BADLANDS - Chapter 1

This is a novel I've been working on, based on a real crime case I covered as a journalist in the Bakken in North Dakota. I won't spoil too much of it, but this is a fiction story first and all the names have been changed. I wanted to make this my own thing and not be beholden to reality. Plus, I also wanted to respect those still alive from the real life events depicted. So here it is.

Chapter 1

Insomnia often gripped Keith Hallock in the earliest hours of the morning. He was prone to getting up and pouring a glass of milk and sitting out on his family's Texas porch and watching the stars, listening to the cicadas. On the morning of May 12^th, 2012, he felt a particular itch in his gut, a churning he usually associated with being sick, but he didn't feel sick. He clutched the glass of ice cold milk in his hands and, in a fit of the insane and inexplicable late night thoughts that sometimes occur, feared he would drop it, but he didn't. He sat on the porch and watched the moon, which was full that night. He felt a powerful urge come over him and he stood up and couldn't turn away from the moon, couldn't even if he'd wanted to. He stood there transfixed. He felt as if his whole life would begin very soon. There wouldn't be any more waiting or false starts, any more droning hours at the auto body shop with his hands covered in grease, any more aimless drunken nights spent wavering in the streets. He felt in that few moments he stared at the moon, coursing through him like a surging river, and then it was gone just as soon as it had come.

He was able to go back to bed after twenty minutes or so, and though he would lie awake for another ten minutes after that tossing and turning, he couldn't recall what had brought on that feeling so powerful. The next day he would walk around as if in a trance. At work he was distracted. His boss, Rex, told him to step it up, people were waiting. People were always impatient. He could see the relieved looks on their faces when their gas was changed or their brake lights fixed or their engines finally wrenched and contorted back into the right form, and that was what he liked about his job – the fact that he could make them happy with something that came so simply to him. He liked the looks on their faces of contained, mediated joy, the relief of not having to do anything else now.

He poured a cup of coffee, black and bitter and lukewarm, but it gave his brain the jolt he needed. It was cheaper than medication so far as his insomnia went. His co-workers jostled and made fun of him for his distraction; called him out on it and told him to either wake up or go home. He shouted at them back and they repeated the same routine they always did. It was comfortable, but growing stale. It was good that he had a routine, but the routine became everything and then it was time to change it, he thought.

But he'd wanted to go to school – he'd had higher aspirations, still had them, even. If not for his mother's illness he would have gone. He wanted to major in engineering, Build cars instead of just fix them. Maybe a few innovations, somewhere down the line – the idea of electric cars had always seemed so cool to him. He remembered playing with remote controlled RV cars as a child, letting the wheels spin and spit gravel and ride the wind, fantasizing that one day he'd be doing the same. He took a RV car apart once and tried to see if he could put it back together. He'd failed, and his father had laughed so hard that he bought him another one just to say he was sorry for the laughing.

In his late teens he'd been a motorcyclist, a stunt man doing flips out at the race track. He remembered being 15 and getting his first dirt bike and rubbing his hands on the shiny chrome exterior, which was red like a fire truck. He remembered feeling like he was flying, feeling closer to the sky than ever. He supposed, between the remote controlled cars of his childhood and the real life dangerous deathmachines of the road when he was a teenager, he loved wheels. He loved the smell of burning rubber when you went fast and the feel of wheels against the road. It was powerful and permanent and made him remember how beautiful it was to feel alive.

That had all ended when, at 20, he'd gone over a hill wrong, too close to the edge, and there'd been a bit of loose dirt and he flipped. When he'd landed, he didn't feel anything for the first few seconds. Then the pain had hit him like a flash fire. It had been white hot pain, the kind of pain he'd never felt before. They had to put metal plates in his leg. He walked with a limp now. It was after that he'd really thought about what else he wanted to do. His dreams of being a racer were done, but he had also loved building things and loved learning. He had always liked knowing new things just to know them. The way you put something together had fascinated him, so he took the job in the body shop.

He supposed it could be worse. That was what everyone always said when they weren't happy, and Keith thought about it and figured it was a bullshit, nothing-consolement. Even if things could be worse, that didn't make things better right now, did it? There were still things missing, things which Keith was searching for. He liked some things about his life – he liked the drinks after work with friends and long walks around the lake with girls he dated from town or who visited from other ones. He liked his father's barbecues and movie nights and the rodeo when it came into town like a hurricane and then left just as quick days later.

He'd tried to get into the University of Texas the year prior, had all his documents lined up and a fresh prospect. A road map, detailing what classes he needed for the engineering degree. He had dreams of a job in the city at some place big. Some lab maybe, where he could make and design brand new cars or bikes instead of fix ones that were old and broken down. But then his parents' house had a pipe leak and flooded and they were living in a motel for three days, and he had given them some of his money to help speed it along. His mother wasn't used to the change. There was no reason for her to stay in some dingy motel. So he gave them some of his savings and put a dent in what he needed to go to college.

That was nine months ago now, and he'd said – his parents echoing him – that he would save up again and go to college later. That was the mantra. It never came to pass. Like so many things in life it got set by the wayside. Maybe sometime soon, he would say, and it would sit there on the back shelf of his mind and stew and never become anything. He let it go and said he'd get back to it and like so many other people, he never did. He didn't feel especially plighted. He was like everyone else in that way. Who ever really chased their dreams all the way? Not everyone could do it.

But the small Texas town was becoming constricting. Keith would look at the reedy, dusty streets and the churchgoing ladies and the parks full of children of people he'd went to high school with and the bars full of mechanics and construction guys, and he'd think it all felt so damned small. He felt like his life was a series of half-starts and false-starts and nothing ever got done. He was happy with what he had, but he wanted more, anyway, because everyone always wanted more. In his darker moments, Keith Hallock felt like everything he had was a hand-me-down and the world was very close to passing him by, and somewhere in those moments, those infinite brief second-long spaces of time, the seed to want change grew in him.

TJ Harvey texted Keith at 4 p.m. as the day was tapering off and the customers had trickled down to a slow drip, just a few hangers-on waiting for their oil to be changed or their tires filled up with new air. Keith had nothing to do because the other mechanics were handling everything right now. He sat back against the cement wall of the garage and texted back that yes, he would meet TJ at the Buck's Inn in an hour. TJ got back to him immediately, with a smiley face and a cool, see you there.

TJ Harvey was his best friend and had been since middle school. TJ was a burlier kid, a rowdier one back then. He supposed TJ appealed to the side of him that needed someone who could say fuck it and just do and say what he wanted. TJ had been a football player in school as long as Keith could remember and had a football player's confidence. He had also biked for a few years, had started the same time as Keith did, but quit after Keith's accident out of respect, he said – his heart hadn't been in it anymore.

Since he was 19 and a high school dropout, TJ had driven a truck for his father's company, Harvey Trucking, hauling construction equipment from town to town in the southern United States. He would be gone a few days a week and come back with fresh hickeys and a new story of another girl, another dark bar room, another fuck between hotel room sheets.

TJ had been in and out of their smalltown home since they graduated high school in 2002. He had left for Nevada the first time back then for a longer-term construction job and that had been the longest he and Keith had gone without staying in touch. He returned three years after that and said he'd been in prison for a spell and now he had a blemish on his record for something involving a firearm. He wouldn't elaborate any more than that, and Keith didn't ask. It wasn't his business.

Keith walked to the Inn after work; an old fashioned British style pub with a dive bar and wooden tables and chairs and a permanent population of old headbangers with big guts and leather jackets now faded and worn, so regular it was as if they were glued there. A jukebox constantly spewed the classic radio hits from the Beatles and the Stones and Zeppelin and Hendrix, a low hum and a pleasant melodic drawl, serving as a backdrop for the increasingly drunken ramblings and musings as the night went on, and there was a dartboard on the wall and a pinball machine in the corner near the window that flashed and blinked and emitted cheery, cartoony sound effects.

TJ was sitting at the table back against the wall, clad in his usual tight white T-shirt and dark jeans, looking as he usually did like he'd just come off a bodybuilding session, everything about him seeming to swell and pulse when he moved, demanding attention from anyone around him. Everything about TJ had always been large and flashy and loud and attention-grabbing. He wouldn't settle for anything less, and Keith sometimes thought TJ feared he'd evaporate if he wasn't the center of any room he walked into, and so he was constantly brash and crude and quick with an insult or a joke. Anything to keep him in peoples' sight.

The two didn't greet each other with words, but with a fist bump as was their custom. Keith went to the bar and got a Miller High Life, foamy and fizzing. He sat across from TJ. TJ said he wanted to run something past Keith, an idea; one of TJ's famous ideas, Keith thought sardonically. He said sure, he'd listen to what TJ had to say. Behind them, a group of guys lumbered into the bar and sat themselves at the table closest to TJ and Keith, talking loudly about some woman at work who had done them wrong, had swindled them out of cash or something similar. The waiter behind the bar came over and served them a pitcher of bright yellow beer fizzing and foaming.

TJ leaned forward with that electric, crackling kind of lightning in his eyes and the grin on his face that always reminded Keith of a coyote; all teeth bared and he had an idea he was ready to pounce on like prey.

“Yeah, man, look,” he was saying, keeping his voice low and hushed as if someone else in the bar could eavesdrop and steal his idea. “My dad's business is kinda shit right now. But I heard about this thing up in North Dakota. It's booming up there. Shit's going crazy, man.”

“Oh yeah?” Keith had seen a few news articles about it from the business journals his father devoured every month. For the last several months, more oil had been found in North Dakota than there had been in decades. It gushed from the ground, virile shining black gold, and now everyone was flocking there to mine and extract it from the carcass of the earth. Halliburton and Nuverra and Nostra and MBI – they were the new gods of the land out there and the state, Keith had read, was completely changed. It was fascinating stuff, though he hadn't honestly dedicated more than a brief moment here and there to read about it.

“It'll be good, man,” TJ said. “You and me. I want you up there with me. We'll run a business up there.”

Keith took a longer swig of beer. He thought about it and moved the beer on his tongue as he swallowed. Outside it was beginning to get dark. Keith's wallet was thin and he wouldn't be paid for another two weeks. He thought about the money in North Dakota. He'd read some things about the boom up there, though never in detail. He knew the oil found up there was through the roof and everyone wanted a piece of it. He knew TJ wasn't exaggerating about the money – it was certainly more than Keith could make here as a mechanic, and TJ knew it; that was why he was leering at Keith now with that 'I got you' stare, that wily, cocksure grin. Keith thought of the university he'd been out to see a year and a half ago, which he'd had such grand plans of attending. He thought about the long halls and the beautiful women carrying books and the sense of purpose, drive and knowledge he'd felt just standing there in that university's lobby, A/C hitting him and him feeling like he'd entered an oasis after a long stretch of desert.

He told TJ maybe. He said he'd think about it.

TJ grinned. “Good man. I'm still in the planning stages on this. But I trust you.”

“Oh, that makes me feel so much better,” Keith said. “The fact that you trust me. I feel like my life has meaning now, man. Thank you.”

TJ let out a harsh bark of a laugh. “Go fuck yourself, Stumpy. You ain't shit.”

“Oh, that's a low blow,” Keith said, taking a long swig of beer and laughing. TJ could be an asshole, but he was funny. He made jokes that were bawdy and offensive, directed like barbs at everyone around him, and you just rolled with it, because that was the kind of atmosphere he created. He was like the sun, and everything orbited around him. He existed in his own universe that he himself had created, mostly because no other universe would have him the way he was.

TJ said, “Man, I'll tell you. It's good to just shoot the shit after work. Been such a damned long week.”

“You know it.” Keith drank his beer.

“It just kills me that I'm still working for my dad,” TJ said. “I mean, I love the man. He's my flesh and blood! But I want to strike out on my own, man. That's why I'm doing this.”

Keith nodded. “I know, man. Yeah. You think you'd be good at it?”

TJ shrugged. “I don't think I'd be bad. I think I could learn. I always had a natural, like, knack for running things. I did take a few business classes at the community college.”

Keith laughed and said, “Dude, I hope you go for it. And thanks, man, for thinking of me on this.”

