Holcomb had trouble recalling specifics, but he remembered that the past had, in fact, existed.
When it surfaced in his mind, brooding and patient as a crocodile partially concealed by the murk, he was inclined to think that it had always been awash with soothing blues and dramatic violets—glimpsed in perfectly symmetrical fragments—as he now saw everything else in the world.
He stood at the edge of the soybean field and marveled at its efficiency. The plants hugged the ground in narrow rows that stretched toward the dark horizon, like green fingers searching for the pulse of the earth
In the distance, Holcomb saw the mantis claws of a harvester stabbing the ground in the moonlight. Swirling plumes of burgundy dust rose in an ethereal haze. The harvester tossed the plants in parabolic arcs as it inched forward, providing just enough height and velocity for the uprooted flora to land flatly in the steel container that trailed the bulk of the machine.
His left ear twitched. Interlink signals entered his temporal lobe and moved unobstructed through the occipital and parietal before settling like ball bearings in his corpus callosum. Involuntarily, he began grinning.
“Rescue crews are on the way,” the sterile voice of his regulator reminded him. “Please, remain calm. Consider the ice cream.”
His tongue went limp.
Vanilla, chocolate, rocky road, Pralines ‘n Cream: his stomach grumbled and he fought the notion that he was hungry. Ironically, his gut told him that he was sick of ice cream. He would never openly admit this, though, mainly because he was exceedingly grateful for his current position as lead taster.
“Consider,” his regulator said in a firmer voice, the synthetic pang less noticeable, “the ice cream.” Glistening images of soft serve overcame the rebellious tendencies of his neurons, and he lowered himself into the undergrowth that lined the shoulder of scenic US 441. The smell of melting plastic—the burning wreckage of his car, which had been slowly reduced to nothing more than whistling Polyethylene, tried to communicate with his regulator. The automobile tried vainly to inform the fourth generation processor wedged just beneath Holcomb’s scalp that his car was on fire; it tried to remind the precisely positioned transistors that it was no longer a finely crafted biodiesel three-wheel.
Instead, its signals were overridden by manifestations of healthy men in white coats smiling courteously. With outstretched arms, they swooned over that which humanity had come to covet like nothing else—Country Fresh ® Ice Cream. This pleased Holcomb, and the translucent image of the outside world before him quickly melted.
“One taste, and you’ll agree” the soda shop clerk declared cheerily, “Country Fresh can’t be beat.”
Holcomb jolted in his place among the weeds and pulled his knees close to his chest. His lips trembled as his regulator reminded him of the nearest Country Fresh distributor. At times this bothered him, but he knew the CPU was only doing what it was programmed to do. How could it know that he was lead taster? How could it possibly record that he had accompanied the Gainesville area account executive on several lucrative visits to potential distributors? Unfortunately, there wasn’t room for that. The regulator only talked; it didn’t listen.
The clerk disappeared in a flurry of pixels, and Holcomb found himself staring dumbly into a thicket laced with blossoming milkweed. Veiled dandelions wilted in the heat and stars burned pinpoints in the black dome overhead. After several minutes, he stood, brushed off the seat of his pants, and walked back to the smoldering vehicle.
* * *
Fulton had a smile that took precedence over everything: his indomitable laugh and the way he shuffled a deck of playing cards, with astonishing speed and precision, were qualities that should’ve been trademarked. Holcomb admired the confidence with which his dad fanned all fifty-two of the cards across the entire breadth of the flimsy vinyl table he kept in the garage, and then said in a low voice, “All right, Holcomb. Pick a card. Any card. This will blow your mind.”
Although Holcomb hated the cliché of it all, he had to admit that Fulton was good at stuff like that. Parlor tricks. Hustling. Holcomb eventually reached a point in his life where he actually hated his father for his obsession with illusions.
This was all enhanced by an acute bitterness bought on by the fact that Fulton had been previously employed in a noble profession. His father was, at one time, a firefighter.
In kindergarten, Fulton visited Holcomb’s class on show-and-tell day. He entered the room noisily, the heavy fabric of his suit scraping at the knees. The pride Holcomb felt was transcendental—his father was Hephaestus, able to fearlessly confront an inferno and manipulate it at whim. The equipment he toted into the small classroom (with its ceiling border of lower case letters and ten-gallon aquarium brimming with goldfish) seemed an unworthy temple. Holcomb thought back to the lesson he had heard in Sunday school the previous week: the story about the keepers of the Ark of the Covenant.
