A teacher walks onto a stage in an upstate New York college hall. He sits and closes his eyes, presumably to meditate. We wait. And we wait.

Fifteen minutes later he opens his eyes, adjusts the microphone to his seated position and begins speaking in a slight Californian accent. “I assume,” he says, “that you’re here because you were forced to be.” Again, he stops for a few minutes, surveying the crowd one at a time and smiling. His gaze settles on my section of the audience and he says a simple truth that he would repeat many times over the ensuing years. A warning that, every time I thought had it understood and safely under hand, would surprise and stump me over again.

He says:

“Meditation will fuck you up.” Crude, but Vajrayana was never big on protocol.

I studied hard with my teacher, and the harder I worked at my meditation and my life, the more difficult he made it out to be, saying all the time that it is not work at all, that enlightenment is power, that meditation will give you all the energy you need to break into and navigate these strange new worlds. And so it went for years, waking up at the Hour of Brahman, 3am, to meditate, then again at 6 before work, again in a city park over lunch if practical. And yet again, after a full day of work, three hours of school, another two of study, would I sit in a corner of my tiny rented room at midnight, my stark little meditation corner, listening to music and staring at a colored stone for 30 minutes and visit these places. This is the life of an American yogi, he’d say. The world is your monastery. If you can meditate on a subway you can meditate anywhere.

You don’t immediately notice the benefits of meditation; it’s a drug that takes months and years to work. There is a relaxation effect, and a ‘more energy’ effect, and a ‘greater concentration’ effect, but in rare moments of candor even the teacher himself would admit to these observations being a shared placebo effect. “Enjoy it, of course,” he’d say. “But this isn’t it.”

“Until you pass a certain stage in your meditation,” he’d said in one of our private meetings, “the main effects you will experience will be those you create in yourself. When you do someday form your meditative mind, at that point you will have some understanding of what meditation is. And if you ever decide to stop the practice, well, at that moment you will discover precisely what meditation is.”

That warning, again.

I followed my teacher for years, absorbing his advice, meditating, and unknowingly transforming my mind and my character. As my training advanced, and this transformation became more pronounced, he’d often ask; “Do you miss yourself?” and walk around with a chuckle. But the truth is that yes, I sometimes missed myself. I also missed the child I once was. Such is life.

We use the words meditation and yoga interchangeably. Indeed, yoga has a prettier sound to it, and is a more inclusive term, but in America it has become commercialized and a bit egocentric. People wearing $100 pajama ensembles and staring at one another in front of floor length mirrors, really that is one small facet of yoga extracted for commercial value. Most people would not pay to sit in a quiet room and experience meditation (libraries and parks are free), but throw in some music and mirrors, sexualize the practice and set the stage for a competitive fashion show; that’s Western Yoga. But again, that, too, has its beauty. That, too, is a part of enlightenment. Beings inching towards perfection, even if accidental. Better to do misleading yoga than no yoga at all.

The mid-term goal of yoga and meditation is to stop thought, and in so doing begin to experience life, God, the universe…whatever you choose to call it, in a fundamentally different way. It doesn’t matter what you’re wearing or whether you are horizontal or vertical. To experience the world with something more than your eyes and ears. To become, in essence, sensitized.

And it is this, of course, that gets you. Only the insane would choose to become sensitized in a world like this. To be numb is to be happy. To become small and fractious, to buy into the busyness fetish; indeed, our very way of life depends upon the very last bit of energy being drained from us for the greater good. We go to sleep exhausted. We wake up, exhausted. This is why many Buddhist teachers encourage some form of martial arts. It takes tremendous power to move your character in an intentional direction, and to not waste that power and thus fall further back. Paradoxically, before I was permitted to take my first black-belt test, my sensei required me to have 100 hours of meditation, sort of like driving instruction before getting into a powerful car. They did not know one another, but they did know some of the same things.

The world requires us to be weak and distracted; that is how we function. Yoga makes you strong and focused. But to what end?

True Buddhists have a difficult time keeping relationships with friends, even family. In core practice, meditation is a cult, a disassociation from the world. You take yourself out of the race, bow out with no excuse. No plan, even. People are drawn into meditation because they literally have no other choice. You stop taking the pill, and for a while there is a certain paranoia, enforced by those who imagine themselves to be close with you, to have known you. Strange changes are taking place, they’d insist. This is where you begin to feel alien from your own species. It’s a feeling I had already experienced as a lifelong stutterer, and a not wholly unwelcome one for me personally; I’d never had much use for people, but obviously it proved disconcerting and difficult for others in my study. They’d make solemn ceremonies burning yearbooks and photos, they’d intentionally and verbally distance themselves from family and friends, these sort of cathartic group efforts that they’d’ imagined would further them along. I don’t know if it helped or not. If the descriptions of others matter to you, then perhaps so. And if the teacher ever noticed, he never said.

I’d just stare at my rock in my little room. I never had many friends, anyway.

He did notice one thing, though. Shortly after one of our desert retreats, where we’d hike for days into the mountains of California or Utah or wherever, winter or summer, build a fire and meditate throughout the night. We were back in upstate New York having one of our post-trip receptions, a time for the small group to reflect on our experiences. We’d all get up and speak, one by one, usually a quiet affair, happy and solemn at the same time, but at the end of my speech the teacher, sitting alone in the very back of the room, stood and clapped. Everyone turned their back on me to face him. He smiled and nodded his head slowly, almost as if he were proud, and pointed towards the front, prompting everyone to turn back around towards the little stage. Talking directly to me, he asked “Do you miss your stutter?” No one moved. The room was total silence. I was, literally, dumfounded.

There is no known cure for stuttering. Either it fades in childhood or you have it for life.

My teacher died shortly after that last trip. In me, at least, he had instilled enough tools, and helped through enough discoveries, to build upon. Rudimentary tools, to be sure, but more than sufficient, if only I’d use them.

As he’d said, though, meditation will fuck you up. And in typical Buddhist fashion, there is no good or bad. There is only karma.

In most religions, the ‘subjects’ are observers. They are provided with books of rules to follow in order to be in God’s good grace. Serve God, ask for his help or his pity, debase yourself to a king of your own making. Buddhism, though, is a religion of participation. There is no savior. No one will help you. No one cares. You’re not trying to get God’s attention; you’re already in the ring with him.

TM, or Transcendental Meditation, is becoming a common practice in this country. It is often described as a deep relaxation to allow a glimpse through certain doorways of the universe, or to yourself, which initially seems like the same thing. Tantric Meditation, and occult Buddhism (Vajrayana), is to rip those doors off the hinges and smash them to crumbs. We’re not satisfied with a little peek into our deeper selves. We enter the Superconscious with a sledgehammer. Everything must go. All the structures and mirrors of our created self, swing the hammer. Our fears, accomplishments, desires, doubts. Swing the hammer. Our self love, self pity, our greeds and losses, the descriptions of the world imprinted upon us from birth. Swing the hammer. Swing the hammer.

This is the essence of Tantra.  It is a one way trip. Those doors….you never get them back. And to lose power partway through is to enter a very dark place.

Years went by. I would stop meditating and wallow in success. My income increased a hundred fold. I had a social life for the first time in years. I could speak. People called me, and I called back. I had girlfriends, a car, clothes, the life people want. I’d joined the world of the busy yet again. The very opposite of why I’d studied yoga in the first place. To meditate generates power, and to meditate well does so significantly, but to stop is to spin out.

I’d stopped. Life is a dangerous habit. The first, and often only, addiction we experience.

