Chapter 4: Choke

“...That place was called Taberah, because fire from the Lord had burned among them.”
– Numbers 11:3; NIV

____________________

Voluntary actions seem intuitive, so conclusively agentic. We see a button, we decide to press it, then execute accordingly. It’s a textbook diagram with tidy arrows pointing in one clear direction. However, the truth is older and considerably ruder. The subconscious is where things get done. The conscious mind is taught to catch up, but sometimes – more often than the textbook concedes – the mind doesn’t catch up at all. It is simply handed a forgery so drenched in cognitive dissonance and ignorant faith, that it can live; so deftly grafted that the welds in the truth disappear amid the plastic.

There’s a literature on motor agency and deferred intentionality, on the bizarre clinical reports of patients whose hands dance through unspeakable things as their proprietor swears, with hysterical conviction, that he never directed them.

It’s the mouth that confesses last. The fingers, arteries and lungs: they confess first. You could almost call them honest.

____________________

Sonny is walking the strand at Sandy Hook because the kitchen had begun to feel like a held breath. Between his bedroom ceiling and the ocean, the latter is more reliably sympathetic. Donning the emperor butterfly crested jacket, he slipped out the side door under the dependable white noise of Chester’s snoring, stopping to check that each window extinguished before rounding the corner.

It is 1:47 AM on a Tuesday with the late autumn dying in earnest now, the clouds the color of a galvanized bucket. The few souls present are meandering dog-walkers and a older man with a metal detector sweeping deliberate, monastic arcs across the dunes, searching for some part of himself lost in the 1970s.

The boardwalk is a negative of its daytime self: rides sheeted and shuttered, the funnel-cake smell replaced by the cold, mineral edge of Atlantic brine. Sonny’s boots meet packed wet sand below the high-tide line. The Fire unfurls seaward like a satellite dish pointed to the sky, resolving the noise in his skull to a soft, polyphonic purr. Nothing useful radiates off the ocean. Only the rinsing, hypnotic churn of water; the hydraulic, unscalable fact of its indifferent pressing and release.

He has not eaten since yesterday – another fact filed in his drawer besides those he is currently postponing. The pier looms ahead: a black, skeletal extrusion protruding into the surf. Beside it, hunkered into the dune line: the old boathouse, bearing splintering cedar shingles silvered by decades of saline slime, and a patch-job roof whose mismatched asphalt squares resemble an apathetic quilt. Sandy Hook Marine Patrol, in faded white spray-paint christens the door – obsolete signage, judging by the rust-dimpled hinges.

As is precedent on this stretch, the sky contorts and unleashes its contents without preamble. The waters bristle and send the metal-detector man trudging back the way he came, hood-raised, as if he received an answer he already knew.

Sonny's jacket wicks for approximately thirty seconds before folding to the torrent. He builds pace. The boathouse door's corroded hasp gives readily; somebody else has been here before quite recently, that much is plain from the way the dust is strewn in unsealed disorder. He crooks his shoulder in, then the rest of him follows.

The interior smells of pine tar, industrial adhesive, the sweet rot of old ropes and diesel-soaked fibreglass. Two small vessels are propped on dollies in the centre of the space, hulls upturned, their cracked bellies exposed like neglected autopsies. The sole overhead bulb is fried, yet light seeps in milky through three cataracted windows. The rain on the roof becomes a percussive metronome, measuring the atmosphere of this place.

He walks the inner walls, trailing his fingertips absently over the lath. There is a workbench, vice still mounted albeit missing its handle. There are some lobster pots stacked, the wire mesh corroding at the joints in saffron-coloured rust. A chest of grey, lacquered wood, half-filled with what looks like loose carabiners and a length of tarred line. Taking stock is the comfort, a systematic procedure to compensate for other less easily organized inventories.

He turns to leave when a movement registers in his peripheral, in the dim well between the two upturned hulls. There is a posture there, one befitting of a surgeon returning to their dissection table.

The Fire stutters back online to apprehend the apparition, and registers nothing, which is itself informative. The Fire reads what is broadcasting. This figure is the absence of broadcasting occupying a humanoid void.

A wifebeater that had been white at some prior epoch but is now ashen like damp newspaper. Fraying acid-washed jeans worn thin at the knees, dirt-caked at each cuff. Powdered latex gloves drawn up to forearms, whose exposed expanse is a coarse, keloid topography of VIOLET cipher, glossy from incessant re-engraving.

Above the neck, its body disappears into the mask. Some bastardized, Looney-Tunes facsimile of a Japanese Lucky Cat in chipped, white-glazed rubber, the hyperbolic arch of the eyelids painted to match a perfect, unreadable smile. The former crimson of its bulbous nose, theatrical lips and rosy cheeks has faded to a scored, tubercular pink. Sonny knows – from previous encounters – that nothing lies under this scaffold: remove the mask and the figure disintegrates.

Its eyes always hold the most hostile vacancy. The zany cartoon pupils are perforated apertures which conceal no glassy reflex of human sight. There is, instead, a coldness. One that pours through the mask in a constant, slow and austere exhalation, like a winter draft seeping through a condemned building. It is the cold of a stairwell where a man died alone of a head trauma and nobody has come back to scrub the mess. The cold of a room that has hosted atrocities, which it refuses to disclose on the principle that disclosure is a kindness it will not extend.