He thought about these Hebrews, so different than his family, and the way they measured in “cubits” and participated in the ritual slaughter of helpless animals. He thought of the way the most revered priest was the only one allowed to enter the room where the ark was kept—how the man had a rope tied around his waist in case he made a mistake. In case he forgot the order of things.
“If this happened,” his prim teacher told him, her eyes flashing beneath a white frazzle of hair, “He was rewarded with instant death. With Jesus, things are different. There are no temples and ropes. There are no high priests and blasphemous rites and rituals. One thing remains, though. Respect. You must always demonstrate proper respect for the divine.”
And proper respect is what Holcomb had developed for his father. It was an inherent admiration that Fulton commanded with a conspicuous lack of words.
An eerie silence pervaded the room, and it was something that no one dared disrupt. Holcomb’s classmates stared at his father, their tiny mouths agape, round eyes grotesquely distorted in the amber morning light.
They absorbed tales of crumbling rooftops and exploding windows. Fulton discussed his EMS training, too, and even showed them how to perform CPR. When he exposed his Vader-like oxygen mask, many backed away. The air hissed from it in whipping squalls, and, for a time, no one approached.
Arms folded, Holcomb trotted quietly to the front of the room and donned the immensity of the apparatus, his bobbing head an odd caricature that elicited a few giggles. This was all it took, though, and soon the room had converged into a single file line, each five year-old waiting anxiously for his or her turn too.
A year later, all of that changed.
Fulton returned home from the station visibly battered. His eyes had retreated into their sockets and his cheeks were loosened. Holcomb’s mother asked her husband what was wrong.
Fulton, in his still young voice, mumbled something about a car accident. There was a teenage girl in a convertible and a UPS truck. One of them had gone the wrong way on the interstate. Holcomb’s mother approached him, but he backed away nervously.
Fulton didn’t eat dinner that night. As far as Holcomb was concerned, that was the red-letter date when it all began—the magic: the illusions.
The next morning, Holcomb’s father gathered his things and walked out of the heavy metal door in the rear of the firehouse, his chief following him, belligerently firing questions as they went.
Things continued to decline, and the older Holcomb became, the less patience he had for his father’s increasingly juvenile behavior.
One sweltering July evening, Holcomb slipped out of their south Charlotte, one-story ranch home. He was eighteen, and had decided to head south.
Someone had written him a letter not long after he had left. He didn’t leave his new address with anyone, but even with the Internet Monitoring Act in full swing, anything was available for a price. Before he had a chance to read the greeting, he knew it was his mother. After completing his bachelor’s online, he landed a job in advertising, and he had a knack for scanning proposals and other documents, looking only for the stuff that mattered: sifting through all the garbage. The sloping curve of her R’s and the capitalization of every word were unmistakable. It was the four-word sentence she had written in her concluding paragraph that gave her away: “Philadelphia Really Misses You.”
Philadelphia. That damn dog.
Philly was his eleven year-old chocolate lab. The aging mutt had had hip surgery some years before Holcomb took off, and his father had given up on slight of hand for an entire week so he could focus on constructing a ramp that would allow the elderly dog to climb the steep stairs of the deck without yelping with the arthritic placement of each paw. It was a hideous thing, the ramp (nothing more than plywood and shingles), but it worked.
Soon after, Holcomb told Fulton that his desire to become a magician was “ridiculous” and “irresponsible.” It was an unwelcome role reversal they both despised. Holcomb’s mother feigned acceptance of the part-time position her husband took at Fed-Ex/Kinko’s, but, to a son who couldn’t afford anything his friends had—who couldn’t participate in school sports because the equipment fee was something that his father said they couldn’t afford—the world of Houdini and Copperfield that his father decided to immerse the family in was nothing more than a shoddy velvet curtain, doing a terrible job of masking reality.
It didn’t help that Fulton actually seemed happier. He hummed various sitcom themes as he worked with the jigsaw in his garage, sawdust filtering through the air like talcum.
