incredibly dense. More dense than we had previously been aware. And its architecture is. . . irrational. It’s been difficult to establish an efficient mode of analysis for it. Data points refuse to correlate under previously effective rubrics.

Perhaps you could just give us the basics. I need something to take upstairs. She was asking him now, in a way that was perhaps more than professional. She was only provisional after all. She wanted to make an impression on the brass.

I’m sorry, said Litmus, I’ve also been experiencing some take-home problems. Could be connected with the case. It’s hard to say. Possible security issues. Putting a strain on my marriage. My wife is becoming more and more upset. I don’t know as yet—

Just in broad strokes, Agent Braithwaite, broad strokes, can you tell us what it is that you’ve been spending these hundreds of billed hours of company time on?

. . . ah—that is, it’s not so easy to [...] If I were to say, come to your department, and ask your provisional overseer, you know—exactly what it was exactly that they were, I mean, every second of every—

Not exactly, Agent Braithwaite. Just one thing. Tell us one task you’ve completed. One aspect of the work you’ve been focusing on.

You want one aspect? A single aspect? A multitudinous rhizome of possibilities flashes through his mind! Do you know who these people are, that I’ve been assigned to analyze, do you know the things they’re capable of conceiving?

One thing Mr. Braithwaite, a single, solitary thing.

[...] Reels and reels of movie film, erupting out of the ground like an oil geyser [...]

Dad, Dad I saw that man again yesterday down in the run, picking up trash with his claw on a stick. Man, these eggs are runny. You burned the toast again.

I told you to stop going down there, I told you, I said not to go down there.

Ah there’s no problem down there! It’s where all the kids go! C’mon Dad!

It makes your mother very worried.

Yeah, I know but she worries about everything.

Your mother loves you very much.

Where is Mom.

She’s asleep with her sleeping mask on.

OK, well, I should get out the door for the bus.

Alright son, have a wonderful day at school.

Braithwaite watched his son board his cheerful yellow school bus through the window of the living room. The drapes were heavy fabric printed with colonial designs and had been very expensive. Everything in the house had been bought from the same store, which was W & Sons. His wife loved W & Sons. Litmus finished drinking his glass of orange juice and eating his runny eggs, before going into the kitchen and thoroughly wiping his plate off before depositing it in the dishwasher. The dishwasher was very sensitive and could not take a lot of food debris. It was very environmentally friendly. He then went upstairs to look in on his wife. Their bedroom was totally dark, the heavy printed fabric blinds from W & Sons having been totally drawn, but he could still vaguely make out her form in the middle of their king size pleated bedspread. She was so beautiful when she slept. She had taken more than the recommended dose of her sleeping pills, Litmus supposed, probably more than the recommended dose of her anxiety pills too. And, if he was being honest, she may have had a glass or two of wine before bed as well. Actually, they both had. Modern pharmaceuticals are an important part of a healthy, wellness-promoting lifestyle. She really was beautiful when she slept.

He continued down the hall to the door of his study, which was locked by a special fingerprint lock he had had installed, as well as a deadbolt. Undid the deadbolt with a key from his pocket, then pressed his thumb to the scanner pad. It clicked on and glowed blue. He entered.

The holo-projector had been checked from the work lab. Usually priced at around 100K per but he made it clear to the technicians that it was absolutely necessary he have one for his work. It looked, essentially, like an old xerox machine with a glass aquarium on top, the glass aquarium being the box wherein the 3D holograms were projected. He booted up the system in live mode, viewing the various rooms on the screen in only two dimensions. Living room, dining room, kitchen, first floor bathroom, hallway. Lucky came in and began to lick his leg. He realized he’d forgotten to shut the door behind him, then realized he’d forgotten to walk the dog as well. He shooed Lucky out, vowed only to scan for a few minutes.

Litmus rewound to the scene of the two of them in bed the night before. He could scan how many pills she had taken when she was in the bathroom, what faces she had made while he had talked to her through the bathroom door while he was still lying in bed shirtless, reading his book. He could scan whether or not her orgasm had been real or faked, by projecting her torso within the glass box and slowing the moment down until he could see if her pelvic floor muscles were involuntarily contracting. He could scan and re-scan their entire conversation. There was a key somewhere, buried deep in the data. He could understand. Once he understood, then he could focus on his case.

Things had started to move, within the house, was the reason for the scanner. Things had begun to go awry. Things had started being unmellow. For instance there was a black spot that had appeared on the ceiling above the television. Black and greasy, perfectly round. Denise scrubbed it away when they’d first noticed it, but it always seemed to creep back when they least expected it. One of them would look up, arm across shoulder over the couch, and there it would be. They would have to clean it immediately, getting out the high-powered cleaning sprays and the footstool, the mop, paper towels. And after it was cleaned up the night would invariably be ruined. Denise would find it impossible to relax and be forced to begin “winding down,” and usually within forty minutes would be catatonic.