TJ raised his drink and gave another cocky grin – his only real gesture of thanks, Keith knew. They both took a drink and the night began to swim away from them. They would go back to TJ's place, where he had a bag of good weed he bought from a dealer in Nashville the week prior, and they smoked it while watching reruns of Chuck Norris movies on TV and laughing until one of TJ's neighbors told them to shut up, banging on the wall and screaming at them that he had to work in the morning. TJ turned the TV up louder.

The main reason Keith was apprehensive about leaving for North Dakota was because he knew TJ's tendency for making big, grand plans that didn't always align with what Keith thought was the right way to do things. Much of the time his ideas could be termed as illegal, or at the very least, amoral. In their younger years he had always come up with schemes – to get girls or to get money or to get something. It was always about the getting for TJ. TJ would drive Keith to the mall and they'd sit in the food court and lie to girls, tell them they were older and they could buy them beer. It almost never worked. Girls laughed at them with their tiny, barely visible mustaches and their wild tall tales.

TJ also tended to snatch things off the shelves at convenience stores and Walmarts when they'd walk around – just little things like notebooks and lightbulbs and whatever else he needed or wanted at the time. TJ told Keith this was because Walmarts and convenience stores were tools of the oppressive force that lorded over them. He said he was fighting back against the notion that they had to respect big corporations who only wanted to suck dry the marrow of the soul. Keith never knew what he was talking about. It sounded to Keith like TJ was just ranting.

So he thought about all of the things he didn't like about TJ that evening as he went home, and he wondered if this was the kind of man he wanted to go into business with.

His parents' home was the same home he'd always known; a one-story, two-bedroom deal with a living room with plush, antique couches surrounding a glass coffee table and a TV that was old enough to show static and a kind of yellowy tint, but Keith's parents wouldn't replace it. Why spend boatloads of money on something when the one they had worked perfectly fine, they asked. Keith had given up trying to entice them on the wonders of modern technology.

He ate dinner with them once or twice a week and they talked about the world. His father had always loved rousing political talk, maybe too much. He was a quiet man at heart, but some things got him going and you could see the fire light up his face and then spread to his whole body like a lantern glow. He talked about the country like it was going to hell and all that could save it was strong conservative leadership – as if it were some raft in a storm. He didn't like the Republican candidate this year, Mitt Romney, much, though. Romney, according to Teddy Hallock, was too pampered and too weak by half. He'd never be able to unify anyone.

His mother just agreed with his father. Keith usually had something to say, but tonight he was distracted, and they noticed halfway through dinner. He had a mouthful of his mother's scalloped potatoes he was chewing and he swallowed them, then told his parents about North Dakota. He told them he was seriously considering it. He told them TJ Harvey really seemed to have a good thing going. He tried to convince himself that it wasn't a crazy idea. His parents didn't do much to encourage him. They told him they'd never liked TJ and it sounded like trouble. His father said TJ Harvey was a kind of lawless, rugged guy. He wouldn't do business with TJ if he knew him today, his father said.

His mother said she remembered TJ as a kid. She said she remembered him playing in their backyard, and she pointed there. Keith looked and remembered himself and TJ in the backyard playing soccer or baseball and talking about what they believed the world to be like. He didn't remember what either of them had said. As children the whole world seemed to be wide open and boundless with possibility, so rich with wonder and the unknown, with fiction and fact blending like Puree style. They talked about their favorite movies and comic books like they were gospel. They had no grasp on what was real and sometimes that was very nostalgic to Keith, in that innocuous, what-were-we-thinking way. He missed the freedom from inhibitions.

He said goodbye to his parents outside in the dark with crickets chirping and buzzing around them, the lights of the other houses and cars in the distance providing some illumination so he could see their faces. They had stood here countless times before and now as they were older it seemed like all those times were converging, layering on top of one another, all the years in their homogeny. Things had to change, Keith thought standing there and then again in the car driving away, because otherwise, how would he continue to appreciate the things he had? He felt like he had to make a change. He could feel North Dakota calling to him now, a place he had no mental image of but could picture perfectly in an abstract way.

He knew he had to go there. Now he just had to figure out how to say it to everyone he'd known all his life.

The drive over to the Cozy Coffee Shack in the morning before work was long and dry. The town stretched before them in long rows of hack medical and law offices and fast food chains and Starbucks where there were once food chains and coffee shops indigenous. This was a town that had been eaten alive, he thought. The corporatization of America, nothing but rows and rows of the same interchangeable places everyone could go in every town.

The Cozy Coffee Shack was a roomy little place and every inch taken up by something. They made use of their space. It was the only indie coffee house on this side of town. Everything was brown and soft and warm looking – the couches and the oak chairs and the coffee mugs steaming with that nectar everyone couldn't live without. Regulars sat lounging on the couches with touch-screen iPads and tablets, and people in collars and slacks with laptop bags slung over their shoulders got to-go cups and muffins and scones in paper bags. The Cozy Coffee Shack was green to the core. They didn't waste plastic. It was the new way of things.

At the counter was Stacy Lemmons, skinny and brunette, with librarian-style horn-rimmed glasses, wearing as she always did sweaters too big for her and jeans and slip-on shoes. She looked constantly like she'd just gotten out of bed; hair tousled as if brushed in a hurry, sweater hanging a bit lopsided. She wore a forest-green apron and a little hat to signify she worked there. She had been his friend for most of his whole life, since before either of them had hit puberty and things changed up and got so weird for them both in ways they never spoke of; those unspoken, wordless truths that went back through generations of men and women.

“I'm real sorry,” she said, and she looked at him with the kind of big, lean-on-me look he'd never known what the hell to do with.

“Sorry about what?”

“You know,” she said, “just that you're not doing so well. I wish I could do or say something. That's what friends are for, right?”

“Oh yeah. I really appreciate that.” It sounded so fucking fake to him, really. He hated that he couldn't sound more grateful. Stacy had a motherlike aura around her that Keith had always found welcoming. It was an intrinsic, natural thing, an attitude about her more than anything she did – she was just the kind of person who, through how well she listened and the kind words she said, made you feel welcome. So Stacy, as it went, was well liked.

“It's not your fault,” Keith said.

“I didn't say it was. I just said I was sorry. Kind of a sympathetic thing, no?” She punched him softly in the arm. “Gotta learn to take some help once in a while, buddy.”

He smiled wryly at her. “I get you. Okay, so thanks. You always help me out.”

“Got that right,” she said.

She was saying how their little group, they who hung out at the race track, hadn't been the same since he left.

“We all miss you,” she was saying. “You ought to come out again sometime.”

Keith nodded. “Yeah, yeah. I should. I miss all the guys.”

He didn't, really, not all the time – he didn't want to watch Seth continue to improve his bike racing craft. Seth, who hadn't hit that snag. Seth, who didn't have a metal plate in his leg now. He wasn't sure Seth wanted him there either – some reminder of the life that he'd once had, of what could happen at any time – the cruel hand of fate.

“How is everybody?” he asked.

There was a small smile dancing in her eyes. She'd always been so communal, so about friendship. She loved bringing people together. She said, “They're good, yeah. Evan's getting married in September. Darby and Alice are both doing real good. Alice won a competition the other week, got a bit of money out of it.”

Keith nodded, surprised how much it made him smile to hear about his old crew, the race track guys and gals, they who toiled under the Texas sun on screaming bikes and tried to touch the sky. He didn't tell her about North Dakota yet, not feeling he had found the words to. He felt all nervous and shaky like the awkward adolescent he'd once been when he thought about telling her. He remembered being 13 and trying to ask her to the homecoming dance, and it hadn't felt right at all, and she giggled when she told him no and then had to say sorry. This felt like that in a way, but worse; more severe.

Keith went out to the race track on a Saturday at 10 a.m., and the air was clear and crisp and the sun was bright but not intrusive. Some of his old friends sat on the bleachers, drinking water and Coke, and Evan Richards and Seth Paulsen were out on their bikes speeding down the tracks, trails of dirt kicked up behind them, the sound of the motors like a symphony. He knew Evan and Seth by the patches on their jackets, and the two men couldn't have been more different. Evan wore an American flag, a patriot to the end, and a bunch of patches for bands like Korn and Nirvana and Kid Rock. He was a conservative and had disdain for where the world was heading, had an anger welling inside him for the changing times. He'd been in jail a few times for fighting and DUIs, and Keith remembered hearing that he'd once had ties to a local skinhead group, though he hadn't seen evidence of that in the time he'd known Evan. Evan raced because he needed an outlet.

Seth had a bunch of dragons on his jacket, drawn by an illustrator friend of his. Seth had never been loyal to anyone or anything. He was a fierce competitor, and loved winning, whether at drinking games or racing. He got his high from competition, from challenge. He had never been one to idle, and while he was nice in person and pleasant to be around when the games were over, he had always been a cold son of a bitch in the games. He played like he had something to lose, and it irritated people. A lot of people around town would tell you Seth was a son of a bitch and they didn't like him. But Keith wasn't one to discriminate without reason, and Seth had been good to him.

Watching the two men race, standing out there behind the bleacher, Keith thought maybe you had to be a bit crazy to race on bikes, to risk whatever happened. Keith wondered why he'd done it. He stood there and didn't quite remember, but he did know he missed it.

Then Alice Phelan saw him and beckoned him over. Alice, a stocky girl with curly black hair and bright electric blue eyes, was a racer herself. She sat with Pete Stockton, Leigh Ann Townshend, Darby Rollins and Stacy, the four of them playing a card game and sweating. Keith sat on the edge of the bleachers and they all greeted him as if he hadn't been gone near eight months.

“You ain't racing today?” Keith asked, cocking an eyebrow at Alice.

“Bad hangover,” she said. “I'd rather not right now. Had a hard enough time driving the fuck down here, man.”

Keith nodded. “I know the struggle.”

Leigh Ann Townshend, whose father ran the Ford auto dealership, said, “Haven't seen you out much, man.”

“Yeah, yeah, I been busy,” Keith said.

“Too busy for us? Bullshit,” Pete Stockton said. Pete was tall and gangly with a spatter of freckles and hair the color of straw. He was a hard drinker and his mouth got ahead of his brain. There were a lot of guys like him in town – scrappy, energetic guys bouncing off the walls, they were so bored; but with no money or means to leave like would be good for them. So they stayed and they got drunk and they fought and ran their mouths. It was the way of things.

Alice Phelan invited him to play cards and so he did. They sat and played cards and sweated. Leigh Ann asked Keith if he missed biking. He looked out at the race track and felt the dust on his skin and remembered what it felt like to run up a big ramp and feel the wind and feel weightless, leaving the world, an exhilarating blast.

He said, “Yeah, yeah. It was a good run, you know.”

“We were all just crushed when the accident happened,” Darby said, Darby being the kind of person often given to displays of overt sympathy. She posted Facebook updates whenever a tragedy happened, full of sad-faced emojis and hash-tagged RIPs. She had always been pretty, though. Keith dated her for a few weeks in high school and now, as it went in little towns, they just saw each other all the time.

The day drawled on. Seth and Evan would get off their bikes and josh Keith about whether he wanted to come out and join them, and he would laugh, genuinely, and tell them to fuck right off. It wasn't that he didn't enjoy seeing his old friends – he did – but when he left he didn't feel anything but a notion of closure. He felt as if everything he could have done with them, and that it was time to move on. This made him a little sad, he admitted, because they were good people, and it had been a good run while it lasted.

The bong was tall and teal-colored, see-through, with pictures of fish on it. TJ said he'd gotten it from the flea market out by the highway, the shady one where you could buy guns illegally and find all kinds of stuff that had probably been stolen. The weed had come from a dealer friend of TJ's he only identified as Skunk. TJ knew a lot of these guys, and Keith never knew where he met them. It seemed like they just grew out of the ground, sprouting like shrubs from the bare earth. They took hits from the bong and the smoke filled the room. They were way out in the country in TJ's grandpa's trailer. TJ's grandpa had passed earlier that year and he inherited the trailer. An old Steven Seagal movie played on TV.