Then came the war. No one had really expected it to happen, and it ended almost as quickly as it had begun. But that was enough time for the government to enact a law that actually regulated thought among known terrorists in an international “bag and tag” initiative. It was experimental, but highly effective according to the news reports and White House press releases. Glib commentators warned of the “slippery slope” it pointed to, but the evidence that the regulators did their job was undeniable. Terrorism in developed nations became virtually nonexistent. As a matter of fact, the highly debated Regulator Act for the Preservation of Democracy (RAPD) thwarted two bombing attempts on an emissary who resided in Washington.
Grants were approved, and funding was issued. Holcomb remembered hearing one of his friends at a board meeting refer to the surgical regulator procedure that criminals were required to undergo, which was now required by law, as “being wrapped.”
“Wrapped?” he asked, his eyes squinting.
“Yeah, you know,” his colleague spelled it out for him. “Phonetics, or whatever. R-A-P-D…wrapped.” He swatted a fly that paced nervously along a nearby edge of the mahogany table, clasping its wiry front legs together as if in prayer.
“Oh,” Holcomb responded, leaning back in his chair, carefully adjusting the conference room blinds as to deflect the glare of the late afternoon sun.
* * *
He remembered something about a deer—it had stepped onto the highway, its effortless movements hypnotizing, taut muscles rippling beneath a coarse layer of matted hair. Before he deactivated the autopilot and jerked the wheel, he remembered its nose. Black, wet, and alert.
Holcomb also remembered the front fender glancing off of a steel mile marker and the subsequent collision with a sprawling oak that had somehow avoided being cut down when the road was widened. The airbags deployed and he managed to squeeze, delirious, out of the thick bubble of cushioning and membrane of fire retardant plasma that concealed him from the external world. When he emerged, screaming and coated in the pink substance, it was as if he had been reborn.
“Holcomb,” his regulator interrupted. “You have been involved in an accident. It’s important to remember that it wasn’t your fault.”
“An accident?” He repeated this audibly, allowing it to hang in the air heavier and more substantial than the oppressive Florida humidity he had grown accustomed to.
“I remember.” As soon as he said it, he knew it was a mistake. He hadn’t meant any harm. He was truly happy with his job: he really was. The brain isn’t like a regulator, though, and sometimes it makes mistakes. Sometimes it remembers.
His back shivered, and his spine prickled. The signals pulsing through his cerebrospinal fluid coalesced into a familiar digital voice.
“For headaches, there’s nothing better than Sherman’s Solution ®—the headache powder that produces real results.” Holcomb’s mind throbbed with a blinding vision: a man toppled over on a hardwood floor in front of a clean bed with white sheets. He wore pressed pants and a starched shirt. The curtains were fresh and bright against the solitary bay window. He groaned in a guttural way, fingering his forehead gingerly.
“I was useless,” the man said, lifting his head, “and then I discovered Sherman’s Solution. I had tried other headache solutions, but nothing matched the healing power of Sherman’s. Within seconds, the pain was completely gone.”
Children bounded into the room, and the man, whose greased hair was perfectly parted, laughed with the children and they fell upon each other playfully. Their clothes, like the man’s, were pure—pressed and white. The sterility of it all was overwhelming.
Holcomb clutched his forehead.
“You can purchase Sherman’s Solution at 8730 Malcolm Rd., just past the I-98 interchange,” his regulator reminded him. “Remember, if you’re not getting real results, you’re not using Sherman’s.”
* * *
On Holcomb’s thirtieth birthday, Fulton sent him a letter. It began:
“Dear Holcomb,
You won’t believe this. I’ve actually perfected the Sliding Queen of Canterbury. Remember the one—”
Holcomb crumpled it with one hand and tossed it into the wastebasket in the corner of his Gainesville loft. He remembered asking for a “Canterbury Egg” the Easter he turned seven. His father laughed and peered down at him through a pair of binoculars he kept on the foyer for cardinal watching.
“A Canterbury Egg?” he asked, his eyes hidden beneath two mammoth black rings. “You mean a Cadbury Egg.”
“No, Canterbury,” Holcomb said stubbornly, his brow furrowed. Fulton laughed harder and set the binoculars down. He exited the room and shouted from the bathroom, “That’s it! Holcomb, you’re a genius. That’s perfect!”