That wasn’t to mention the missing objects. Bread knives missing from the knife block, never found again. One of Denise’s favorite tchotchkes from W & Sons, a porcelain doberman, simply gone. This was when she had said she was starting to feel unsafe. He couldn’t of course, tell her the nature of his work, but assured her she had no reason to be anxious. She started complaining of headaches and difficulty seeing. Her evidence of persecution began to mount. The final straw had been her laptop. An expensive new MacBook weighing only a few ounces, with full spectrum display and lightning quick solid state retrieval memory. His Christmas gift to her. Rose gold. When the agency technicians opened it up they claimed the board had been fried, blackened, but gradually, as if by degrees. Denise said the screen had flashed blue and then dark so she could only see her reflection in the black dead glass. Denise said this experience of seeing her own reflection so suddenly and in such a context, had deeply terrified her.

But Litmus wondered. He wondered what she did every day while he was at work, Richie at school. He couldn’t help feel that her complaints were in some way pointed. That there was a certain disparaging flavor to them, as if they were his fault, as if it were all somehow due to some inadequacy that he had repressed, but that she was attempting to hint at. He sensed the aura of spite all around her in these moments, spite and vindictiveness.

Still, the orgasm had not been faked. He could see the involuntary flexes just below her hip bones. Her dosage of pills had been high but not abnormal, her face, hidden from him in the bathroom while he talked to her through the wall, had been neutral and impassive. Her eyes, though, had been closed at the moment of climax. She could have been thinking of anything, anyone. There was no way to tell what lay underneath her eyes. Did she know about the scanners? He had told her only that she didn’t have to worry, they’d installed a high-end security system, something that would not let even an out of place insect through its high-end security fields. Did she intuit that part-and-parcel with this would be high-end surveillance using high-end holographic scanners? He decided he would not be going in to the office today. Denise would be awake soon. They could have some more interactions which would be useful to analyze later for behavioral cues. He took a pill, washed it down with some water, and began to truly get down to business with his machine, strapping on the virtual reality lenses and floating through past versions of his house like a ghost, projected within a projection of its interiors, utterly detailed in every way. He watched individual motes of dust float backwards and then forwards in time, caught in light streams through his kitchen doors. He haunted his own house like this for hours. When he finally stopped it was because the dog was barking outside his door. He cursed, realizing he had never walked her, would have to take her down around the run. He opened the door to the study, surprised to find outside the early autumn dusk falling. He realized he was very hungry.

Out in the run the clouds loped through the sky like angry pack animals. Lucky strained at her leash. His white sneakers got dirty with mud. There were a few marks on the trees. Strange painted circles, a few odd carvings. He did not wonder if they were related at all to his work, his investigation, the people he had been assigned to. The group he had been moved all the way from Connecticut to this Oklahoma City suburb to investigate.

Lucky followed his path through the scrub easily, without thinking. Litmus began to hate the run. To the right of the path were the deep, jungle-like thickets of ivy which clung to the trees, to his left was the man-made slope of earth separating the subdivision from the environment around it. He at no point wondered if he was being watched. He at no point wondered if there were things, persons or beings concealed within the impenetrable thicket to his right. The dog snuffled its way onward among the thinning pines. The last of the light was leaving the sky. He thought of a river of oil running underground, seething with raw petroleum. A strange glow seemed to fill his chest, and he smiled. The river seemed to run on simultaneously with his walk, he could almost see it and feel it roaring around him. He turned the corner at the end of the path, going up and onto the road above, returning walking on asphalt through the development, past the rows of identical houses that sat there like pretty paper mansions.

That night Litmus heard the wild dogs barking down in the run. He reached out into the air, made a sign the scanners would recognize. A time-stamp he could check on later, review the renders of the backyard, see how close the animals were getting.

Data science is the future of society. Data-driven models are the future of the free market and the future of capitalism. The Bureau understands this. Data science is the future of investigation, surveillance, and intelligence. Data models are what will form the future out of the past. Data science is what brought Litmus Braithwaite, his wife and child, from their home in Windsor Connecticut to a small suburb outside of Oklahoma City. The group he was assigned to, the Oklahoma group, were essentially an eco-terrorist outfit, which demanded the end to all fossil fuel consumption, while also worshipping oil itself as a deity. They believed oil had slept but was now awake, and it was not humanity who held the reins of destiny now, but oil itself. They were wackos.

Excerpts from reports on the Oklahoma Group

<There are several data fields associated with this case—at least seven (7) as far as our latest trawl indicates. This is not an error with our equipment, these are the actual figures that have been checked and rechecked by several different independent entities. Three years ago, under the old algorithm, we generated only three (3) possible fields—still an untenable figure but nonetheless more manageable. Whether our current estimate is a result of the increased sophistication of the GLADHAND algorithm over the previous iterations of same, or that the phenomenon under study is actually growing at this rate, remains to be seen.

