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Morning in the French countryside: mountains bowing into their purple shadows, so deep and dense you couldn’t tell shape from substance. It was the first clear morning in a long time, and the birds were clearly ecstatic.
It was all very placid and picturesque, and had a different person been sitting on this stoop, they might have been moved. Unfortunately, Sam was still Sam, no matter the radical acts of excision he had continuously and deliberately performed since he was very young. He took a drag of his cigarette. It was a six-a.m. cigarette, his very favorite kind, and it made the whole world feel hot and calm.
A rooster brayed from somewhere over the hill. When Sam thought about assassinations, which he did almost every minute of every day, the rooster featured prominently. He wanted to wring its neck and make a soup out of it. Sam didn’t know how to make rooster soup; he would have to ask ChatGPT.
It was mid-December, and very cold. Sam sometimes got the feeling that he was waiting out the clock on something. What exactly this was he didn’t know. His own life, maybe, which now had very little to propel it forward and instead slouched from day to day, mean and bad-postured. He hadn’t ever imagined that he might be in this position, staring down the barrel of an interminable number of years. Cigarettes. Birds. Disgustingly beautiful mornings. Days where he did not go to sleep with that giddy, elastic thought running through his head: I’m gonna die young, I’m gonna die young. Now he was old. He was old, and not sleeping very much anyway, and his cigarette was almost done.
He stood up and went inside. He probably had some peanut butter or dandelion roots that he could make into a meal of some kind. It never occurred to him to go shopping until there was literally nothing left.
*
Around eight-thirty, he emerged again. He had showered and put on a kind of lumberjacky shirt. He couldn’t pull it off; he just was not a lumberjack gay. When he wore this shirt, he looked like a Charlie Brown character who had mistakenly walked into an ad for a furniture store. He didn’t have a lot of warm clothes, so it was in frequent rotation.
Sam lived in a cabin in the mountains, which he had bought on a whim almost five years ago. Like all of his ideas, this was a terrible idea. He had all the requisite camping skills, but none of the enthusiasm. The hot water was sparse, the window screens were not meaningfully “screens,” and the fucking gutters kept coming off and dumping wet leaves everywhere.
Sam kind of liked the great outdoors, and knew more about trees than your average disgraced ex-triggerman, but Christ there were a lot of spiders in the bathroom. On a conservative estimate, there were three thousand spiders in his bathroom at any given moment, and most of them had those horrible really long legs that they used to climb the exposed pipe at hideous speeds. Fuck that.
But the air was fresh and cold, and there was a lake not too far away, and he could practice swimming, sprinting, and shooting, and he looked really fit and broody in the reflection off the window when he lit a few candles and cleaned his guns. There were worse places to live. If he wasn’t a person so riddled with holes and absences that the wind went right through him, it would probably be an excellent place to live.
*
Three times a week, he drove to the nearest town for four hours’ worth of WiFi at the local cafe. All the baristas hated him because his French was shit and he was basically incapable of eating a croissant without getting crumbs all over the table. They had good coffee and fine tea, and it didn’t seem like anyone had noticed that he used a different name every time he came in because he kept forgetting the ones he’d already come up with.
“Name?” said the teenager behind the counter.
Sam said, “I am . . . Naaaaathan,” the slowest anyone had ever said that sentence.
“Okay, Nathan,” said the girl. “It will just ask you one more question here.” She turned her strange tiny iPad so that the tip options faced him, and then pretended to be very busy looking at the to-go cups.
This was one of the few businesses Sam ever went to. He was half-convinced that all this shit they’d implemented over the last seven years---the iPad, the tipping, all of it---was just to screw with him, specifically. What the hell did it mean to insert, swipe, or tap? How did you tap a credit card? Probably all the text on the screen was making fun of him, but he didn’t know because he couldn’t read French.
He tipped twenty percent and went to find a table.
Sam had an itinerary for his WiFi hours. First, he downloaded the next few episodes of “Tiger King,” which he watched sometimes while he cleaned his guns (looking fit and brooding). Then, he played several rounds of slither.io, an online game about snakes that he had just discovered and was rather taken with. Finally, he checked Facebook.
Sam had a fake Facebook account, attached to the name “Lionel Doll.” Lionel was a children’s football coach in Scotland. His profile picture was an image of a meadow, which was meant to imply that he was gay. For a while, Sam had written the occasional status update, but it turned out that he couldn’t write anything casual without sounding like he was being held hostage, so now he had ChatGPT do it.
Lionel Doll had several Facebook friends, all of whom had attended the University of Kent. The one outlier was Helen Webb, who was also the reason Sam had made the account in the first place.
She didn’t know, of course. If she did, she would give him shit for the name. Sam had been infamously terrible at coming up with fake names, or remembering the ones Reed gave him. As far as he knew, he was the only member of the London spy networks who still went by his birth name. This wasn’t because he was particularly attached to Sam Young, but more because Sam Young had been a non-entity for as long as he’d been alive. Other people had to work to shuck their personhood, to grate down their original selves into nothing, but Sam had been born this way. This hollowness was inherent, inherited. The name “Sam” meant as little to him as if he’d made it up that morning.