Keith told TJ about the old gang out at the race track. He told him they'd been the same as always, but that it hadn't felt like home, that Keith had mostly just felt out of place now.

“Fuck them,” TJ was saying. “Those guys were always dicks. You know?”

“They're cool, man,” Keith said.

“All they ever did was judge me. They were never cool. Bunch of fake posers, you ask me.”

Keith shook his head. “Hey, whatever, man.”

They sat and watched the movie, the sounds of explosions and car chases filling the little tin shack trailer as sure as the smoke from the bong.

TJ took a big hit off the bong. He said, “You know, come election season, this right here could be legal as fuck. We wouldn't have to come hang way the fuck out here to smoke.”

Keith laughed. “Maybe, yeah. But what are the chances of that? All the old farts 'round these parts – you think they'd go for it?”

TJ said, “That's why we gotta mobilize, dude. We get everybody we know, they won't have a chance. We'll win and we'll be buyin' weed and whatever the fuck, right over at Walmart. They can get their dentures and diarrhea meds same time we buy our Mary Jane.”

Keith had to laugh at that, too. He'd bristled at what TJ had said about the race track gang, but TJ was too funny to just ignore. He always got Keith laughing, in spite of anything else going on. The two had sat in the back of classes at 12, laughing the same way they were now. Teachers had scolded them, their parents had thought them rambunctious, spiraling out of control. None of that had mattered then and it didn't matter now.

TJ was leaning forward. “For real, though. It's all about control. Mobilizing. We tell em what we want, and we take it. We just throw up our hands, though, and we got dick. Nothing. Nothing happens if we just go, oh well, shrug your shoulders, let it go.”

Keith took a hit off the bong, felt the smoke in his head, but he didn't feel high. Now he felt down to earth and everything felt hard and immediate. “What are we talking about here, man?”

TJ's eyes lit up like Christmas lights. “The oilfields. North Dakota.”

“I see.”

“My dad, he can get us the capital. He'll lend me his trucks, he's got more than a few. He's getting old, but we can carry the torch for him. He'll support me.”

“Man, I dunno.” Keith looked out the window and saw how alone they were, and how little he could do to divert this conversation. He'd thought about North Dakota though. It was alluring, he admitted – especially the thought of all that money. He'd be rolling in it, if he went out there.

“Just think about it, man, alright?” TJ asked, clapping a hand on Keith's shoulder, which actually sort of hurt – TJ never exactly knowing his own strength. Keith said he would. They turned their attention to the movie, but Keith couldn't stop thinking about North Dakota – about rolling plains, oil wells, long sunsets and lots of money. He had always been one to fixate on things, his mother had once told him – always one to take an idea and just run with it until he couldn't no more.

He got the text from Stacy when he was eating lunch the next day at work. He was sitting at the greasy old plastic table in the break room, a bite full of turkey sandwich in his mouth, when the message popped up: Hey Keith, listen, I'm really sorry to bother you...

She told him in that text that her ex-boyfriend, a 'roid freak named Todd who she'd broken up with months ago, had been showing up at her apartment and just waiting outside. Like some kind of silent sentinel or guard, except he was becoming a threat. She sensed it every time she had to walk past him, she told Keith – she sensed it like some awful stench radiating off him. A woman could tell, she told him – women had built-in douchebag sensors, were her actual words. She'd said the same thing about TJ Harvey multiple times.

So, she was wondering – could he come by and try to scare Todd off?

Keith texted Stacy that he'd come by at 4:30 when he got off work.

Stacy lived in the nice apartments downtown. She worked as a junior therapist at one of the clinics, and so she could afford a place with a window looking out over Lake Margaret. He saw Todd as soon as he arrived – sitting in his black monster truck, sleeveless shirt, bulging biceps, his head shaved like a skinhead, eyes set dead ahead, still as a monolith.

Keith walked right past him and made sure Todd saw him.

He walked up the stairs and knocked on Stacy's door. She opened the door a crack, saw it was him and let him in. Once the door was closed, she wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed herself into him, a real full-bodied hug, and he could hear her sighing with relief. She pulled back and he missed the feel of her against him for just a split second. “Thank God you're here,” she said.

He said, “Yeah, of course. What's going on?”

She sighed again and said, “Okay, so I broke up with him like, four months ago now. I didn't see him around for a while, so I figured it's okay, you know? But he won't quit texting me. He just keeps texting me these nasty things, and the last day or so it's been threats, like he's going to make me pay. I don't want to have to go fill out some form with the cops, some sort of restraining order? Because those things never work. It'll just make him madder. I'm hoping we can just resolve the whole thing without the law being involved."

Keith cast his eyes out and saw the guy sitting there, not even looking at the apartment, just sitting there staunch and unmoving. “I see,” he said.

“I'd really, really like it if you could try and make him go away,” she said. “I'll cook you dinner later or something. Please.”

Keith said, “It's cool. I'll see what I can do.” He put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. She seemed to relax a little, though her eyes were still so wide and saucer-like and full of worry and empathy. Keith thought it must be exhausting to care as much as Stacy always seemed to. He thought about the guy outside and thought you'd have to be a psychopath to act this way to someone like Stacy, or, hell, really any woman. They didn't deserve that kind of treatment, Keith thought.

He said, “I'll be back in a few minutes.” He crossed the apartment to the door and opened it and went downstairs. He felt an odd sense of equilibrium, a purpose which he didn't always feel. He supposed he liked helping people. Or maybe it was just that, in that moment, going down those stairs with the wind in his hair and seeing what he was going to do, he felt he could die and it would be so simple. He didn't want to die, true – but he also didn't want to die with uncertainty. He felt like too many people could never see exactly what their path was. Keith could now.

He approached the truck. The guy in it, Todd, turned and looked at Keith with annoyed eyes, goading Keith to say something. Keith hated him already. He'd known guys like this before – gym rats who lived there and thought they were wise to the streets, thought they could push other people around and that the world was theirs for the taking, like muscles granted authority. Keith always wanted to tell these guys that it wasn't the Cro-Magnon age anymore, and that society lived by different rules now.

Keith said, “Hey, man, Stacy wants you to back off.”

“How do you know that?” He asked, his face suddenly twisted into something inquisitive and pleading, and Keith had to admit he was good.

“She told me, man,” Keith said. “You're scaring her. You need to back off right now.”

Todd opened the truck door and stepped out, towering over Keith, who was no slouch in height himself. Todd looked like a mountain of a man. Broad shoulders, a tree-trunk neck, biceps the size of footballs.

“Or else what?” Todd asked. “Think you need to stay outta this, man. Ain't your business.”

“Oh, it is now,” Keith said. “She's a friend of mine. I'd appreciate it if you'd let this go. Just get back in the truck and drive away, and we won't have to get the cops involved.”

Todd arched his eyebrow as if to say you serious? He looked up at the apartment. The curtains were drawn and if Keith didn't know better he'd say it was dormant.

Keith said, “Come on, man.”

Todd turned and scowled. He said, “Fuck you,” and jabbed a thick finger at Keith. “Fuck this. Bitch doesn't want me out here? Fine. Fucking whore.” Then he got back in his truck and started the ignition – a monstrous, revving sound – and then he was speeding off, a trail of black smoke where he'd been. Keith coughed in the dust and the exhaust and looked up at the window, where Stacy was peeking out from behind the curtain, just a crack in the otherwise closed window. He gave her a thumbs up.

The day bled into the evening and the skies turned a slate-gray. Keith stayed at Stacy's house and as promised, she cooked dinner for him. She stood in the kitchen and cooked Shepard's Pie and black bean rice. They were both drinking beers. Stacy wore an apron with a floral pattern on it and tropical, bright colors. He felt at ease. She had thanked him a dozen times and he kept telling her it was no big deal.

“Really, though,” she said. “I can't even tell you how much I appreciate it. You just hear such awful stories on the news, of these women who have these fucking psycho-stalker ex-boyfriends...it's just so scary to me.”

“You should call the cops if he comes back,” Keith said. “I don't know what I could do against that dude in a fight.” He drank his beer. It was fizzy on his tongue and went down cool.

She turned and looked at him. “Oh, come on. You could take him.”

“Oh yeah. I'm a regular MMA champ. Especially with the screws in my leg that I can barely even run on. I think I got knocked down a few weight classes just 'cause of the leg thing. I'd be fighting little kids or women.”

“You could kick him with it,” she said, a mischievous, childlike grin coming over her. He let out a big laugh. Suddenly she was seven years old again and they were just friends who lived across the street from each other in a sunny suburb. He remembered pushing her down the street in a wagon and his father shouting at them to stop, they might get hurt, there could be a car coming. He remembered sitting across from her in the back of her mom's station wagon, both of them eating ice cream from Baskin Robbins.

He didn't know where the nostalgia had come from. He just suddenly felt like he could be leaving everything behind very soon.

He said, “Hey, you mind I ask you something?”

“Sure, what's up?”

“TJ floated an idea past me the other day,” he said. “He's thinking about going up to the oilfields in North Dakota. He wants to start a trucking business up there, like his dad's got here, and he wanted me to go with him.”

She had stopped stirring and looked at him now completely serious. She said, “TJ asked you?”

Her dislike of TJ had been well documented. She had been in his life first, when they were so damned young, and TJ had entered his life in middle school and changed everything, become the brotherly figure he'd never had. She had told him over the years that he had changed when he met TJ. There was an element to it, he thought, of jealousy. She had said TJ was not a good guy, she could just feel it, but she stayed a friend, however warily. Through all his arrests for DUIs or marijuana, Keith had felt her disapproving gaze.

“I dunno about that,” she was saying. “I mean, do you really want to go?”

“I mean, the money sounds good,” he said, shrugging. “I don't really know about going all the way up there. I mean, I wanted to get out, sure – but North Dakota?”

“I just don't trust TJ,” she said. “I know, I know – I've said it before. But he's just...he's not a trustworthy guy, man.”

Keith said, “He's good to me. But I appreciate the concern.”

She made an exaggerated sigh. “You're too nice,” she said.

She served the Shepard's Pie and the rice, steaming hot and aromatic, and they sat together. She smiled at him from across the table. “If you do end up going, I'll understand. Just don't forget about us little people back here, 'kay?”

“Heaven forbid the thought,” he said, and they raised their beer bottles and toasted.

TJ was gone for three days in North Dakota, he would tell Keith that night by text. He said he couldn't give much details yet, but that he was working out a place of business and talking with potential partners. Keith was at home by that point, surfing Youtube, and his phone would light up every ten or fifteen minutes as TJ relayed the news. The last thing TJ said was that he had met a woman there. He'd talked her up in a bar and they slept together. Her name, he told Keith, was Jackie. She was a hot strawberry-blonde. She knew the oil trade because her father was in the market, and she wanted to help TJ out, too.

“It's the best of both worlds,” he texted Keith. “She's a business partner who gives good head.”

Keith felt like he was witnessing a real-time HBO drama. He told TJ that was great, he couldn't wait to meet her.

TJ told him he'd be back on Friday, two days from now, and he'd bring her with him.

Like clockwork, TJ did return that Friday. His coming was heralded by a storm. The skies were blacker than they had been all month and clouds hung swollen and fat like a pregnant woman's belly, and around 3 p.m. they exploded, the rain coming furious and fast and heavy. TJ asked Keith to meet him and his girl Jackie at the Inn, and Keith looked out the window and thought if we don't all drown in this flood.

But there was no flood. After the last customer had taken her beat up PT Cruiser out of the auto shop, and after Reg at the cashier closed things out, they all scattered. Keith washed his face in the bathroom and made sure his hands were free of that oil-smell. Then he went to the Inn, where the bar was empty save for TJ and the buxom blonde, clad in a sleeveless white shirt and jean-shorts so short they might as well have been panties. The two of them sat at the very back of the bar. There was something different about TJ, Keith thought, but then figured it was just the dim lighting, flickering as the storm raged.

Jackie shook his hand. Despite her garish attire, she had a demure manner and spoke in a soft voice, choosing her words in a way that suggested to Keith she was educated well. She had a margarita and he and TJ drank Coronas.