[...]

One of the more interesting and controversial aspects of the data is our contention that it should in fact be regarded as phenomena; i.e., that the rhizomatic movement within the data-sets and its correspondence in the real world seem to represent models of causation closer than correlation. Essentially, the origin of all possible sets are shared, and as such the form of all sets are shared in structure but the precise nature of these forms remain hidden. We cannot help but wonder, given the unnaturally elusive structure of the data, if somehow our systems have been penetrated by an outside intelligence organization. This particular set of data would only seem possible to arise without deep knowledge of our methods and tools, followed by precise artificial insertion of markers within the real world, coded to create the responses by GLADHAND.

Litmus was not a sociologist or a researcher, he was not an expert on the occult or on militant separatist ideology, fringe academic theory or petro-history. He was an expert on data-modelling, and to the Bureau, the problem with the Oklahoma group was one of data modelling. It was a problem of an excess of outliers.

To the Bureau, what was happening with the Oklahoma group was unacceptable. It represented a problem they could not fully understand, and therefore did not wish to solve. The ideal solution for the Bureau would be for the problem to simply be ignored, for the group to go away, for the outliers to resolve back into acceptable boundaries. This was not occurring. Phenomenon in this case, as he came to understand in his research, was closest to Artifact Out of Place phenomenon. In this case, the Artifact was communications flagged as relating to the Oklahoma group. Combinations of keywords used across digital platforms would create a flag. The algorithm would collate these flags into a model representing the group’s reach and influence. The algorithm had so far generated seven possible models, which amounted to seven separate real-world scenarios. Seven discrete realities. This is how the group came to be a data-science problem.

The algorithm, GLADHAND, at this point is a product of itself. Its ways are hidden. The keywords used to generate the flags are created by GLADHAND. Years of digital communications, as well as text-converted phone calls, video calls, and surveillance audio were fed into the program. The program in turn recognized patterns within this data. [It developed its system for doing this by studying previous algorithms and analyzing their success rates.] These incredibly specific linguistic patterns became the group’s flags, their signature markings in the world of ideas. Human operators do not necessarily ever get to see the compiled signatures used to generate the flags. GLADHAND then analyzed all available data from all available individuals for these specific signatures and came back with a list of potential nationwide members of the group and their potential level of involvement. The program was also very adept at isolating individuals who might be susceptible to the group based on certain factors such as personality traits, socio-economic status. It could even detect people who were essentially already members of groups but did not know it yet, as their data so exactly matched the profile.

GLADHAND has so far generated seven different possible models of the Oklahoma group’s national presence. The Oklahoma group is not very wide, it is not very important. It has little to note it besides its eccentric ideology, and its utterly unique ability to confound the most powerful artificial intelligence on the planet. The only way this would be possible is if a conscious entity with knowledge of GLADHAND’s hidden flags, inserted these flags in communication across the country in such a way that it triggered some embedded code deep within the algorithm itself in order to generate this response, similar to how a series of tones at different pitches could manipulate old landline phone networks. Either that or somehow the ideas of the group represented in linguistic codes are somehow arising spontaneously, bubbling up from out of the country’s subconscious in a way that the algorithm cannot comprehend.

What Litmus Braithwaite was experiencing was phenomenon.

[...]

A record of every American communication going back to 2001. Every piece of communication information within America, a digitally searchable record of every American relationship since 2001. A machine to read the ultimate document. A machine to tell us what it says inside of the ultimate document, the American Federal Akashic Records. GLADHAND-machine, a map of the territory the size of the territory->

Litmus Braithwaite masturbates furiously in his study to a hologram of him fucking his wife; them, their bed and their bedroom shrunk down in miniature inside the glass box on top of his projector.

1. Gathering-machine

2. correlation-machine

3. doing-machine

4. empire-machine

5. warmachine

6. deathmachine

7. cultmachine

8. unmachine

There was a single plume of breath on the render. A few minutes after the dogs had started barking and Litmus had made his sign in the air, around 2:30 AM. The next day he reviewed and reviewed the observational ranges of the scanner, the darkness at the edge of his manicured backyard. No sign of anything at all. He passed a significant amount of time like this: headset on, hovering around his backyard in the middle of the night as a wandering eye, slowing time and speeding it up, reversing, stopping. Finally, there it was. A white cloud momentarily blooming into the observable range of the scanner, tiny, hidden, only a few inches in diameter, its bottom skirting heads of blades of grass. Dogsbreath. He positioned himself inches away from it, slowed the render to its lowest speed. It bloomed out from the dark, individual fingers of steam coming into the known world like a clenched fist from the mouth of whatever feral animal stood just out of sight. He was transfixed by it. When he called the dog catchers he felt a twinge of some disappointment. He wanted to hunt the source of that breath down. He wanted to make it show itself. He wanted to drag it out into the light.