When his father explained that he had just given his “perfect trick” the perfect name, even at that young age, Holcomb’s enthusiasm was far from unbridled.
When he was older and on his own, he spent his afternoons leaning against the sill of a large window that faced the freeway. He watched throngs of cars enter and exit the graded curves of the ramps and barrel past stalled vehicles, tucked tightly against the stout concrete barrier. He watched all of this on his afternoons off, when he was able to abandon proofreading copy for Alltel, Energizer, Nestle, or whomever he had been assigned to.
There was something about the cars. The way they made their daily migration; the way they looked like platelets coursing through an artery, like the ones he had seen in the Discovery Channel simulations of how a healthy heart operates, that Holcomb found wholly hypnotizing.
Then came what was collectively referred to as “The Order”—the UN mandate.
Newborns of all nationalities were being outfitted with regulators even before their umbilical cords were detached. Protests turned violent and the world was reduced to a seething anthill as other countries adopted similar laws and revolutions were attempted and, just as quickly, thwarted. Before he could get out of the United States, he received his Wrapped Notification.
It arrived in the mail in an unassuming envelope, his name printed clearly at the center. The seal of the Department of Defense was stamped in red at the top left corner. His palms grew cool and he felt his throat tighten.
The next day, Holcomb called in sick. He wanted some time to consider his options: something he should’ve been doing all along, but he had grown apathetic for reasons he had trouble identifying. The whole scenario seemed surreal, borderline fantastic. Briefly, he thought about calling his father for advice. When he had reinitiated contact with his mother, she had mentioned in previous letters that they had made arrangements to move to Florida, so they could be closer to him. Fulton had plans to renew his EMS license and was looking for job openings as a paramedic. The idea was laughable at best. He knew his father, and concluded that he hadn’t saved a nickel since the day Holcomb left. Yet they had somehow successfully avoided being wrapped, and there was something to that. Holcomb imagined the conversation he might have with Fulton:
“Dad, I’m in trouble. Some real shit. I got my WN.”
“Son, there is a way around that. Sounds impossible, I know, but there is. It won’t be easy, though.”
“Okay. It’s just that I…I didn’t know who else to call.”
“Right. Well, you know I’ll always be here for you, and all that. First things first. You’ll need six pieces of pressboard and two mirrors. I’m talking about long mirrors, not short ones. A fog machine would be good too, but dry ice will work if you’re short on dough.”
“What? What the hell
are you talking about?”
“A disappearing box: that’s the only way.”
It was then that Holcomb decided to formulate his own escape plan.
Before dawn the next morning the majority of his irreplaceable belongings were in a Florida Gators duffle bag. With one arm already in his jacket, he cautiously approached the door after a knock had echoed precariously down the angular hall outside. The sound of padded steps faded against the engine of an eighteen-wheeler struggling to climb a distant exit ramp. They had arrived earlier than the notice had said.
His window was open, and he made the decision to descend the fire escape. The lock on his door began to spark furiously and clattered against the center hinge when it finally fell. He was halfway down before they overcame him, and when he surrendered, he noticed varying degrees of brightness overtaking the dense firs that unfolded beyond the freeway.
.
* * *
The harvester had made its way across the field and wasn’t far from Holcomb. He coughed in the wake of its exhaust; shielded his ears against the rhythmic clanging of its hydraulics.
His regulator kicked in.
“Cough getting the best of you? For breathing the cleanest air possible—”
Holcomb screamed. Heat and stiffness set the slant of his jaw. Tremors rocked his limbs and he seemed to be engaged in a clumsy waltz, saliva snaking down his chin, strangely viscous. And like everything else in his life—the war, relationships, his respect for his father—almost as soon as it had begun, it was over. He peered down, dumbfounded, at his bloody right hand, clenched into an immovable fist.
His fingers were swollen and cramped, but at least he could feel them. And, on top of that, he could think about them.
This was an idea, and it terrified Holcomb. He hadn’t meant to conceive it, this foreign embryo of thought that would quickly mature into ruthless torrents of pain. “Neurons must’ve fired in the wrong sequence,” he said softly and with absence, his hands shaking in anticipation, “it was an accident. There was no malice.”
