Benno dressed in another Gemma-provided outfit—identical to the first—in the hallway off the Shenandoah’s bridge. The return to the ship had felt both deliriously fast and mind-numbingly slow. He recalled—foggily—being on the roof with Edda. He recalled transporting back aboard the Shenandoah, the whirring and the stifling darkness. He recalled standing on the bridge, where Hermann offered him a brief, sympathetic nod before wheeling himself over to Edda, who stood tall over her crew, her mask, sword and phallus gone, holding the Koan aloft in one long, slender hand, boasting in her strong, alluring voice about how easy it was to separate it from the Forrorians. He recalled standing and watching this for far too long before remembering he was naked, at which point he sulked off to the hall and dressed.

He leaned against the hallway’s white marble wall, staring, despondent, at a statuette inset on a shelf, a bust of a woman with strong features and short hair. He wondered—in the way one wonders without noticing—if the woman depicted in the bust was related to Edda. There was some resemblance, though it might have been merely a symptom of Edda’s voice—her bragging, arrogant voice—infiltrating Benno’s ears as he stared at the smooth, unmoving face.

This is worse, Benno thought with the part of his brain he was aware of. He pulled a whiskey from the air and took a long, shaky drink. Before, I was just minding my own business. I wasn’t hurting anyone… Images of the Forrorians wailing with fear and grief crashed through Benno’s mind. He did not want to be part of this.

I do not want to be part of this.

He did not want to be whatever Edda and her crew were—pirates and murderers.

I do not want to be part of this.

He wanted nothing to do with Edda or her pursuit of the Gardens, despite—or maybe because of—its untenable promises.

He wanted to go home.

He pressed his thumb to the Gemstoke.

INPUT REQUEST.

Just ask Gemma to take you where you want to go, Edda had said. It was that simple.

“I want to go home,” Benno mumbled.

…ERROR. INTERFERENCE NUMBER 971: HOME LOCUS NOT INVENTORIED.

Benno frowned down at the Gemstoke.

“Gemma,” he said, articulating. “Send me home.”

…ERROR. INTERFERENCE NUMBER 971: HOME LOCUS NOT INVENTORIED.

He held the Gemstoke to his lips. “What does that mean?”

HOME LOCUS NOT INVENTORIED.

Benno thought for a second.

“Can you take me to the Gardens?”

The Gemstoke whirred.

…ERROR. INTERFERENCE NUMBER 971. GARDENS LOCUS NOT INVENTORIED.

Benno punched the wall, jostling the statuette. Of course he couldn’t leave. Edda was a liar. Everything out of her mouth was twisted and false. She claimed not to keep prisoners, but held an old woman chained in a room in her house. She assured Benno he wouldn’t have to engage with her operation, but then dropped him onto a roof and made him complicit in a robbery—and a massacre. She made promises about a solution—about the possibility of escaping his seven year Hell—but the Gardens was not real. It was an invention to placate Benno and exploit him until he was no longer needed. Edda was a conniver. A charlatan. A dangerous, duplicitous liar.

“You decent?” Rose’s little voice called out from around the corner.

Benno slid the Gemstoke into his pocket as Rose stepped into the hallway, waving lazily at a pall of smoke, a long, lit blunt in her stubby, child’s fingers. She leaned her shoulder against the wall and eyed Benno for a moment, then took a deep drag. “You don’t look great naked,” she said, holding her breath. “Thanks for getting yourself dressed, for all our sakes.” She exhaled a thick, dark cloud, which filled the hallway.

Benno breathed slowly in the smoke.

“So what’s your problem?” Rose asked.

“No problem,” Benno said, unable to conceal his disdain.

Rose raised an eyebrow and gestured back toward the bridge, where Edda’s voice held court. “Not what you expected, huh?”

“I didn’t expect anything,” Benno said. “No one gave me anything to expect. I was asleep in my bed. I didn’t know any of this existed. Then next thing I know I’m here. No one asked me. No one gave me a choice. And now…” Benno tried to keep himself measured, but he could feel a hot fury rising in him—leading him to the edge of his composure—and he opted not to continue, closing his eyes and breathing slowly.

Rose nodded, signaling nothing. “That sucks,” she said. “You know what else sucks? Being a fucking crybaby.”

Benno stared at the girl for a long moment.“How do I leave?”

Rose took another deep drag. “You gotta practice a little selective sociopathy,” she said. “You can’t care about everything all the time. I mean, whatever you saw down there, I’m sure it stunk. Edda is…” She took a half-step forward and lowered her voice. “…A bit ruthless. I’ve known her a long time and I’ve seen some shit. But the truth is that bad things happen, whether or not you’re involved. If it wasn’t Edda, it would be someone else, or something else. And even if you leave, or look away, bad things are still gonna happen. Those folks down there—the Forrorians or whatever—they’ll mourn and move on. That’s just part of life. We all mourn, right? And we all move on.”