Sonny feels the cold meet his face like a frigid wet cloth.

"Kitty," he calls to it, voice held and faltering.

The figure crosses the space between them in three swift paces, unfolding along a different, faster reel of film than the one Sonny occupies. He means to step back, but his feet are locked into a separate, obtuse negotiation with the boathouse floor.

The first blow is to his sternum; an open palm measurement. Kitty is gauging him, the way you palpate a melon for ripeness before committing to purchase. Then the hand clamps. The mangling grip constricts around his collar and swings him, the boathouse spinning past in a slow orbit of rope and wire until his back is rammed against the workbench, the ghost of the missing vice handle digging into his lumbar.

Kitty's other hand raises and the forearm slips, with a fluency Sonny finds repulsively familiar, against the lateral surface of his throat. He feels its gnarled bicep flex against him, the opposite hand locked behind his head. The configuration is textbook, as if a shared manual is being consulted by an instructor whose face he cannot see.

Pressure across the carotids.

Not the trachea – this is not a windpipe choke, this is a blood choke; the difference dissociates a noisy panic from a steady, quiet snuffing. He rattles from the futile pounding of his major vessels growing stenotic. The trick is to permit the airway, since a subject who cannot breathe will deliriously fight to their very last sputter of life, leaving dispositive bruises in their wake. In contrast, a subject who can breathe but cannot feed his brain will simply, gracefully, shut down at the rate his assailant has decided.

Sonny's vision bleeds, crowding at the edges to a clouded vignette. His ears start the nauseating, whining tone of hypoxic deprivation. In some remote cell of his mind, the Fire crackles helplessly behind a closed door, clawing into its resistant wood.

The chilling umbrae oozing from Kitty’s hollow eyes deepens, becoming an malicious entity of its own. It burrows into the negative space the strangulation has carved inside Sonny, occupying the diminishing cortical real estate with the seniority of a debt collector redeeming long arrears. In that cold, very, far away, beneath the tinnitus and the pulsing roar of his own dying brain’s pleas for oxygen, there is a voice.

“You are sick, Sal. Not like the others, there is a thing within you which is contagious, which is terminal, and yours alone. None of this is your fault. But it is in there. Do you know what it looks like, Sal? It looks like you.”

The voice is patient; it has all afternoon. Every afternoon.

“That is why you cry when you see yourself. That is why, every time, when we replay the tape and you see your own little face on that screen in this mess you’ve created, you start to cry and beg me to shut it off. It is not the lights or the camera. It is your own face, Sal. You are looking at the disease.

This is why you can't go out there and those people cannot love you. You do not understand: we have to keep you in here to protect them from you. I am the only person in the world who can stand to look at your contamination, the only one who knows how to clean you. Your mother and father could not. They handed you to me because nobody else can stand it. Because I am the only one with the medicine for you.

You should be grateful.”

The boathouse returns in pieces.

The body remembers.

Sonny's hand snaps up of its own accord into a defensive grip and finds, without fumbling, the specific point of leverage known to the reticular core of his nervous system. He drives his knee up into Kitty’s abdomen, thumb steady at the tendon's edge, fingers curled to dig at the plush underside of the forearm, attempting to wedge open the seal. The motion is so precisely correct, so unthinkingly executed, that even as he is withering inside it, he senses a small, rancid pang of pride: a craftsman admiring his own clean work, divorced from the question of whose throat is being worked on.

He has applied this hold with the somatic certainty of a pianist’s arpeggio.

The flesh lock gives slightly under his targeted force but the vignette tightens further. He is going down.

"Kitty, this has to stop," his words scrape out as a ruined gargle of consonants.

Kitty does not relent. The pressure is mathematically sustained for one count past the limit at which a courteous attacker would let go. Then, without ceremony, it’s hand releases.

Sonny crumples to the floor, which receives him with a resonant thump that rallies up his spine and into the underside of his skull. His vision sparks back through stippled sludge of shapes emerging from abstract shimmers, fizzling through blotted purples and greens; his lungs hauling air with the ugly, ragged heaving of water-logged bilge pumps. He coughs, retches; producing only acrid bile. Regaining his hearing from the telephonic ischemia, he can make out the calm procession of footsteps, unhurried, retreating; the boathouse door's howling complaint; the hiss of the rain through its open frame… By the time he has the strength to lift his head, Kitty is gone.

Sonny lays supine for some indeterminate period, staring at the rafters. Eyes recalibrate focus upon cobwebs hanging a sagging grid while the body initializes its implicit subroutine to monitor the restoration of baseline vitals, until it detects an anomaly:

His hand is at his throat.

He registers this slowly. His own right hand is at his throat. Has been, the entire time.

He pries his hand away. The skin beneath burns. He can already feel the petechial bloom flaring under the jawline – the ruptured capillaries that mark the surface like a notarized stencil of his own violence. Sonny flexes his fingers experimentally. They twitch and knead at the air with a fractured memory not quite his own. There had been no Kitty, yet Kitty remains indisputably real: the tangible agent by which Sonny’s hands were honed and made operable.