Nothing happened. The world, too, had suddenly flooded with color. Even then, at night, he relished the subtle glow cast by the moonlight across the miniscule highway reflectors and the radiant, twinkling of far off streetlights. “This…” he said, his voice growing louder, “This is a thought.”
And that’s exactly what Holcomb did, completely uninhibited: he thought.
At first, his mind was focused only on his fingers and the dull ache that constricted his skull. Then he thought about his car, now a bubbling, warped mass. Next, he thought about the harvester. He considered its ability to pluck soybean plants and throw them (he guessed) twenty feet in the air. They seemed too light for that. Too insubstantial to reach those heights.
It was the roots, he decided. They were still heavy with dirt. They had enough weight to make the journey and not get tossed around by gusts.
What he had accomplished was more than mere “thought” or cognitive “idea”: he had fully explored a scenario and generated conscientious, observant commentary, and he bathed in the unpredictability he had been presented with.
Holcomb felt something in his fist. Then the awareness settled on him gently, like a warm blanket. What was happening was more than just the textbook processor malfunction. He had experienced that before, and the “thought” he encountered during those moments was a garbled amalgam of horrific design, programmed to keep his mind from wandering too far in any one direction. This time, there was no regulator to interrupt him. He was in control. There were—he absolutely quivered at the thought—no distractions.
Flaccid: torn and crumpled at the center of his dirty palm, with gruesome simplicity, was his left ear. A tangle of stripped wiring hung like plastic grass.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.
It was a miracle he was still alive. By all accounts, removal of a regulator resulted in death. That was the one thing the regulator had allowed mankind to remember with terrible clarity.
A wave of nausea swept over him, and his knees buckled.
* * *
Years earlier, after Holcomb had been wrapped, he tired to commit suicide. He stood motionless outside of a bank, and was suddenly compelled to thrust his head through an office window adjacent to the ATM he was using. Both his brain and the regulator told him how thick the glass was; oddly, this was a moment with no conflict of interest. One of the first. They both reminded him that the action was counterproductive; but he went ahead anyway, bludgeoning his head against the rattling pane until he was barely conscious. When it finally shattered, his scalp was nothing more than hair and fleshy pulp. Tears and blood lined the scraped bones of his cheeks. He grasped one of the jagged shards and began sawing at the back of his neck. He hadn’t meant to cause any trouble for the regulator, but somehow it was unavoidable.
After a period of staring at the harvester as it positioned itself in between rows, he came to the conclusion that this was his involuntary reaction. This was his brain telling the regulator, finally and with complete authority, to go to hell.
At first, he accepted the notion reluctantly. But soon his eyes, unveiled and aware of the complete spectrum, his mind able to diverge random thought after random thought into uncontrollable tangents, he knew there was no alternative. He was purging himself of the artificial.
* * *
Holcomb woke in his apartment with a dull throbbing in his left ear and a sore face. He warily examined the jagged scar that ran the short length from the base of his left ear to the joining of neck and shoulder, and didn’t seek medical attention when it was inflamed for three weeks. Eventually, the stitches dissolved just as the notification said they would.
One night he decided it would be good to have a distraction. Vince, from work, decided to set him up with a woman he played poker with named Peggy.
Typically, he avoided women with names that sounded like “piggy,” and he postulated (among other things) that all of her appendages were nothing more than pine stumps. Holcomb didn’t like that she played poker, either.
He was surprised to find that she enveloped an unfamiliar, almost supernatural beauty. Peggy sat quietly, cloth napkin in her lap, chewing absently at a forkful of roast duck. She wore a blue dress with thin silk straps that accentuated the curves of her shoulders. Her hair was blonde, and carried a twinge of auburn in the muted light of the cafe.
“Peggy?” he blurted loudly, trying to overcome the roar that suddenly thundered through his ears. He saw that her eyes were blank. Peggy’s lips were pursed and her teeth came down in alien chatter against the metal of her fork.
Several people had apparently experienced the same phenomenon. Family members waved open hands in front of empty eyes, and children sobbed confusedly.
