“Is it touch ID?”

“It’s retinal. Or iris. I forget. It’s lobal. Ears. You’re going to have to cut off a nipple.”

“I will hurt you if I must.”

“With the blessings of Balk the utopian pacifist, I’m guessing?”

“Tetbook. Now, mate.”

“I’m only trying to make sense of this, sort out your position.”

“Toss it, mate.”

“Wait, I’ve got it—you’re striking out on your own. You’re leaking the leaker, sticking it to Balk.”

Maleksen scowled. “I count.”

I said, “You’re going rogue, like with a ransom thing. Going to publish the interviews yourself. Or sell them off for publication? Or sell them back to every last user they incriminate?”

Maleksen slashed out with his bootheel and knocked me to my knees and the tote swung around my neck and hung down in front of me.

“Fuck,” I said, “just fucking hold up.”

But he was whispering, “b-Leaks is become soft. In politics. Balk is also soft, sitting in Russian Iceland, cannot ever go outside. His intellect tells him he is persecuted because of advocacy and not because he is pederastic. I am only telling this now to you because you like him lie to yourself about your importance. I count.”

“Four” went to “three,” but then Maleksen’s two was “dva” and one was “odin,” and as I was fetching my glasses from the dirt I had to say, “You’re Russian?”

There was a strangulated swan honk from beyond the willows.

Maleksen held a gun, and though all of it was camouflaged in flecktarn browns and greens, it gleamed, as if it were a plastic laser toy, with a black wire straggling through the tangle of roots back to a busted sniper game at a condemned arcade on the Jersey Shore. Then again, the way he was aiming it was real, like all my flesh wasn’t real but pixel, to be shot to death infinitely, to be resurrected eternally—I had the hiccups.

“Why do this?” I said. “Who cares?”

But what I wanted to say was this: I’m only protecting myself. What I wanted to say was: You already know what’s in it. Everybody knows. Within themselves.

There were contrails of light through the boughs. A gray Merc idled out in the raster.

I turned back from it and smack into the gun. Its butt to my jaw, my jaw to the grass.

I wasn’t just wet but made of wetness, flowing along to the lowest ground, and then thrusting up from the matted blades. But when I put a hand to where it stung I fell again, flat, and breathed a puddle that felt like breathing a plasticbag. I wrenched off the plasticbag that had wrapped around me. It was from Kaufland, the hypermarket.

And that was morning.

I straightened my knees, slowly, achingly slowly straightened my grovel joints, patted myself down. No wallet, but Principal’s passport was still there damp under a sock, gravel. The tag wound around my neck identified my corpse as Aaron Szlay’s. What I didn’t have was a tote, with all my lives inside. Each step sparked fire but I was cold, that back of the throat cold. Every swallow was mucous. Each step twinged up the spine, and shook me into coughing fits, croupy coughing, fuck. Sneezing stuff the consistency of gauze, as if to stanch the jawblood. I rubbed my shoulder, at the totemark, the strappage. The 2.4 lbs of my Tetbook, the 2.4 tons of the book it contained, gone. I’d backed nothing up. If posture be my judge I was fucked. I had no other younger version to reload. I had no other younger version of myself.

There was a construction site in my head and then farther along the street was a construction site, jackhammering, pointed pneumatics of kurwa, pizda, overalled gastarbeiters cursing in Polish while breaking asphalt, drilling at sewage with sexual fury.

I felt a car creep up, but it was just a cab, which once it’d crept alongside my condition veered away and soaked me. My suit had been made to order, not to get stretched—it had pleats now.

Here’s the name of the street: Mainzer Landstraße. And here’s another streetname: Taunusanlage. The air was a sodden drear like a frozen screen. A constant pane between me and the skyscraping curtainwalls of mirrored glass just ahead.

Observe, perceive, glean everything—it was as if I were compensating for the material I’d lost by collecting the trash around me. Piking it, staving it, to fill this pit in me. To heal the welts pulsing like stoplights at my temples. Gravel in my shoes like babyteeth.

Into the Messe again. A guard halted me, examined my blood against my tag—“What happens to you?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m here for the panel on zombies.”