TJ said, “So, look. Jackie here? Her dad's a big farmer out there. They found oil on his land, and now the whole place's just fucking crawling with oil guys and everything. She said that's the area to start in.”

Jackie nodded. Looking at her, Keith found something unsettling about her – just something sly, he thought, in the curve of her smile, the reserved way she carried herself that seemed sort of fake. He told himself he was imagining that. He said it was great that TJ was making some gains.

Then TJ asked what Keith had thought of absentmindedly in the days prior as “the million dollar question”; he looked at Keith and asked if Keith was in, if he was going to come along and stake out with them in North Dakota. Keith had mulled over it as if it were something not happening to him, analyzing the pros and the cons like some sort of literature report in grade school. On the plus side, he'd get the money he wanted, maybe all he'd ever need, like going to the army if he could actually do that with a gimp leg. On the minus side, though – did he want to leave all of his familiar things behind? The auto body shop with its low hum of motors and engines and mechanical, steel clanking? The Inn with its classic rock and cheap, fizzy beer? His parents and their barbecues and their rousing political talks?

Stacy Lemmons, and her warm kitchen, her tasty dinners, her wry, goading grin and her funny little quips?

He had thought about these things for days. He recalled all the things his father said to him growing up, back when he was young and his father's hair hadn't yet greyed, about chasing one's dreams and losing all the games you never play and every other cliché, and Keith thought this was what those cliches were made for. He was at a crossroads. And, really, he had made up his mind a long time ago. Everything else had just been mind games. The stuff of a distracted brain playing around with ideas that were decided long ago.

And he couldn't stop the words coming: “Yeah. Yeah, I'm in. Fuck yeah.”

“My man,” TJ said, letting out a bark of a laugh and reaching across the table, clapping Keith on the shoulder with his big, rock-hard hand. They proceeded to start drinking more. Jackie, for her slender build, could put away a lot. She kept up with the two of them like a pro, Keith thought. They sat at the table and downed shots of whiskey and beers and talked about the promise of the Bakken. She told them it was like nothing they'd ever seen up there, guys with more money than they could count, the whole place thriving like a living, beating organism, the disgusting depraved wealth of a lifetime.

Keith paused her at that point. He said, “That can't possibly last forever, can it?”

She giggled – a high, girlish sound, and TJ pulled her closer to him. Outside the storm was raging and clattering against the building. She said, “Well, let's hope it lasts a long time, right?”

Keith had to laugh, surprised at the answer. “Uh, I guess so,” he said.

TJ bought him a beer. He said, “C'mon, man, now's not the time for that. Now is the time for celebration!”

Keith agreed. They were in a bar, after all, and now truly was not the time to debate business. He drank down another beer in just a few minutes, and he felt his head swim. TJ called over one of the girls at the bar, and she sat with them and talked about nothings and laughed with them. Keith would pull her to him and feel her curves, and then she was sitting on his lap. He kept putting down money and she would get her friends to pour them drinks. The laughter would become a chorus. The noise replaced the silence.

He woke up with his mouth drier than the desert and his head shaking like a small tremor. He was on the floor of what he discerned to be TJ's apartment. He was in a sleeping bag and he was shirtless. Looking through his phone, he saw he'd taken pictures with the girl from the bar – his hand on her tit, her laughing and smiling, then him with his arm around her waist, her kissing his cheek. He didn't remember a damned thing.

He got up and put on his shirt and shoes and walked out. The Texas morning was blue-grey and the air was cool. He walked to the bus stop and sat there and waited for one, which came within the half hour. He ate breakfast at the Sunrise Cafe, got scrambled eggs and two slices of bacon and coffee. His head cleared and he remembered he should be at work in thirty minutes. He didn't really feel like going, his head fuzzy, his body sluggish.

So, he thought.

He guessed he was done, then. He'd known it in his heart for some time. He could feel the Bakken calling, that great vast cutthroat land of money and oil and blood and sweat. He knew it didn't matter what he did or thought, because deep down, in that primal sense, it was already done, had been done since TJ first told him about it, was ingrained deep in his blood like a cancer. There was nothing else to be said.

He would try to convey this to his parents. His mother just smiled, told him she got it, and continued helping load his bags into his pickup truck. His father would look stern and old and would pull him aside. Keith, he'd say, I'll tell ya', just be careful out there. It's a rough and tumble world and I hope you're ready for it, though I'm not too worried 'cause I know you're smart. But as 'yer father, I feel like I gotta say it anyway, just don't take anyone's shit and do good for what we taught ya your whole life.

Keith said, okay, Dad, I will. I love you guys.

Keith's father, who was rarely prone to displays of emotion, wrapped Keith in a rough, quick hug, patting his back too hard to compensate for hugging him at all, as he'd been raised never to hug another man, not even his own son. He said, “Love you, son.”

His mother would come over and hug him, too, and when Keith drove away with them in his rearview mirror, he thought about how he'd finally spend time at home after a long school semester. It would always seem so fucking refreshing to be able to kick back and not worry about school. He hadn't gone to college, but now, with this – he imagined it would be so good to come back soon, revisit all his old haunts through new eyes, sleep in the town he'd been born in.

The Red Rabbit

I wrote this story in a flash of inspiration. It's about a lot of different things, and it was a reaction to much of what I see going on in the world now. This is the second draft of it after much editing and cutting down - the original one was so insane, so crammed with plot and story that I could barely keep up with everything that I was doing, and I was the one writing it. It's definitely my most ambitious short story so far. There's a bit of Stephen King's mid-period work, and a bit of a parable-like feel to it, I think.

I was afraid this was too on-the-nose and preachy, but then as I kept writing, the more different themes and ideas and angles kept coming out and revealing themselves, like layers of a cake or an onion, or whatever you find more appealing as an analogy. I don't know how one declares his own work to be multi-layered or complex. I think it's not something you strive for, but something that comes out by itself. It's just another quality a work can have. I don't know how well I did it here. But I enjoyed writing this as a way to experiment and push my own limits in what I can write.

Thanks to Michelle for looking this over the first time.

Rick Walker had lost his job as a middle-school teacher at Duval High School two days ago and had not told his wife yet. Instead, he pretended to go to work each day and wandered the streets; visited old haunts of his, coffee shops and bars, and walked the beach and sat in the parks. He felt homeless in a way. They had told him he could stay until the end-end of the semester and finish grading his kids' papers, but instead he dumped the papers on an intern who wasn't getting paid anyway, and left unceremoniously, without another word.

He hadn't ever not had a job – he'd worked his way through college as a busboy and later a junior manager at Red Lobster, and then got the teaching job right out of college. That teaching job and getting married to Kathryn all in the same year had been like his whole world had fallen into place.

He was wandering the beach on a foggy, rainy, miserable morning, tracing patterns in the sand with his toes as he stopped periodically to look at the horizon – now a misty curtain from which he could make out nothing but vague shapes of waves and clouds. Rick told himself he'd go to the library after this, spend a few hours in the back hunkered and looking for jobs. He didn't care if he had to look for some janitor job, some low-level shit. He didn't care if that was what he had to do.

So then – his first objective was the library, he thought, standing on the beach.

Right after he was done with this walk.

He looked down the beach at the long road of sand and the fog that covered everything. He didn't feel a great need to go anywhere right now. Maybe he just liked the idea of having some goal. The endless carrot dangling in front of him. It was attractive, to say he had something on his agenda. But he didn't feel like going anywhere. He feared today would be a repeat of the previous one; a few beers and a book and then breathmints from Walgreens as he went home. He couldn't come home looking or smelling like booze. Unless he wanted to explain to Kathryn that he'd actually taken a teaching job at a place he could drink alcohol all day, it wouldn't be good. He chuckled to himself walking down the suburbs with their cracked windows, their broken fences, the split pavement of the sidewalks. Maybe he could be a standup comedian.

Rick met Kathryn when they were both 20 and in college. He and a friend were making fake IDs with an old printing press and laminating machine they'd bought at a garage sale, and Kathryn, bubbly and brunette and showing too much cleavage, had approached him in the college pavilion at the dinner hour and asked him if he would hook her up with an ID. He looked at her and felt the heat in his face and said he'd give her one for free if she would come out with him that night. The odyssey they embarked on that first night, full of lights and running and dancing, was something ingrained in memory.

After that they stayed together and learned that they had a lot in common. They started to make plans – they had such grand plans. He wanted to teach in India, vacation in France during the summers and knock out that novel he'd always wanted. Money was never an object of concern. It was the passion they both had. Kathryn wanted to go volunteer with the Red Cross over in Iraq or Libya. They gave these things long and impassioned orations to one another. But the talk was easier than the reality. The reality was, after college they both got jobs in Jacksonville and said they'd save up for a year and then go. But the year turned into two when Kathryn got pregnant that winter. A Christmas gift for their parents – you'll be grandparents, they told their respective parents, smiles adorning their faces.

In private they both felt the weight. They didn't speak of it much – each of them thought the other would just find the concerns pedantic and petty, so they tried to build each other up and ignored the schism forming. They had their child, a girl they named Selena, and things were pretty good. They settled. Rick thought he could ignore the weight of his failed dreams, as well as the increasing apathy and delinquency of his students in the public school in the poor area of town. They didn't want to learn. He felt like he was screaming into a void.

But even that would have been fine. He had been making it work forever up until then. They had felt special and like they were destined for something. That sowed their disappointment. Fine, OK, Rick thought; that happens to lots of people.

It was being laid off – just two days ago now – that had nailed the coffin.

He'd failed. In some great, inexplicable way, he'd failed, and the thing killing him was that he didn't know where he'd turned wrong.

Kathryn didn't know he had been laid off. He'd tell her soon; he'd have to, because otherwise she would find out anyway and things would be that much harder to explain, all the aimless days of wandering, drinking, reading, thinking.

***

He was walking home when he saw the little shop with the red rabbit insignia on it. He hadn't seen the place before. It looked like any other boxy hole-in-the-wall in Jacksonville, with a black overhang and tinted windows, only there were no words etched on the windows to signify what was inside. Just the silhouette of a rabbit's head, painted blood red, on the side of the tan stucco walls. It looked very new and had none of the grime and filth that other older buildings had, the stains of neglect and time. Rick first just slowed his pace, squinting his eyes to try and see if there was anything going on inside. Then he came to a stop and he just stood there looking at the place.

He didn't know why. He just felt such a connection to this place.

So he walked over and looked at the building. He put a flat palm against the door and it felt chilled. He tried to look inside, but the glass was tinted a shade too dark and he could only see vague shapes. So he pulled the front door and just stepped inside.

What greeted him was something like a vacant doctor's office lobby; white tiles polished to a mirror-like sheen, a flat counter and a glass window separating a receptionist's office from the rest of the room. The chairs were hard and uncomfortable-looking, just orange plastic. The whole room had an air of sterility and a smell like Clorox or bleach; suffocatingly clean. After days of cigar-smoke-filled bars and the beach with its musky, warm sea smell, this absence of smell was striking. There was a door, too, beside the receptionists' window – a tall black door with no handle. Something about the door, with its pitch black color, filled Rick with a dread he could not explain – just in the pit of his gut, a burning like a coal had been dropped there.

Then Rick heard the footsteps, like thunder, loud and filling the whole room. They were coming from behind the door. Then the door opened and there was a giant of a man there, all clad in black, with a top hat on his head much like that of an old stage magician. The man was pale and the lines etched in his face were like crevasses in rocks. He looked at Rick with the gaze of a man very old and very wise, but then his face broke into an easier grin and it was like the clouds had parted.

“Oh,” he said, as if only just noticing the man before him. “Are you here about the job interview?”

“I, uh... no, I was just stepping in,” Rick said. He felt an antsiness about him and his body, unwillingly, was starting to tilt back toward the door. But the man in black did not seem so intimidating. If anything he was inviting now. He looked at Rick and told him to come on back anyway. He said they might have something that interested him.

“Uh, wait,” Rick said. “I dunno about that. What is this place? Some kind of medical thing?”

The man in the tophat chuckled. “Something like that. If you don't want to come back and see what I have to offer – if you've got to be home with a family or something of the sort – I'll understand. But we do something very special here, and I think it would have interest to anyone. I'm eager to show it to whoever is interested.”