On the morning of 9/11 I was sitting in Battery Park, near my apartment, after a night of partying with my new friends. I was drunk, tired, stupid, lost. That was my life. The price I’d paid for my success. I’ll never know why I ran towards the site, heroic suicide, maybe, or just as likely that I didn’t care about myself too much at that point. But in I ran. I’ve never written of it or even spoken of it much, but what you know is true and worse. The jumpers. The smell. The chaos. The utter hopelessness of it all. A blow to our deeper hearts that we hadn’t even known existed.

But there is something far worse, and especially confusing to a deep meditator or, for that matter, to any truly religious person. It is the rare humanity that comes forth, unushered and unannounced. The strangers who hug you every time you stop. People who previously and would subsequently live small lives of selfishness and meanness, those people shone for a time. Every store was free, every person filled with tears of hope and despair. Everyone a friend, everyone family. From those very first moments came forth the true essence of humanity; the very real desire to immediately build a newer, better world. To start with yourself, with your neighbors, with strangers. To enter a state researchers would later coin ‘False Utopia.’ But there is nothing false about kindness. About generosity and sacrifice. There is nothing false about love, and it applies to strangers every bit as much as it applies to ‘soulmates.’

One morning I was returning to the red zone on my motorcycle and stopped at a bodega off Greenwich Avenue. I hadn’t showered in over a week. My entire body was covered in grime and sludge, the mere thought of which a decade later still makes me retch. I returned to the bike with some water bottles and crackers and, as I began pulling away, a small girl ran out of the bodega and called for me to stop, and I did. She was maybe 12 or 13, Pakistani or Indian, I couldn’t tell. I switched off the bike and slumped down on the front bars. I’d never been so tired in my life. The girl lifted my head, and I sat up straight once again. She handed me a pair of old work gloves, helped me get them over my swollen hands. She wiped my face with a wet, warm towel. Her thin arms trembled. Her hair covered her face. She was filthy, all of us, filthy. She cried the entire time, and I cried, too, with her. For a long time I didn’t want to move, but there were things to do. She hugged me again, hard, for at least a minute, and I left, tracking through inches of sludge and human muck.

This is not a false utopia. This is who we are, underneath. The real religious experience is the experience of life. This is why we meditate on the subways. This is why we wear suits and go to work. This is why we shun the monastic life. This is the essence of Tantra.

Shortly after those dark days I began to meditate again. I stripped down my life once more. I’d forgotten who I was but remembered who I wanted to be. And I don’t think a single day has passed without that small girl weighing on my mind and my spirit.

A decade or so later I sit alone in a remote Central American jungle to celebrate the winter solstice. I meditate for hours immersed in plants and wild animals and the pure chaos of nature. I remember, briefly, the people I used to be. But mostly I remember that small girl. I hope she grew into an extraordinary woman. I hope her corner of the universe is filled with light and wonder and brilliance. I hope she shares that same kindness she’d shown me with everyone she encounters. I hope she remembers nothing of those horrible days, and discovers, through some slower, gentler way, how important she is to the world.

And I hope, someday, we can all become her.

One

AKRON, OHIO. 9 P.M

Ren knew the woman would be dead from the moment she sat at the table across from him. It’s in the way they approach, he thought to himself, as he watched her enter the diner through the glass door. The way they move and turn. Two steps forward, one back, always hesitating, always thinking. The one’s who run, the ones who survive, they don’t rely on thought. They live on muscle memory. They live on momentum. They never look back.

“Ren?” she asks, sliding into the booth and removing her hands from thick, wool mittens. The woman is slight, with big eyes and thick red hair, mid-forties but looks older.

Ren nods, sliding a thick envelope across the table in front of her. “10K, circulated. Passport, stamped and circulated. Denver driver’s license renewed three times, 6 points against. Two credit cards, $700 each. One burner cell, sealed.”

“Are you sure these will pass for real documents?” she asks.

“Ma’am,” Ren says. “These are real documents.”

The woman sighs and puts both hands around the coffee cup in front of her. “So that’s it? You take me now?”

“No,” Ren says. “There’s a blue mustang parked out front. You passed it when you walked in. Your first address is on a typed note inside the passport. Drive the mustang there tonight, and then leave it at the airport in the morning. After you land in Montreal eat what you need to inside the airport, and use the automated check-in at the hotel directly to the south of the international terminal, using the blue credit card. Turn on the phone at 6 a.m. the following morning. A text message will be waiting; confirmation for either another flight, or a car rental. Memorize the confirmation number, destroy the phone, and leave immediately.”

Ren sips his coffee as the woman leafs through the items in the envelope.

“Where am I going after Montreal?”

“I don’t know that,” Ren says. “I’d be either dead or out of business if I did. Did you bring the items I requested?”

The woman hands over a white purse and goes back to sipping her coffee. Ren looks inside, noting the phone, wallet, makeup kit, and other items a woman would normally carry on a short drive.”

“My children?” the woman asks.

“Second stop,” Ren says, staring at her face. “And change your appearance as soon as you leave this diner. Walmart. Different clothes, scissors for your hair, dye, cosmetic contacts. You should have done this already. Lucky for you Halloween is coming.”

“How do you know I didn’t already?” She asks, a shy, nervous smile on her face. “Change my appearance, I mean.”

Ren stares at her, his expression blank. “If you did, you’d be touching your hair, glancing at the mirror behind me, getting used to your new self.”

“They said you were good.”

“I’m alive,” Ren says, finishing his coffee and standing up to leave.

“Wait,” she says, putting her hand on his forearm. “Please, just for five minutes.”

Ren hesitates for a second, looking around the empty diner, and then settles his weight back into the vinyl booth.

He motions to the waitress, two fingers, asking for more coffee. They say nothing until their cups are refilled and the waitress returns to the front counter.

“What about my car?” She asks?

“There will be an accident by the time your flight lands in Canada,” he says.

“With a body?” She asks, staring straight at him.

“Three,” he says. “Burned. Takes a few days to identify dental records.”

“Everyone told me not to fly,” she says, staring at the cup on the table in front of her. “Said it was the worst thing I could do.”

Ren stares at her for a moment. “If you ever have the law after you, then yes. But not here. Not the people looking for you. After 9/11 it’s a lot harder to get live flight records. These guys are good, but not technical enough. They’ll keep looking for you, though.”

“For how long?”

“Forever.”

The woman considers this for a moment, and then nods.

“You can never look back,” he says, reading her mind.

“I know,” she says. “Believe me.”

“I don’t believe anyone,” Ren says. No contact at all. No old friends. No new friends. No Facebook, email, nothing, not even the Internet itself. Don’t become somebody else. Become no one. If anyone from your past contacts you, and I mean anyone, be ready to run in 5 minutes. And that $10K in the envelope? Make sure that’s always replenished. Always ready. That’s your lifeline. From now on, that money is as important to you as air.”

“You’ve done this before?” she asks?

“Many times,” he says.

“No, I mean…once.”

Ren hesitates, not wanting to answer, but the expression on her face weakens his resolve. “Yes,” he says. “Once. Long ago.”

“And the people looking for you? They never caught up?”

“No,” he says, standing up to leave. “The people who were looking for me are all dead.”

She grabs his arm as he stands. “Wait,” she says. “Can you do that for me?”

“No,” he says, leaving eight dollars on the table for the coffee and tip. “But ten thousand dollars can buy you a lot of things.”

“OK,” she says, setting her jaw and staring up at him. “OK. Any last advice?”