Glinting dull between a coil of mooring line and the legs of a dolly, he is drawn to an old tackle box. It is a small chrome-clad clamshell sort with a folding handle and a single brass-plated latch. Its coating has tarnished to a dull, peeled mottle. There is, however, on its lid, a residual band of reflective surface, pitted and curved where the hinge cover shielded the metal from the elements.

In it, his mirrored face adopts a different quality, one aligned with the descriptions of that glacial voice. Its skin glistens like suppurated fish scales sloughing beneath sodden paper towels, eyes darkened in sunken orbitals which inspect the slack, chapped mouth below. The entire skull appears somehow narrower, with pronounced temples conceding to underlying skeletal architecture. This is the face of the contagion. The one he was conditioned to see.

Sonny chuckles.

It is a dismantled, raked-up laugh that dies fast against the aging wood. There is something in it, even so. Not amusement. Recognition. The laugh someone who has caught his oldest jailer briefly visible in a junkshop reflection.

He rises, brushes the sand off his jacket and walks to the door before braving the blistering downpour.

The rain falls. The wind off the Atlantic is honest. The strand is desolate of life.

Tactile receptors of his skin are reporting, dutifully, a steady, chilling rate of approximately 40 degrees Fahrenheit – but there is no recipient on the line.

A song possesses him throughout this dirge: a gentle, sweet thing that floats in the air like butterscotch all the way back to the Volvo.

Above, unobserved, gulls swoop in wide low patient circles, in the patterned indifference of creatures with nothing to prove.

____________________

There is a building lurking in the cracks of the municipal record.

The paperwork documenting the building on Stillwater Avenue, Lakewood, survives in the photocopied form of a school inspection from 1991. The form reports nine pupils, all enrolled under codes matching the state's special-education schedule. The governance board for Clearwater Learning Center, once a small independent school for children with cognitive and developmental disabilities, eventually dissolved and its charter lapsed in 2013. Public records confirm the school received state funding during its operation. Its physical lot has since been listed as derelict, pending redevelopment -- for sixteen years. It is a place which was never a school. This place was, for a duration the official record will never be permitted to specify, a hub.

Nolan Mallory parks his black Ford Ranger two streets away and approaches on foot at 03:24 AM, corresponding to when the cortisol curves of local fauna reach their vertex and curtains are drawn against the world by simple biological consensus. He bears a black backpack, a small LED headlamp, a pair of bolt cutters, and the cellular signature of a dead Oregon postie who would be 71 today had he not expired to an aortic dissection on his kitchen tile in 2016. The phone runs on a SIM acquired at a 7-Eleven in Newark for $15.99 – cash, and registered under that postie’s recently deactivated identity, because the federal database monitoring the transactions is operated by a backlogged subcontractor – who Nolan, for the past eight months, has been quietly probing.

The building is a brick, former residential structure; single-story, mid-century, backing up against a scrubland buffer zone. Someone made this choice deliberately: a geographic asset for structural privacy along its rear perimeter. Meanwhile, the front presents as innocuous, a converted family home with a wide driveway and a concrete ramp leading up to the front door beside a steel rail painted in institutional green. Above the door, the laminated nameplate has been sun-bleached past legibility. The windows are boarded from the inside and walls tagged at hip-height by generations of transient teenagers.

A cheap deadbolt blocking the rear entry sits so inadequately that Nolan is half-tempted to push it ajar. He picks it instead. Discipline is hygiene.

He has been here before, briefly, twenty-nine years ago. He does not recall the spell but a primal electricity stirs him, inviting familiar intrusions: the slight automatic tension in his shoulders paralleling a hitch in his step over the threshold of the back hall, into the long classroom on the right. A writhing heat grips him under his epidermal layer – rough, bestial hands radiating noxious lust as they crawl amid intimate regions. He flinches with each wave, inhaling sharply but pushing onward.

He clicks the headlamp to its red filter and allows himself one full, panning appraisal. The classroom has been cleared of its desks. The chalkboard remains, its slate cracked across the diagonal. The floor's vinyl is curling at every seam. Along the rear wall, where in any other shuttered school would sit the cubby locker-space, there is a recessed plywood panel painted the same colour as the surrounding plaster, with the proud screws on its leftmost edge betraying its extent.

Nolan considers the panel expressionlessly.

He approaches and unscrews the panel with a #2 Phillips and his bare fingers, the tip of his tongue against the back of his front teeth in the only sign of focus he ever permits to surface. Behind the panel is a small alcove revealing a steel door; behind that lies a stairwell, and at the bottom of the stairwell is the room.

Twelve by sixteen feet, the room is filled only now by the scarlet light, the dust of decommissioned electronics and the faint biological reminder of mice who perished as unnoticed as the truth insulating its walls. Beneath it is the staleness of sweat, tobacco and the particular sour note of children kept in a place they could not leave.

That last note. He breathes it shallowly, sensing the wet radiation of phantom palms slickly mangling his flesh ever deeper. The faintest tautness innervates his facial muscles – epiphenomenon of a Lantern’s perfected instinct.