Rick took a deep breath and said, “How long will this take?”

***

When Rick was eleven years old, he and a friend of his had found a porn mag by the lake and spent the afternoon marveling over the naked flawless bodies of the models inside. His friend's father had taken it away later that night after they'd split up, but the fascination remained, and a week or so later, his friend came to him with a proposition – there was a store where they could see even more of that kind of thing, and an older friend of his brother's could buy them some more magazines or even video tapes. Rick, as dumb as any kid that age, agreed.

Rick's friend's brother was a skinny guy with a do-rag and a missing tooth, and he'd driven them there in a beat-up old Camaro with a side door of a completely different car welded onto the passengers' side where Rick sat. The store was all brick-walled and had only a bare-bones white sign and in red letters was written JACK'S on the top. The windows were smudged and grimy and the place was way out in the sticks by the highway exit that no one used.

They all went inside together and the man at the counter was a fat old man with a beard down to his belly, who'd asked what they were looking for. Rick's friend's brother said they were just browsing. They milled through the store – apparently the fact that two prepubescent children were there was no concern. Rick saw row after row of nude women, bare flesh pink and brown and black, and was overwhelmed by it. Jesus. His head spun.

Then he found himself out by the counter again. The old man, leaning against the back wall, was leering at him with an inscrutable look in his beady eyes. He asked the 11-year-old Rick if he wanted to see something and Rick, impressionable in his young age, had said yes, and then the man was showing him a magazine from under the desk with girls blindfolded, gagged with red balls and with black straps tying their arms behind their back. This is real prime shit, the old man was saying. Real grade-A gold shit. And we got some booths in the back with some holes in the wall, too, you're into that...

Rick had been too scared to answer and he'd run outside instead. When his friend came out Rick didn't say a word of what'd happened. He didn't feel like going back in and his friend dropped the issue, seeing Rick didn't want to talk.

That was how Rick felt at 33 now, following the man in black. It was a curious combination of the curious and the perverse – he'd wanted to see naked women at age 11 and he wanted to see what the man was offering him now, jobless and in need. But there was also this fear – both times, a fear clutching him like a vicegrip, a fear so pitch black that he couldn't even put it in words. It was the Unknown staring him in the face. But he followed the man anyway. He crossed that threshold. On the way he asked the man's name, and the man said Rick could call him Mr. Winter.

Mr. Winter led him down a white tile hallway like that of a hospital, nondescript and sterile. At the end of the hallway was a set of swinging double-doors. The man pushed them open to what initially looked like total darkness, and Rick walked behind the man and into that darkness. Then there was a click and a dim red light turned on in the distance. It looked to be coming from a slender structure about eight feet high. Rick's eyes were adjusting to the dark. They were standing in what looked like a high-school gymnasium, with a polished wood floor. There was an insignia looming large that took up much of the center of the floor, and Rick stepped back and looked and saw that it was a giant red rabbit's head in a red circle, just like what had been on the side of the building outside. Looking at the large insignia on the floor filled Rick with a reverence usually reserved for standing inside some kind of far-off religious temple, perhaps in the east in a place completely alien from home.

Mr. Winter saw him looking at the insignia and said, “You're wondering what this all is still, I presume.”

“Uh, yes,” Rick said.

“This is the Red Rabbit,” he said. “It is a new kind of alternative healing process. What you see over there” - here he pointed to the glowering red box diagonally to the right of where they were standing - “is a state-of-the-art method of easing the mind. It's akin to sitting in a sauna and letting all the fear and the worry wash off you. Sit inside that box for a while and you'll feel at ease with the world. Connected with the universe. Sit in the box and you'll feel everything you're worried or angry about roll off your back like sweat.”

“Some kind of placebo?” Rick asked.

“No, no,” Mr. Winter said. “It's very real. This is a proven method. Try it if you like. It's free and on me.”

“Why's it called the Red Rabbit?” Rick asked.

“It's a catchy slogan,” Mr. Winter said, shrugging. “The rabbit is the energy, the moving positive force that awakens in you. Red is the color of energy, too. Or, maybe, it means nothing. Maybe it's just a name.”

“I don't know about this,” Rick said. “What's the catch? Is it, I dunno, going to give me cancer or something?”

“It won't take but a second,” Mr. Winter said. “And it's perfectly safe. If you don't like it, you're free to leave and we won't bother you anymore. But we're looking for good, strong people who can promote us here at the Red Rabbit, and sell pleasure and healing to those in-need. We want people to feel better. That's our main goal.”

Rick looked at Mr. Winter and saw that he was telling the truth – there was no fake smile, no salesman's pitch.

So he said okay. And he walked to the box, the red glow warm on his face and his skin. He already felt better. If this was a placebo, it was a damned good one, he thought. Rick had never bought into new-age medicine much, and he found woo-woo crap like dreamcatchers and the lotions and herbs sold at farmer's markets and flea markets and hippy festivals to be naught more than pleasant distractions, but this seemed intriguing to him – it called to some primal part of his soul that he'd not even known was there. It was the same as the porn shop. Deadly curiosity.

The box was the size and shape of an old photo-booth, barely big enough for two people, but more than good enough for one. There was a curtain instead of a fourth wall and the red light emanated from behind the curtain. Rick pulled the curtain aside to reveal a tiny area with a leather chair like a movie theater seat, red velvet with long arms, and a blank white wall and nothing else. If Rick had not felt the twinge of danger and excitement in him, he would have seen the inside of the box and thought for sure it was a scam.

But he thought he'd suspend his disbelief. Give it a try anyway, he thought – what was there to lose anymore?

So he sat down in the movie theater seat and closed the curtain, and then closed his eyes. At first, there was nothing, and Rick thought for sure it was some kind of scam for people who just wanted to believe.

But then there was a click, just barely audible, which seemed to echo all around him as if from an unseen speaker somewhere above. And then the red light turned to a bright white light and then Rick felt something wash over him in a wave, a kind of esoteric cleansing inside him, and he suddenly felt unreasonably, ecstatically happier than he'd ever felt in his life. There was what felt like a gust of wind from below. He took a deep breath in the way one does upon witnessing some great monument like the Grand Canyon – it was utter awe and nothing else. Unfiltered bliss.

He stepped out of the box and Mr. Winter was standing there.

“Well?” Mr. Winter asked.

“I get it now,” Rick said. “I'm sorry I doubted you.”

“Do you want the job, then?” he asked. “All you'd be doing was selling this product to those who need it. The homeless, the depressed, those without jobs. Anyone who needs a boost. Tell them to come in and then let them take a ride in the box as you did. That's all you'll be doing.”

“That's it?”

“Yes. That's it.”

“What's the pay like?”

“Just name your price. And we'll match it.”

All of a sudden Rick felt his mouth go dry. He told Mr. Winter his price, the same as his teacher salary, and Mr. Winter's face didn't change, and he didn't blink, and then he was shaking Rick's hand and saying he could start Monday morning.

***

He walked home in a daze. It occurred to him that he may have been brainwashed. That maybe something in the box could have turned him into some kind of shill for a new religion. Like all those actors buying into Scientology, he thought – maybe that's what this Red Rabbit thing really was. He hoped not. What he'd felt in the box was real. And if he was having critical thoughts and wondering if the whole thing really was some cultish conspiracy, well, then he couldn't have been seriously impacted. But how did one really gauge that? He supposed he wouldn't know until he was attending secret meetings and sending emailed pamphlets to his Facebook friends about the new world order.

By the time he'd worked through these thoughts, Rick was home. His house was a humble little thing, a one-story with a little patio on the back overlooking a small garden which they'd outfitted with a pastel-colored child's playset complete with a slide and swings. The inside was cramped and the rooms were small and there were wine stains on the carpet that some previous tenant had left. But then, those stains had contributed to the good deal price they'd gotten for the place.

Inside he found his daughter Selena with a coloring book on the floor. She looked up at him with a child's glee, unpretentious and full-attention, and showed him what she was doing. He smiled and told her it was great, the whole time thinking how awful it would be if none of this worked out, if he was still left without a job by this Red Rabbit. He kissed Selena's forehead.

Kathryn was in the kitchen stewing vegetables. She leaned her hip against the counter and she was absorbed in a book, and as he got closer he could see it was The Great Gatsby. That had been the one constant through all the years, through all the disappointments and compromises – the both of them still loved to read. Rick walked to her and kissed her neck. She mumbled some vague murmur of acceptance – not happiness, maybe, but acceptance. Here it was – like the first day he'd asked her out, so damned nervous, now he was fretting about telling her the truth about his lost job. For days she had thought he was going to work, grading tests and that everything was normal.

He hadn't had the heart to tell her. For the entire time he'd known her, Kathryn had had the uncanny ability to just cut right to the heart of a situation. She was as real as it got. She had no patience for bullshit or waffling around and nothing turned her off more than someone wasting her time and avoiding saying something important. So he didn't want to do that. He'd spent at least some of the last several days jotting down notes and trying to find the right words. He hadn't been able to yet. But he couldn't lie anymore. Looking at her with her book and the steaming vegetables on the stove and their daughter innocuous playing in the living room, the lie had become too great a burden on his shoulders.

“Honey,” he said, “can we talk? Maybe outside?”

She looked up from her book with worried lines on her face. “Oh, God. What is it?”

This was already going poorly. He put his hands on her shoulders to calm her down as he always did. “It's fine, honey. Can we go out to the porch?”

She put her book down and checked the vegetables, stirred them a bit, and then they walked out to the porch with Rick's heart pounding in his chest. They sat in the two white plastic lawn-chairs they had set on the porch to watch Selena when she played in the yard. Kathryn looked older and more concerned as she had been for years now. He always wanted to tell her to relax, that he could help her and ease her worries. But he didn't, too often because he worried that he wouldn't be able to help her like he thought. That maybe her problems were greater and more complex and had more depth than him or even her relationship to him.

She said, “What's up, Rick?” Her voice lifted in some desperate attempt to sound lighthearted and fun like they both used to be, but the spectre of worry was there.

Rick cleared his throat and what he had come to do came back to him hard and painfully clear. This had been hanging over him for days. But now it seemed easy. He said, “Kathryn, honey, I've lost my job at the school. I was laid off a few days ago, and I haven't been able to tell you. I'm sorry.”

She stood up and paced the yard. He got up and went to her and she wouldn't look at him. She said, “You've been lying.” Her voice was shaky. “What are we going to do about money?”

He was putting his hands on her shoulders. He felt her softening. He said, “Honey, I've got a new job. I got one today. That's what I'm trying to tell you.”

“A new job,” she said.

“Yes.”

She turned to him, eyes brimming with tears and the great bowel-clenching fear any parent feels about the future, about providing. “You've been a teacher your whole life. It's something different, isn't it?”

“Yes,” he said. “A sort of sales job. It's with a new start-up thing.”

“Oh, honey, not one of those fraud things, those predatory...”

“No, nothing like that.” He had his hands on her shoulders. “It's totally legitimate. It'll be great.”

“I don't like this,” she said. “I think it's a bad idea. I can feel it.”

Her feelings had bordered on the clairvoyant for years. In the winter she would always get a chilly feeling and tell him not to go out, there would be some accident, something on the road, and there sometimes was. She told him to watch how he ate. Beneath it all, he thought there was a genuine concern for him, but he found it to be cloying and sometimes claustrophobic. But that was how a relationship went. You took the bad with the good. He didn't pester her about it.

The dinner they had was wrought with a pained silence, an awkwardness. Selena talked about her class and Kathryn could only reply in one-word answers. She cast furtive glances at Rick all throughout the dinner, and he did his best to try and reassure her with just his eyes. But he'd never been one for that kind of subtle communication. His words had been his weapon in the classroom and he could not use any of them to assuage her concerns.