“Yes,” he says. “When you reach the second stop, and the termination of our arrangement, you’ll feel safe. You’ll be tempted to stay. To rest. Don’t. Get as far away as you can. Keep running.”

Two

QUANTICO, VIRGINIA. 8 A.M.

“He’s not involved,” agent Victoria Wilson says, cutting off the man standing in front of the conference table with his back to her.

Special Agent Vince Mark, her direct superior, stares at the glass wall of the quiet room, waiting for Wilson to continue.

“Sir, he does one, maybe two jobs a year, low-level disappearances. Lives in a trailer with three wheels in the mountains of upstate New York,” she said. “He works alone, takes jobs based on some weird personal criteria.”

“You’ve seen this trailer?” Mark asks, sitting across the conference table.

“Photo, once,” Wilson says. “He moves it around.”

“On three wheels?”

“He jacks it up high, Sir,” Wilson says. “He’s handy, what can I tell you.”

“So, he was contacted.”

“Yes,” Wilson says. “Single phone contact. Less than one minute. And even if that was long enough, he won’t go for it. He doesn’t do retrievals. Doesn’t interact with military. And detests Homeland Security.”

“Sounds like a wonderful guy,” Mark says, raising one of his trademark gray eyebrows. “But a man like that has some sort of honor code. They all do. An old friend needs help, for all you know he’s already on the job.”

Mark leafs through the papers in a folder on the table in front of him, chewing on the back end of a pen. “Leverage?”

“Sir, he won’t do it,” she says. “Definitely not with Homeland Security attached. And if he was on it, there would be no press, no kidnapping, nothing. Not his style.”

Mark takes a sip of water from a plastic bottle on the table in front of him, taking the extra time to screw the cap back on. “So we don’t tell him,” he says, replacing the plastic bottle on the table. “Put him on the girl’s trail. Say she’s one of his projects getting repossessed.”

“Sir,” Victoria says. “He’ll know. And even if he doesn’t, he won’t care.”

The third man in the room, Joe Barber, also the most junior, speaks for the first time. “He has a niece in New York. Same school as our vic.”

“He’s worked for us before?” Mark asks, ignoring the interruption.

“Not directly,” Wilson says, glaring across the table at Barber.

“Explain?”

“Wit-sec has specific protocols,” Wilson says. “Very few people qualify. So his name is made available through intermediaries. Citizens avail themselves. Outside of our purview.”

“Agent Barber,” Mark says, looking directly at the junior agent for the first time. “You’ll accompany Wilson to New York. Get on the niece. Same school, maybe they know each other. Use that. If he refuses to get involved, involve him.”

“Yes Sir,” Barber says, avoiding eye contact with his partner as their boss stands up.

Mark pauses at the door and addresses Wilson, ignoring the junior agent again. “No H.S. for now. You two will report only to me.”

“Sir,” Wilson says. “You don’t want to do this. He’s unpredictable at best. We can’t control him.”

He answers without turning. “We don’t have to, Victoria. You’ve said it before; he already works for us. It’s just another job to him.”

She answers as the door closes behind her boss. “No, Sir. It isn’t.”

Three

WEST VILLAGE, MANHATTAN, NY. 1 A.M.

The concert begins at 12 a.m. in a small, crowded lounge on Bleeker Street. The sole performer wears a simple white dress, sitting upright behind a scratched grand piano, her strong vocals alone filling the dark room before the piano begins. Ren stands at a bar at the opposite end of the room, sipping a draft beer and watching the young woman sing.

He watches her often, more frequently than she knows. And she’s good. The room remains still and silent as she performs her music, songs she’s been composing for as far back as Ren can remember. The room watches her, entranced. Ren watches the room, wary.

In Ren’s world, life can explode at any moment, but this particular routine has been going on for years. During the break Ruby Stone talks to everyone, working the room, as Ren adjusts his position to avoid her. There’s little reason to; Ren is always cautious, but old habits die hard.

Ruby has long, curly blond hair. Smart, ambitious, but also humble in a strange way that both touches and impresses him. He watches as people gather around her, drawn by her quiet presence.

An hour into the second set, she makes eye contact and mouths the word wait. Sometimes she catches him, sometimes she doesn’t. Ren nods slightly and takes a sip of his beer. 20 minutes later, after a steady escalating of volume, the set ends, and the woman stands up from behind the piano, bows, and walks straight to where Ren is standing. “Drinking from glass, I see,” she says. “Classy.” She hesitates for a moment longer and then leans forward into Ren, hugging him hard around the chest.

“They didn’t have any white wine spritzers,” he says, smiling for the first time in weeks. “Your mom?”

“Good,” Ruby says, smiling back. “Very good. You need to come by more often.” She has huge brown eyes that dominate her face. Intelligent, aware eyes.

“New number,” he says. “You ready?”

“Go,” she says.

“7685551156.”

“Got it?”

“Of course,” I’m not a retard, Ren,” she says.  She takes a sip of his beer and then recites the number backwards.

“Anything else going on?” Ren asks, his tone turning serious.

“It’s Manhattan, Ren. “There’s always something going on.”

He looks down at her face. Even leaning on the bar at an angle, he’s still a foot taller than her.

“No hang-ups, no follows, no serious stalkers, no one shooting at me. Anyone ever tell you you’re paranoid?”

“Julia Kenner?”

“I heard the name, but I don’t really know her. Why do you ask?”

“I served with her father. Said she had some trouble. Asked me to look in.”

“Is it ever just social with you?”

Ren shrugs. “He thinks she’s in trouble. And I’ve never known him to be wrong.”

“You big-ass stupid grunts are all the same,” she says, faking a small smile.

“Yes,” he says. “Recognize anyone odd hanging around or asking about her recently?”

“No. I’d barely even recognize her. Different circles. I was never really accepted into the ‘OMG’ set,” she says, taking a deep pull from his beer.

When he doesn’t respond, her smile fades instantly. “What is it, Ren. I know that face.”

“Just be careful,” he says. “I mean it.”

“Are you staying in the city? Want to get a coffee?”

“Something I’ve got to do,” he says. “Sorry.”

“I miss you,” she says, looking down at the counter of the bar.

“Be careful, Ruby. Remember that number.”

Ren kisses her on the cheek and leaves the room, saying the ritual goodbye in his mind. Avoiding the small tears forming in the corner of her big eyes. Only truly sad people can sing that well.

He exits the bar and walks directly to a blue sedan idling across the street, half a block away. He’d spotted the car on the way in and watched from inside the bar, hoping it was just a coincidence. But Ren doesn’t believe in coincidences. Or luck. Or accidents. Whatever happens is always someone’s fault, and when it comes to his family, he was that someone.

He enters the sedan through the back door, sitting on the edge of the seat and pushing his matte black Desert Eagle .50 automatic against the back of the head occupying the passenger seat.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot your partner in the back of the head, Agent Wilson,” he says, staring at her in the rear view mirror. “Make it quick.”

“We have a job for you, Ren,” she says, making sure to keep her hands on the steering wheel.

“You’re following my niece, Ms. Wilson.”

“No,” the man in the passenger seat says. “We’re intercepting-“

Ren clubs the man in the back of his head with the butt of the heavy pistol before he completes the sentence. The man slumps forward and goes limp against the dashboard as Ren swivels the gun towards the driver’s seat.

“You know where I live, Wilson, and yet you come here.”

“Closer to the airport,” she says, staring at his face in the mirror.”

“Bullshit, Victoria,” he says. “What’s the job.”

