Theseus's Axe

I wake up as the Expat today.

There’s always a brief instant of panic when I wake up. Who am I? Ah, the Expat. He’s not a bad person to be. Some days, I prefer him to the Thug or Teacher. He’s young but not obnoxiously so. Educated, multilingual, English, French and the local language. Marginally attractive, marginally underemployed, in a bedroom whose marginally ineffective Venetian blinds are now allowing the sun to blind me awake.

There’s an unpleasant taste on my teeth and an uncomfortable ache around the back of my skull and I’m betting the Expat is hungover. Which means I now get to enjoy all of the after-effects with none of the fun.

Fantastic timing, Expat. Well done.

He has a name, his roommate has a name, we all have names, titles Sharpied onto shoeboxes filled with facts and memories that say nothing about the contents inside. ‘Expat’ says more about him than any random collection of syllables. If he goes back to the country that birthed him, he’ll be the Re-pat. If he becomes a stripper, he’ll be the triple-X-pat. It’s all part of a process.

Waking up is also a process and a painful one. I roll the Expat out of bed, or he rolls himself and humors me by letting me think it’s my idea. Am I parasite or symbiont, pilot or passenger? Either way. Our cooperative efforts maneuver the Expat into the bathroom, where our reflection regards us, crunch-faced and blearily-haired. I lean both hands against the washbasin and look for signs of myself in that face. I smile, he smiles, the reflection smiles. Which of us is really smiling? It’s a sad smile.

What are we? Alien virus, distributed souls, reincarnation in overdrive or ancestral memory gone senile. In any event, in our case the Cartesian dualists were right. The mind and body really are two separate, independent things. We splash some water on the Cartesian plane of our face, then propel ourselves towards the kitchen in search of liquids to apply internally.

The kitchen is glaringly, painfully clean and bright and shiny. Nothing is beautiful, and everything hurts. It smells the way toothpaste tastes. My roommate, in an uncharacteristic burst of cleanliness, has evidently descended upon every surface with righteous, disinfecting fury. Maybe he’s expecting company. The once-familiar geography of unwashed plates and cluttered countertops has been replaced by a barren wasteland of nothing but neatness. There’s probably a lesson in there, something about the illusion of permanence, but I’m too dehydrated and decaffeinated to notice. The coffee maker proves not only clean but also frustratingly empty, so I satisfy the Expat’s thirst with a glass of lukewarm tap water, drowned in four noisy gulps.

I retrieve my smartphone from where it is tethered, umbilical to the wall, and scroll through the day’s news. Tiles of information zip past the screen in brief ocular bursts of random misery. It’s grim, sometimes shockingly so—much like my morning reflection: Brexit agreement rejected in by the British parliament for the third time; Shooting in Toronto; Brazilian singer dead of an overdose in Rio; Son of a US politician missing off the coast near Martha’s Vineyard. I frown and squint at the photo of the last, but no, there’s no way to be sure, not without meeting them in person. The face feels familiar, but. Might be one of us, might not.

An island of color draws my attention to the kitchen counter: A cake of lemon-yellow paper with a frosting of black ink. In my roommate’s angular handwriting, the ink spells out the name of a neighborhood café and a time, which upon further inquiry with my smartphone turns out to be an hour from now. Time enough to shower and change. Dark denim jeans, black button-down shirt, hip-length brown leather jacket.

I hesitate in the lobby before stepping outside. A young man is missing off the coast of Massachusetts, presumed dead, and he might have been one of us. I watch the crowd passing by the front of the building. Faces blurring into one another like tiles of news on a smartphone. Different people, same crowd. But nobody looks up at the Expat standing inside the doorway, nobody makes eye contact, they’re all looking dead ahead or glued to their screens. Maybe reading about some American politician’s disappearance, shrugging and moving on.

Where are we? Maybe Bangkok or Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul or Taipei, Hong Kong or Tokyo. More Sharpied titles on shoeboxes. Different names, same urban overcrowding, same anonymity through density, same toothy skyline of concrete and steel. Every city, every day is different. Every place is the same.

I step out into the street and immediately stuff my hands into my jacket pockets and hug my elbows to my sides. It’s late spring here. Some days colder some days warmer. Different days, same season. It’s a cold one today—it’s more than caution that makes me hunch my shoulders and bury my cheek in my jacket lapels.

A siren cries. People turn. I keep walking, shouldering my way through anonymous bodies. Red lights flash as an ambulance speeds past, dropping through traffic like a hot ember through snow. I wonder who’s inside—an expat or a pop idol, maybe a senator’s son.

I pause outside the window of the coffee shop, tent a hand over my eyes and try to peer inside. My breath starts to fog the window. I look but can’t see in, my reflection looks out and can’t see me. Well, I’m not waiting out here, shivering in the cold. I wave my hand under the door’s sensor and step inside.

The inside hosts a Bohemian fever dream of cracked chocolate leather sofas straining against their buttons, angular chairs of timeworn wood, tables with a surprising number of right angles. The barista sees my face, my foreign-ness, and speaks loud and slow. I’m used to it, and she’s just doing what she thinks she needs to do. I retrieve my drink and retreat to the far corner, back to the wall. Shuck my jacket across the back of the chair, just in time for the roommate to come sailing in.

“Hey!” the roommate bellows from the doorway and waves. The company he was expecting stands at his elbow. I would recognize them anywhere. So would the Thug, or the Teacher. That presence is a red-hot ember, burning through the sleepy gauze of my morning. I’m trying to process what this means. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything is fine. Sure. Maybe the senator’s son isn’t dead.