***

In the pink dawn the men in short-sleeved white polos waited, all middle aged and desperate and glad to have a job, sweating in the light of the sun peaking above the buildings of the Jacksonville downtown streets. Rick stood with them and shook their hands. There was Omar Chavez, who had worked as an advertising rep at a pharmaceutical company; Pat Hawking had been a Best Buy manager; Steve Huntsman had been a car salesman. All of them were laid off, which was the first thing they had in common, and the second was that they all now worked for the Red Rabbit and were grateful to have the job. Rick struck up a conversation with Omar Chavez, who said he had a little girl at home, and because Rick did, too, they got along. The sun was in their face and cars were going by at a groggy pace, not yet fueled by coffee, the drivers staring at this gaggle of white-polo-shirt-wearing men.

Then Mr. Winter arrived, as if from thin air, not sweating even through his black suit, looking like he didn't really belong in this early-morning grimy broken cityscape, like he'd been poorly cut-and-pasted. He greeted them with a pleasant candor, gentlemanly and perky. He invited them in and they had coffee.

Rick was unsure of what would happen when they actually started working, but it turned out he didn't have much to fear – the broken and the lost souls came to him. They would amble into the lobby as Rick himself had on that morning and they would ask what the place was for, with an almost instinctive knowing in their eyes, like they knew it would solve their problems. Rick or one of the other guys would escort them back to the box and they would wait in line. The single moms and the cleaning ladies and the sad middle-aged accountants and the stockbrokers whose wives were leaving them – they came like moths to a fire and they went in the box, and they came out with the same rapturous glee that Rick had experienced that first time. They all looked so peaceful. The thought returned to Rick that this was some kind of cultish thing, that they were all being brainwashed. He voiced the concern to Omar in the break-room.

“Man, I don't think so,” Omar said. “A lot of these people don't come back more than once. They just needed kind of a push in the right direction. I've not heard of anyone doing anything, y'know, crazy after this.”

Rick said, “You don't think they'll, like, go nuts and snap because of this?”

“I haven't seen that happen,” Omar said.

The one thing they told Rick, one nugget of advice, was that he shouldn't use the box too often. It was addictive, they said, and it should only be used sparingly. He left that day with a kind of foreboding in him and looked at the red light of the box as he left and thought about it all the way home, thought about the temptations of life and the burning out of ideals and moderation and all its frustrations.

***

On the job Rick saw the city through new eyes. He sat at cafes and looked for people and handed them cards directing them to the Red Rabbit. It took some getting used to the first day, but he began to see the lost souls, with their heads down and their walks painfully aggrieved as if they were carrying boulders on their backs. He saw people of all ages and races – the whole spectrum, diverse and proud, crushed by the weight of the capitalist monster of America. They walked the streets aimless looking for some kind of relief. It was a familiar feeling. They came in and he welcomed them with a smile and a handshake, and then guided them to the Red Rabbit box, as Mr. Winter had done for him the first time. He would stand there and cross his arms and feel the envy course through him, the searing jealousy of being able to experience the box for the first time.

They all came out with delirious smiles, heads in the clouds. A Hispanic woman told him about her life as she walked out with him. She was a single mother of two, working in the Marriott down the road. She went home every night too exhausted to play with her kids. She feared for them, feared they would fall prey to gangs or start doing drugs.

The box, however, made everything feel like it'd be alright. In the box she knew her kids were good souls and would grow up to be responsible adults. In the box, her menial job never bothered her and she was on the way to better things, and she was watching her children grow and she had the sincere knowledge that they would be successful, because that was the dream – that your children could have better lives than you had. That was what you worked for and with the box, she was assured this would happen.

Outside the building, she clasped his hands in hers and looked at him with love in her eyes and said thank you, oh God thank you.

Other customers – tall, burly black men with kids waiting at home and no jobs, white single guys about to get married and looking for answers at a crossroads, women considering abortions – came every day. Rick felt like he was doing the same kind of helping people as he had as a teacher. He loved the looks on their faces. He stood in the gymnasium and watched them come out of the box and felt, above all else, a surge of pride.

***

They were all allowed to use the box once a week, as a complimentary benefit to their salaries. It was better every time, Rick thought. When they went out for drinks after, they were all delirious and hadn't a bad thing to say in the world. Rick went home smiling and had dinner with his family, and he thought it was the best he had felt in years, since he was a budding teacher and Kathryn was pregnant; in the days when they'd come home and continue the impassioned discourse on whatever arthouse flick they'd seen that week, whatever book she had read or whatever museum they were planning to drive to next.

As the years went on their passion – and thus, their propensity for art – had diminished.

But now it was coming back. The feeling, anyway. They were talking more, and he was happier and she actually laughed at his jokes more now. They kidded and joked with Selena more, which she enjoyed – her laughter rose higher than either of theirs and the house felt alive again.

This was all because of the Red Rabbit box, Rick thought. It had saved him and brought their family together.

He was getting out of the shower one night and found Kathryn on the bed, looking at him with inquisitive eyes. She looked like she was about to say something – he knew that look; with her eyebrows arched and her lips pursed like she was searching for exactly the right words. In days long past he would see that look when she was thinking of telling him something and it was inevitable, but she was trying to find the right words, the exact summation of what had lit up in her soul.

“What's up?” he asked.

“You seem different these days,” she said.

“Oh?”

“It's the new job, isn't it?” she asked. She leaned back on the bed, smiled at him. “You just seem...I dunno, like you did when we met.”

He dried his hair and his face with a big, fuzzy towel and looked at her. “I feel younger. I feel like a new man,” he said.

She giggled. “Well, I like it. It feels like a good environment here now. Let's try to keep it this way.”

He walked and laid next to her on the bed, sidled up and put his arms around her waist and pulled her to him. “How are you these days? I feel like I haven't asked.”

“Oh, you know,” she said. “I take calls all day. It can wear on you. I feel like I'm always just so fucking exhausted, like everything is just day-in and day-out, and every day bleeds into the next. But that's work, isn't it? It's normal.”

He nuzzled his head into her neck. “Well, we can make our home the best we can, then.”

“I like the sound of that,” she said, and he could hear how tired she was, the exhaustion in her voice coming out like smoke from a burning house.

“Maybe it doesn't all have to be so bad,” he said, and she thought he was just talking about the small pleasures of life, the things that get people through the day, but really a different idea was forming in his head. He was thinking of the Red Rabbit now, thinking she needed to take a visit to the box, too. He kissed her neck and felt how tense she was in his arms and thought he would make it happen for her.

***

The next morning, he told her to take the day off.

She looked at him there, in the kitchen, and said, “What? Why?”

Selena had left for school. In the kitchen, bright and nubile sunlight shone through the windows. It was a December morning and chilly for Florida. She was already dressed for work.

“Because it'll be fun,” he said. “I have something to show you.”

“Something to show me,” she said. “What is it?”

He felt a childlike, impish grin come over his face. “If I told you, it wouldn't be fun.”

She shook her head. The passion from the previous night was all gone, seeped out. She was back in work mode and she was stressed and joyless, the lines on her face deepening just listening to him talk. This was what he wanted to fix, he thought. He felt a restless urge.

He told her, “They can do without you for a day. When was the last time you took a day off? They couldn't ask for a better employee.”

She looked furtive, uncertain. Between them, she had always been the better one academically. She felt every missed school day or class like a tiny wound. It was something deep ingrained in her by her parents, overachievers who had adopted a philosophy that nothing was ever too much if you budgeted your time right.

He put his hands on her shoulders and said, “Look, I think you'll like this. What I've got to show you – it's important.”

She looked over her shoulder as if there were someone watching and she wanted their approval. She sighed and said, fine, she'd go with him, but just this once, okay?

They got in the car and Rick felt like a kid again playing hooky, running on his own terms.

***

When he pulled up in front of the door in the wall, parked the car on the street in one of downtown's free parking spaces, she immediately clammed up. She looked as if a chill had passed through her.

“Oh, no,” she said, turning to him. “This doesn't look legitimate at all. This looks like some sort of place where you'd meet a guy to buy drugs.”

“Just trust me,” he said. He got out of the car. She did, too, clutching her purse. Her knuckles were white and her face was drawn. She looked somehow small in the surroundings of the city, all the big buildings and the bustling traffic. He realized with a pang of sadness that he barely ever saw her outside their house anymore – such a drastic change from their early days. But she followed him. He opened the metal door in the wall and went in, and then they were both standing there in the waiting room.

“It looks like a doctor's office inside,” she said.

“Yeah, same thing I thought,” he said. He led her back beyond the lobby, then down the hall and to the gymnasium room. He opened the door. The red rabbit on the floor in the dark was massive and imposing. The box sat in its spot and looked singular and ominous as the only thing in the room.

“What is this, Rick?” she asked. She walked around and stood on part of the giant red rabbit insignia on the floor and looked around, and god she looked small, he thought – in the dark of all this empty space, his wife was engulfed.

“Come here,” he said. He started walking toward the box. She followed and didn't say a word, and Rick understood – saying anything in the gymnasium somehow felt sacrilegious, as if they were in a church and it would disturb some kind of unspoken peace and order. The box was silent and there appeared to be no one inside. He called, is anyone in there? No one answered.

He looked back at Kathryn.

She looked at him with unease and said, “What is this? You've been so secretive this whole time.”

“It's impossible to describe,” he said. “Just come inside with me. I promise you this will be good for you.”

She sighed. “Well, I've come this far,” she said. He extended his hand and she took it.

Inside, staring at the blank white wall, Kathryn said, “What are we supposed to do?”

“Sit down,” he said, gesturing to the chair. She did, and he sat on the arm of the chair with a hand on her shoulder.

“What now?” Kathryn asked, gripping his arm and looking at him with wide questioning, childish eyes. He was reminded of one of her least pleasant habits, the tendency to need to know everything right then. It was always irritating to him, in a minor and pleasant way that you put up with from people you love, when she would constantly ask questions in the middle of a movie and expect him to tell her, to ruin the surprise, but then again some people just needed that, hated surprises so much.

So he put his hand on her upper arm, as he'd always done to calm her down, and he looked her in the eyes. He said, “This is going to make us very happy. It'll alleviate all our woes and fears for a little while.”

She opened her mouth to say something, but then it kicked in; the familiar click. There was a shift of the air and a sort of imperceptible change that was impossible to describe, and then there were colors in the air, and a sudden mad urge came over him, and he looked at her and saw that she had the same urge and then they were taking off each others' clothes. The heat was rising between them and there was a kind of celestial tune in the air that Rick hadn't heard before – he didn't know how real it was, but it was what he needed. The energy between them was too large to ignore and then she was naked before him and he before her, flesh touching flesh, and then they were lost in one another.

After, she laid beside him naked and heaving and sweaty and said, “Okay. You were right. I feel better.”

***

On the ride home, she asked him if the box was always like that.

“Like what?”

“You know. People sleeping together that way. Wasn't that just some kind of weird artsy porn house, or something like that? I mean, I'll have some serious things to say about you working at that place later, but that was just...so good.”

Rick laughed harder than he maybe should have, and said, “It's just... it's a sort of new-agey way to feel better. It's different for everybody.”

“Oh.”

She was sitting with her arms crossed and looking out the window, the gears in her head turning like mad as she thought about everything, and that was why he loved her; that kind of introspection, her quick, brilliant mind. She said, “So that's where you work. What do they have you doing?”

He told her he was helping the lost and the weary and the weak. He said he was bringing them in and letting them have a crack at the box and at finding happiness. She asked him how he got paid for that – the people coming in surely couldn't afford to spend much money on the box. So how did he get paid for bringing people in to work the box for free?

That stopped him. “I don't know,” he said, suddenly feeling very stupid.

She said, “Just seems weird to me, is all. They don't charge them anything to go in and use the box? Maybe I'm cynical, but I feel like anyone who wants to start a business like that isn't just going to give a product like that away for free.”

Rick didn't know what to say and just kept his eyes on the road. He was thinking about her words and he didn't like where she was taking this. Truth be told, he hadn't considered that at all. He was just happy to have a job.

She said, “I mean, damn. That was just... wow. Being in there? I can't even put it into words.”

Rick chuckled. “It is pretty good, isn't it?”