Across the far wall, three industrial 19-inch racks. Two empty, scavenged at some point by people who knew what to take. One remains populated. He approaches it.

Punch-down blocks. A rotary patch panel of a vintage already obsolete by 1998. A Western Electric 1A2 line key system: the brass of its lamps dead and dustblind. Above it, a shelf bearing a Hagelin-style mechanical cipher device he has only ever seen in declassified photographs and the undocumented curatorial inventory of an espionage museum in Washington. Under it, a PBX unit, tone generator and a pair of Motorola handhelds perched upon a wire bin. This in turn holds a coiled bundle of standard six-conductor handset cord.

This is the maintenance node.

The frequency-driven architecture by which a field asset could be reached, instructed, reassigned – a narrowcast relay that would punch down through an ordinary phone trunk into a specific, addressed handheld, and from the handheld into programmed receptiveness. Nolan had wondered, for a long time, where these nodes had gone. They had, it turns out, gone exactly where you'd expect: into the basements of buildings the Lanternless obliviously exist around, unremarked for two decades.

Underneath the Hagelin device, secured against the back panel of the rack with a single bulldog clip: a logbook folder. He cradles it and sets it in the centre of the room, crouching, headlamp angled. Harnessing the swelling burn, his eyes lock to the task, processing the text in determined, methodical sequence. Carbon copies of schematics and installation orders, the carbons worn sepia at the edge.

Stapled to the inside back cover of the folder: a sheaf of correspondence. Three letters dated between October 1997 and March 1998. The letterhead, on each, of a regional engineering office of a prior incarnation of a major North American carrier. Each letter signed in hasty handwriting:

E. Fotakis.

He has heard the name in the way a hunter has heard the names of every prey animal in his county.

...Eva – call re: T3 config Tues...

...Fotakis – routing tables. She'll fix remotely...

Eva Fotakis: a woman of 53 who lives in a modern condominium on Hudson Street in Hoboken. She is, at present, the senior director of Network Reliability at the consolidated successor to her former employer – a corporation now four mergers and a logo away from the regional office whose stationery she once typed her name on. She keeps a quivering white lapdog and maintains a drinking problem through routine. She has a doorman who works the lobby until two in the morning and spotty reception cover after that. She has, hung above her sofa, a Rothko: three stark red rectangles.

Nolan has meticulously mapped her routine and commute for six weeks.

He neatly tucks the correspondence into the inside pocket and returns the folder to its clip then retraces his ingress. By 04:07 AM, the sky has begun the pale labour of drawing in morning. He climbs to the Ranger and heads north.

At Hoboken, Nolan waits in the cab until the lobby's overnight reception – who by this hour embodies pure lethargy: headphones in, scrolling – to conclude that the previous engineer's planned fire-safety inspection, which Nolan introduced into the communal mailbox via a forged work-order, is legitimate.

At 04:31 AM, a man in a hi-vis vest, navy zip-up, and a tool belt arrives at the desk, quietly presenting his clipboard. His badge identifies him as a fire-safety contractor employed by a company that does not exist. The badge looks, to the receptionist's sleep-debted eyes, indistinguishable from a real one. Without further interrogation, she offers the spare keys on a key ring with a plastic tether and asks the contractor to please be quiet. The contractor nods affirmatively.

The contractor ascends via elevator to the eleventh floor. He unlocks Apt. 1108 with the provided spare key and slips inside. Soundlessly, he closes the door stands in the entryway’s gloom, listening.

The condominium is empty. Ms. Fotakis is, at this moment, concluding a Boston business trip whose schedule he obtained from a phishing exercise her assistant fell for nine days ago. She is expected back at this address at 19:20, allowing for transit and a planned dinner with her brother in the West Village.

He has fifteen hours.

With a degree of solemn ceremony, Nolan sheds the hi-vis and folds it neatly in a Whole Foods bag he has brought for the purpose. He glides through the apartment. The Rothko beaming its lurid landscape from above the sofa. A stack of New Yorkers atop the side table. A French press on the kitchen counter, its glass coronaed with the granulated dirt of unwashed neglect. Each item is evidence not of guilt, but a normal human sediment that he finds, in its predictability, contemptible. The Lanternless do not decorate their lives: they obey the banal catalogue and accrue domestic detritus with each eroding imprint.

He inspects her doors, her locks, the angles of her hallway and her hidden firearm behind the cleaning supplies below her sink: a Glock 43 with an unregistered magazine. It is left in its place. The set is a fixed vivarium, the entirety of a life, untouched.

Nolan prepares.

In the kitchen, he unspools from his pocket a length of monofilament suture spliced to two short wooden dowels at either end, wrapping it neatly on the counter. Unsheathing sterile packets of individually-wrapped surgical gloves from his bag, he arranges the implements of his workspace for examination.

Without eating or drinking, he remains stood at three points in the apartment. The skittish bichon accessory, locked in its crate in the laundry room, emits its codependent weeping through the early afternoon then gives up. The pet is tangential to his purposes.

At 19:14, the elevator chimes in the corridor.