Wilson looks over at her partner slumped against the dashboard in the passenger seat. “Daughter of an H.S. resource, someone you know,” she says, having decided on the flight to tell at least part of the truth.

“You don’t make personal contact for a placement.”

“It’s not a placement,” Wilson says, staring at the mirror and keeping her body upright and still. “It’s a retrieval.”

“I don’t do that,” he says, the gun pressed against the back of her neck. “You know better.”

“Following orders, Ren. Washington has changed. You know that.”

Ren settles back into his seat, keeping the gun aimed at the back of her head. “Your orders can get you killed, Victoria. Learned that well enough on my first tour. Taught it to others on my third.

“What do you want with Ruby?”

“Knows the vic, possibly.”

“Drive, Wilson. You can keep your two guns, but understand; I’m faster. And you threatened my family just by coming here. The bullet will enter your brain and exit your forehead before the message even reaches your fingers. Clear?”

Wilson nods and starts the engine. “Where to?” She asks, putting the car in Drive.

“East,” he says.

When they reach the river, he directs her to handcuff her partner to the wheel, and retrieves his two guns, cell phone, keys and handcuff spare that all Feds carry, often in creative places.

“He’ll be out for hours,” she says.

Ren opens the car door and turns his body towards the street, keeping the gun centered on Wilson’s head. “Get out of the car, slowly, with your hands high in the air. Walk in front of me to the rear of the car. Leave your gun, phone, and wallet in the trunk.”

“Yes Sir,” she says under her breath as she walks around to the back of the car and deposits her equipment in the trunk. Ren adds the other agent’s guns, wallet, phone and keys.

Four

EAST RIVER PROMENADE, MANHATTAN, NY. 2 A.M.

“Talk.”

Wilson turns around and leans her back against the railing. “Gun in New York City,” she says, staring at the weapon in Ren’s hand. “Risky, even for you.”

“I won’t ask again, Victoria.”

“Jack Kenner.”

“What about him.”

“You served with him, two tours. We know he contacted you.”

“You also know that I broke his arm. That he testified against me. That I don’t do retrievals. That I don’t do military. And that Homeland Security is a thousand angry teenagers with advanced weaponry.”

“Kenner’s daughter, kidnapped 12 hours ago. Goes to the same college as Ruby,” Wilson says. “We can’t ignore the coincidence.”

“Casual contact. I already relayed this information to Kenner,” Ren says, lowering the gun as a jogger passes by. Only in New York, he thinks to himself, do people jog in the middle of the night.

“You spoke with him?” She asks.

“I met with him,” Ren says, raising the gun again. “As I said, coincidence. Ruby’s never even spoken with his daughter. Kenner’s a piece of shit, lied to me to force me to help.”

“Today?” Wilson asks, confused.

“Three days ago.”

“Before the kidnapping, then.”

“There is no kidnapping, Wilson.”

“Of course there’s a kidnapping. We’ve had Kenner under a microscope since the beginning,” Wilson says, annoyed with his cryptic answers.

“Not from the beginning. From when the locals called you in. Think, Wilson,” Ren says, finally lowering the gun. “They would have been walled off in the house – correction – the compound, five minutes after the threat he came to me for, three days ago. H.S is the biggest gang in the world. Nothing larger than a mosquito would have gotten within 1000 yards of the girl. Yet she’s taken from school. Amateur move. Kidnapping’s a fake, Wilson.”

“You looked into it?”

“I look into everything that affects my family.”

“What was the hook?”

“Afghanistan. Said they’re circling back to me to find a placement. He was my C.O. Said they couldn’t find me, so they got to him. Convincing, but a lie. Designed to involve me from the start.”

Wilson turns around slowly, leaning her arms on the river railing and watching a barge pass by. “You don’t know that.”

“Kenner’s a bureaucrat now,” Ren says. “Easy enough for him to push this through.

Wilson considers this for a moment.

Ren lowers the gun and leans against the railing beside her. “Every halfway decent lie makes sense, Victoria.”

“You’re reaching.”

“But you’re not sure, are you? The question you need to be asking yourself is not where the girl is, but whether this is an operation, or a father panicking.”

Wilson looks sideways, staring at Ren’s profile. He might have been handsome, once, she thinks to herself. “So help on background then.”

“No,” Ren says. “Not my problem. And it’s old. Whatever price he’d pay for anything I’d be a part of, he’d have paid it 12 years ago.”

“From you?” She asks, pulling her coat tightly around her chest.

“No,” he says.

“They won’t stop.”

“Who won’t stop, Victoria?”

“Us,” she says, looking back at the water. “H.S.”

“Kenner gave you Ruby?”

Wilson doesn’t move, answering slowly. “We never knew much about her, little more than her name, until 12 hours ago,” she says. “No reason to dig that deeply.”

“Your second lie, Victoria,” Ren says, turning to face her. “Who else knows?”

“Besides me? Partner, in the car. Vince Mark, Quantico. Kenner, and whoever he’s told.”

“Is she in the system?”

“What?” She says, turning towards him.

“Is she in the fucking system!” He yells, his mouth inches from her face.

“I’m sorry, Ren,” she says. “Wasn’t my call.”

“Go fuck yourself, Wilson,” Ren says quietly, walking away and leaving her leaning against the railing.

He stops several feet away and turns back towards the agent. “One more thing, Victoria. If I have to pull Ruby for this, you will all pay a very dear price.”

Wilson remains still against the railing as Ren walks away.

Six

QUANTICO, VIRGINIA. 10 A.M.

“Did he go for it?” Special Agent Vince Mark asks the two agents seated in front of his desk.

Wilson doesn’t answer immediately, unsure how much to tell her boss, which unnerves her.

“He says he met with Kenner three days prior. He agrees with your assessment.”

Mark considers this for a moment, standing by the tall window and looking at the woods adjacent to the building. “Gone dark?”

“Not yet, Sir,” Wilson says to his back.

“But he’s in?”

“Gut feeling; no,” she says.

“Any insight to their conversation?”

“Two mil, in cash, to disappear the three of them. This from Kenner. Not Ren.”

“Didn’t take it, I presume?” Mark says.

Wilson doesn’t answer.

“You sure he’s legit? He didn’t disappear the daughter first and stage the kidnapping as smoke?” Mark says.

“No, Sir,” Wilson says quickly. “Kenner is still in play. Unnecessary drama otherwise.”

“I don’t get it, Wilson. Why the warning in the first place?”

“Kenner wanted him involved, there’s something he wanted from Ren, something that two mil couldn’t buy.”

“No other communications?” Mark asks, walking back towards his desk.

“None that we can find, but he’s good, sir. Very good.”

“So Kenner disappears his daughter. But why the public kidnapping? The drama, as you say. Easier ways to protect his family,” Mark says.

“Proactive, sir. Protects his daughter, and the publicity takes him out of the game, at least for a few days. Gets his enemies looking at each other instead of him.”

“I’m sorry, Agent Wilson, I’m not buying any of this,” Mark says, flopping into his desk chair. “No record on Kenner. Not a single blemish. He’ll do serious time for this.”

“But by giving us the niece, he gets what he couldn’t buy. He gets Ren.”

“So what, Wilson? He’s got a hundred agents just as good as Ren, and with better resources.”

“He gets nothing, sir,” Agent Barber says. “He’d have to know that Ren would just ignore him.”

“Maybe, but there’s another angle.”

“Sir?”

“Stay on the niece, Wilson. She’s our best lead now. Comms, full team, tracking, 24-7.”