They came that day, around dusk. Ragged looking men in old blue jumpsuits, pulling up to the house in a pickup truck, taking out their lures and nets, lengths of rope and wire. He led them back to the run. They stood on the edge of his yard, looking down into the little overgrown gully there with its little made up bike path.

They’re out there somewhere, in all of that. We hear them at night. And I have recordings of them. I have evidence they’re out there.

Well sir, if they’re out there, we’ll find them.

Do you mind if I ask. . . What it is you do with the dogs after you catch them?

Depends on the animal. All depends on the animal.

He spits. His stubble and long greasy hair gleam in the orange setting sun. Litmus is in awe of these men with their traps and lengths of wire as they descend into the run, going out to investigate, going out to meet the thing.

IF YOU NEED ME I’LL BE INSIDE he yells after them. And returns to his study.

Down in the run Richie is seeing stars. He’s enveloped by the vines and their cool leaves swathe his body. His back sinks into the earth, he is closed in and shut up by it all, everything divides. He breathes out for a thousand years. A hundred paper bags are lying at his feet. A kitchen knife, a porcelain doberman. He tries to stand and walk but falls. He laughs and curls, his body doubling and tripling on itself. The spray can dings as he kicks out with his foot, the bright sun kaleidoscoping patterns behind his closed eyes, bursting like diamonds through the leaves. The swimming disparate points begin to resolve. He hiccups and finds himself again underneath the tree. He breathes out and in a few more times. He gets to his feet and slowly goes back to where he’d been before, cradled in the crotch of the tree. He reaches for the spray can again.

Braithwaite is in the kitchen, mixing himself a drink. Braithwaite is ultra-aware that all his movements are being recorded on three dimensional holographic tape. He is ultra-aware that every physical object exists in the house both as itself but also as its digital double. He is ultra-aware that upstairs in a glass box there is a live holographic projection of the house and there is inside that projection a tiny holographic kitchen and in that tiny holographic kitchen is a tiny Litmus making a very tiny drink using microscopic olives and vodka. The idea of it all sends shivers down his spine. He drinks, sets down his martini on the granite countertop and reaches for the frozen bottle of vodka itself. He puts it to his mouth and takes a few gulps. Bracing. He sets it down. Things in the tiny house seem to have taken on a warmer glow, a more distinct hue. He sips his martini as a chaser before steadily walking out of the kitchen and through the living room, past his wife, who is reading a magazine on the floral printed couch.

Honey? She says, I think I’ve lost my favorite pair of gold earrings, but I’m sure they’re somewhere around here. Will you keep an eye out for them?

Litmus opens his mouth to speak and realizes he is still smiling about being inside a tiny holographic house. He utters a few syllables, attempting to sound affirmative and in control about the whole situation. This fails, so he simply continues to smile. His wife frowns. He realizes he is horribly drunk, the alcohol is reacting to his anti-anxiety prescription medication.

I think this. . . alcohol is reacting to my anti-anxiety prescription dedication. Medication. I’d better go lie down. And he stiffly leaves the room, taking his martini with him. He knows exactly where the earrings are. Not yet, of course, but the data is certainly available to him. Back in the study he begins to review the data. Watches her take them off the night before in the bathroom, set them down on the marble bathroom countertop. She takes off the rest of her clothes and goes to turn on the shower. With the water running she goes back to the mirror to look at herself. She makes serene eye contact with herself, turning to catch a different angle of light against her face and breasts. She suddenly looks up and makes sudden eye contact with Litmus. Her reflection in the mirror is directly meeting Litmus’s gaze. That is, by some freak coincidence, she had chosen this moment the night previous to look directly, piercingly, at an object just behind the place where Litmus was reviewing the scene from. He does not want to turn and see what that object is. She breaks eye contact. In a careless gesture, as she turns back to the shower, she knocks the earrings with the tip of her index finger off the white marble countertop. They fall down a forced-air vent adjacent to the wall and sink. They disappear. He moves his perspective across the room and peers down into the vent. It is black, the scanners can not render what is behind them.

Down in the run stalk the dog catchers. They clutch nets in the lastgoldening sunset forest. Neither one of them can smell a dog. They come to the end of the forest, not realizing it was so narrow a gully. Climb a steep man-made hill there, muddy, no grass grown on it. On the other side is another development. They are standing above a vacant lot, burgeoning with dying yellow tallgrass. One lights a cigarette.

I don’t suppose there are any wild dogs out here. He says.

Could be though. Plenty of trash. Domesticated, owners don’t want ’em anymore. Lots of mortgage type situations in these neighborhoods.