“Someone I want you to meet. This is—”

“We’ve met,” the other says as he sits down. He looks vaguely professorial. Brown blazer over a blue button-down shirt. Overlarge glasses, beard gone mostly to grey, hair a little longer than strictly respectable or necessary. “Hello again, Semkath.”

“Aunty,” I nod. We’re unrelated. Bit of a joke—Aunty, short for Aunty-diluvian. ‘Aunty’ has only male … well, male whats? ‘Bodies’ sounds too crude, ‘incarnations,’ too grand. Identities, perhaps. Selves, personas, avatars. Uniquely, as far as I know, not only are all of their selves male, they all look almost identical. More or less grey, one a little taller, another a little thinner, but all looking like they came from the same factory.

The others call him Aleph. The first.

He’s the one that found me, let me know there are others. He keeps an eye out for us, keeps us in touch, makes sure we’re okay. I have a feeling we are not okay.

The roommate is rapidly realizing he is completely out of his depth, and not enjoying the taste of it. Bitter grounds of suspicion darken his brow. “You do? You have? Wait. What. How the fuck is he your aunt? And who the fuck is Semkath?”

“We have; he isn’t; I am.”

“He’s an old friend,” Aunty pats the back of the roommate’s hand.

“He’s only been in-country two years.”

“A friend of the family,” Aleph amends. “Now, why don’t you get the drinks?”

The roommate retreats, baffled, to the counter to speak with the barista.

“You don’t have to do this to impress me,” I say.

Aleph’s glacial smile indicates impressing me is unlikely to ever feature on his list of things to do. “What a lovely fellow. You saw the news?”

“You mean the senator’s son?”

“Yes. And no.”

“Ah, how delightfully Delphic. He was one of us?”

“He was. And so were Gabriela ‘Bia’ Cavalcanti and Mohammed Alshaiba.” He catches my frown of incomprehension at the last name. “Killed in Toronto.”

Of course. The attack. “All ours?”

“All one of ours, to be more precise. All Sadhe’s, to be excruciatingly precise. Someone has apparently found a way to do what we thought was impossible: Kill one of us, permanently.” He smiles a sad little smile, a tiny thing next to the colossal weight of what he’s just said. He looks up and brightens. “Ah, there you are dear.”

The roommate has returned, with something small, black and aromatic for himself, something foamy for the thing currently inhabiting the shell of a middle-aged professor. The roommate has regained his composure a little, evidenced by the ivory shine of his smiling teeth.

“Hey, crazy you two knowing each other. Small world, eh?”

“Tiny,” Aleph nods, taking a sip with an appreciative “Mmm!”

“Great,” the roommate nods to me. “Great. That’s going to make things so much easier. You free for dinner next week?”

Icarus has fallen and he’s talking about his stomach. No, that’s uncharitable. One man’s tragedy is another man’s Monday. Still, dinner is the last thing I want to think about. I am about to decline, when Aleph interrupts: “I’m afraid our mutual friend here will be going on a trip.”

“I will?”

“You will.”

I sigh. Should have figured. “You want me to look into it?”

“You’re already in place in Rio. Boston should be easy to arrange for Miss Low. And you, dear sweet boy,” Aleph withdraws a long white envelope from inside his blazer and slides it across the table. “Time you paid a visit home to Canada.”

#

It smells like piss in here. Piss and blood.

There’s a square cut in the moldy concrete wall that you can only call a window because it’s too high and too small to be a door. A waterfall of rusted iron bars drips down outside, a bedsheet being used as a curtain hangs limply from one corner.

The room is bare of furniture save for a single chair. There is a man in the chair. His name is Rodrigo, and he’s a gerente da boca, he sells drugs. Quite recently, he sold drugs to one of Brazil’s most famous pop icons. He is shirtless, wearing only baggy, neon-bright trunks and wafer-thin plastic sandals. He’s manacled to the chair and his head hangs down, chin to chest, his face puffy and swollen. He has been beaten, badly.

Or rather, he has been beaten quite well. I should know. I beat him.

Today, I’m the Thug.

“The fuck do you want?”

Well, what do any of us want? Predictability, stability, security, all the things Maslow told you about, with maybe one addition: I want to wake up knowing who I am. Much of that depends on keeping Aleph happy. Otherwise, happiness is a job well done. Journalists, researchers, policemen, in all my selves it seems I’m drawn to finding answers.

“Just give me a name, Diguinho,” I sigh as I look out the window.

The favela of Morro da Babilônia festers outside, etched into the mountainside. Babylon is one of Rio’s nicer slums, high up on the slopes with plenty of pretty views, but even so the people and buildings are blurred, worn smooth like river stones by the repeated, daily application of poverty and drudgery. People, stores, buildings come and go, yet this place remains, the same river that can never be entered twice.

People sit outside on plastic chairs by the puddle-pocked streets, smoking aimlessly, looking at nothing. Dogs roll in the dirt. Only the language of the graffiti tells you we’re in Brazil—take that away, and it’s Global Shantytown, Population: Half of Humanity. Could be Mumbai, Johannesburg, Manila or Dhaka. It’s the sunless shadow of the world the Expat inhabits. Even the soundscape is anonymous. If you’re hoping for samba, I’m sorry to disappoint, but the only sounds are a truck chugging up the hillside and one man’s pained, labored breathing.

“The fuck you even talking about?” Rodrigo mumbles into his collarbone.

The truck fades into distance. Humid silence returns.