“He’ll know, sir. Like I said, he’s good.”

“That’s the point,” he says. Kenner wanted to involve him, we wanted to involve him, and now he’s in. Full team. Visible. Doesn’t matter. You think he’ll try to run?”

“Ren?” Wilson says. “No. He’ll go for Kenner first.”

“We’re all over Kenner. But the clock’s running us here. No kidnapping, no crime, and we’re off budget in a matter of hours Stay on the niece, maybe we’ll catch a break.” Mark says, dismissing her.

Seven

LEESBURG, VIRGINIA. 1 P.M.

Ren stops his truck at the base of the long, arching driveway, shutting the engine and exiting slowly, leaving the driver’s door wide open. He walks ten feet in front of the truck and then stops with his hands held up and his arms bent 90 degrees, so his palms are level with his head and facing towards the house. When no one shoots and no guard appears, he lowers his right hand, very slowly, to his torso and lifts his shirt high in the air, turning around in a 360-degree circle.

30 seconds later he begins walking up the inclined driveway towards the gate with his arms still raised next to his head. When he is within 20 feet of the gate, the tall iron barrier swings inward. When he reaches the base of the walkway leading up to the two matched oak doors of the house, he raises his shirt again and repeats the slow circle. After nearly a minute, the right hand door swings open and two men step out, frisking him, first with hands, then with electronic wands, and finally with frequency scanners.

As he enters the house, two black Humvees appear in front of the gate, idling. The two men escort him past several more agents standing around the island in the center kitchen to a large den at the rear of the house. They leave Ren standing at the arched entryway of the den and walk out of the room backwards.

“Jack,” he says to the man seated in an armchair underneath a mounted bear head.

“Ren,” the man says, looking much older than when they’d met in a diner in D.C four days earlier.

“Where’s the girl?” Ren asks, circling around a massive stone table.

“Upstairs reading.”

“Risky,” Ren says.

“Having her here?” Jack says. “Safest place in the world.”

“No, Jack. Having me here.”

Kenner stands up, using the arms of the chair for support. “Gout,” he says.

“I don’t give a fuck.”

“Listen, I appreciate you covering for me those years ago. And the higher I rose, the more I insulated you,” he says, standing at his full height but still looking up at Ren. “H.S., Feds, Justice, hell, even CIA don’t touch you. I gave you that.”

“Feds are on me. They’ll uncover the ruse soon enough,” Ren says.

“Who, the FBI? They couldn’t find their own dicks in the shower, let alone an entire person,” Kenner says, chuckling at his own joke.

“What do you want, Jack,” Ren says, looking down at the smaller man. “Be precise.”

“Julia got herself pregnant,” Kenner says, walking towards a window overlooking a wooded area below, and the Potomac River in the distance beyond.

“So get her some condoms,” Ren says, anger creeping into his voice. “I already told you, there’s nothing there. You guys read way too much into chatter concentration.”

“No, Ren. I don’t think so.” Kenner retrieves a tablet from the counter of a wet bar next to the fireplace mantle, swipes to a photo and swings the tablet towards Ren. “Recognize the guy?”

Ren looks at the photo for several seconds. “No,” he says.

Kenner swipes again. “Him?” he says.

“Jack of Spades,” Ren answers instantly. “Retired, last I heard.”

“Dead, actually,” Kenner says, replacing the tablet on the counter. “You’ve been out a long time, he says. ”Anyway…kid’s uncle.

“Not my problem,” Ren says, walking towards the older man.

“It is, Ren.” The two men who escorted Ren into the house appear through a side door with guns drawn, having watched his approach on the closed circuit cameras, probably mounted in the bear’s eyes, but Kenner waves them off. He picks up the tablet from the counter again, swipes several more times, and hands the tablet once again to Ren.

Ren looks at the photo for several minutes, Julia Kenner with a bull’s-eye circumscribed over her abdomen. He reads both the Pashto script and the English translation before dropping the tablet back on the counter a minute later. Kenner picks it up again and swipes for several more seconds before handing the device back to Ren.

The message on screen reads: 7 of Hearts.

“They can’t know that, Jack,” Ren says. “No fucking way.”

“I tried contacting you as soon as I received this, Ren. They’re closing in. I couldn’t tell you without first protecting my family. I can bring you both in,” he says, grabbing the bigger man’s forearm.

Ren doesn’t move, staring into Kenner’s eyes, looking for tells but finding none.

“I swear on my daughter’s life, Ren, this didn’t come from me. “Look,” he says, grabbing the tablet once more and navigating to a side-by-side view of his wife and daughter. “Kuwaiti,” he says softly. “Similar features. Look, Ren.”

“They can’t know,” Ren says. “No way they could know.”

“They’ve been looking all this time. They know she’s still alive.”

“No way, Kenner,” Ren says, his voice fading as he turns back towards the window.

Kenner responds slowly, talking to Ren’s back. “They know, Ren. This kid targeted Julia. Because of you. Because of Afghanistan. Got her pregnant just to sweeten the target.”

“Is this an op?” Ren asks.

“You know I can’t answer that.”

“So Julia reappears in a few days, full press coverage, and you visibly don’t run. All this, Jack, is it to draw them out or me in?”

Kenner doesn’t answer directly, staring across the room at Ren. “It’s a game to them, Ren. They’re sick. We always knew that.”

“We’re all sick, Jack. All of us.”

Twenty-Six

I back the truck out of the garage and into a full-scale blizzard, the thick snow blowing horizontally and piling up against everything in its path. Though I slept for several hours, I don’t feel rested at all.

I make it all the way to the Manhattan Bridge without seeing a single other vehicle, the big tires leaving deep, wide tracks in the snow. As I drive across the East River, I can see that the bottom half of Manhattan is dark. There are no overhead lines in Manhattan to be pulled down by trees or ice, and it’s an unusually large area for a routine outage, so most likely it’s a blown transformer, not from the snow but from flooding. The blizzard struck land during the full moon at an incoming tide. Tomorrow they’ll call it a freak event; a ‘once in a century storm’ that hits every few years. Sara would have blamed it all on my truck.

I coast down the Manhattan Bridge’s lower roadway, leaving the truck in neutral and feathering the brakes lightly, and then onto Bowery, engaging the transmission and turning off at Hester Street. I take side streets the rest of the way, heading north and west through Chinatown, Little Italy, Soho and Tribeca, turning up Greenwich Avenue around 20 minutes later. Jane was right. No snowplows. No cars, and with this much wind, not even pedestrians.

Visibility is little more than 10 feet as I drive up 14^th street in the pitch-black night. The snow is at least a foot and a half deep, but the truck holds steady. I turn at 9^th Avenue and drive south for a few blocks, and then loop back around to 10^th Street and head north, rolling past the address Rastov gave me at the cabin.

The building is an old standalone three-story brick building, with a garage and loading bay on the first floor, one of the few remaining beef companies in an area once dominated by slaughterhouses. The second floor could be an apartment, or more likely an office for the business downstairs. It’s impossible to tell from outside in the dark. The third floor, however, has curtains.

I park the truck around the corner in an alley next to the adjacent building. Covered in snow, the Dodge can easily pass for a commercial vehicle, and even if there were patrols looking for me, it would be covered soon enough. I get my bag from the cargo area, along with two of the mason jars and the gun I took from Rico, and make my way back to the short brick building.

There are old vent-style windows on the first floor, and vertical sliders on the second and third. I walk around the back of the building to the opposite alley, the wind and snow cutting visibility down to near zero now. It’s little better in the alley, but I still have to hug the wall and lean forward against the wind.

