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The vitals monitor beeps the countdown of the heart. Lazur sits next to the bed reading an old Lispector paperback of his mother’s, The Passion According to G.H. She was never the type to underline, but her presence is still felt. Paper is delicate and fibrous as any tissue. His mother’s hands dog-eared this page, spilled tea on that corner, and in every place the oil of her fingers lead to permanent near invisible changes.

Oh, my unknown love, remember that I was imprisoned there in the collapsed mine, and that by then the room had taken on an unutterable familiarity, like the truthful familiarity of dreams. And, as in dreams, what I can’t reproduce for you is the essential color of its atmosphere.

Rubicon sits on the plastic stool, shower blasting his scarred back. Water spills through the holes of his face, turning him into a fountain in the dark granite cubicle.

The shadow walks toward him, empty soles silent on the carpet.

Lazur reaches under the pile of clothes he removed from his body earlier, boxer briefs soft on the back of his hand. He pulls out his gun and aims at the shadow and pulls the trigger faster than he intended, still adjusting to his actual body, and he must have missed because the shadow keeps gliding toward him and there’s a crack on the window like the crack on his mind.

Then he sees the hole in the shadow, edges sparking around a coin of night.

If you ‘act’ the most fatal ‘act’ of your life, the most fatal act of the epoch, you are depriving your life and the epoch of their deadly seriousness. From this consideration springs my first warning advice:
1. By no means should you consent to acting yourself, to become the actor of your life.

— Günther Anders to Claude Eatherly, the pilot of Straight Flush

Lazur stares into those hell blue eyes that reflect him without iridodialysis black or hyphemic red. Pupil, iris, sclera; clean circles of control.

He made a terrible mistake.

It’s raining but the rain is dry. It gathers on his hand, in his nails.
A clicking sound. He checks his watch but his wrist is empty.

The rain is dirty and it’s too late for him. There is contamination at the deepest level.
Something ticks under his pillow. He reaches under and his hand disappears behind the blank mass. He doesn’t know what is under the rock. He stares at the pillowcase where his wrist ends. The pillowcase is flat with wrinkles at the edges.

Snip. Snip.

The cutter in his hand grows wet, soft tissue brushing his fingers. Snip. Snip. Biological current severed. The house will be sold soon. His mother’s garden has to look decent.

She calls for him, weak as the wind.

*

“I want you to have something,” she says, eyebrows still dark under paling hair. Her voice is like autumn leaves crumbling from humidity.

He is acutely aware of bringing a loaded gun into his mother’s house, each bullet containing enough explosive potential to eradicate the face gently weathered across a lifetime.

“I put your father’s watch in the box.”

Lazur sits at the booth, the restaurant dim as always, black interior, cold morning light through half-drawn curtains. He wears blue jeans and a green field jacket and worn-out combat boots, black stripping to gray.

The only reason he knows about this place is because as a child he was taken in search of what was supposedly his dad’s favorite restaurant. They drove for hours looking for it as his dad explained the virtues of this particular location, hinting that it would reunite them with something that had been taken from them, imparted by proximity to an authentic mode of production, something honest and true pertaining to manhood and culture. Lazur still isn’t sure if this is the restaurant, or another restaurant his dad settled on in lieu of the perfect, still-undiscovered ideal, in whose absence their masculine trajectories have suffered. When they ate here, his dad seemed vaguely subdued, which his child-self didn’t think much of, but decades later he tried to decode the cloud of adult emotion in retrospect. Perhaps it was the restaurant, but it wasn’t as good as his dad remembered. Perhaps it would have been better never to find it at all.

A photo floats on the ashy water, charred along the white edges. Lazur picks it up and it drips as if fished from a tray of developer fluid.

In the camera flash, the 5000K explosion of a false sun, his naked body looks snuff-film obscene, his face vulnerable and agonized from the stick of dynamite inserted in his ass, invisible except for the way his knees are thrust forward, chest arched, legs spread.
The boy next to him smiles, the half-boy, shattered boy, buried teeth glowing in the burst of light, jawbone strewn like a constellation through blasted flesh.
Their eyes are red from the flash bouncing off the blood in their retinas. They look like demons set apart from the rest of humanity. Demons of the bomb.