“Bia,” I say, not turning around.

“Who?”

“Oh please. Gabriela ‘Bia’ Marcelly Teixeira Cavalcanti, model, actress, pop star, Instagrammer, corpse. One of your customers.” I do turn from the window now, and Rodrigo glances up at my face and shudders.

You might like the Expat—well, okay, no. No, you’d probably forget him. He’s a forgettable person. Alright, let’s say you’d find him unobjectionable. The Thug? Oh, you’d object to him. You’d object to him all right. You just wouldn’t be stupid enough to say so to his face.

“How the fuck was I supposed to know? Not like she comes up here to collect it herself.” Rodrigo spits blood on the floor. “Even cops know that, you donkey’s ass.”

The Thug is wearing black, black and black with black highlights, accessorized with black combat boots and a black beret. The only dash of color is on the cap badge. It’s a cheerful red-rimmed little picture of a skull with a gold dagger through it, over a pair of crossed pistols. There’s another badge on the left arm, that says ‘Operações Espesciais.’ The mark of the BOPE, Special Operations battalion of the military police.

“I do know that,” I nod, and draw my sidearm. Let him see it. Taurus PT92, same as what the army uses. “I also know you know who it was really for. Which means somebody told you to do it. Which means you are in deep shit right now, Diguinho. You’d best unshit yourself quick.”

“The Terceiro Comando will come after you.”

The Third Command are the unofficial rulers of Babylon, though given the way the current turf war is going, possibly not for much longer. Their rivals, the Red Command, are a bigger, badder beast. It’s an empty threat.

“After who? For what? A dead dealer in the middle of a war? They’ll draw the obvious conclusions.”

“Son of a whore.”

I’m tired of this macho bravado, knowing even as I say that, the Thug with his black-on-black uniform and decorative skulls is part of that same culture, part of the cockerel strutting of which the Expat roommate’s jealousy is just the feeblest outlier. It’s the predictability of it that gets to me. Of course he can’t admit to or show weakness. Of course he can’t admit he was ever wrong or made a mistake. There’s nobody around to see, nobody to hear, just him and me, but still Rodrigo feels the need to hiss and spit, puff his bare chest out in defiance. So tied to this identity, even if it kills him.

I shoot him in the foot. The right one. The bullet takes his big toe clean off. Well, no, not so clean, really.

The gunshot is deafeningly loud in this small space. Rodrigo screams at the top of his lungs, as if to compensate. He flails and writhes and arches his back, and succeeds only in toppling the chair over backwards, smacking the back of his skull against the floor. The shock produces a moment of silence before he begins yelling again with renewed vigor.

I stand over him, gun still in hand, and wait with exaggerated patience until his caterwauling modulates into something a little more decipherable.

“Piece of shit,” he wails.

“That’s not a name.”

“You shot my fucking foot off.”

“Shoot your head off next.”

“They’re coming now. They heard the shot.”

“In Babylon? Be serious.” People are used to the sound of guns out here. Everybody within earshot is currently behind something thick and solid, and very carefully not looking out into the street or up at the building the noise came from. In any case, there are three other armed BOPE officers standing outside this building to make sure nobody tries to intervene. “Who gave you the stuff to sell to Bia? Or the guy who bought for Bia, whatever. Be smart, for once in your life Diguinho.”

He hesitates. “Alex,” he hisses at last, from between clenched teeth. “He said his name was Alex.”

“It’s a good name.”

“I can help you find him.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you’re spinning shit to keep yourself alive. Tell me more about your new-found friend, ‘Alex.’ ”

“English, not Brazilian. Accent. Rich.”

I circle the pistol barrel in a hurry-up motion.

“Connected to the Command, but not part of it. They introduced him.”

“Who did?”

“Untie me.”

He’s calculating—trying to give me enough information that I’m convinced he can be useful, but not too much that I decide I don’t need him anymore.

The second shot doesn’t feel as loud as the first, maybe because my ears haven’t recovered yet. Rodrigo jerks once, though there’s no thought behind the movement, that’s just kinetics.

I feel neither justification nor revulsion. I don’t hate him for being a drug dealer. He wasn’t always. I’ve been plenty of things in my own time. I don’t hate him for helping to arrange Sadhe’s death. He was doing what he thought he had to do, as am I.

The Expat could never do that. Or could he? We like to think we’re not the kind of people who could do such things, so you make excuses. I was tired. I was stressed. That’s not the real me. It is. All the awful things you’ve ever done—that’s you. You’re the kind of person capable of doing bad things when they’re tired or stressed. You have never existed in a vacuum. You can’t separate yourself from the changes you go through.

When I go downstairs and exit onto the street, there’s a fat, glistening black luxury sedan parked behind our SUV, as out of place here as the Expat was in that coffee shop. The driver gets out and opens the rear door with a flourish. A man unfolds himself from the leather interior. Suit that cost about as much as the sedan, sepia aviator sunglasses, pepper aviator stubble, hair as glossy as his car’s finish. He palms the sides of his hair flat against his skull, unnecessarily, and starts to walk our way. The three men I left by the SUV eye him with disdainful hostility.

“Taw,” I nod in greeting. He’s something fancy in Petrobras, one of Brazil’s big oil companies. He’s also a cab driver in Toronto and runs a cell phone company in Lagos. We can’t always choose what we are.

“Got the call. What do you have?”

“A wealthy British businessman, or someone who can fake the accent well enough to fool our gerente da boca. Has enough connections to get an introduction from the Third Command. Goes by Alex. Look into it, would you? Aleph wants this expedited.” Taw is no more crooked than your average businessman, but he knows people who know people.