You mean like defaults.

Yeah, like defaults. Defaults, foreclosures, things make wild dogs. Also plenty of trash to root around in.

Well no shortage of that.

They look out at the neighborhood fading into gray light for a few moments longer before going back down into the run. They start setting their baits. One of them sees Richie, slumped against a tree, paint all around his mouth. He points him out. The two of them stop.

You think that little guy’s breathing?

Litmus rips off his goggles and begins to make his way down the hall. He realizes now that he is extremely drunk, it runs a strange contrast to how light it still is outside. He feels stupid, vaguely ashamed going into the master bathroom and falling to his knees above the vent, feeling with his fingernails for the crack between the metal and the linoleum floor. He gets one side up and then the other, relieved that nothing had to be unscrewed, it comes right out like the floor was its sleeve. There are the earrings, pretty and shining, lustrous, just there. He takes them up in his hand.

Downstairs the dog is a fusillade of yapping. Litmus replaces the grate and stands too quickly, blood rushing to his head. Spots swim in front of his eyes. Downstairs someone yelling for him. Screaming, screaming downstairs. Realizes at this point he has to run, awkwardly pitching into the dark bedroom with shades still drawn before exploding into the hall, down the stairs, bursting into the living room where the dogcatchers are coming in through the sliding glass doors off the porch and the big one holding something dead in his arms and Denise yelling and patting the thing they were holding and it was Richie, Litmus realized. And the tiny holographic house flickers around him.

In this moment everything is still. Through the glass doors there is not a hint of a breeze and the dogwood tree set by homeowner association specifications in the front yard does not stir a single iota, the individual dust motes hanging in beams from the windows do not stir, the flora surrounding the house, the silent motionless ivy grown over the trees down in the run, assorted shrubberies planted around the house stiffening for the autumn weather, the moment of this, inescapably fixed, unchangeable. Somewhere in the algorithm a flag is triggered.

The screen doors close, the dogcatchers walk backwards out of the house. His wife sits down, her magazine reappears on her lap, the dogcatchers disappear at the edge of the lawn. Eventually Litmus walks stiffly backwards through the room holding his martini, in the kitchen the alcohol goes back in the bottle, the olives back in the jar. This happens over and over again.

Lucky dies a few months later. Litmus buries her out in the run in a box with the gold earrings. He explains to his wife the origin of petroleum, the deep hot biosphere. He explains how ancient star-seeded organisms, born from a meteor, lived in magma under deep pressure, died and decayed at the beginning of time and became crude oil. He explains faults deep under the earth where volcanic steam rises, microscopic organisms thrive in the roiling lightless depths there under thousands of pounds of pressure, eating sulfur. He explains how, over millions of years, the giant tube worm species has become completely reliant on the excess food produced by this microscopic digestion of sulfur, so much that its own mouth and digestive system has atrophied, and it has grown instead a sac for these microbes to live in, and special gills to filter in the sulfur for them. He thinks this is beautiful. He thinks this is the most beautiful thing he has ever heard. Somewhere deep in the algorithm a flag is triggered.

When you love somebody then that is that. You can’t let them go because they’re stuck in you. Glittering, like, doom laden. You know, it’s impossible. So, when April told me I had to pick her up from the bus in New Jersey and drive her to Pittsburgh—“Something’s happened to Emily”—I knew this was what, and that destiny was once again coming into my life. I’d thought something was coming, had been having waking dreams about Kentucky; springtime, me drinking again, feeling the trees moving in the wind move something in me.

I used to just say to myself, “If this bitch has the audacity to ever ask me for anything—”

You know,

“If this absolute—complete—for one second thinks that I would lift a finger, after all the—I mean, considering—”

Our parting had been less than amicable. When we were really really in love we used to have circular shouting fights until six in the morning. So, like, imagine. If I’d kept a diary of our breakup it would have said, “All our fights were just a microcosm of this parting. Me starting it, her ending everything everything she could.”

If I’d kept a diary.

Really, before I got sober I should have done more drugs. I should have really lived it up. Now I can’t do any of that. I review now all the times that I held back, all the times I had pills and didn’t take them, all the times I could have become truly loaded under the blazing summer sun and felt like God—it is with pity and regret. Would I like to be high, and driving an automobile at blurring speeds along nightbound highways? Certainly. Now there is just a low awkward grace, sublimely subtle. But maybe I’d had that before, too, with her.