And that’s when the first transmission hit him. It came first as a smell, similar to burnt rubber, and then there was darkness. Seconds later, an image began to form; colors and textures were uploaded in blurred conglomerations.
It was information about the proper way to protect oneself in a public dining location in case of a bomb threat, presented in a stiff dramatization that featured computer-generated patrons displaying techniques to help deflect shrapnel. He absorbed this numbly and was then unexpectedly confronted by a dancing greyhound that wore a top hat.
The “public service announcement” had been followed by an ad for dog food.
When it was over, people began ramming their heads into things. A bald man seated at the table across from them had no immediate reaction. Minutes later, he vomited into his bowl of crab bisque.
Holcomb concentrated on Philadelphia. His dog was one of the few things that could make him smile. He wondered how his dog had adjusted to the makeshift ramp in his old age. The week after the ramp was completed, Holcomb remembered, his father invited eight of their neighbors to a magic show he had advertised with flyers stapled to the telephone poles that lined their block. “A Miracle of Space and Time,” the flyer declared. “Fulini will dazzle the eye, capture the heart, and defy the laws of nature!” Fulini: Holcomb loathed the name and the sincerity with which it had been created.
“All the greats have memorable names,” his father told him.
“Fulton the Magnificent,” he said thoughtfully in response to a sarcastic suggestion made by his son. “I considered that. I really did. I batted it around with Bill Fritz. It just doesn’t have the bite that I’m looking for. You know?”
Holcomb didn’t know.
Five people showed up for the magic show, including Mr. Fritz. For the first fifteen minutes, things were routine. It was what Holcomb had seen practiced a thousand times before while he sat cross legged on the green shag of the living room floor. When he was younger, there was admiration—even excitement at the penny pulled from behind his left ear and the wriggling, severed thumb.
When Holcomb made the transition to middle school, though, the tricks became slightly more complex: a stuffed rabbit pulled out of a Red Sox cap; a multi-colored handkerchief stuffed into a clenched fist, which vanished in an explosion of confetti that set the drapes on fire.
“Now, ladies and gentleman,” his father shouted, neutral paint peeling in sheets from the walls of the garage, nylon cape fluttering in the breeze generated by an oscillating fan, “The grand finale!” The usual grandeur his father displayed was replaced with concentration.
Fulini shuffled his deck of cards rapidly, not allowing a single one to fall to the table below. He spread all fifty-two of them in a wide arc, gloved fingers moving slowly over each.
Suddenly, one of the cards began to twitch. Then it sprang into motion.
Holcomb hadn’t seen this one before, and it caused him to sit up in his chair. The card glided effortlessly across the surface of the table, the symmetrical Bicycle design facing the rotted beams above. “Prepare,” Fulini bellowed, “To meet the queen everyone in the kingdom loved. The Sliding Queen of Canterbury—the queen of hearts!” The card instantly flipped up into his hand. No one made a sound. As far as Holcomb could tell, there were no severed pieces of fishing line or bits of translucent wire.
Bill Fritz jumped from his folding chair and clapped wildly. Holcomb’s mother smiled. Eventually, all five people were applauding, including Holcomb.
Fulton’s face filled with creases as his smile widened. Mary Hollister, from Woodbury Lane, whistled and cheered.
“Encore!” someone shouted from the back of the garage, which drew a few encouraging laughs. Fulton bowed, and when he did, his right glove slipped off.
As it cascaded to the cement floor, Holcomb noticed that the queen of hearts fell with it. Not just next to it, falling in sync with identical wind resistance and by sheer coincidence—he realized that the card was somehow physically attached to it. Fulton slowly righted himself when he realized the applause had ceased.
Mr. Fritz approached the glove cautiously, as if it were a dead snake. He picked it up and examined it, tugging at the playing card until it separated. He held it overhead briefly, eclipsing the single florescent bulb in the garage. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “It’s a magnet. The son of a bitch put a magnet in the card! Genius!” Bonnie, president of the neighborhood book club, burst into laughter. Soon, the place was in an uproar.
Fulton reddened, and asked politely for Bill to return the card. Holcomb watched silently as his father unlaced his cape and packed his things back into his black briefcase and tucked it underneath the ratchet set on the workbench.
Holcomb returned to his bedroom and decided to begin packing his things.