Taw grunts, smirks a little. I get the feeling this body of his spends a lot of time smirking. “And you always do what Aleph wants, don’t you Sem?”

“He looks out for us,” I bristle.

“Please. He looks out for himself.”

“The fuck does that mean.”

“Figure it out.”

“Are you going to be difficult about this?”

For a moment I think he is. Taw has the face of a truculent child for a moment, on the verge of throwing away his toys and declaring he’s not playing any more. It passes. He settles for another smirk instead.

“I’ll pass it along,” he says. “Might be too late for you though. UPP is going to haul your ass in for this.”

The UPP are the good cops to BOPE’s bad, the ‘Pacification Police’ who get sent in to patrol the favelas after we drive the gangs out.

I shrug. “Wasn’t planning on sticking around for that long.”

#

I emerge from the husk of yesterday, from past into present, like a snake shedding its skin. I’m Theseus and I made this ship with my grandfather’s axe.

It happens when I sleep, nap, or even just blink for too long. It’s a seamless transition, close your eyes in one existence, open them in another. I tried staying awake once, just to see if I could. Stayed in one body for four days before nodded for a second and woke up half a world away. Didn’t achieve anything either, other than experiencing all the joys of sleep deprivation. I don’t get to choose who I am, but hey, do any of us?

What do they do, while I am away? They don’t just lie there, of that I’m sure. They go on living their merry little lives. Am I to them nothing more than an odd mood, an inexplicable tendency to say and do strange things in unlikely circumstances? Do they remember anything at all, or blank it out? Does it gnaw at them, this sneaking suspicion their actions are not their own, that their consciousness is just riding piggyback in a brain that decides things for itself? Maybe their minds smooth out such ripples, explaining all the cognitive dissonance away, rationalizing, making it all make sense post facto.

I’ve never met one of my selves when I’m not at home, so to speak. Though I cannot help but wonder if they would recognize, if they’d see something of themselves in me. Not sure even I see myself in me. Who am I? Oh right, the Teacher. Research fellow at NUS, International Law.

There’s an overstuffed bed with white sheets and a far too many pillows. It’s morning but the Teacher is struggling to stay awake—jet lag is kicking her ass. Long flight and she hasn’t recovered yet. I’m half a world away from where I was, she’s half a world away from where she was, yet somehow these two halves don’t make a whole. Just a whole lot of nothing.

I’m in a business hotel with an above-average number of stars, which means there’s a reassuring sameness to everything. It’s a kind of comforting nowhere not-place that exists outside of geography. There’s a flat-screen TV where you expect to find one, free WiFi, a mini-fridge with the usual number of water bottles and thimbles of outrageously expensive whiskeys and cognacs. Downstairs, the buffet breakfast will be serving the same dozen dishes you get in any city from Cape Town to Kathmandu.

There’s a plastic case holding a conference ID with my name on it sitting on the bedside table, perched on top of its rolled-up lanyard. Keynotes and breakout sessions and discussion panels with have to wait though. I’ve another job for the Teacher. It’s a two-hour drive and ferry ride from here to Martha’s Vineyard.

Today’s theme is monochrome. White blouse, black pants, black jacket. Hair pulled back tight. The intersection of the Teacher’s clothes and the Thug’s, between corporate and paramilitary fashion, does not escape me. They’re both a kind of camouflage, a way of hiding from yourself.

I stop by the breakfast buffet before picking up the rental. A fourteen-hour time difference is etched into my face, and I do my best to erase it with generous applications of caffeine. That, at least, is consistent.

The early morning crowd clinks its silverware about me. Businessmen here all seem poured from a common mold, all big and beefy and doubtless named something honest and plain and down-to-earth like Bob, Jim, Dave or Greg. You don’t get very far in the hierarchy with a name like Constantine or Hubert.

“Mind if I sit here?”

I look up. The owner of the voice is a middle-aged man, friendly of face, tousled of hair and genially bearded, expensively dressed. His voice suits the face, warm and friendly with a strong hint of Scotland. He sits down in the chair opposite without waiting for my reply.

It is Aleph. And it isn’t.

There is something off, different. He holds himself differently, moves a little less gracefully, a little more like a middle-aged man. Is this perhaps one of his identities, when Aleph himself is elsewhere?

“Sorry, have we met?” I ask. “Are you from the conference?”

“No to both, not in the sense you mean,” he says with a smile and extends his hand across the table. “And yes, in a sense. Alex.”

I halt with my hand halfway across the gap. “Alex?” I repeat, withdrawing it again.

If he is disappointed with my reaction, he doesn’t show it, only shrugging with a rueful grin and retrieving his own proffered hand. A waiter swings by and offers coffee. I watch my new dinner companion carefully as it is poured. The Teacher is no expert, but ‘Alex’ seems neither tense nor angry. He merely sits back, nodding in thanks as the young man goes, pot in one hand, napkin draped over one bent arm.

A number of possibilities present themselves, none of which are especially pleasant to contemplate: One, in a truly remarkable coincidence this Aleph-husk just happens to bear the same name as my prime suspect in Brazil, and has blundered into me by pure chance. There must be millions of Alex’s around the world, vanishingly few of whom have arranged the deaths of popular Brazilian pop idols. Two, he … remembers somehow, and from Aleph’s memories he has dredged up both my face and the name ‘Alex.’ That’s a potential threat. Three, I’m jet lagged worse than I thought and hallucinating.