He flows into the fluid shadows behind the front door, fitting one hand beneath the dowel of the garrote and the other above. He inhales once, unwavering and deep into the diaphragm, and waits. The sequenced clock-ticks phase to sync with his pulse. A booming pacer of elapsed time dominating his mind; stripped of all but the operation -- primed, ready.

The key turns. The door opens.

Eva steps in, muttering into her phone, something work-related in clipped, professional cadence. She carries a tall stature, draped in maroon coat and hair peppered by silver threads. She kicks off her heels with a rehearsed flick and nudges the door shut with her elbow, attention fixed to her call.

She does not see him. He has positioned himself such that she will not see him until after.

Nolan lets her finish her sentence. He does not enjoy this. Enjoyment is a Lanternless indulgence, attached to the sloppy dopaminergics of primate reward; he was trained against it.

Finally, he steps forward, loops the suture across her throat from behind, plants his right knee in the small of her back and pulls.

She does not have time to scream. There is no scream available. Her phone clatters onto the parquet and skids from view. Her frenzied hands fly to her throat in the universal reptilian reflex of every garrote victim before her; nails scrabble, thrashing at the line and find no purchase in the thin, tensioned slit. Her mouth gapes, with nothing but silent, horrified agony and drool barely crawling from it. And her eyes shoot wide with the specific astonishment of a person whose whole life has been the lackadaisical accumulation of advantages and whose Bourgeois apathy has been shattered by a force she cannot bargain with. There’s no wager or deal she can concoct to slither out of the synthetic, constricting snare.

Those eyes begin to roll. As her face darkens with swelling asphyxia, he eases the tension by a tenth.

Just enough.

Then she hears it: a low, monotonous whisper into the back of her ear.

"Eva. The 1A2 in the East Orange node. The line that ran into the residential subproject. I want the maintenance handle."

She gasps, trying. The garrote permits enough air for a shallow, wheezing intake. She has the wits, even now, to recognize what is being asked. She has been expecting some version of this confrontation in the back chamber of her competent mind for too long.

"Names," he says, snagging briefly for encouragement. She gags, flailing and bucking like a seizing slaughterhouse animal at the mindless bludgeoning of a bolt gun. "And the present location of the relay. And whose desk the maintenance log lands on."

Eva strains a whimpering noise. He waits.

"Walt," she rasps. "Walter Ostrich."

"Where."

"R-Reston, Virginia. He's – he's not at the agency anymore, he – he contracts."

"Where, in Reston."

"I don't – Sage Hill, Sage Hill drive, I can't – I can't remember the – please. Ple–…"

Another sharp yank curtails the Lanternless’ grovelling.

"The relay."

"Bayonne. There's a – in a closet. In that Verizon facility, the – " she gives him a five-digit address, sub-basement designation and six-character code that he files. He cross-checks it internally against the map he has been stitching, and the address is one he had narrowed to within four candidates.

"Who maintains it currently."

"A contractor, Tobi Anuluwa. H-he's – he's in Jersey City. Don’t – he doesn't – he doesn't know what he's working on, he's just – gets a punch list once a month, he – please. Please. I have a daughter. I have a – "

"You did know."

A volcanic, theo-manic pressure fills his head with white noise in the vacuum of her silence. She is beyond the threshold of answering, in which pleas abandon grammatical frameworks.

He gives her, then, perhaps three seconds. Three seconds in which she might, in some solitary pocket of her dimming cognition, complete a thought she has procrastinated for thirty years. He owes her this fairness, on the principle of impartiality.

The scenery of the apartment rolls away like theatrical props, where the only thing tangible is the garotte’s tearing choke and its power between his fists. The cord coils tighter and tighter until the Lanternless flush saps from red to ghastly white. A clean groove slices through the fascia just above her larynx. Ruby beads along the line in a hot, dark dotted rule. Her hands finally drop, slumping limp and flaccid, now drained of their prior spastic contours. Surrendering through the door of the body, her nerves fire their waning, reflexive twitches as deafferented entrails relinquish grip upon the remains of her brother’s meal.

When Nolan releases her, the carcass folds into its mess on the parquet like a coat slipping from a hanger. He arranges her, with two blood encrusted, latex-gloved hands at her shoulders and ankles, onto the sofa. He composes her, face cocked toward the room in three-quarter view.

The haemorrhaging around her throat is already budding, the deep fluvial purple blossoms tracing her improvised collar. Her lips are dry now, the cyanotic blue of an ink-wash, matching the bruising of her half-lidded eyes and skin, which is pricked by capillaries as though sown with poppyseed.

In the light of her own apartment, the Rothko a setting sun above, she becomes finally legible: fragile, finite, no longer the architect of any node, simply dead meat in a filthy gown.

Nolan retrieves a camera from his bag: an unregistered Polaroid Go. He kneels at wall opposing the sofa, frames her and depresses the shutter.

The flash goes. The mechanism sighs, the ultrasonic whir rousing further pitiful bouts from the dog, whose narrow concerns lie beyond its owner’s fresh corpse. The square of glossy paper extrudes from the Polaroid and Nolan holds it by its white margin, spotting blood upon the exposed image as it gestates in its chemical interior.

…And there she is. Fixed. Caught.