What I remember about us meeting is the laughter. It was like an electric something outside of us. The laughter in my little room seemed to speak to me and tell me something greater than the sum of its parts. That was how I first fell really in love, with laughter, like that. I proposed, I think, just a few months later, beginning of the summer. We were on cocaine driving back from some place to another in the early morning. An insane, sun beating trip, somewhere in the vast and expansive strip mall running out of Hartford, Connecticut and into western Massachusetts. I remember I’d said it, “We should get married,” and then felt so young. I saw myself feeling so young, feeling incredibly young and stupid and asking April to Marry Me Or Something. I never even bought a ring. We meant it, I know we both meant it at the time, but we didn’t talk about it too much after. Didn’t feel up to us so much, is how it felt. Until much later when I was screaming at her through the door to her fancy New York apartment where she lived now with her friends, to give back my fucking drugs, I’d left behind my pills after storming out, righteously storming out of the big last fight and now screaming through the door I’d left behind my drugs. I guess things just took their toll. One could say. She’d apparently been fucking her ex for months at that point. At any rate, it was this complete and total just this absolute—this—who, let’s not forget, I had multiple times pledged my undying love to, made clear again and again that our love was the love that could not die, that our souls were made in some otherworldly forge to mesh together like this—perfectly.—It was this, let’s be honest, total, absolute whore of Babylon, who was now calling me, name buzzing my screen, lighting me up in this way with excitement at a second chance. Like life was calling instead of her.

“Evan’s done something to Emily.”

“What’d he do?”

“Can you get me from the bus?”

Have I mentioned that it’s winter? Just after Christmas, before New Year’s. Dirty snow all over the New Jersey bus stop, dirty snow all over the New Jersey buses.

“Merry Christmas,” she said in the lobby of the Greyhound station. She was dressed in her fashionable clothes, hair clipped back in a beret. I tried to gauge her elfin features for murderous intent. Difficult to parse.

“Merry Christmas,” I say back.

I’m so glad to see her, I can tell she’s glad to see me too. We hug not too close.

“Well how the hell have you been?” I’m acting like a good ol’ boy. She’s from Kentucky.

“Absolutely fine!”

We grin the same grin and it lights us up behind the eyes.

“What a time to be back in the saddle with an old chum!” I say.

We walk out to the lot, I’m carrying her bag. Gucci. She’s a classy dame. “Water under the bridge,” I’m thinking in my head. Trying not to get my hopes up, probably a one shot deal I tell myself. She’s gonna go back to him. Just like last time. Art-Guy Tommy with the social connections and cocaine. Yeah maybe so, but hmmm. . . what were the sleeping accommodations going to be like though? I had a feeling that was a part of this whole thing. I had a feeling they were going to be. . . favorable.

“Same old piece of shit?” she says when we get to my car. I laugh and we get inside. This is a moment where, looking back I’m thinking: did I laugh because I thought that was funny? We used to laugh when we were in love and it would mean we were in love but now we still laugh but it means something else, something worse, and we can hear that too, when we laugh. Or, I can.

Information about Emily. This is my defining image of Emily: Wearing sunglasses and converses with the sun behind her, catching on the gold of her aviator rims and lighting up her brown hair from like a golden russet colored eye. Emily was so cool. Emily stole the taxidermied buffalo head from the science building. Emily was a real addict, a walking chemical fire. Her room was stacks and stacks and stacks of books. She stole things, lots of people’s things, said she didn’t know why. She never slept. And I’m not explaining Emily very well. What I mean is when she talked it had levels, man. What I’m saying is she was art.

Emily was April’s best friend. This is where the story gets interesting. Things fell apart between her and April around the time I came on the scene. Which was sad because with them I felt like I’d found my people.

It all accelerated into badness as that winter turned into summer. Emily wasn’t allowed inside the apartment for some reason. Everything was murky. April, paranoid. Like Emily was going to “come for her,” saying how scared and bad she felt. I understood nothing. This was me inside of my Great Love Story: I understood nothing.

I guess she bought the gun when I wasn’t looking. I mean, I knew what she was doing. I went in to buy sandwiches at Subway. She said she was going to stay in the car. She’d found the place on Google Maps. I guess she didn’t want any of my homemade sandwiches, she wanted Subway. In the same parking lot as this Subway was a big indoor flea market. I go into Subway, thinking I’m getting the sandwiches and that she’s staying in the car. I knew what she was doing. I’m not dumb. Different vendors rent the spaces in big markets like these. Lots of them sell firearms. Gun show rules out here. No ID. No nothing. Just cash. In the Subway I got two hoagies. I got a big chocolate chip cookie. I got two cans of Coke and a big bottle of water. I got two bags of Garden Salsa chips. Out the window I could see her sprinting across the lot. When I got back to the car I had to not know she had the gun in her bag and she didn’t tell me so I didn’t. Live and let live is my motto. The motto of the WWBE is “Let there be light.” Or whatever that is in Latin.