“I wasn’t sure if it was you,” Alex says as he leans forward, gently blowing on his coffee before taking a tentative sip. “Thank you for confirming. Sorry to have missed you in Rio.”｛のろ｝

“Rio?”

“Rio.”

“I’ve never been to Rio.”

“She hasn’t. But you have.” He sets the coffee down with a sigh. “Please, Semkath. I want to help you.”

Alex, Rio and now Semkath. Theory number one has now been well and truly blown out of the water. After discarding all possible answers, the only one left if the impossible: He remembers.

I need to know more, and the middle of a breakfast buffet is not the place to do it. I fold my napkin and place it beside my cup, push the chair back and stand up. “I don’t have time for this.”

“I’ll come with you,” he volunteers, rising. “I could save you a lot of time.”

This is, of course, exactly what I was hoping would happen. Get him alone. “How?”

“I know where the body is.”

“You’d better.” I am already marching out of the dining room, past the bow-tied and smiling maître d’, my tweedy companion in tow. We ride the escalator down a level in suspicious silence, Alex on a lower step, me above him. I keep my arms folded, my eyes on Alex. There’s mace in my purse. He maintains the patina of a friendly smile.

The rental agent sizes us up and speaks to Alex: “Can I help you, sir?”

He smiles, a little embarrassed and thumbs in my direction. “She’s the one with the reservation.”

The agent looks dubious. My smile is adamantine. Truth is, I’m used to this. He is doing what he thinks he has to. I present my license, international license and reservation printout.

The rental is a grey Camry with large coffee stains on its floor mats. I assure the agent I am capable of handling a vehicle this size. I consider leaving a scathing review on one of my social media accounts (More personas: My inconsistent online activity drives the algorithms to distraction). I dismiss the idea—I am just tense with ‘Alex’ around.

“In,” I point to the passenger side door. Make sure he’s buckled in before I enter the car.

The steering wheel is on the wrong side, and I keep hitting the wipers every time I want to change lanes. And there are always too many lanes. Four lanes of blacktop. Still adjusting to how oversized and spaced out everything is here. City folds slowly and gradually into suburb, then peters out into countryside. You want an identity crisis, try moving back to your hometown someday. You’ll feel the same, but everything will feel different. Truth is, you’ve changed more than it has.

I wait until we are on the Interstate and I am sure we are not being followed. High banks to either side of the road are shrouded in trees. Bare branches among the evergreens, spring has come late here. I’ve got the heater on inside. For all their sap-slow thoughts, trees handle the change somewhat better.

I turn on the radio, which has already been set to an 80’s classic rock station. Boy George fills the cabin. Alex reclines his seat and closes his eyes. Hands clasped on his lap.

“You’re him?” I ask, eyes on the road ahead.

“In the flesh.”

“You remember?”

“Is it really any stranger than what you are? Have you ever heard of the Arc gene?”

“No. Why?”

“Thought is a virus.” He is silent for a long while. “Yes, I remember. I don’t think any of the others do, though. They’re the lucky ones. It’s like being a passenger in your own life.”

“How do you know about Martha’s Vineyard?”

“How do you think?”

I have been thinking, and what I’ve been thinking is that once you discard all possible answers, the impossible must be the correct one. “Aleph killed him. You killed him.” Alex says nothing. I drum my fingers on the steering wheel. I’m driving at the speed limit and cars, pickups, trailer trucks go squealing by in the other lane. “Why turn on him, if he’s you?”

“I’m disposable. Even moreso than she is, to Semkath. How many of us does he have? Dozens, at least. All the identical. He’d sacrifice me with less thought than he’d give some favela drug dealer.” Alex opens his eyes and sits up, watches the cars streaking by in the other lane. “So many pickup trucks. What do they need them all for?”

“It’s America,” I shrug. “Tell me the rest.”

Alex shakes his head. “That’s all there is. Why he did it, and why he asked you to investigate a murder he committed himself, I don’t know. I only know what happens when he’s in my head. I don’t know what goes on in his.” He thinks about this for a moment. “I don’t think he’s evil, for what it’s worth. He genuinely cares for your roommate. People are never all one thing or another.”

I blow out a long, slow breath. It’s a lot to take in. One thing at a time. Find the boy, see if this guy’s story holds up. Then what? One thing at a time. I focus on the road. There won’t be a ‘then what’ if we collide with the back of an 18-wheeler. Just drive.

I turn off Route 28 when Alex tells me to. We stop for gas. Alex goes to the bathroom. I wait by the car.

We head east a good ways, towards the Atlantic coast. There’s a wildlife preserve or something there. Seriously large houses, white-picket palaces. You’d have to be somebody really important back in Singapore to own a house like these—the owner of a hot pot restaurant chain or something. The names around here are an identity crisis mix of old English and native American. The asphalt ends, turns to sand and gravel. The car bumps and rattles down the road for a couple of minutes. I hope there’s no lasting damage to the rental, though depending how long this goes on I might not be the one paying.

Alex tells me to stop.

We walk into the long grass. I make Alex walk in front. The mace is in my hand, held low at my side. I’ve got him alone, true. And he’s got me alone. He points to something in the high weeds. Two wedges of white rubber, not far from the shore. I motion for him to move away to one side, walk forward and look down at the pale, pale body of the senator’s son. Of Sadhe. Big, handsome boy, would’ve made a great CEO someday. The Thug looks out through the Teacher’s eyes. Entry wound at the temple. Powder burns, close range. Shot through the head.