Sometimes he thought about messaging Helen, trying to re-establish contact. He wouldn’t be able to say where they actually knew each other from, obviously, but she would pick up on it in a heartbeat. The last time she’d seen him, he had been covered in blood and halfway through the most catastrophic loss of his life; probably, she’d have liked to hear from him.
But none of that had happened to Lionel Doll. He was pleasant, meek, forgettable. He’d lived an uneventful life, and when he loved people, he did so with his whole self. He and Helen had nothing in common, and he had no reason to reach out to her. So he didn’t.
Most of Helen’s posts were about her children, who were quite small and had extraordinarily waifish names. In Sam’s experience, the richer the child, the more Dickensian the name, so this shouldn’t have surprised him. When he first saw the birthing announcement, he’d thought, my God, it’s like she wants them to be orphans, and then felt quite bad about it. He’d spent a few hours pulling invasive sedge in the yard as penance. He still thought of the kids as girl waif and boy waif in his head, though.
Helen’s most recent post was a video of the kids sledding down a long hill. They were shrieking like banshees, flying red blobs against an endless slope of white. At the end of the clip, Girl Waif looked up from the foot of the hill. The camera zoomed in on her face, ruddy and bright with flyaway strands of hair.
“MUM LET’S GO AGAIN,” she hollered.
Sam thumbed at the bullet scar in his side.
“Coffee for Nathan!” called the barista.
*
There were other errands in town. The grocery store. The post office. He had a P.O. box that no one ever used, that possibly no one knew about. There was a duck pond, which also had pedal boats. Occasionally, Sam bought a bag of nuts and watched the pedal boats. He’d never seen anyone actually use one, of course, but he was confident that it would happen sometime soon.
The sun skimmed the top of the pond, turning it into a long gold plane. He sat on the bench and opened his nuts---cashews---which were toasted and sprinkled with salt and felt very Christmassy. He liked the anonymity here. He could have been anyone. Just an English gentleman with an outgrown mullet, watching the vacant pedal boats bob on the surface of the pond.
Lionel Doll sometimes looked up Michael, on Facebook. Lionel knew Michael only vaguely. They had worked together once, maybe, or they hooked up in uni. It wasn’t worth staying in touch. He never clicked on the profile, because Lionel had once been a child in a dark room who wanted nothing more than to look at someone and be looked at in return. Who wanted it so badly he felt imperiled by it, sometimes, like a fish in a burning river. So Lionel knew better than to actually look at the social media of any of his exes, but sometimes he wondered things. Like whether Michael was doing well. If he’d met anyone. If his eyes were still bright, warm and expansive, or if he’d started to scan for exits and clench his fists in his pockets. If he still looked like Michael, or if he’d started to look like Sam.
Not that Lionel Doll knew who Sam was. But he understood, instinctively, that it wasn’t a good thing to be.
The sun was starting to set. It got dark early now. Soon it would be Christmas, and then New Year’s, and another year would be gone, lost to some silent hollow place where nobody looked.
There was no sense of progress here, only utter stillness. Sometimes, Sam went on benders, or had breakdowns, and had to spend a few grueling months pulling himself out of it, and to what end? To get back here? Sometimes he let his self-imposed training regimen lapse, and then bullied himself back into it, endlessly prepared for an eventuality that would never come. It was possible that he could go back to England, if he was ready to do some serious groveling to Lenny and likely also Reed, but he knew he would never make that call. It had nothing to do with dignity and everything to do with the knowledge that however little of a person he was in France, he was even less of one in England.
Sam folded the bag of nuts and put it in his coat pocket. He waved goodbye to the ducks, and left.
*
Driving up to the cabin again. The road was steep, with minimal shoulder. Once it got icy, it would be a real pain. During the really cold months, Sam sometimes didn’t go to town at all, or if he did he walked there. Even when he wasn’t driving, he went out to the car almost every day---ostensibly to keep the battery warmed up, but really so he could smoke and listen to his Björk CDs.
Sam parked and spent a good hour hauling firewood in the purpling light. As always, he timed it wrong, and ended up stumbling around in the dark with his arms full of splinters. He kept forgetting to buy a headlamp. He’d read somewhere that in places like this you should get a red-light headlamp so you didn’t fuck with any of the bats. Did Sam care about the bats? He didn’t know. It wasn’t the sort of thing he’d ever thought of before he got here, and now he’d spent seven years not knowing.
He was carrying his final load of wood inside when he tripped over something warm.
His first thought was, a body. He dropped everything in his hands and pressed himself against the wall. Feeling around---there were guns in every room but he might have better luck with the fireplace poker, especially if he moved fast---
The motion-activated lights finally flickered on, and he saw that there was a dog lying on his porch.
“Shit,” Sam said. “Are you dead?”
It lifted its head and gave him a profoundly morose look.
Sam took a deep breath. He gathered up the dropped wood and put it away.
“You can’t come in,” he told the dog. “That’s too John Wick.”
The dog made no move to come in, perhaps also recognizing the cliché potential. It didn’t have a collar, but that didn’t mean much around here. Sam started to put his groceries away. The fridge had a smell. What did you do to get rid of fridge smell? Whatever you were supposed to use, he probably didn’t have any.