“Pretty good is an understatement,” she said, and she let out a laugh; loose and spontaneous and with a crackling, nervous energy. He looked at her and she was flushed and smiling like he hadn't seen her do in several years now, at least since before Selena was born. He felt a perverse kind of flying sensation, a reminder of who they'd been, careless children. But they couldn't be careless children anymore, and there was so much more baggage and weight between them now, all the years in-between weighing now like anchors. They weren't who they had been.

***

Over the next two weeks business boomed. It seemed that all anyone wanted was to sit in the box for a few minutes and let their fears and worries melt away. The city around them seemed a stinking black filth-hole in comparison, all rage and pent-up aggression, and Rick started to see things through that lens. He didn't want to go anywhere except the box. It seemed that just being near the box was good enough for a minor endorphin rush, a tiny sliver of the drug. It was kind of a drug. Rick felt that it was no different from the morning cup of Espresso or that evening glass of whiskey. Everyone needed something to get them through the day; some drug or way of blocking out the bad.

The change came one Friday when business was slow. Mr. Winter told them all to come into the breakroom, which looked like any breakroom Rick had ever seen; a fridge in the corner and a large circular table perfect to fit a laptop and a takeout box. Rick and Omar and Pat and Steve all huddled there and crossed their arms.

Mr. Winter told them they would be making some changes in the way business was done, which were imperative orders from up-on-high; whoever they were – Rick hadn't asked, and at this he felt another stab of uncertainty. How could he have been so stupid as to not ask questions about that? Mr. Winter had told him they were a young, bustling startup company. That, in Rick's desperation, had been enough.

Now Mr. Winter told them that they would start charging people to use the box. It would boost their business and it was the next necessary step they needed to take. They would maybe be able to work in some kind of charity or payment arrangement later on, but it was absolutely necessary that they begin taking money payments. If they wanted to thrive and keep the box going, they would have to do it.

None of the men were happy about this. They voiced their concerns, to which Mr. Winter listened with the kind of calm demeanor of a man who didn't care what they said because nothing would change. Their complaints fell on deaf ears. As if he were on another plane, Mr. Winter glided out of the room once it was over, leaving them with the assurance that the instructions on how to bill customers would be in their mailboxes at work the next morning.

The first day they started demanding payment, Rick felt the change. The customers would walk away disheartened, vowing to come back with cash later, with the air about them like they were about to go dig through their couch or their car seat. All the cracks where nothing could be seen. They left with hunched shoulders and gaits like the world was on their shoulders. Once they started paying it was those with the money who came; the pleasure-seekers leaving their yachts behind, the women with their PR and their lawyer jobs with men on their arms, all of them drunk with flushed faces. They threw money at Rick and the others and went in the box with an already free and caring demeanor that was unfitting of the box. They were already happy. What need did they have of it then?

***

Things became sour after the announcement that they'd begin accepting payment. Rick would go home and he wanted that to be his reprieve, but at home, Kathryn was stoic now. She had been weird ever since the box. Once the euphoria wore off, she had begun to talk about how the box was unnatural and how it made her feel something in her that she didn't like. He tried to ask her questions and figure out what she was talking about, but he couldn't understand, and soon she stopped trying to explain it. She just thought it was wrong somehow.

They were only allowed to use the box once a pay-cycle, once every two weeks, and Rick took full advantage of it. He even cheated a bit. They all did, though – they snuck in after work for just a quick hit, just a little pinch of that euphoria. He would come home with his eyes glazed and his mind in a kind of happily numb fog. Kathryn would glance at him through dinner and she'd have that pinched, scowling look on her face; the one she got when she was pissed at him but Selena was there so she couldn't say anything. She didn't talk to him as much.

He went out to the bars along the downtown strip with Omar and Pat and Steve after work. They talked about Mr. Winter, and Rick learned that he was as much of an enigma as he'd thought. He came to work every day in the same black coat and hat, and he answered to bosses they never saw. They talked about life and their kids and Rick felt a kind of camaraderie reinforced here as it had been that first day when they stood outside in the sun, sweating and anxious. They were like him. They were lucky to be employed and to still have something to bring home to their families. But there was also a kind of desperation about it, like they were all trying to convince themselves this was a good idea or the right idea.

Rick supposed that was the titillating part of it. Fly by the seat of your pants, take a risk, go for the job that paid well and also provided that excitement. Seek the unknown. He wanted to keep going. They all still believed in the basic goodness of the box, believed in that effervescent light and the feeling that had saved them in their time of need.

One day when he came home, head in a fuzz from the box and also the alcohol, she was sitting in the living room alone with the lights off, and Rick thought about turning around and leaving just then, just avoiding the whole thing. But he turned the lights on and he sat down opposite her. She laid into him for a solid ten minutes; telling him how goddamned irresponsible he was being, how egotistical and lazy, and they were raising a child; what did he think he was doing? She told him he was like a different person now. Barely recognizable from who he'd once been. It wasn't that long ago that she was saying he was like his old self, Rick thought – now it was the exact opposite. He'd gone too far.

He told her he was just happy and that he was celebrating having a job again. He told her he was going to be fine and they would all be fine. She wouldn't have it and went to bed alone and told him not to follow her for a while, so instead he just paced the dark house with a cup of water in his hand, and it got lukewarm and he kept drinking it anyway.

***

On that Friday Rick woke up with a dark feeling in the pit of his stomach, like something had grown there. He showered and got dressed and ate two pieces of toast and drank a lukewarm cup of coffee as was usual. He was alone in the house – Kathryn had driven Selena to school early that day, as it was her turn. Rick put on his socks and felt sluggish like a flu was coming on. But he had to go to work. This was a new job and he was lucky to have one. He could bear a headache and a sore throat. He would nurse his wounds when he got home.

When he got to the office the front door was locked and the lights in the lobby were off. The whole place had a tomblike air to it, and Rick walked back to the break room prepared to put on his best game face and ask who died. But when he got there, they were all sitting perfectly still with the TV on to CNN, and on CNN a newscaster talked in a grave tone about a mass shooting. Shit, Rick thought; another one, already?

But then he noticed the familiarity of the setting now in ruins. He saw bleeding and screaming and wounded people were being hauled out of automatic Walmart doors, and the ambulances were screaming, lights flashing, the world having lapsed into chaos. Then saw the familiar things; the street sign he drove by every day on the way home and the 7/11 next to it and the pothole-filled street...

It was the Walmart down the street from them. Rick shopped there three times a week.

The news anchor was saying something about the suspect still being on the run. He was reported to be a skinny white guy in his 20s, looked normal as could be. There were seven reported dead and a dozen wounded. The suspect was holed up somewhere deeper inside the Walmart.

Reports released throughout the day had the shooter's name as Clinton Reed. He was 22 and a clerk at a Perkins. He was arrested two hours after the initial news reports and carted off in handcuffs, and as he went, the internet exploded with talk and outrage; how could the police shoot black kids down in the news every day for nothing and take this mass-murdering scum in handcuffs, safe and unblemished? He would be holed up in the police department and the building surrounded by protesters carrying signs, an aura of anger around them palpable like smoke from a fire.

Then the words came out that would damn them forever: Clinton Reed, it turned out, had been using the Red Rabbit the previous day, identified in the news initially only as a “local alternative healing spa.” That was what he told the investigators. The silence in the room when the newscaster said that was heavy enough to be real. They weren't even thinking for those first few minutes about the fallout to come. What all four men thought about was did I see that kid in here? Each of them had the thought and none of them wanted to admit it, like some kind of secret perversion. They all wondered, looking at the guy's pimply, sallow face and those dark, resentful eyes in the picture the news ran, if they had seen and let him into Red Rabbit. If some of the money in their newly income-driven pool had come from the man who murdered seven people – in that case, blood money, then, they were all thinking.

Or was it something even more sinister, then? Perhaps it was the box that gave Clinton Reed those murderous thoughts to begin with. Maybe it was some kind of poison, some brainwashing, after all – there was no way to be sure. None of them wanted to speak, for fear that their words and fears would become bile.

They watched the news and all anyone talked about was Clinton Reed. They said he was a quiet kid – weren't they always? They said he was a community college student and that he lived with his mother. People who knew him began to come forward through the day. He was always so weird, some said. He didn't have a girlfriend, a few noted. He was just recently rejected by a girl he'd spent months pining over, one guy said, and that was the narrative they went with, the story spun.

But they didn't need to speak, for then Mr. Winter was upon them, for once not smiling or in possession of his usual calm, almost ghostlike candor and charisma. He looked frustrated now. Brow furrowed and a scowl on his face, he asked them who had let the deranged psychopath into the Red Rabbit box? He looked them all over with a furor that, in any other job, would suggest some major transgression, would signal the firing or the severe reprimanding of one of them. But this wasn't a usual job, and Rick had no idea what would happen.

Steve Huntsman spoke up. “We don't know who it was that let him in. But we also don't know--”

“Don't try and rationalize this shit,” Mr. Winter said – it was the first time they'd heard him curse, which sounded so unfitting coming from him, with his proper clothes and prim demeanor. “We need to have some kind of filtering process here. We can't just let anyone in here if they're going to do dangerous things like this. The box clears their minds and who knows what they'll do next? There has to be some kind of way to vet people. Some way to know who's coming in and out. Make no mistake, gentlemen – things are going to change for the worst. They'll descend on us like vultures to a corpse.”

He was gone soon after that, promising to return with instructions on how to proceed. But the office had a very different feel now, or so Rick thought – now it felt like they'd been abandoned by whatever deity was above them. The office felt like a cold and lonely void. He looked at Steve and Omar and Pat and knew they all felt it, too. He thought of the box, glowering red in the dark prison in that gymnasium-like room, and all he wanted to do was go inside it and let it overwhelm him, let it take him wholly and completely.

But he didn't do that. Instead, Rick stayed with the others and they prepared to face the media and the law and whatever else came through the storm.

The law came first; stern-faced detectives probing through the office and asking questions and no matter what the answer they kept those sour, stern looks. They pulled all four of the men aside individually and asked questions: how long have you worked here? Do you know anything about Clinton Reed? What effects does the box have on users? Has it been scientifically quantified?

Most of the questions, they couldn't answer. By the time the detectives went to leave, the media had showed up. Black camera faces with cold lifeless eyes surrounded the doors. Camera flashes came like lightning bolts and the shouts created a chorus that began to sound like one massive, thunderous voice. Rick and Omar and Pat and Steve went to the break room again and stayed there and didn't talk much. Mr. Winter did not come back. Eventually, the media were gone, and they all went home, avoiding looking each other in the eyes as they had been doing all day. None of them wanted to come back to the building. They'd never wanted to come to work less.

***

Kathryn was livid with him. Selena colored in her room, humming with light pop music on that Rick doubted could mask his and Kathryn's argument. She didn't even want to sit down – she paced furiously and jabbed her finger and came close to tears. She told him he was a jackass for doing this. She said he'd put the family in jeopardy and said he was terrible and should feel terrible. He didn't need her to tell him that. He put up his hands in surrender, he said he wanted to sit down and talk this out, but she said there was no talking – she'd been accosted all day by reporters who had done some sleuth-work and found his address, and now they were done, they couldn't live normal lives. How was Selena going to live normally when the bloodhound reporters found their door and wouldn't leave?

And more importantly, with the venom in her eyes, Kathryn asked, “How am I going to trust you?”

Rick hadn't known what to say to that. He stood there shocked and feeling like the world was shrinking on him, contracting and collapsing like a fold-up chair. He was watching it like a man bound – he could do nothing to stop Kathryn when, a moment later, she announced she was going to her mother's for a while. Some indeterminate amount of time. She didn't know when she'd be back. He didn't feel like any of it was really happening to him – it felt more like watching a stage play, a bad one, with no control over what happened because he was sitting in the audience. So he watched her go.

She'd loaded Selena into the car and she was standing in front of him. He told her, don't go. He said, you'll just be miserable. He said they'll find you anyway. He didn't tell her he needed her – he told her everything but that, and she left, and he watched the car go in slow-motion, pulling out of the driveway and then gone, gone, gone. He went back inside and felt alone in an empty tomblike home. He was alone. That was that. All she wrote.