Which means Alex has a gun. I twist, bringing the mace up. Alex is standing there, a small pistol in his hands. Sig Sauer P238, the Thug whispers to me. The body language has changed again. Something old and cold settles behind Alex’s eyes.

“Too late, Sem,” Aleph says.

“Don’t move.” I raise the can threateningly.

“That’s my line,” he smiles. “I called the police from the gas station. This is going to be hard for you to explain. A foreign national, hundreds of miles from the conference she’s supposed to be attending, who just happens to find two dead bodies? And one of them a senator’s son, no less. No, not easy at all.”

“What do you mean, two?”

Aleph winks, and places the barrel of the pistol against Alex’s temple. I shout, full volume, thrust the can forward and thumb the trigger, but the sound is lost in the boom of the gunshot. A jet of blood goes one way, his body falls the other.

Shit. Some of the spray blows back into my own eyes. I reach up and rub them—

#

—blink, slam the brakes, swerve at the last minute, narrowly missing a boy who’d run out into the road, chasing a wayward soccer ball. SUV skids, comes within a few centimeters of hitting an imported sedan coming the other way. SUV stops, sedan stops, boy stops. Golf ball eyes. Rigid with fear.

I power down the window. The hand on the button is beefy, thick-fingered. There’s a black uniform rolled up to the elbow. The Thug. “You okay?” I ask in Portuguese.

The boy stands frozen.

“You’ve got to watch out there, kid. I could’ve killed you.”

He nods jerkily, looks like he’s about to cry. Same here, kid. Same here. Shit. Aleph? Aleph. I’m a pawn in a game I didn’t even know I was playing. I get the feeling I’m being painted as the bad guy here—killing the guy who knew about Bia, taking out one of Aleph’s selves to cover up the murder in Massachusetts. Yeah. This is not going to look good to anyone. I’ve no idea why.

Damn kid hasn’t moved yet.

“Where’d your ball go?” I ask him.

He points at the other sedan.

I look over. See another one of Aleph’s bodies getting out of the car. Automatic held in both hands, pointed at the car. Muzzle flash.

“What the f—”

#

“—uck!” I shout in the middle of the business-class section of the airplane.

Alive. I’m alive. Breath coming in deep, heaving gasps. I’m alive. Pat myself down, touch my face. All there. I’m alive.

The man in the next seat looks over, twitches an eyebrow and smiles to himself. He goes back to reading his magazine. The Economist. One of the ANA stewardesses stops by and pointedly asks if I’m okay. I jump a little at her voice. Her neckerchief is tied just so, her hair looks ceramic, doll-like, probably deliberately so. I stare at her, wondering, but no, just an ordinary hostess.

I smile sheepishly and assure her I’m okay. She reminds me we are on final descent into Toronto.

There’s a superhero movie playing on the tiny screen in front of me. Blue-skinned woman who can look like anybody she wants to. This does not cause her to lose her mind. Instead, she is saving the world. I could do with being saved.

A trap. Aleph bought and paid for this ticket, the same Aleph that shot himself in the grass, the same Aleph who shot me as I sat in an SUV in Rio. So it is safe to assume this is a trap. To what end, I still have no idea. It’s not as though I can just step off this plane, though. Have to see this thing through, I reckon.

The customs agent stamps my passport, slides it back across the counter and waves to the next person in line. No “welcome back” or anything like that. Canadians have a reputation for niceness in much the same way that the United Kingdom, the nation that gave the world soccer hooliganism, has a reputation for politeness.

“Welcome back,” I say to myself, but I’m not sure I mean it. Ask me where the Expat is from and I couldn’t answer. Born in one country, raised in another, living in a third. At what point does one of those become more important than the other? The truth is that the three kind of elide into one another, you can’t pick the Expat’s past apart and choose just one. He’s all of them, pretending he’s anything else is just a convenient label for people with a need to compartmentalize. And that’s everyone.

Taw is waiting at the arrival gate, holding up a placard that says ‘GLASS’ in black ink on white. Written with a Sharpie, I bet. This is Sikh cab driver Taw. Loose khaki shirt, gold bands at his wrists. Clean-shaven, short hair, no turban. A lot of people are uncomfortable with the thought that immigration changes us, both the ones immigrating and the ones immigrated to. As if we wouldn’t change if people never went anywhere. As if we didn’t change just sleeping in the same bed.

At what point does the Expat become the Immigrant? Don’t tell me citizenship this or that. That’s a piece of paper. The answer is, it isn’t a light switch. You were always changing. You are always becoming. Hi Theseus, nice boat. Say, is that your grandfather’s axe?

I watch Taw for a moment. He just nods in greeting, waves for me to follow him. I scan the faces as we walk through the concourse. One of them has to be Aleph. He has to be here somewhere. Families hug. Businesspeople slice through the crowd with the blade of their own self-importance. Sunburned youths heft backpacks taller than they are. People squat by every available power outlet, charging tablets and phones, laptops across their knees, ensconced within headphones.

I recall Taw’s earlier hostility. I think whatever trap Aleph has planned, it is intended to catch Taw as well as myself.

“Aleph killed Sadhe,” I say to him quietly.

“Huh.” Taw does not slow or change expression.

“He shot me in Rio.”

“I don’t believe you.” The automatic doors slide open and we step outside. Cars idle at the curb, trunks and doors yawning open, swallowing the shadowed stream of people and luggage coming out of the terminal. Evening is coming on, leaking orange into the sky.

“What?”

