It—everything. Not just the TVs. I screamed and got under the desk. The floor moved, I could feel the concussion in my chest. My eardrums felt like they were shredding.
But the fire and the—how did you survive?
The fire didn’t come into Stephen’s office.
They protected you.
Apparently what I told them was that I wanted everyone in the office to die except Stephen.
You told them you were afraid he hadn’t died.
Yes.
So they … interpret?
They have ways of figuring out what you really want, Eden said. And then they leave you to it.
Turk had turned operations over to her staff years earlier, but for me she was front and center, met me right there in the lobby. White-glove service. I don’t recall being surprised to see her there, the only addition to the jeans and button-down shirt she wore every day a blue shawl, an attempt to appear matronly. I’d known her my entire life, of course. I’d assumed she was independently wealthy. We were neighbors, but what can you really know about anybody? Every so often she would come tapping at the service door. Spare some milk, have any sugar? When there was a blackout, I’d check on her if she didn’t check on me and Vik first.
As I emerged from the cryptoporticus, she took my arm and walked me through the marble lobby to her office in the back. The lobby looks the same today as it did then. Standard corporate scenery. Glass, marble, tasteful gray twill sofas that have never hosted a set of buttocks. When I asked Turk why she hadn’t extended the corporate façade all the way out, she explained that it was of particular importance that participants remember they were underground, down with the rats and ancient creeks. Anyway, she said, leaning in to me, do you have any idea what it would cost to waterproof that tunnel?
Good Turk.
Her team constructed a complication for me that put me right back in the same office space Eden had watched erupt in flame. Vik’s office, after all, had been right next to Stephen’s. But I wanted some changes. I wanted to be out there in the bullpen when the flames swept through. I wanted the place to disintegrate around me. Wanted the ceiling to collapse. I wanted to be buried in rubble.
On the appointed day, they sent a car to deliver me to the compound upstate, on the Wallkill River. They layered me in Nomex, full hood, breathing apparatus, forty pounds of shielding, ushered me onto the office floor, where I stood among my husband’s colleagues—professional stuntmen and -women, I now know—variously hammering at their keyboards, or sucking on coffee cups with a foot on the file cabinet, or watching the news, and there was this one guy who had a phone to his ear, nodding, scribbling on a pad, and it was he who got my attention because I wanted to know what he was writing (gibberish, doodling interlocking benzene rings, or had he so committed himself to the role that he had collected research on deals the firm would have been tracking that morning and was jotting from memory so that I, the participant, might in some way benefit from his method approach?). I stood against the back wall in my green EOD suit, peering out through the acrylic visor at the scenery, and there above the windows (Eden was right, what a view!) were the LED clocks for London, Singapore, Tokyo, Frankfurt, Buenos Aires, Shanghai, Milan, New York, and it was 8:42, by my request, and when I said, Ready, into the hands-free, the colons on the LEDs began to flash and I prepared to die. I’d spent a month under the supervision of a psychologist, but when it was showtime I didn’t feel like I was Vik or myself or an all-seeing eyeball. I felt like I was a stranger to us both, someone who’d paid an outrageous sum of money to participate in an outrageous stunt in the name of distraction. I felt crass and dishonest and utterly American.
I had a long four minutes to consider the implications of what I’d undertaken, the fiction I was creating, the familiar sense of life at a remove from life. I had time to consider the presence of Albert Caldwell within me—yes, still there, always there—either directing me toward or away from the truth from his frozen little cave, I couldn’t tell which, I could never know, my existence being a dictatorship of ignorance, and at the mark, the windows erupted and fire stormed through the space, a rolling, rippling flood of plasma, incinerating carpet and paper, carbonizing the ceiling tiles, roaring like river rapids, exerting an unexpected force, a physical force—what had I expected, seaweed lapping at my legs, lambs licking at lilacs, tongues of flame and all that? Certainly not this godlike presence crushing me from all sides, reducing, suffocating, combusting within me. The flaming analysts had all dropped safely into the subspace through trapdoors, and when the ceiling collapsed, my puckering throat sucked at the deoxygenated atmosphere, even though the EOD suit had been reinforced with a carbon-fiber cage so that I was wearing, in essence, a protective refrigerator, and the O2 was flowing normally.
The crushing panic was only my neurons hurtling along ahead of the physical sensation, playing the odds, and as I lay pinned beneath the rubble, panting, stinging sweat searing my lips, the screech of steel girders shearing from their mounts piped into my headset, rebar screaming as it knotted and broke, I recalled my training and opened my eyes so that I might take in the same darkness as Vik, had he been there. Had he been there and had he survived the initial impact. A tiny flame danced around in the little pocket of rubble before my eyes, gobbling up oxygen that, had Vik been trapped there, could have sustained him for just a few seconds more. A bright red combustion thread crawled across a wafer of ceiling