Photographs, of all the technologies of human violation, are unique in the way they freeze a subject in a state from which they cannot escape. The Lanternless ascribe to photographs all manner of aspirational or sentimentally nostalgic functions, but the photograph's metaphysical centre is immutable: a subject is captured at a moment of unforeseen vulnerability and preserved against their will, and that moment is thereafter transmissible, indefinitely examinable. It is the original technology of the perpetrator: what was done to him and every Lantern of his original family. It made the residue of their torment monetizable propaganda, forever fixed against any healing narrative they might subsequently attempt to grow over it.

He has done to her, in this regard, what she materially helped to make possible all those decades ago. She will not grow old. She will not retire to a coastal property. She will not be allowed to die surrounded by the pretty fictions of a life completed. She will be, forever, this. The blood trailing from the garrote, sown conjunctiva, lifeless blue lips and soiled, buckled legs sprawled across the remains of her own construction.

Nolan places the photograph face-up on the kitchen counter, beside the French press and the unwashed tide of its sediment. He weighs it down with a corner of her own work-laptop's edge so the air movement of the closing door will not disturb its position.

He disposes of his gloves, rebuttons his hi-vis vest and doesn’t look back. There is nothing further to say.

He lets himself out.

He returns the spare key to a dish in the lobby and informs the still half-absent receptionist that the inspection is complete. The woman nods without interest. The contractor leaves through the front door.

The Ranger turns east on Newark Avenue. The city, half a block at a time, restores the headlights of the new morning.

____________________

The kitchen on Sumner Avenue smells of ginger again.

Sonny enters from the back hall and the scent orients him gently into the room as a lighthouse guides sailors to shore. The light over the kitchen island is on, illuminating Denise is at the table, sketchbook before her, snuggled in the woollen periwinkle sweater she wears when she expects to be still for a while.

Beside her elbow sits the radio. Sonny rebuilt it for her three weeks ago after her old one developed a tweeter buzz he was constitutionally incapable of leaving uncorrected. It is tuned, presently, to the local college station. Some modest, ambient, mid-period Brian Eno, painting the kitchen like a temperate weatherfront.

She looks up when he enters.

"Hi, you," she greets him softly.

"Hey, Dee." He has his hand at his collar, tugging the shirt up, and even as he does it he registers the gesture as transparent evidence, which Denise registers in tandem. Her sketching pencil pauses above the page. Her eyes narrow tactfully down to where his hand is and back to his face.

"Take it off," she says, gently.

"Pardon?"

"The hand. From your neck."

He does. He stands in the kitchen doorway with his hands hanging beside him, trying fruitlessly to dispel the image that he’s standing for attention.

"Come sit with me," she says.

He sits, because not sitting would cost more.

Denise rises and crosses to the freezer without commentary. She extracts an ice pack from a stack of three, wraps it in a clean dish towel and gently sets it on the table in front of him.

"Show me," she says.

Sonny gingerly lowers his collar. The marks on his neck are, by now, an established impression: the spread of stormy contusions rich like overripe fruit accompanied by the speckled vascular debris under the angle of his jaw.

She draws in quickly through her nose and lets it back out without the inhalation becoming commentary.

"Ice this," she says. She places the wrapped ice pack into his hand, which he raises to throat.

She returns to her seat. She does not resume her work. The radio, on the table between them, continues its soft ambient tide. After a while she asks it, "What happened?”

"I went to walk the Sandy Hook strip." he begins.

"Yeah,"

"And it started raining. So I ducked in the boathouse near the pier. The old marine patrol one."

"Okay."

"And I had – had a thing. In there."

"With?" she begins to press him.

He weighs the gravity of his restrained confession, yet lacks the alphabet to orchestrate an alibi with satisfying integrity.

"With me," he says in hushed tones. He glances at the corner of the table. "It was me. I had a thing with me." Denise gazes at him. She does not say anything for the long span of the song fading out and the next, a piano piece that he does not recognize. The radio's small speaker reproduces the piano with a warm, slightly fuzzy mid-range honesty.

"Sonny."

"Yeah?"

"You did this to your own neck."

"Sort of."

"On purpose?" she asks, her tone becomming faught.

"No! Definitely not on purpose."

She deconstructs this without any template to do so. She has watched him do many things throughout their friendship which have lacked templates and she has worked out each in turn by reading the room of him.

"Are you safe, right now?" she frets.

"I’m safe, here."

"Are you going to do it again tonight?"

"No. It's not something I do again on the same day. There's…” he furrows his brows, briefly sanding his face with his hands before continuing, “There's a kind of clearance window. Or there has been historically."

"Historically."

"Mm-hmm!"

She places her palm flat on the table. Not toward him, just flat as she tries to inhabit responsibly.

"I want to call somebody," she announces, quietly.

"Please don't."

"Sonny. You just strangled yourself. In a boathouse. Alone."

"Please."

He looks to her, immediately pale and petrified. He cannot offer her an eloquent appeal, so he offers her his eyes, with the Fire dim enough that she can what trembles underneath: a man with an exhaustive history of doctors, a man who has been institutionalised for significant portions of his life, whose body still goes flat with shell-shocked dread at the fluorescents of any clinical hallway not curated by a small animal at the end of it. The dread is not theoretical: it has paperwork; it has scars.