“You were always Aleph’s pet.” He’s walking down the line of vehicles. After a moment of hesitation, I follow after. Invisible carbon monoxide fumes curl about our ankles.

“It’s not like that.”

“We’ll see what it is or isn’t like.” He stops by a white minivan with tinted windows. Chrysler Town and Country. They don’t make them anymore. Just the Pacifica. Two men and a woman step out of it. Leather jackets, turtleneck sweaters, dark sunglasses. I know them all: Gamal, Zain and Lamadh. They do not look pleased to see me.

“Get in,” Taw says.

I get in. They wedge me in the middle seat. Gamal on one side, Zain on the other. Taw and Lamadh in the front. Lamadh is going through my carry-on bag. Taw starts the engine, pulls out.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“You aren’t going anywhere,” Taw says.

“Bout time we did something about you and Aleph,” Lamadh nods.

Shit, they are serious.

I have a thought: Count backwards from three.

It’s like someone whispering in my ear. It’s a strange, intrusive thought.

Trust me.

Well, what else am I going to do? I bow my head and start to count. And close my eyes.

#

“A stalking horse, used to draw opposition out into the open,” I tell the officer kneeling in front of me. I’m holding a damp tissue in my hands, sitting in the back seat of a police cruiser. The door is open, I’m turned sideways, my feet on the ground. The officer looks concerned.

“Ma’am?”

“He wants to know who his enemies are, and he’s using me as bait,” I explain again, as patiently as I can.

“Ma’am, I know you’ve had a bit of a shock, but you’re not making any sense.”

“You have to call the Toronto police. I’ll give you the registration number of the vehicle.”

“Toronto?” The weight of confusion collapses the officer’s face in on itself, pulling his eyebrows down, mouth up, crunches it into a ball of bafflement. “The heck has Toronto got to do with it? Is this about the shooting they had there, couple of days back?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

He sighs and rubs his face. He doesn’t believe me. This hysterical foreign woman. He twists to talk to someone out of my field of view. “Hey Charlie, you speak Chinese?”

“Thought you said she was from Singapore,” Charlie’s voice comes floating back from somewhere near the front of the cruiser. Good to know.

“Well, what language do they speak in Singapore?”

There is a pause. “Singaporean?”

I wish we could talk this out. But he’s the police officer, I’m the suspect. Our roles are fixed. He won’t budge or bend on that. He’s been trained to resist every attempt I might make to change the relationship. He’s just doing what he thinks he has to do, based on who he thinks he is. Me too.

I hit the officer in the throat. Nice little university professor like me. The Thug knows what to do. The officer goes down, gasping for breath. Get a knee on his neck. Take the taser from his belt, a stubby black pistol-wedge of polymer with a neon grin tip. Charlie comes trotting over, he’s heard the sound, has one hand on his gun. I hit him with the taser as he rounds the edge of the door.

I manacle them both, heave them into the back of the cruiser, throw their guns into the water, then retrieve my purse from the rental, fish out my smartphone. I dial the Expat’s number. It rings, picks up.

“Don’t hang up, Lamadh,” I say.

There is a beat of silence. “Neat trick. He just blinked and you were gone.”

“Don’t hang up.”

“You’ll be back, eventually. You’ve only got two now.”

“Listen, it’s a trap. You, Taw, Gamal and Zain are all in danger now. He knows who you are. Aleph will be hunting you.”

“Good. We’ll be ready.” Lamadh hangs up.

I stare at the blank screen of the phone for a moment. I swear. If people would just unbend for one goddam minute. Dial another, longer number. International.

“Moshi moshi?” the roommate says.

I give him a number to call. When we finish talking, I squeeze the power until the screen goes black. Drop the phone, stamp down on it. Pick up the pieces and hurl them as far as I can out over the water. Small plop when they hit. Dust my hands, head back to the rental.

I wish there was some easy way to get back there, some way of knocking myself out, preferably one that doesn’t involve cranial trauma. I see the taser where I’d dropped it, not far from the police cruiser.

“Shit,” I mutter to myself.

#

“He’s back,” says Zain, close to my ear.

“Did you miss me?” I crane my neck, peer out the window. Big building coming up on one side. Blocky, grey-white in the dimming light, crenelated rooftop, single minaret.

We’re just up the road from the mosque. From the site of the terrible shooting. A terrorist attack. People shot down for their religion, because of someone else’s religion. As if religions never change. As if personal beliefs never change. As if a killing could ever keep things the same. The mind goes crazy when it realizes the outside world no longer conforms to its images of permanence.

“What do you think you’ll find here?” I ask.

“Justice,” says Taw.

It feels the way I imagine the Chernobyl sarcophagus must feel. My skin prickles. There must be invisible bursts of evil emanating from that ground, surely I will be contaminating just by stepping foot there. It’s a kind of moral black hole. A hole in the fabric of the world. It’s been several days since the attack, and the area remains taped off. Yellow warnings strung between pillars, flapping in the wind. Keep out.

“You did this,” says Taw. “You and Aleph, you arranged it.”

I shake my head, but he’s driving and doesn’t see. Not that it would make any difference.

“It’s only right that justice should happen here, too.”

Taw slows down at the intersection, hits the indicator, getting ready to turn. I’m watching him. So I don’t see the pickup truck that hits us broadside.

Impact. Sound. Pressure. Flying glass. Screaming metal. Screaming people. World tilts.

#

“Está vivo,” someone says, high above me. Far away.

Portuguese? I don’t speak Portuguese. Everything is dark. Sense of motion. A truck hit us. Hit us hard. Must be why my head hurts so much. I try to explain.