* * *
The indistinct sound of wailing sirens eased Holcomb back into reality. He watched a police cruiser and an ambulance skate around the sharp curve he had negotiated seconds before encountering the deer. He thought about running.
For an instant, he contemplated moving toward the tract of wilderness to his right, but the police officer and paramedics were already out of their vehicles.
“Hold it a second, fella,” the officer said, stopping Holcomb with a grave look. “Where you goin’? You’ve been in an accident. You need to take it easy.”
Before he could object, he heard the echo of an injection round as it left the triangular barrel of a concealed rifle and felt the sting of the needle when it pierced his neck. Crumpling into a heap, he noticed that the wires in his peripheral, which had previously connected his regulator, hung from the side of his head like streamers. They were crinkled and flat, each one a different color.
ROY G. BIV. He remembered that from high school. He enjoyed the memory and how he imagined Mr. BIV might look—a gangly fellow with infinitely clashing vestments who had a prism dangling from a length of hemp tied around his neck. Holcomb jumped when a spark lighted from one of the exposed wires cascading from his head.
“Whoa,” one of the paramedics said, laughing dumbly. “Looks like we’ve got a live one.” Another paramedic approached, silent as he slid his fingers into a pair of powdered latex gloves. “Don’t worry, buddy. We’ll get you all fixed up. Everything will be okay.” As the men prepped their equipment, Holcomb peered through the darkness at the name sewn into the nearest man’s shirt.
“FULTON—Para-Grade II.”
He felt his stomach roil as the silhouetted man charged his tools, mumbling to himself quietly, adjusting knobs and thumping gauges. He barked something at one of the machines and it suddenly began to whirr with internal movement. Holcomb noticed that the man, unlike the policeman and the other paramedic, had the same pale scar he did. It was a cool, gracile line that ran from the back of his left ear all the way to his jugular. Holcomb recognized the moonlit bust, now balding, but with the same shrunken appearance it had taken when returning home from the scene of that roadside fatality so many years ago.
“Dad,” Holcomb said in a hushed tone, his eyes scanning the gray shoulder of the deserted highway, trying to locate the two intruders who had no business witnessing this long overdue intersection of fate.
“It’s me. Holcomb. We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Holcomb?” the man asked, his head titled toward the oscillating lights of the ambulance. He scratched his chin and sighed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re going to have to be still. This is a fairly complicated procedure.”
“No, listen,” he said, his voice stammering, “You’ve got to rip it out. Yours, I mean. Get rid of it. We can make it out of here.”
“Sir,” Fulton said in an annoyed tone, his equipment now idling gently. “You need to relax. This will only take about thirty minutes if you relax.”
“The disappearing box,” Holcomb said firmly, “Listen. Just listen. There’s a way out of this. We can build a disappearing box. Remember? You built one when I was in fifth grade. We’ll need some plywood and mirrors. And dry ice—remember the dry ice? There’s a way out of this, dad.”
The man stared at him, his eyes distant and unintelligible. Holcomb held his breath, and sweat pooled around his eyes. Moments later Fulton turned and lunged at Holcomb.
Another sharp pain crept up Holcomb’s left arm, and he saw his father withdraw a syringe. “This will help you relax,” he said, dropping the needle into an orange biohazard container attached to his surgical console.
The harvester had lurched back across the field. The thick cloud of dust it had kicked up on its approach had begun to dissipate, and the incessant clanging had been softened by sheer distance.
As the paramedic began his work, Holcomb thought about his father. He absorbed the glazed appearance of the man, whose features twitched amid the rain of sparks that lighted from his solder gun. Holcomb thought about Philly and his dilapidated ramp. And he concentrated on the letter his father had sent. He imagined what the intricacies of the trick had been—he imagined, among other things, that he had finally given a flawless performance.
The police officer approached and kneeled by them. Holcomb confirmed his initial assessment that the man hadn’t been wrapped. The policeman smiled, removed his dark hat and ran his fingers through his hair. The moon had begun to mingle with the purple of dawn, and a man shouted from the ambulance. “Sun’s rising! We better get him fixed before traffic picks up.”
The officer stood and yawned; he backed away and allowed Fulton the room he needed to work quickly. To make all of the necessary adjustments.