"They keep me," he swallows; it hurts. "If you call somebody, they keep me. They put me in that room. They put me in a room where it only gets worse, Dee. The Fire. It screeches and rips everything I have apart. There are too many – there are too many of them in those cells. It's like a kennel – it’s louder than – they – their shocks and poison, until I can’t think, until I don’t exi—" He freezes. He starts again. "I can't go back. Please don't make me go back, Dee."

"I am not making you do anything."

"Please don't ask me to go on my own, then."

"Alright."

The ‘alright’ sits like a knife’s edge between them and gradually, as the radio plays and the ice melts in its towel, dissolves.

"Alright," she restates, more levelly. "We’ll work this differently."

"What's differently?"

"You eat the stir fry," she states. "The actual one in the actual fridge that has your name on it. Tonight."

"Dee..."

"You eat the food. You sleep on the side of your room with the window cracked, which I know you do anyway because I checked. And you— let me keep an eye, tomorrow. I'm not going anywhere tomorrow. I will move my buyer call by an hour. You don't go to the Costco shift; you're not safe to drive. Okay?”

"My shift starts at three."

"You'll call out."

"They'll –"

"They won't sack you for one shift, and if they do, that is far from the worst outcome in a list of worse outcomes I'm not entertaining today. Sonny. Please."

His eyes rise to meet hers, plaintive and defeated, concentrating on how he can receive this without flinching. The Fire reaches out, with a tenderness he does not always trust himself to honour, toward her. She is exhausted. She is watching him at twenty past midnight in her comfort-sweater with rice-starch at the cuff of one sleeve, afraid but choosing to repress it following a correct assessment that her fear is a tax he cannot pay. The shape of her care is so whole. He does not know how he ever ended up here, on its receiving end.

"Okay," he says.

"Okay?"

"Yeah. I'll call out. I'll – yeah."

"And the food."

"I’ll eat."

She nods. Relieved, she descends to her sketch, but does not take up her pencil, merely sitting with her hand resting on the page. The piano piece on the radio resolves into something slower.

After a time she says, "If it gets worse before I'm awake, you will wake me up. Won’t you?"

"Yeah."

"Even if it's small, or you think it's small. You wake me up."

He smiles at her. It is his trademarked, boyish half-smile, which accompanies a subtle tilt to his head and warm wrinkling below his eyes. A token that resoundingly reminds her he is here.

"Sonny,"

"Yeah?"

"I love you, you stupid bastard."

He laughs. The laugh aches through the bruises’ protest but comes out anyway with the freedom of something sincere that cannot be deferred. "Love you, Dee."

She rises and kisses the top of his head, embracing him briefly, the way an older sister would a younger brother, and takes her sketchbook with her toward the stairs.

"Promise you won’t stay up," she says, over her shoulder. "And put the ice back on."

"I will. And I promise."

"Leave the radio on, too, if you want," she adds, beginning to climb. "It helped me."

The stairs creak, the bathroom door upstairs latches and pipes run a while until eventually her bedroom door clicks shut. The house settles into its small after-hours sigh, the radio on the kitchen table cooing into its nighttime atmosphere with its conscientious tide.

Sonny, eventually, retrieves the stir fried rice and eat half of the container. It is hearty and vibrant with the umami flavors of soy sauce, chili and well-marinaded shrimp. Chester is, in his way, a generous cook, even with his reduced presence.

He puts the container away and returns to the table. He picks up the radio.

It is light. He turns it inquisitively, looking at the back panel. He can see, faintly, the fresh solder beneath the housing where he replaced the caps. His efforts were kind, a datum logged in the slim folder of evidence that his own hands can be kind.

He flips the band switch from FM to AM. The station fizzles; he scrolls down through the little frequencies, past local talk, the late-night Christian broadcaster, weather-reports, to the bottom of the AM band where the radio offers only a wash of static.

Sonny carefully pushes the band switch one click further. The radio is older than its market generation suggests. Sonny, working under the housing, noticed the additional position on the band selector unannounced on the front panel. He had soldered it back into the circuit out of an electrician's compulsion to honour what was intended, even where the user-manual demurred. Only now has he felt the inclination to use it.

The third position lights up the dial.

The static here is different. It is not the empty, airy hiss of an inactive band; it is the lower, dense howl of articulated static of frequencies in active human use, voices chirping just below the threshold of intelligibility, snippets resolving in and out as the tuner cycles. He turns the wheel steadily.

He passes a man in Argentina’s QSO, indistinct; fisheries log being listed in monotone English; a nasal voice describing chess moves to no one. Then…

A robotic and looped woman’s in vintage bit-crushed samples still serviceable and retained in use, delivered in the cadence of a numbers station. It reads a sequence of 5, one cycle, two. The tones at the end of each cycle are the dual-frequency notes whose intervals are themselves a redundancy code.

After the third cycle, the woman is truncated. Replaced.

A live voice. Male. Low. Slight vocal fry. The kind of monotone whose flatness is a discipline rather than a deficit. Without overture, the voice begins with a callsign:

"004 8602454 008S 009N ATONEMENT 004—"

The kitchen tilts.

