jungle fatigues stands at attention, plastic M-16 slung low. I have a jelly jar full of whiskey in one hand. Early September and I have the radio tuned to the Diamondbacks game. They’re tearing up the Cubs. I am again staring out at southbound traffic.
If I lift my head just so, I can see the lights of stars. I look at the box, give it a nudge. Bend over it and sniff around the edges. Nothing. The smell of cardboard. I take it in my hands once more, feel the weight of it. Five, maybe six pounds. This is the weight of the average human head. I can open the box, or not. I turn my attention to the envelope. The handwriting is strange and beautiful, at once jagged as broken glass and somehow curved and girlish. My skin feels cold. Like touching metal, or walking into church. The skin remembers. I first laid eyes on this handwriting in a hotel bathtub in Denver almost seven years ago.
This is Jude’s hand, and I know whose head is in the box.
I open the envelope. It contains eleven hundred seven dollars and a one-way plane ticket to Amsterdam, first class. Eleven hundred and seven dollars. Jude has this thing about even numbers being unlucky. Taped inside the envelope is a silver hotel room key, number 9. There is also a photograph of a small boy with blond hair staring bullets at the camera.
Everson Poe, my son.
I stare back at him just as hard, trying with all my might to cross time and dimension to communicate with this tiny severed shadow of myself, this as yet perfect piece of me I’ve never met. In the envelope there is a jagged scrap of paper, thick white linen hotel stationery bearing the crest of the Dead Sea Hotel and an Amsterdam address.
On the back is a note, unsigned.
Come to us.
My name is Phineas Poe and this is how it begins.
Will Christopher Baer