Benno ground his teeth.

“So the best thing is just to lose touch with the part of yourself that’s getting hung up. Let it wash over, or pass through, or go around or whatever the fuck. And look at the bigger picture. Some people lose, some people win. Today we won. Selective sociopathy.”

Benno glowered. “You’re broken,” he said. “You’re all fucking broken.”

Rose shrugged. “Whatever, whiskey breath.”

Benno’s molars whined. “How do I get home?”

“Gemma doesn’t understand the word home.” Rose ashed her blunt on the floor. “In her mind—or whatever she has—all the Realms are inside the same big place. It’s all the same to her. The Ensemble is her home.”

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“How…” Benno said through his teeth.

“Ask her to take you to your Realm of origin.”

Benno placed his thumb firmly on the Gemstoke.

“But before you do,” Rose interjected, holding up the blunt for emphasis. “I want you to hear one thing. If you haven’t heard anything else I’ve said, I need you to hear this. Please…”

Benno waited. She could say her final piece. It wouldn’t make any difference, but she could say it.

She stepped forward, glanced back over her shoulder, took a slow breath, and then lifted her leg and let out a long, winding fart.

Benno nodded slowly. “Take me to my Realm of origin,” he said into the Gemstoke.

INITIALIZING LOCUS RECALIBRATION…

Rose smirked and dragged on her blunt as the whirring sound rose up in Benno’s ears and the world darkened around him.

#

As he stood in his trailer he realized, with a mix of relief and shock, that it had been less than twenty-four hours since he’d last been here.

He pulled back the crusty blinds and peered outside; thick snowflakes tumbled down from the overcast afternoon sky. There was no giant disembodied heart, no endless hills of yellow grass. Just the frozen, creaking woods surrounding his trailer at the end of a lonely dirt road in a depressed town in a struggling state in a declining country in an old world in which everything was dying except for him.

Here I am. Here I still am.

He picked up his father’s revolver from the table and studied it. It felt lighter than it usually did, perhaps on account of being unloaded. Or maybe it was a lightness of concept. He raised it to his head and pressed the cold muzzle against his temple. His finger settled on the trigger. He thought about Isaac’s slap, and Hermann’s voice: Nearly twice the energy of two cars colliding head on at eighty miles per hour—each…

He set the revolver back on the table.

His fingernails prodded the coin-shaped object in his pocket. It was real. It was here with him. It had followed him home—or to his Realm of origin. He pressed his thumb to it, thinking about a whiskey. He noticed his phone, half-concealed under the oily sheets on the unmade bed. He set it and the Gemstoke in the junk drawer. There was rusting from the corner of the trailer; a cockroach scurried from beneath a pile of dirty clothes, up the wall, and into a crack beneath the window frame.

Benno threw on his coat and made the long, cold walk to the liquor store.

#

The aluminum handle on the liquor store’s glass door had a little dimple at exactly the spot where Benno tended to place his thumb. It had been there for years, so familiar that Benno rarely noticed it anymore. But today it was distinct. It nearly perfectly matched the dimensions of the pad of his thumb. Had opening the door day after day after year after year after year with his thumb in the same spot slowly worn the dimple into existence? Had he been like the tide to a cliff? Or did it have nothing to do with him at all?

Mickey’s mother sat on her stool staring blindly toward a corner of the store. Her lips were caked with dry spittle, her purple, swollen ankles protruding over the tops of her sneakers. Benno had never noticed before, but the old woman wore a thin chain necklace around her engorged neck, its pendant—if there was one—concealed inside her wrinkled collar.

Lucky, Benno thought. Lucky…

“That all today?” Mickey asked, poking at the register.

Benno looked down at the bottle of Jack Daniels on the counter. “Yeah,” he said, fishing a crumpled wad of bills from his back pocket.

“You know…” Mickey took Benno’s money. “I shouldn’t have said any of that stuff yesterday. It’s none of my business how much you drink, or how you look—even if you look good—and I hope I didn’t offend you.”

“Never crossed my mind.” Benno slid the bottle into his coat pocket.

Mickey offered a gracious nod. “I like your new shirt,” he said.

Benno glanced back at the old woman. Can you see my mind? he thought. Can you?

The old woman stared off, unmoving.

“Hey, what happened to your beard?” Mickey asked.

Benno pulled his collar up. “Cooking accident,” he said, heading for the door.

“Happens to the best of us.” Mickey slammed the register shut. “See you tomorrow, Benno.”

“See you tomorrow, Mickey.”