It’s at this time I should tell you all, full disclosure, I’m not an amateur at this. I am a member of the World Wide Brotherhood of Electricians. WWBE for short. Our symbol is a hand holding a lightning bolt, superimposed over a globe. I became interested in electricity a short time after I got sober. It makes sense. Do you know what it’s like to have no recourse against your own psyche? No way to artificially induce your lumpy worm-infested brain to release the necessary chemicals you so desperately crave? Well, maybe you do. Electricity was naturally the thing that I turned to, and it has turned out in spades. Oceans of force arranged into lines. So beautiful. Do you think petrochemicals are the governing force of the 21st century? Wrong again. The oil is just the means to an end, and the end is electricity. We have chapters all over the world, we hold great sway in many courts. At the time this story takes place, I was one year into my electrician’s training. They recognized my utility immediately to their union. What is electricity but the entire context of modern existence? Tell me, can you wire up a house? How about a city? A country? I thought not. Never forget the electrician, the stories circuits tell. But I digress.

So, like, what do I know? I’m ignorant. We keep driving. Now I think she has the gun she’s even more relaxed. She’s funny. I decide to pick on her a little.

“Have you ever actually, physically fought anyone?”

“I fought you.”

“Yeah besides me. And Emily.”

“Do I have to have fought anyone before? Jesus Christ, I think I get the basic concept!”

“Which is what?”

“Hurt ’em bad, before they hurt you!” And she rolled her eyes.

Probably, at this point, you want the details. What did Evan do to Emily? Evan, Emily’s roommate and longtime dubious, heroin-afflicted, on-again off-again associate and all-around shit fiend? Questions like this will really get you nowhere. I mean, do you even need to know? Would that really be proper of me to disclose, like, the sordid details are really so important? Could I just say, “He sexually abused her,” and would you get the picture? Would you still be curious? Would the question still hang in your mind, as if it’s any of your business, well, does he deserve to be tied to a chair with duct tape and whipped with metal coat hangers before being connected to the ungrounded high amperage domestic circuit rightfully meant for the resistor heating coils of a common domestic kitchen toaster, but rigged by yours truly for specialized use, and so fried into a warm jelly? Does he deserve that? Is that what you’re asking?

Well, yours is not to reason why, dear reader. . . yours is not to reason why.

At any rate.

We got into Pittsburgh around 3pm: Did I mention that we drove all morning? Well, we did. And as a result, there we were, outside their apartment, the bottom floor of a shitty little house in one of Pittsburgh’s shitty little neighborhoods. April was texting Emily and calling Emily but Emily was not responding.

“She might not even be in there,” I said. “She’s probably staying with a friend.”

April did not reply to this. At this point, I was still just enjoying being around her. I have to admit, looking back, I think I knew then. This was sort of the end of it, the real end. The last moments I would have really with her. I knew at the time, and I think I knew that I knew and the feeling of it made everything sweeter. She said not word one to me at this point, working herself into a state of agitation. But I was just excited, the sun was catching in her hair and on her skin, the awful suicide-white winter sun here took on a kind of lovely, lustrous hue. I just leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, tried to picture it. Kentucky in the summertime, and it was the two of us, just kids, cruising down Bardstown Road with the air conditioning on, just on our way from one sunny drug to another. Cold air came into the car with the noise of the old soda-stuck plastic handle. She’d gone out the door, taken her bag with her. I snatched the key out of the ignition and followed her. I was silent at this point.

She pounded on the front door. Pound pound pound. Nothing. She wouldn’t look at me. My electrician’s instincts kicked in. Here’s where things really take a turn for the sad and unfortunate. I could almost smell the ozone in the air. It was so cold. April went and was hammering on the windows on the side of the house. Hammering and yelling. It was like something out of when we’d first met, that kind of dramatic scene. She picked up a rock. I began to think things might be going too far. Here’s where it first occurred to me: she put it through the window and climbed in after. I stood outside, basically stunned. Too late now, I thought, too late to back out now. Thought if things came out poorly I could always lean on the local WWBE for support. Like I said, they recognized my utility early.

I reached through, disengaged the window lock, climbed in after so then I was standing in their living room. Nothing really there, just empty. Old cathode TV just sitting on the ground with a DVD player hooked up to it. That struck me. The TV on the ground. Seemed odd seeing as I’m, like, forever seeing people giving away little tables on the sides of roads. There was a plant too, next to the sink and it was still alive. Loved that. Small green buds all angling towards the window sun like little holy acolytes. Like it had just started growing, only now was putting out growth. April yelling in the bedroom. I moved until I could see into the bedroom and there was April, yelling. No gun yet, at least. I followed.

Mattress on the ground, like you’d expect. Smell of cigarettes, and there were bottles and bottles and glass bottles. Was this Emily or Evan’s bedroom? Evan’s at a guess. Nothing on the walls. Books and shit, clothes, but it just seemed dumb in there, dumb and sad; mute. They were both, I realized, under the billowy cloud formation of white blankets on the dirty mattress on the ground.