After walking against the length of the wall, I hit an iron drainpipe coming from the roof. I could climb it, but then I have no idea what’s on the roof, or how sturdy the rusted supports are, or whether I can even make it to the top, so I circle the building again.

The residential entrance is a single door a few feet north of the loading bay, an imposing, fortified steel door with a round buzzer and an encased metal frame to discourage pry-bars. I might be able to get at it with the sledgehammer, but it would take too much time, and would be very loud. Same problem with the lower windows; the glass in each small panel contains shatterproof wire mesh. I’m not sure the noise would even matter out here, muffled by the snow, but I decide to keep looking anyway.

20 minutes later, I am back in the alley climbing up the 4-inch drainpipe, the handles of my duffel bag wrapped around my ankle and dragging against the wall beneath me. I creep up slowly like an inchworm, contracting and stretching, inch by inch, with the bag dragging two feet below. My hands go numb halfway up, but I keep climbing. I pass two windows, completely dark and out of reach, before levering myself over the ledge and rolling into the deep snow on the roof. I lay there for several minutes, staring up at the swirling snow, my chest heaving for air.

I catch my breath and start to rise up, but the wind is much stronger up here, forcing me to crouch down and walk slowly. Eight or nine yards away there’s another steel door set into a wall beneath what looks like gravity-fed water tower, a huge, metal cylinder around 40 feet high, perched atop a wooden structure that looks like something out of a farm back home.

I creep up to the door, spreading my weight as evenly as possible and approaching with the pry-bar. The door is flush set and fortified like the one in the first floor entrance. I don’t see any other access point on the roof, nor is there a fire escape leading back down to the third floor windows.

I press the light on my LED watch. It is just after four. Shielding the beam with my hands, I shine my flashlight on the base of the tower. Standard 4 X 4 structure, with four newer looking 2 x 4 planks wedged diagonally between the surface of the roof and the curved wall of the water cylinder itself for additional support. I stare up at the old tower, my eyes squinting in the snow.

I loosen the base of one of the diagonal support beams with the pry-bar, detaching it from the roof and walking sideways with it until the other end breaks free from where it’s attached to the cylinder itself, maybe eight feet up. I repeat the process for the remaining three supporting planks, trying to make as little noise as possible.

Even with the gale-force winds, the tower does not move. The supports were probably just added in response to a code violation. I walk around the entire tower again, pushing my weight against the four support beams, but the tower doesn’t budge in any direction.

I return to the south side of the tower where I first started, locating my duffel bag now covered in fresh snow. I reach down into the bag, remove the long fire-ax, and walk back to the first support, which faces towards the center of the roof. I swing the ax against the interior side of the wooden beam so it buckles away from the tower, arranging my body under the center so I can quickly back away as the tower falls forward. The original wood is old and soft. After four long, slow swings, the bottom half of the 4 x 4 support falls away, leaving the remaining three wooden legs hanging in mid-air.

The tower still doesn’t move. I look up at the water cylinder, high up in the blizzard on three legs like a mythical, defiant creature, the top barely visible in the swirling snow. I have a momentary, irrational urge to climb the thing, to climb to the top and keep climbing into the snow.

I walk around to the rear side again and lean against the base structure of the tower once again, pushing up and against the corner, and I can feel it give slightly, swaying a half-inch or so. I pull back on the structure and push again, rocking the tower on its three remaining wooden supports, the wind helping it forward. Push, pull, push, pull. The tower swings back and forth, at least three feet each way, before the second supporting beam in the front buckles and the tower lurches forward.

The metal cylinder crashes down on the center of the roof, falling all the way through and collapsing a large section of the roof and the floors beneath, the entire supporting structure of the water tower dragged down through the hole behind it like a tail.

Twenty-Seven

I crouch-walk around to the front of the hole, dragging the duffel bag behind me, and drop down onto the second floor, landing on a wooden floor in a hallway covered with several feet of water sloshing around and looking for a way down and out. I wade through the hallway towards a single door barely visible at the end.

As soon as I open the door, I feel the impact in my upper chest, the force of the hit propelling me backwards and slamming me against the debris from the collapsed roof.

The figure walks through the door holding a small gun and instantly I know it’s him, his eyes wide open and smiling. He looks even older in person, but his face that same wild cruelty I saw in the video as he raped my sister. Crooked teeth. Dead, brown eyes. Stained, silk pajamas.

“You’re the brother,” he says, standing above me pointing a gun towards my face.

I don’t answer. My chest feels like it’s on fire as I slide down into the water rushing across the hallway floor.

“I almost don’t want to shoot you again,” he says, swirling the gun around in circles as if he’s stirring a pot. “You saw how much I liked your sister, poor thing, and I can almost admire you,” he says, glancing up at the hole in the roof. “But family is a difficult thing, trust me…I know.”

“Where is she?” I say, struggling to get the words out, my chest feeling like it was crushed with a hammer.

“My sons are morons,” he says, waving the gun from side to side now. “Both of them, I know. Your sister, too. They step in it, we clean it up. You and I, Mr. Leon. You and I. We’re the cleaners. We’re the real necessities. He seems to not even notice the hole in the roof, or the water pouring down through it.”

“Where?” I ask again.

“It was that damn cop. Had a thing for Vicky’s wife…ah…your sister, whatever the fuck her name is, or was. You know they didn’t have a warrant? I had it all covered.” The Bear steps around me, standing at my feet, lifting his head towards the hole in the roof, and closing his eyes as the snowflakes land on his face.

“I can’t do business without rules, no different than the police, although not entirely the same either. Rastov?”

“Dead,” I say, pulling my body upright and wall-walking to a standing position.

He tracks my movement closely with the gun, the smile gone from his face.

“Dead,” I say again.

“Well, as I said, a moron. I figured as much. But you can’t choose family.”

“Where’s Lily?”

“Pretty cheap, I guess you know now, to buy a cop, eh? I own quite a few, as you’ve miraculously discovered. My little pets. By the way, I never knew you could break a safe like that,” he says. “It was very interesting. We had a camera on you the whole time, streaming right into my living room.” He glances up at the roof briefly, and then lowers his gaze back to me. “Yes. Very interesting.”

“Where’s my sister!” I scream out.

“Where are the contents of my safe?”

“Everywhere,” I say.

“No matter, Mr. Leon. You can publish them in the New York Times, for all I care, and I will still never see a day in prison. For all your success, you Americans still don’t have the slightest understanding of how America works.”

“I’m not American,” I say.

“No, you wouldn’t be now, would you,” he says, his lips curling into a snarl.

“Lily,” I say again.

“Yes, back to the girl. Well. Leon. You know what happens when you’re transporting, say, I don’t know, tomatoes?”

A large beam from the roof falls behind him, crashing on the wooden floor, but he doesn’t flinch, continuing to speak as if nothing had happened, “and someone drops a box, and a tomato falls onto the floor and it splatters?”

I say nothing, my body shivering violently from my soaked clothes. I unzip my wool coat and let it fall to my feet on the floor, landing in a black, wet pile. My t-shirt is covered in blood, but the cold does help a little.

“Breakage,” he says, walking towards me. “We call it breakage.” Another beam falls behind him, dragging a chunk of the ceiling with it.

“So, particularly and precisely,” he says, still waving the gun, “I don’t know where your sister is, any more than I’d know where the guts of the tomato would have been tracked to. Do you understand?”