***

He found the office empty the next day when he came in. The flow of customers had trickled down to almost nothing. Now it was a few reporters who wanted some excuse to come poke around the office, and he couldn't stop them entirely – they got what they wanted more or less. Then there were the stragglers who didn't give a rat's ass about the news or the politics of it; the lost souls who had become used to coming in for a hit of their new favorite drug. He let them use the box free. What was anyone going to do? The only thing that crossed his mind was whether or not the box would corrupt them, too, if that was what the box did. He wondered with some kind of hysteria if there would be someone coming in, in these waning days, who would go on to kill other people. What would he do then?

In the meantime, of which there was much of it, he watched TV. He heard the talk about the Red Rabbit. People who may or may not have ever ventured inside decried it as witchcraft and voodoo. They called it fake new-wave hippy crap. He found pages and pages online of people talking about the Red Rabbit, saying those who went and used the Red Rabbit's box were weak and cowardly, couldn't control their own lives, had to go hide away in some bullshit fantasy. He had to force himself to stop looking – all of this was poison. But he couldn't turn away.

All the while, there were the breaking stories, the sensations – in court Clinton Reed and his lawyers were doing mental somersaults, calling the Red Rabbit the real cause of Clinton's shooting. The Red Rabbit, they said, had released chemicals in Clinton's brain that made him act irrationally. They had a psychotherapist who would be testifying to this effect, they said. Rick wondered about the therapist's qualifications. By this time, it had become very late in the day, and he had not seen anyone else in the office all day. No one had even come in. It was just Rick by himself. He supposed it was for the best, as he wouldn't have known what to say to anyone else.

He turned off the computer and the radio and walked to the front door and locked it. The ephemeral orange glow of the evening shone through and he looked out at the horizon and felt a closing of things, an ending to what his life had become, and he felt like crying, screaming, beating against the tides of life and protesting it, but instead he did none of those things. He locked the door and went to the gymnasium. He stood there and looked at the giant Red Rabbit insignia and felt the power coursing through him, the righteousness. They had been telling him the whole time not to use the box too much – it was an addiction, it was dangerous to indulge too much as with food or drink or anything else. But now he didn't want anything else but the cool air and the clean and simple way of the box. So fuck it, he thought.

He wondered if staying in too long was what did it. He thought of Clinton Reed and wondered if that was the ticket – stay in too long and it messes with your brain. Otherwise maybe it was fine. Maybe someone had just stepped away for a bathroom break, him or Pat or Omar or Steve, and Clinton Reed had stayed in too long.

Or maybe he had been lying about the whole thing. Maybe he'd never even used the damn box and the box didn't do a thing except make you happy.

If only.

So he went into the box. He sat down in the chair and closed his eyes.

Then it all washed over him, a wave of white hot pleasure and he was lost in it, blissfully.

***

He woke up with his head on his arm and his arm was numb. He'd fallen asleep. It was dark and he was inside the Red Rabbit box. He'd drooled on his arm and as he sat up, everything felt numb and hard and shaky. He put his hand on the flat wall of the box and looked around, and it was just a box, just bare walls and a movie-theater armchair that could have been ripped from any cheesy old 70s New York theater, and there was no magic. He'd been in so long that he was disoriented. His tongue had fur on it and he felt dizzy. He stepped out of the box and into the gymnasium as he heard the door opening and the footsteps, like thunder, coming in from the outside. He knew who it was.

Mr. Winter then stood before him tall and dark with a flowing coat around him. He looked serene yet again – all traces of the frustration and the anger from the previous day were gone. He said, “So you're the last one.”

“I guess so,” Rick said, his voice congested with the remaining traces of his uncomfortable sleep. “What's going on?”

“We're shutting down this location,” Mr. Winter said. “Orders from the bosses. The recent tragedy, whether Clinton Reed's comments hold water or not, have made this venture unstable and untrustworthy. We can't risk further controversy.”

“Oh,” was all Rick could think of to say. His mind felt clouded – that was, he figured, what would have been the euphoria from the box, if he hadn't stayed in so damned long. Now instead of euphoria, it was just muddled fog, like coffee that had been sitting out too long.

But then something did come over him, and standing there in the wide dark gymnasium where their words echoed, Rick asked Mr. Winter why they did any of this at all. He asked why they had the box and what the point of it all was. These were questions that had bubbled up in his mind before, but that he hadn't asked Mr. Winter, partly out of fear and partly out of complacency – he'd just been happy to have the job. But now he wanted to know. Now it was important to know.

Mr. Winter told him that the box was there because people would pay for it. People would always pay for a distraction or a drug, he said. The box existed for the same reason as cigarettes or alcohol or church or fast food, to attempt to fill the void with something; people needed something to look forward to and they would do anything to get it. They'd come for free and then they'd pay. It was simply good business strategy. The box would never die. Even now, if it had to exist under some other name because of the controversy, it would still be back in fine form in no time. It was a place of healing – and who didn't need healing?

Rick asked if the box was responsible for the shooting. He asked if there was something in the box that brainwashed people or altered their minds – it was, after all, a drug of some kind.

Mr. Winter said the box hadn't caused the shooting. But he took a bit too long to reply, and he didn't look Rick in the eye. Rick felt a shiver all over his body. They started to walk out together. It was a bright day outside and there were no cameras or reporters now; perhaps they'd all gotten tired of the whole spectacle and gone home, for even bloodlust only had a limited draw now. Even that got old and there were still other things to point the digital eyes at, more jobs to do.

Before Rick was able to open the door, Mr. Winter said his name and he turned, and he was reminded of the day they'd stood in very similar positions – he by the door and Mr. Winter standing as a kind of gatekeeper to the Red Rabbit box. Now those positions were reversed. But of course it meant nothing – there was no symbolism and no greater meaning to that. Mr. Winter was asking if he wanted a job with the next incarnation of the Red Rabbit.

Rick said, “Wait, wait, what?”

“A job,” Mr. Winter said. “You're the only one who remained. Everyone else moved on when things got bad and you stayed, so I want to offer you this job. You've proved your devotion.”

Rick laughed. “I stayed because I don't have anywhere else to go. My family's left me, and I have nothing left, so I came back here to use the box.”

Mr. Winter's eyes lit up and he had a grin on his face almost mischievous. “But you came back anyway. That's what matters to me. In all this turmoil, you returned to the very source of that turmoil, the Red Rabbit. I think you'd be good for this.”

Rick sucked in his breath and shoved his hands in his pockets. He said, “If I do this, I want to be able to help people again. For real this time. No more charging these poor souls for a few seconds of bliss.”

Mr. Winter said, “I'm sure we can work that out. And if you're not satisfied, then you're more than welcome to leave. But we would be very grateful for your continued service. We'll make sure you're happy.”

Rick didn't have to think about it. Brief images flashed through his head of his family. He wanted to keep providing for them. He didn't know if Kathryn would forgive him, not after the shooting and everything else, but what kind of a man wouldn't even try? He shook Mr. Winter's hand and they made the deal.

***

He would go to Kathryn at her mother and father's country home where she was staying. It was a warmly-lit block of bricks out where there were no paved roads and the sun could stretch a painted canvass across the evening sky, and the crops of corn stood tall and defiant, blowing in the wind. He parked his car in the grass. Kathryn's father, tall and broad-shouldered with his long Amish-style beard and farmer overalls and plaid button-up shirt, stood on the porch and looked stern at Rick. He told Rick that Kathryn didn't want to see him. Rick said it was OK, he wasn't there to fight. He just wanted to make things alright. Kathryn's father looked stout and resolute. He didn't let Rick come in. But then Kathryn herself came out and she sat with him on the porch.

Sitting with her here made him remember everything the way it had been. Kathryn and her mother sipping tea on the porch, Selena drawing in her room or perhaps running amidst the fields. That was how it had always been when Rick went with them. It was a place out of time in a way. Out in the fields of barley and crops and dirt and the sun that filled the whole horizon, time bled away.

The evening sun was red and there was a glow around everything. He stood with Kathryn on the porch. Her mother and father watched with reproachful eyes from inside. Selena was watching something on the TV and soft cartoonish voices and sounds reverberated through the house, accented their conversation.

“You look better,” she was saying.

“Thanks,” Rick said. “You look amazing.”

She smiled weakly and nodded. There was a pregnant silence between them. The weight of their marriage was all around them. She said, “I hope you've been dealing with, you know. All of the stuff from your, um. Your job.”

He nodded. “We've closed shop in Jacksonville.”

“That's good, I suppose,” she said. She looked bittersweet and she put a hand on the side of his face. “I'm sorry. But I didn't like what that place did to you.”

“It made me so goddamned happy,” he said. “But it was a fleeting happiness. I think a lot of what's been happening has been fake. And I'm sorry for it. I took you along on a ride, and it feels like I've been playing you.”

They just sat there for a while. She let him put his arm around her. They watched the big orange glowering ball of fire sink beneath the horizon and then it was dark and cold, and the light of the porch illuminated the regret and everything else they were feeling, this torrential outpouring. She said, I don't think it's working out, and he said, maybe you're right. She said she worried about Selena. Rick said he worried about her when he was still part of the family. He said his involvement in the Red Rabbit was ongoing.

Maybe, she said, they just needed to work everything out.

Maybe, he said.

We had such grand dreams once, she said. So many things we wanted to do.

Rick shrugged and said so went life sometimes. He asked if she would come back with him and she said maybe, said she'd think about it. She asked where he was going and he said he didn't know – they would be shipping him all over the place. But he said he wanted to help them. He had to, he said.

Kathryn said she appreciated that. She asked him if he was going to be okay, if he was using the box too much, and he said no, he was done letting that happen. He said he was better now.

She said, “Well, maybe we can work out a way to move back in again. I was too hasty before. I don't want to break up this family that easily.”

“I'd like that,” Rick said.

“Well, you know,” she said. “Eventually, anyway.”

He nodded and looked at the horizon and then back at her and she was smiling. He was OK with all of this.

***

He wouldn't, in the end, negotiate a full deal with Mr. Winter to do things pro-bono. The best he could get was once in a while. In the event of future tragedies, they told him that accepting payment was the only way to do things with the box. It created a failsafe they could fall back on and really, they were all about the profit. They had a product too valuable to give away all the time – and giving it away all the time was perhaps selling it short.

He got an apartment in downtown Jacksonville, where he stayed in the off-hours, though the job would ship him all over the country to different locations where they were setting up boxes and he never saw the apartment much. It was fine for him, because really, there was no other home for him than where Kathryn and Selena slept, and if he couldn't be with them, then what was the point?

There were other guys he met there, guys who he met eyes with and knew they were of the same stripe as him – guys once left out in the cold and this box was what had saved them, a lifeboat in a storm. He had brief kinships with these men, though they never remembered one another's names for very long and they only spoke about business. It didn't matter. It was in the soul. The unspoken bond.

He talked to Kathryn often and saw Selena a few days of the week. Eventually they would move back in together. It was a reluctant transition but it was exciting in its own way, in a feeling-it-out way, like they were kids again just getting to know one another. They didn't need the box to have that again after all, Rick discovered. Selena was growing into a delightful child. He was glad to be back in her life. He would watch her come home from school on the nights he was home and listen to her talk about her day and watch her do her schoolwork and the light would light up in her face when she figured something out, and those were the moments Rick was glad he was still there with his family.

But the rest of the time he traveled. There were boxes and offices set up under different names in Seattle, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Brooklyn... and more to come. He would go there periodically and fulfill the job that Mr. Winter had done in Jacksonville. He would guide new recruits to the cause and oversee things. He would tell the young guys working for all the various new places that they should always be vigilant and look out for those who might be harboring ill intent, for what the box offered was not so much happiness as it was a contentment and a clearing of the mind, a way to see things as they were.

And that could be dangerous.

Rick would stand in lobbies vacant and white-tiled and sterile, and he would wait for the lost to come in. A man with that downtrodden look that he found so familiar would walk in and ask, hesitant and guarded, what the place was about, and Rick would see that familiar look in this man's eyes that he'd once had in his own; that small and fragmented but growing belief that things could get better again, and would tell the man to follow him. Then they would walk down that hallway again toward the red glow behind those double doors.