The callsign goes through him in the sequence in which all proper authority does: spinal cord first, conscious recognition second. ATONEMENT. The voice's exhale on the second 004 is the exhale of a small boy he last shared a twin room with ninteen years ago, the older brother, the one who –

His hand jerks out and snaps the band-switch back two clicks and then the volume off and then he is holding the radio's dial knob between thumb and forefinger as if he might torque it bodily out of the chassis. It sits, dead, in blushed plastic. Innocent as a stone.

"No," he whispers exasperatedly, rocking himself. "No, no, no, no, no—", trailing off into successively fraught cries.

Sonny jolts up from the table, knee bumping the underside of it. He paces in a hectic death-spiral upon the kitchen tile, to the back door and to the sink and to the back door again. His hands are open at his sides and clenching and reopening with the small, stricken motions of trying to grasp smoke.

This is the slip, his inherent hardware malfunction. He had found a position on the band-switch that the manufacturer had abandoned and then populated it with a voice he wanted. That is what the Fire does when given an empty channel: it broadcasts back his own hopeless homesickness dressed in a familiar timbre. His auditory cortex – primed by Kitty in the boathouse and his own scarred left hand and the four damned pages that notebook – has rounded the nearest coincident phoneme up to the codeword hec craves most from the only person in the world who used to use it.

Repeating this to himself as a clinician would, he fights through disbelief.

He can’t tell Denise. He cannot tell Denise he has just heard his deceased brother's voice on a radio he built, on a band which he activated then shut off in terror. He made her a promise eight minutes ago that he would not provide her reason to call anyone, and the kindness she is at this moment investing in him upstairs hangs by a thread of fraying tensile strength.

He recalculates.

He climbs the stairs without turning the kitchen light off and drifts into his room, locking the door quietly behind him with the small brass deadbolt he installed himself.

The bottom-right desk drawer, in addition to his laminated cards and the spare batteries for the turntable. holds a flat zippered pouch the colour of a hospital wristband. He has not opened it in eleven months.

He sits with it on the edge of the bed, opening the pouch over his duvet.

Inside: a small clear glass ampoule with a printed yellow label. CLOPIXOL ACUPHASE. ZUCLOPENTHIXOL ACETATE. 200 MG. INTRAMUSCULAR USE ONLY. Beside it: a capped 21-gauge needle, sealed 2 mL syringe, two alcohol swabs in foil wrappers, and a small folded piece of paper on which his discharging psychiatrist had, in fountain pen, written the dosing notes.

For acute breakthrough only. One ampoule deep IM, lateral thigh. Lasts 48–72 hours. Will sleep, then groggy. Call me when used.

A despair creeps over him as the world dulls. He considers the radio, ATONEMENT and Denise down the hall, whose fragile rest relies on the trust that he will honor their pact. The discordant echoes of the white-washed kennel of voices bellow in his ears.

Sonny cracks the ampoule.

The glass tip snaps clean under his assertive thumb with a small, dry, instructional sound. He draws the contents up into the syringe and there is something almost domestic about it, which is the part he was taught to do by a nurse with her hand over his on the plunger eight years ago because he was shuddering too much then. He is not shaking now. The Fire, presented with the procedure, lies motionless in resignation.

He attaches the 21-gauge. He swaps the air at the top of the syringe out with the practiced flick of a man who has watched it done to him for years. He swabs the lateral aspect of his right thigh with one of the pads and the stinging cool of the alcohol runs over his skin in the same refrigerated venom as the cold off Kitty's mask earlier. As a small mercy to himself, Sonny agrees not to acknowledge the comparison.

He inserts the needle. Deep. Aspirating briefly, he depresses the plunger.

The injection advances sluggishly; the carrier oil is viscous and 2 mL is a meaningful quantity, burning in his aching muscles which tense, reluctant to accept a foreign volume of medication they would rather not have. He sits, enduring the ten second influx, then withdraws and recaps the needle. He pinches a square of toilet roll over the puncture.

Returning the syringe and spent ampoule into the pouch, he lays it on the desk, in plain sight, where Denise will find it in the morning if he has not yet woken up to put it away. She should know what he’s done.

Sonny bundles himself protectively under the duvet in his day clothes, unable to negotiate the additional manoeuvres to undress.

He draws his forearm over his eyes. The ceiling fixture's low hum begins to congeal like treacle, a non-existent ceiling fan beginning its pleasant centripetal wooshing in the visceral tissue at the back of his skull. The Fire smudges sideways. The room stretches. His tongue grows little thick, then thicker. The body is lured obediently behind the dominating medication into the heavy wading depth of dispersed, undecorated unconsciousness that this particular preparation specialises in.

The final coherent thought within him is an unconditional hope, phrased as a child’s prayer: if, he thinks, when I wake up, the radio downstairs is still off, then today was just a day, and Dee will not have to call anyone, and I get to keep this home one more week.

With that, the pharmacological oblivion takes him under.

The numbers station continues its even alto cycle, broadcasting digits no one in this house can now hear.

The voice that called itself ATONEMENT does not call again tonight.

It does not need to. It has ensnared the line.