“Someone must know,” I say.

“Yes. Someone knows. She herself knows. But she’s not telling little brother, eh?”

I don’t catch what he says next. As his lips are moving, I feel the floor of the building shift a little bit, causing a slight rumble. He looks up at the falling roof and instinctively raises both hands to protect his head, still holding the gun but no longer pointing it at me.

As the roof comes crashing down, I push off the wall with my foot, charging into him and forgetting that the duffel bag is still wrapped around my ankle. The bag catches and I veer off to the side, leaping into him and just missing the largest part of the collapsing roof, and we both fall over the edge together, crashing through the both floors and onto the concrete floor below. I cover up and roll into a fetal position as the roof crashes over both of us.

I don’t know if it’s age, or genetics, or just desperation, but my body takes the fall better than his does. I roll onto my knees and take the gun from his clenched hand, struggling to get back my feet. I stand above him and put the gun in my pocket. I take the flashlight from my side pants pocket and switch it on, but the lens is smashed from the fall. I shake it a few times, but clearly, it is not going to work.

As I’m turning towards a table to look for another flashlight I feel his hands on my neck, his slight weight pushing me towards the table, the wound in my chest burning hot. It occurs to me that I’ve never thought of any downside to being deaf before, but having a murderous Russian criminal sneaking up on me, even an old weak soaking wet one, could certainly be the first.

He realizes his hands are not strong enough to strangle me, or my neck just too wide for a decent grip, so he lowers one hand to look for the gun. My hand closes on a curved metal hook of some sort lying on the table. As his hand reaches the grip of the gun, I drive my left elbow hard backwards against his forehead, pushing off the table and spinning around and sinking the hook deep into his shoulder. He falls against the wall and stares down at the hook.

I walk back to the center of the room and find my duffel bag where we’d first fallen. I reach inside and grab one of the mason jars, removing the Zippo from my front pocket lighting the rope wick and pausing as it catches before throwing it up to the door where I first saw him. Where he lives. Where he sleeps. I want the whole place to burn.

I want it all to burn.

Twenty-Eight

The sounds I cannot hear: The whistle of the hammer as it arcs through the air. The wailing of pain and the begging of The Bear. The dripping of blood from thawing meat onto the wet concrete floor. The beautifully crude threats.

My own hideous voice.

I drag The Bear into a walk-in freezer by the hook sunk through his shoulder and toss him into a corner on the floor. When I reenter the freezer, dragging the oak table behind me, The Bear is hard at work on the hook, trying to muscle it out, but it’s sunken deep through the tendons. Hope is adrenaline, fear masks pain, begging helps no one.

I yank him up by the hook and then hold his hands outstretched, one at a time, as I nail his wrists to the table with railroad spikes. I put all of my 240 pounds behind the hammer, but even so, it takes several swings. His body shakes, the nails sink further into the wood, his face is pain; he screams, but I cannot hear.

The building above burns a deep blue hue with my smuggled-in accelerants.

The sound of the hammer into The Bear. The pain in his eyes. I have never seen so much hatred. It is beautiful to me, to reach this center, this uncomplicated base, to disassemble the past and honor a new history. It is another film, also homemade and rough, an overlay, an epilogue. The Bear is broken but I have spared his face, and to see those eyes, that is what I needed; to see his hatred flow into me, my own eyes sucking down the scum like bathtub drains. His life whirls into me and I taste the fear, the hope, the sharp sting of adrenalin pumping and the reeking muck of despair. His pain soothes me…a slow, thick poison. We will all die.

I know it now; I am a broken man. I always was. I imagine Lily watching me, Lily keeping score, making lists, balancing all. As a child from far away, she was the queen, even more so than her mother. But she didn’t survive. The world was not as we had imagined, not even close. The world is a cruel, bastard place, Lily cold and lost somewhere, me hot and bleeding and swinging my hammer. Life as it is, not as we wish it to be.

The sounds I cannot hear: The laughter of the watchers. The groan of my sister as The Bear cums inside of her, pulling her hair until the roots bleed. The Bear screams and shits himself inside of the dark freezer. Lily’s wailing and cursing and crying. I scream at The Bear with all my mighty, damaged voice, swinging the hammer at his ruined hands, hands that will never again touch anyone. Lily at the end, beaten and pissed on and begging to die.

Lily is dead. I am dead. It will never be enough.

I remove the stack of photos from my wallet that I’d printed at the Internet café a lifetime ago and place them face down on the table in front of The Bear. I draw an ‘X’ on the back of the first photo and turn it over, laying it close to the pulp of his ruined hands.

The Bear offers me anything I want. An animal can feel pain but cannot describe or transmit it adequately. The bear both is and is not an animal. I lack hearing, so the bear cannot transmit his experience to me unless I choose to see it. His pain is not my pain, but mine is very much his. I swing the hammer into his unhooked shoulder, and then I draw another ‘X’ and flip another photo.

His lips move, and I understand what he wants to know. 5 photos.

In my notepad, I write; you are a rapist fucking pig. I put the paper into the gristle of his hands and swing the hammer against metal hook again. It’s a sound I can feel.

Anything, The Bear mouths. He is sweating in the cold air of the freezer. Crying. Bleeding.

In my pad, I write: I want my sister back. I swing the hammer claw-side first into his mouth and leave it there. His body shakes and twitches.

I turn over his photo and write one last note, tearing it off slowly and holding it in front of his face, the handle of the hammer protruding from his jaw like a tusk. You are number four. There are a few seconds of space as the information stirs into him and I watch as he deflates, the skin on his face sagging like a used condom. He knows what I know.

I turn over the last photo for him. I turn it slowly and carefully, sliding it towards him. Victor, his one good son, his outside accomplishment, his college boy, the one who tried to fuck him and they fucked my sister instead.

I remove another Mason jar from my bag, unscrewing the metal top and letting the thick fluid flow onto his lap. I wipe my hands carefully and light a kitchen match, holding it in front of his face for a few seconds as it catches fully. He doesn’t try to blow it out. He doesn’t beg me to stop. He just stares at the match as the flame catches, and I drop it onto his lap.

The Bear shakes so hard from the pain that one of his arms rips from the table, leaving a skewer of meat and tendon on the metal spike. I lean into his ear, taking in his sweet reek and the rot of his bowels and, in my own hideous voice, I say:

“Wait for me.”

For much of my writing life, I’ve had a special disdain for writers who insist that it’s easier to write a novel than a short story. After all, it takes me years to finish a twenty-page story, and at that rate, it’s little more than a hobby.

Deep into my second novel, however, I believe I finally understand what they meant. Writing a novel circumvents the always-on editor present in all writers. When you start writing a novel, you know your’e going to throw most of it away. You know it’s crap. You know, in the beginning, that it sucks especially badly, and that’s OK. You just have to write it, scene by blind scene, because you’re building something bigger than your mind is accustomed to looking at. That’s what you’ve decided to do, so you do it.

Someone who writes short-stories is a writer. But a novelist is, first and foremost, a reader. A novelist is an archaeologist, a habitual explorer. You pick a place, and decide to dig. And dig. Your map is only so big, drawn by a blind idiot. You see the next day. The next minute. That’s all. You give up control. You give up knowing. You’re not the star. The story is the star. Your characters are the stars. You’re nobody. The novelist allows the curiosity to take center stage.