The dog barked at something moving outside. Sam tensed up again, then saw that it was a squirrel trying to get onto the roof.
“You have to let your guard down a little,” he told the dog as he stacked cans. “Not all the way, just a bit. Otherwise you can’t really live out here.” He’d gotten the brand of soup he used to make as a kid, because they’d been out of the other kind. Back then, he’d spent a lot of time crouched over the little camping stove. No one had ever explained how to use a can opener, so for a few years he’d just smashed the lids with a rock and licked soup from the edges. Like a little child-neglect caveman. It had become a fond memory, somewhere along the way.
He turned on the stove gas and rooted about for the lighter. When he found it, tongues of flame whipped out from under the pot, bright blue in the dark house.
Sam went out to the porch to sit with the dog. He lit a cigarette and let it wag in his mouth as he talked. “‘S winter now. Have you been around here long? I’ll probably try to make pine needle tea and half-poison myself again. We’ve all got our traditions, I guess.”
He had already run out of things to say. He lifted a hand and set it on the dog’s back, just barely brushing the fur.
“You’re still not staying,” he told the dog. “I know how that film ends.”
The woods settled into themselves at night. It was like all the trees took a deep breath and loosened their roots. It was a relief to sit in the dark, to let his eyes relax.
A whistle pierced the dark, followed by a man’s voice from over the hill. “Harry! Reviens ici, affreux chien!”
The dog picked up its head, then slowly lifted the rest of its body. It trotted down the steps, picking up speed as it reached the edges of the porch light. As it disappeared from view, it occurred to Sam that it was the first living thing he had touched in over a year.
He hadn’t planned on getting high tonight, but fuck it. After soup.
*
Sam had two and a half grams of mushrooms left, which he ground and mixed with warm water from the stovetop. The taste was wretched. He closed his eyes and sat, leaning against the exposed guts of the sink.
He was sinking into the ground. The world converged in one spot, flinched, and swarmed away. It was like the house was filled with bugs, or maybe he was filled with bugs. He was always tense, but he was more aware of it during the come-up, like every muscle in his body was braced. Wind clattered through the trees, and the sound expanded, building up and dropping into a kind of menacing presence. It was like someone was in the room with him, or else he was in a different room entirely, or else that other self was below his skin, his skin which was now buzzing and prickling and remembering all its extensive histories of violence, none of which he could name when sober, and his thoughts went around and around, slowly marinating in the buzz of the porch light . . .
There were cracks in the floor, loose nails. He became worried that the whole house was coming down, so he slinked from room to room, watching the corners shake. The moonlight through the windows was yellow and astonishing, a pure color like a painting. He wanted to be low to the ground to maximize the vibrations, which came through the floor and seemed to be trying to tell him something.
At some point, he became aware of the wind through the trees again, but now it sounded delicious, full-bodied and choral. He rose to his feet, gradually like a puppet, and followed it outside.
The wind led him to the small frozen pond about half a mile from the cabin. On warmer days, Sam swam there, with the tiny jaws of tiny fish nipping at his exposed legs. He was sure that he could feel them now, the water teeming with small bodies, creatures so simple that whole generations survived just on impulse. Chew. Swim. Get away.
He walked out onto the ice and stood directly in the center. Whenever he was high, he became convinced that everything was trying to send him a message, some directive. Instructions for how to live. He had no hope of remembering it sober; the language of the woods disappeared as soon as he came back into himself, words too large and old for him to understand, or perhaps too small and new. Here, he vibrated at the same frequency, and it moved through him like opera through a wineglass.
The ice cracked suddenly, a jagged trail shooting out from below his feet. This was also a message. It said, everything’s going to be all right.
When he hit the water, it shocked the breath out of him. The psilocybin still made everything bright and toothsome. He realized that the ice itself was a triggerman, and that it regretted having to do this but a job was a job. Sam was an old half-dead animal, covered in fleas and frost. They looked each other in the eye until Sam couldn’t keep his open anymore.
Eventually, he made it to the banks, threw up a little in the bushes, and stumbled home. It was impossible to get warm in the cabin. He had neither the energy nor presence of mind to start a fire. In the end, he took every blanket in the house and curled up in the bathtub, shivering and crying, watching the whole ugly universe run from the tap until it was dry.
When he slept---if he slept---he had terrible dreams, some of the worst of his life.
*
Sam woke up. He felt dead, honestly dead, but he knew it was unlikely that he was that lucky. There was a huge spider on his chest. He was still fucking freezing, and having a hard time piecing out thought from sensation.
There was a bleating sound coming from somewhere outside of him. After a minute, he hauled himself over the rim of the tub and staggered into the kitchen. His burner phone was ringing, a sound so foreign it took him a minute to place it.
Before he answered, he rooted around in his coat pocket. It was damp and torn; it had suffered badly from the fall through the ice. But the cashews were still there, and relatively dry. He stuffed a handful into his mouth and stood there for a minute, fortifying himself. He picked up the phone, already knowing what came next.
“Sam,” Reed said. Her voice was crisp and wintery. “It’s time for the prodigal son to return.”