“Jiko ni atta,” I say.

“O que ele está dizendo?”

“Atama itai.”

Someone makes shushing noises. There’s a comforting hand patting my shoulder. Quite right. No sense in getting worked up about these things. ‘This too shall pass,’ as the wise men say. You think they don’t mean everything about you, but they do. They do.

“San kara gyaku ni kazoeyo,” I hear myself say. “San, ni, ichi …”

#

“Merda.”

I come to in the driver’s seat in the cruiser. One leg won’t stop twitching. Something gripped tight in my hand and something damp down one leg and I think I’ve wet myself. Look around. The two cops are staring at me from where I dumped them in the back. They just watched this well-dressed Asian woman disarm them, tase them, handcuff them—and then tase herself. They must think I’m crazy. I’m not sure they’re wrong.

The taser’s powerpack only has enough charge for two uses. That was number two.

I unclench my hand. A folded piece of paper falls from my fingers. I snatch at it. Open it up. It says: Count backwards from three. It’s in my handwriting, that is, in the Teacher’s handwriting. But I didn’t write it. Although I must have. Or.

She remembers. Maybe the Expat remembers. Alex remembered. It would be strange if he was the only one. What did he say? Thought is a virus.

I take my own advice. Three, two, one

#

Houston, we have cognition.

I didn’t think that. Where am I?

Got us out of one of the side windows.

Huh. Okay. So it isn’t just the Teacher.

We lie on the bottom step leading up to the mosque. I test his legs, arms and fingers for movement. Every joint is a symphony of agony. None of the others have emerged.

Do we go back?

Well, they did try to kidnap me. Someone will be along soon, probably.

The minivan lies on its side. The sheet metal has a pronounced V in the center. The accordioned front end of the truck that hit us fumes to itself. The door opens and a figure shambles out. Brown blazer, blue shirt, glasses. Aleph slings a gun across his shoulder, looks like a shotgun. He limps across the intersection towards me.

I have neither inclination nor ability to run. I lie there, and wait.

“What do you want?” I ask him as he hobbles up.

Aleph stops, almost directly under a streetlight. It flickers on, spotlighting him. Erasing his shadow. He lowers the gun, holds it at his waist. “What does anyone want? Stability. Security. Safety.”

I shake my head, and immediately wish I hadn’t. The world revolves, steadies. I fight down the urge to vomit. “Why me? I was no threat to you.”

“You all are,” he says. “You, Taw, Lamadh and the rest. You all know what I look like, but I’ve no way of knowing if I’ve found all of you. Why do you think I was so careful to search for all of you, find you and catalog you, over all these years? Because if anybody was a danger to me, it was you. When Taw and Sadhe and the others started to complain, I knew I had to act.”

A car slows, winds down its window. The driver sees the gun. Ducks down a little and floors the gas. His car screeches off down the road. Aleph watches it go with philosophical resignation, then turns his attention back to me.

“That’s crazy,” I say. “We weren’t any danger to you until you killed Sadhe.”

“Maybe not today, or tomorrow, but someday. How could I be sure? Change is always a danger.”

The phone in his blazer pocket starts to ring. He’s got one of those musical ringtones. The muffled voice of Wham! pleads to be woken up before we go-go. Aleph hesitates, eyes narrowing.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?” I ask. “Go ahead; I’m not going anywhere.”

Aleph shifts his grip so he can hold the shotgun one handed. Roots around in his pocket for the phone. Brings it up to eye level so he can read the display without taking his eyes too far from me. His eyes widen. He recognizes the number. Flash of suspicion, even fear as he looks at me. I make a be-my-guest gesture.

Aleph gets as far as “Hello?” before he’s cut off by a stream of sound out of the speaker. He sags, the shotgun barrel dips. Roommate is giving it to him with both barrels. Poor Aleph. He doesn’t get it. In trying to prevent change, he has changed.

“No,” he keeps saying, “no it’s not, I didn’t, how,” and he loses what he had because he tried not to lose anything.

The phone falls silent and he holds it away from his ear. His shoulders slump, the shotgun dips. The face relaxes. Aleph is gone. Coward. Leaving Alex or whatever this poor bastard’s name is holding the bag. He looks around, notices the shotgun in his hand, drops it like it scalds him. Metal clatters on concrete pavement.

He looks back at the accident. “Son of a b—”

“Better help me up,” I say, extending a hand and nod towards the minivan. “Let’s get the others out of there.”

He looks down at the hand, but does not take it. “When the cops get here, I am so screwed.”

“Maybe I can help. I know a thing or two about cops.”

#

The Thug’s head feels like a watermelon that’s been hit by a hammer. He lies propped up in bed, head turbaned with gauze. The nurses say he’s been acting strange, and blame the head injury. People change, though. People change.

He has a visitor. Has to squint to see, eyes don’t work as well as they used to. A slim Asian woman wearing a lot of black.

“Good morning, Theseus,” she says.

I smile as best I can. “Ojii-chan.” Grandfather.

The Thug has a lot of amends to make. I do, too. I have a lot of amends. Luckily, there are those who will help me do it.

It’s a negotiation, an accommodation, learning to live with two of us in our heads at any one time. I help them out, or maybe, I help them help each other. The Thug knows Japanese and international law, for example. It’s a change. Aleph is still out there, it won’t be all sunshine and roses, but then again it never was. Things will never be the same, and that’s alright, they never were to begin with. We’ll adapt.

#

This morning, I wake up as someone different. That’s fine. I know who I am.