When I write it down like this, electrician style, some piece of me goes back there somehow, into the memory of it. Something moves outside the window and in my peripheral it’s a murmur from the back-then. I feel it, something in its movement, like I’m back in the country, and I still feel a certain way about living and being alive. Something you lose without ever knowing you really had it. Just really important things like that which sometimes move out your window, things you’re unsure of, things caught in a breeze like white sheets on a clothing line in a long cool backyard, or a tarpaulin caught up and blue in a tree above a dirty streetlight, making a sound like the beating of great wings. Memory—like that.

April was really letting them have it. They were asleep. Groggy, to say the least, for 3pm. Likely they hadn’t been asleep for too long, would have been my guess. Took an awful long time to get out of bed, if you know what I mean, especially considering my ex-lover’s remonstrations.

“You are SCUM,” she was saying, “you are worse than SCUM, you are fucking GARBAGE.” She was beating her palm with her fist, “Get the fuck up and get out of here now, get the fuck out of this apartment NOW.”

You see why I loved her so deeply. Would your girlfriend/partner/significant-other drive eight hours to break into someone’s apartment where they’d lived for multiple years and regularly paid rent, and tell them to leave? Of course, it’s unclear how seriously he could take her request. He didn’t really move for quite a long time, or even groan. It seemed to me then that these guys might not be entirely living out their best and most productive lives. I mean, they were fully nodded out, fucked up, seriously spaced. On a long golden stretch of time. “You don’t remember quite what happened but you know that it was extremely good.” Something someone told me once anyway, I wouldn’t know. Friend of mine, handguns figured largely into his philosophy as well. I wondered what his opinion would have been on firing a loaded gun out the window of a room where two people are blissfully nodded out on a bed. Blew a hole in the window but not so loud, a low calibre sound. I finally saw the gun though, shocked at how tiny it was, no wonder I’d missed it. A derringer, a ladies’ gun from a bad movie. That’s what she’d bought, some ridiculous shit like that.

After that they just kind of rolled and groaned. Evan looked around like he was not seeing what it was that he was seeing. Emily woke up with a strange kind of expression on her face. Someone I’d never really seen be vulnerable, really vulnerable, that is, weak—never besides a few odd, extreme circumstances. But that was the look on her face now, scared and out of her element. Lost, I guess. April had her hands on Evan now and was trying to drag him out of the bed. She really had her hands on him. Must have dropped the gun or pocketed it again. Any rate she hadn’t been lying about her plan for fighting. He tried to struggle with her but was too out of it. Looked like he was fighting underwater. She got him out of the bed but it was like, then what. He was just on the ground then, trying to scramble backwards to put his back to the wall. I was worried he was going to get a second wind, but as soon as his back touched the wall his eyes started closing again. April went to slap him, still yelling at him to wake up. If I was being honest I thought she sounded a little like a cop now, on some power trip. Emily it turned out was the one she should have been worried about. Emily, out of bed all of a sudden recovered, not out like Evan, and was grabbing April around the middle and pulling her down, and then the two of them were wrestling on the ground. April had her hands in Emily’s long brown hair, bundling it up like strands of dead ivy in her fists. I pulled them apart. I remember I said, “Maybe we should all come back later,” a complete and utter moron who belongs on the moon.

April stood up, face red, flushed. Her voice shook.

“What is this Emily? What is this?”

Emily didn’t say anything for a while. What felt like a while. When she spoke it was like a glass door closing.

“What are you doing here?”

April began to cry. Emily, just standing there in her underwear and white T-shirt. The same fire. “We worked it out,” Emily said. “I was really drunk when I texted you. I was just really drunk.”

April fully sobbing now. “Come back with me,” she said, not even looking at her. Talking through her hands held over her face. “Just come back with me and we—this can all—we could be—”

Emily just stood there.

It smelled like a bar and reeked of ozone, the silence crawled with latent potency. April left then and I followed her, out the front door. We got in the car and I drove away.

She wanted me to take her to the bus depot but I refused and said I’d drive her back into New Jersey. She didn’t say anything for the longest time. Pittsburgh is built in a valley. You pass over bridges into gullies, neighborhoods built around gradients. We went up and up and out, back towards the deep underground tunnels to take us through the mountains. She finally said things in New York weren’t going so well. I nodded. There was no feeling of victory. At one point she reached out and took my hand. I didn’t regret anything.

I’m trying to show and not to tell. This is the first law in Electricity Academy. Make your circuits coalesce. Things like:

The gray nightstruck highway pulled us home by our snow peppered windshield.

Or:

The circumference of love is half the radius of your heart, cubed, plus or minus the rotation of secrecy.

Or:

There was a cold sense of loss inside my Ford Focus, and when I exhaled the goodness in me seemed to disperse with the steam.

Or like this:

deep water deep water deep water