I got a note to her through a girl she knew, enclosing a more secure IP address—I had changed it without telling my parents. That night I waited for a return message, but when it came it was abrupt and unapologetic.
It was from this low brick building that my father had extracted the cash that paid for our house, our backyard pool, the clothes on my back, and the sedition and betrayal of my best hopes. Out of this warehouse and whatever business he conducted here had come my mother’s chronic unhappiness and my own wholesale humiliation. That was why it had occurred to me with the force of revelation that the building ought to be burned down. For the purpose of revenge, yes, but also as a purification by fire. I had read that on the battlefield wounds were sometimes cauterized to stop uncontrollable bleeding. And I was bleeding, and this building was my wound.
Rainwater gurgled down a storm drain by my feet, stranding scraps of paper, cigarette butts, a discarded condom as pale and flaccid as a jellyfish. The night watchman worked his rounds. I could see the sway of his flashlight on the high windows as he moved from room to room. When he was (as I calculated) at the far end of the building I crossed to the loading bays and mounted a few steps to the steel door, painted military green, that was the building’s back entrance. Mounted beside the door was a two-step lock: you used a physical key to uncover a numerical touchpad. I had taken the key from the top drawer of the desk in my father’s home office, and I remembered the entry code from the last time he had brought me here (because it had struck me as ludicrously obvious: the year of his birth).
Whatever part of Latisha’s tuition my father had arranged to pay, he probably considered it a bargain. My father was never ostentatious about his wealth but I had lived in his house long enough to overhear the occasional veiled reference to offshore holdings and IRS audits aborted by expensive lawyers. He could have sent me to Yale twice over if I had shown any aptitude for schoolwork. None of this money had been applied to the premises of the warehouse, however. The corridor inside had been overpainted with cheap yellow enamel, the floor was ocher linoleum, the ceiling lights were flyspecked fluorescent tubes. A door to the right opened into the storage and forwarding area, stairs to the left led to second-floor offices.
My plan was to douse the hallway, start the fire, pull the alarm by the exit (to give the watchman some warning), and run. Whether the fire would be quickly controlled or whether it would spread, whether the damage would be significant or just another financial nuisance for my father, whether I would be caught and punished for it or whether I would buy a ticket out of town and change my name—I didn’t know, it didn’t matter. My rage mattered, my humiliation mattered. So I took the jug of methyl hydrate out of the plastic bag I’d wrapped it in. I put it on the floor. I unscrewed the cap and tipped it over.
The floor had sagged over the years. The liquid puddled and spread toward the interior of the building. The reek of it was eye-wateringly sharp. It filled the crevices in the linoleum and crept steadily down the hallway, pooling here and there. There seemed to be much more of it than a two-gallon jug could possibly have contained.
I took the matchbook out of my pocket and peeled off the wrapping that had protected it from the rain. The matchbook was dry but my hand was wet and I ruined two matches before I managed to strike one into a steady flame. I wondered if the fumes in the corridor might themselves be flammable, whether I was about to be immolated by my own act of revenge. I decided I didn’t care.
I was in the act of tossing the match when the door to the right opened and the night watchman stepped through.
Maybe there was a surveillance camera in the hallway, though I hadn’t seen one, or maybe I had tripped a warning light in the watchman’s cubby just by coming through the door. Or maybe he had left his post for the purpose of taking a piss. All I knew was that he was suddenly standing in the hallway a couple of yards away, staring at me. He was a skinny guy in jeans and a sweat-stained open-collar shirt. He had a big angular head and his hair was shaved close. He couldn’t have been much older than I was. His eyes bugged out in surprise. A small river of flammable liquid forked around his old brown shoes.
He opened his mouth to say something. But I had already tossed the match. It tumbled through the air, leaving a coiled trail of smoke. I had time to take a single startled step backward. The night watchman just gawked. I don’t think he understood what was about to happen.
The flames were blue and they ran along the surface of the liquid and around the rims of the watchman’s shoes. Then some critical boundary between vapor and air ignited. There was a vast exhalation of hot air, and I was pushed off my feet. I turned and scuttled out the door into the gouting rain. Now the doorway was a curtain of flame and smoke, but through it I could see the watchman burning. He tried to run, and that might have saved his life, but his feet went out from under him. He did a kind of dance before he toppled into the flaming liquid. The dry flooring burned like tinder. He looked like he was screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything over the rush and bite of the flames.
I thought of Allison making her way to the aircraft docks. Maybe she was there already, waiting. Waiting for me, while the rest of Vox waited for a ticket to heaven.
“You don’t have to carry that weight alone,” Oscar said. He sounded as indulgent and unshockable as the pastor at First Baptist, where my mother used to take me when I was a child. “We’ll share it with you, Mr. Findley. The Coryphaeus will share it with you, once your interface is complete.”
The limbic implant was doing its work. I was sorely tempted to accept his offer of salvation, same as I had been at First Baptist, back when my sins were trivial things. Lay your burden down, young man. Lay it at your savior’s feet. Even as a child, I had understood why so many weeping souls made the journey to the altar. The Coryphaeus knew me, word and deed, inside and out. My sins were its sins.
Oscar watched me closely. “But you’re still not ready to take that last step. Unconditional forgiveness from a polity of your peers… you want it, but you won’t accept it.”
A forgiveness that would last as long as it took the Hypotheticals to show up. Or had I been wrong about that, too? Maybe Vox really would be redeemed, maybe Vox would live forever. There was a presence in my head that insisted it would. I said, “I’m not sure every sin deserves to be forgiven.”
“The man you killed has been dead ten thousand years. Clinging to a single tragic misjudgment is a vain and wasteful act.”
“Not talking about
“Oh? Whose, then?”
“It was more than murder, Oscar. The death of all those Farmers. It was an act of genocide.”
Whatever Oscar saw in my face, it made him flinch. He glittered with sudden uncertainty. “The Farmers would never have been taken up by the Hypotheticals… their death was always inevitable.”
“They were only here because Vox enslaved them and brought them here.”
“
“Someone made the decision.”
“We all made the decision!”
“And you all forgave yourselves for it.”
“The
“I don’t mean to offend you, Oscar, but doesn’t it seem to you that a conscience that can rationalize genocide might be defective?”
He stared at me, radiating violet spikes of anger and resentment. Then he shrugged. “You haven’t lived with your node long enough. Before long you’ll understand.”
“None of this matters now,” he said. “Come with me.”