The novelist, in essence, gives up on writing, and he or she decides to tell a story instead. And the editor has nothing to do until the story is written down. He sits in a corner and silently waits until you tell him there is something to chew on. Something to tear at. If you can ignore him, you’ll finish. He knows his place, and you have to know yours. You can’t hold an entire novel in your mind; nor can he. You have to write it down just to see what happens. And so you willingly trade a few months of your life to dig that hole. You build a camp around that hole. You create strong characters to help you dig. You fortify your camp against the editor. You make sure enough of you survive to complete the task.

Halfway though your novel, you’re no longer a writer sitting alone in the woods. You have a team. Imaginary or not; you have a team. You’re the manager, the facilitator, the enabler, the executioner.

When I sit down to write a short-story, I already what will happen, and how long I have to make it happen. But a novel is a leap of faith. Too big for any one person. Certainly, too big for me. That is, I think, what those writers meant. Writing a short story is like diving into a lake looking for that beautiful fish that’s always eluded you. Until and unless you find it, you’re drowning. Writing a novel, however, is like grabbing onto of the fin of a whale and holding on until the very end. If you knew where the whale was going, you wouldn’t need to write the novel. But if you didn’t start the novel, you’d never have found the whale.

So my first ever public reading was a hoot! Much mroe fun than I had expected, and I hope to continue. It was a seven minute reading, so I memorized the whole text, which mad it a lot more fun to interact with the audience. Called it Mr. Sunrise, it was a combination of a finalist in the Opium Bookmark Competition, my latest story ‘Losing Found Things’ in the current issue of The Battered Suitcase and an as yet unpublished work called ‘Mr. Sunrise.’ Here’s what I read:
     The women stand in velvet pens like flowers waiting to be picked and stripped, fake Gucci purses bulging with condoms and gum and hand sanitizer.
     Inside, the work goes quickly. ‘No’ just means that you fucked up in some small, correctable way. ‘No’ means next time. ‘No’ means…wait.
     The pick-up artists forage and roam, cartoon gangsters hovering and clashing. They rush in from the unlit corners, crabbing sideways with I-phones extended, trapping silicon sluts in their grapplers and fighting over the scraps until every shred of flesh is tagged and mapped.
     Drunken models whisper in hairy grey ears. Cocktail waitresses glide by on memorized tracks, dressed in translucent black and slinging trays of drinks with glow-in-the-dark ice cubes. They stumble and curse prettily,keeping us oiled, their thin arms traversed with colored lines of drainage from the swooping trays, snakes of pricey liquor tinkling down their armpits and disappearing into unwashed bras packed with soggy filler.
     I sit in the back an old sagging couch. I poke at my phone, scrolling, texting, calling, deleting. I Facebook and I Tweet. I Nerve, I Match, I Cupid, nudging and tweaking my digital selves as they evolve and encircle the electronic women they stalk. I am between 20 and 40 years old. I have never been married and/or am divorced. I am a Republican but I also like to kiss. I am agnostic and a strong, malleable believer in whatever eases your guilt and relaxes your abductor muscles. I am fit, rich, stable, sensitive, happy, tall. I am a fireman who writes poetry and in my spare time I work as a CEO for the Last Bank Standing. A social yet non-promiscuous Type A, I am the life of the party who will deflate my balloon on your command and weep profound tears of love and empathy as needed.
     I love Jesus, but I’d also fuck the tooth fairy.
     Martha ducks around a corner and I sink a little further into the dirty upholstery. It’s too early for her, and I’m too sober. This is how we live when we get tired of living. It is rehab for romance, a halfway house of emotional bulimics. Lives carefully planned yet poorly executed. The waitress brings me another drink and a useless smile. I growl back and hold it up to the light, looking for lipstick.
     The way I feel about vodka is the way fat people feel about ice cream. Damage done in small, senseless bites.
     We met at the bookstore, Martha and me. A prime gathering spot for libidinous females with mediocre social skills and workable levels of self esteem. I was in personal growth with one foot in cooking, carrying tomes on meditation and senior care and floral arrangement and pacific rim vegetarian gourmet. She was lugging heavy art books to accentuate her biceps. I wore boxers. She wasn’t wearing a bra. We kissed in self help, and it was the last time I ever saw her in daylight.
     The thing about girls like Martha is that you have to sleep with them on the first date. If a girl sleeps with her doorman on her way upstairs, it’s your own fault, and she’ll never see you again. She’ll tell her friends and colleagues and bartenders and they will laugh at your inattentiveness. Your inability to unzipper her will race through your social media circles in no time at all and it will be over for you. Big cities are very small places. Don’t fall for the nice-guy routine. Don’t go slow. Whatever bullshit she slings at you while you twist and yank at her bra clasp in the back of a cab is just more noise. She doesn’t want to be your friend. Her friends have vaginas. You don’t.
     And really, at this advanced stage of civilization, whatever little bit you’re still holding back is worth a lot less than you thought it was.
     I start dialing again as I hover in the bathroom watching unzippered elephants shuffle listlessly into unisex stalls and blasting out minutes later on electrified rails. The phone burns my palm. The bathroom attendant hands out Dentyne for oral fixations and Q-Tips for bloody noses. Another snowy night in August.
     Welcome to Miami.
     You have reached a non-working number at American Express.
     You have reached the law offices of Diddle and Diddle.
     You have reached the rejection hotline.
     You have reached the quasi-mail server and we don’t reach back.
     So here it is. Sit on the couch and give yourself CPR. You’re a fag in the best sense of the word; you love men because you are one, or at least plan to be one someday. The women want you to be like them, but they need you to be you, and they can’t take what you won’t give. We all deserve more. And you don’t have to be the best; but you could suck less.
     Three am in Miami is the magic hour. Three am is when decisions are to be made. Blurry watches are given up on. The kinds of people who go home, they go home at three. The women decide which person or persons they will have sex with. The men start thinking logistics. The insecure eliminate competition. Daily cash limits are exceeded, and the credit-card dealers bump their prices and cut their weight. It is the continental divide of excess, the meridian of maturity. If you’re not setup by three, you’re an orbiter, a scavenger, another loser raking the trash for emotional and sexual leftovers.
     In the dark back rooms the soundtrack is mucous and despair. A dismal merger of exhaustion and desperation and hope. Last minute women notice me and latch on, converging in narcotized spirals with blowjob smiles, old sunflowers twisting towards a fake light. Ugly, used up people, turning like dirty snow, terrified of facing the sunlight alone, of the hour long drunken drive home.
     I give you my best blind man’s turn. How long have you been sitting here? I’m not sitting here, you say. And I believe you. I reach down for one of my five minute fictions but there’s nothing there. I’m all out. I look at you but I cannot see. I will not hear. I do not feel.
     All I see is that other you, two abortions later, naked and screaming and bleeding and murdering my flatscreen with a curling iron.
     Love is a dirty drug with hideous side effects. So wash your hands after touching my heart. My addiction is loneliness, my hangover is hostility. I’ll tell you one last time and you’ll forget me instantly. You will not like me. You cannot have me.
     I can give you a ride on my beautiful lies.
     But I won’t be there when you shrivel and cry.
     I’m giving away what you’re trying to buy.

I’m thrilled to have my latest work, ‘Losing Found Things’ up in the Summer issue of The Battered Suitcase. It’s one of the most difficult stories I’ve written (aside from the gender-bending psychotic ‘Glass Handcuffs’), and it’s a great publication to be in.  Available in print, Kindle, pdf download, and online.

My latest, and most personal work, will be featured in an upcoming issue of The Battered Suitcase, online and in print and Kindle formats. I’m oddly excited about this one, in an empty nest sort of way.