#

The snow picked up steadily, dusting the already icy woods in a fresh layer of powder as Benno walked along the narrow dirt road. A murder of crows, picking at the carcass of a deer, scattered as he approached, landing in the low boughs overhead and watching him until he passed before flustering down and resuming their meal.

There was someone in the front yard of the Rogers’ house as Benno approached. A boy in a blue winter jacket, the hood pulled up over his blonde hair. He packed a pile of pebbly snow into the vague shape of a snowman. It had been months since Benno had seen Asher Rogers. He looked bigger, lankier. But still just a child. No older than eight.

Benno stopped across from the house, sliding the half-drunk bottle of whiskey into his pocket. He watched Asher sculpt the snowman’s head, using the thumb of his mitten to drill two oblong eyes in its face. He hummed to himself quietly, endearingly off-key. It wasn’t until he turned to retrieve more snow that he noticed Benno. He startled, the bone-deep, breath-catching startle of someone who had something to fear, who had been conditioned to anticipate pain.

One of his eyes was swollen shut, a deep, tarnished bruise spreading halfway down his face. Scabs of various ages covered his lips. Inside the collar of his jacket, just under his chin, another bruise, yellowing, in the vague shape of a wide hand.

Benno’s toes curled in his sneakers. That something so vulnerable and so precious could be mistreated so viciously, could be taken so heinously for granted, was wicked. It was wicked and vile, and heartbreaking.

It was unacceptable.

“Cool snowman,” Benno said.

Asher lowered his good eye.

“Are you gonna give it a nose and mouth?” Benno asked.

“I don’t think so,” Asher said, his voice meeker than Benno would have expected from a boy his age.

“You know,” Benno said. “I just met someone who only had eyes. No nose, no mouth, nothing. They had a funny name, too. Want to hear it?”

Asher nodded.

“D’doak Michol.”

Asher cracked a smile, revealing a row of beige, neglected teeth. “That’s silly,” he said.

“It is silly.” Benno glanced up and down the dirt road, then took a few steps toward the house. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but his body moved and his mouth spoke. “I want to talk to your mom,” he said. “Is she home?”

Any levity in Asher’s face dissolved. “She’s sleeping,” he said.

“How about your dad?”

Asher seemed to shrink. “He’s out. But he’ll be back soon.”

Benno took another step. “I know we don’t know each other well,” he said. “I mean, I’ve seen you grow up, but we’ve never really met…”

“You’re Benno,” Asher said.

“That’s right. I live just up there. You know that. And… I just want you to know, that if you ever… If you ever feel like you’re in any danger, or if you need anything and you’re afraid to talk to your mom or… What I’m trying to say, Asher, is… I’m a friend.”

Asher looked out at Benno from inside his hood, his swollen eye a dark stain on his face. What did Benno look like to him? A stranger? A lonely drunk? A monster?

Asher fiddled with his mittens, and then, finally, opened his mouth to speak…

The roar of an engine rose up from down the road.

Jason’s truck appeared around the bend, trundling over the rutted ice and spewing clouds of exhaust as it accelerated toward the house.

Benno turned to face the truck. The engine revved. Would Jason attempt to run him over? Would it be that easy?

The truck turned sharply and rocked to a stop, its wide tires straddling the driveway and the icy lawn. The engine cut and the door flew open.

Jason clambered out, his face an angry red, the veins in his neck throbbing.

“The fuck do you think you’re doing?” he growled, slamming the truck’s door and clomping across the ice. “I told you to stay the fuck away from my house!”

He stomped up to Benno and shoved him as hard as he could.

Benno was a mountain.

Jason stumbled backward with the reciprocal force of his own shove. His feet slid on the ice and he fell, hard, onto his ass.

Benno glowered down at him.

Jason scrambled onto his feet and fixed Benno with an enraged and bewildered glare. “You get the fuck outta here now!” he said, backing away onto his lawn, a thick finger leveled at Benno, his voice betraying a nervous flutter. “And next time I see you out here you’ll be looking down the barrel of my nine.”

He turned and huffed up to his son, who cowered as he neared. “And you!” He shoved the boy, sending him roughly onto his back, before seizing him by the hood and dragging him to his feet. “You get your faggot ass back in the house and stop fucking around with snowmen! What kind of boy are you? Your slut mother coddles you and this is what she gets!” He dragged Asher up the porch steps and threw open the front door. In the moment before he pushed Asher inside, the boy looked back around the edge of his hood, his one good eye finding Benno.

Jason lingered in the doorway for another second, turning back to Benno, his ruddy face ruddier than ever, then entered the house and slammed the door behind him.

Benno glanced up the road toward his trailer. He touched the bottle of whiskey through his coat. It was a cruel world. That’s just how it was. Benno had his own problems.

He lowered his head, crossed the yard, climbed the porch steps, and walked into the Rogers’ home.