He said, “There is that today?” As if everyone was in peril.

“It’s on just now—zombie fiction, the undead.”

He was giddy now, silly, “That is the book I please to read.”

I went to the bathrooms and wet papertowels and pressed my face, spiffed up. Then slogged past the tropicalized Pacific Islander stalls, went unrecognized by the Czechs and Slovaks who just a diurnity ago had been my brothers.

Pod caffeine, strudel in a sleeve. And while I was at it, why not, grabbing the giveaway notebooks and ballpoints.

Lisabeth helmed the booth in mourningdress chic, channeling both the orphan and widow (typesetting jargon: an orphan the opening line of a paragraph stranded alone at the bottom of a page, a widow the closing line stranded alone at the top). It was as if she’d traveled prepared for a loss, a charcoal dress quivering to the knees. Her face was swollen from the crying or bouquets. Aaron would’ve appreciated that—he’d always been attracted to women allergic to flowers, and latex.

The foldingtable was shrouded in blueblack linens, furled roses and closelipped tulips, bonbons, sekt. Bereavement cards in soft and hardback, boxed sets. I lined behind the wild sprigs of a deliverer who turned around and cringed. My jaw must’ve been trickling again. Lisabeth signed for him, took another babysbreathed bouquet, set it among the aster strewings, doing her duty stalwart. Such rectitude, she wouldn’t even avail herself of a chair, but stayed standing as if all the books the agency had ever represented were balanced on her head.

I was about to pay a visit emptyhanded.

But then a woman cut in front of me—Cal’s editor, Lene Termin, Earth Mother. A batik peasant smock, a chunky butchness latebloomed with antidepressants.

Lene didn’t even meet my sneer, only said, “Pardon, Entschuldigung.”

She said to Lisabeth, “Pat Sagenhaft, my partner, just picked Seth up at Newark.”

“So helpful,” was all Lisabeth had.

“Pat’s going to sit in with him and the lawyer—Rich?”

“Spence Rich.”

“But just in an advisory capacity—make sure no one’s getting shafted.”

“Thanks.”

“That meeting’s for noon, NY noon. Meantime and with your OK I’ll go personally make the followup calls, to reassure the clients, offer like second opinion, outsider perspective. The immediate goal is fending off the poachers.”

“I understand. And thanks.”

“Again I can’t stress this enough, I’m here for you—Aaron meant a lot to me. If it makes sense to merge, you’ll merge—I’ve already got a few names in mind and even just casually a couple of feelers.”

“Already?”

“Too soon, but—interesting feelers.”

“Your partner Pat’s still with Riba Group, yes? Or Schwartzlist?”

“Then again it’s never too soon—especially with our girl to take care of, the princess of Princeton.”

“Achsa.”

“Exactly—we’ll be sure to involve her in all aspects of the process.”

“Achsa,” Lisabeth snuffed.

“I’m so proud of how you’re holding up, Lisabeth—that won’t go unnoticed. Now is there anything else I can do?”

There was nothing, and Lene lunged across the table to roll Lisabeth in her breast, then left, oblivious of me. Aar had loathed her—“Hel” he’d called her, “Helene, Queen of the Norse,” senior editor at Viking.

Lisabeth, poor wealthy Lisabeth who’d never understood how to take advantage, forsaken by her lanky associate with the quiff and clip, her underling, but in terms of power dynamics, overling, Seth—I could write it out already, it could write itself out clearly even black on black: Seth would coordinate publicity, the funeral, any lunches he’d take with other agents from other agencies he’d explain away as merely convivial, or acculturating, but then by the time Lisabeth’d get back to NY Seth would’ve installed himself either in Aar’s old corner niche, after having removed Miri’s sexless bed and finally fumigated the closets of her mothballs, or in newer officing toward the top of a Flatiron vivarium repping the bottom half of the list, which, the bottom half quarter, would mean repping me. Clever boy. With any brains he’d eventually move into media, but still keep a bit of lit to keep the cred up. If he or his next partners had any class they’d offer Lisabeth a job, or wouldn’t, that’s the only point on which I’m undecided—I’m sure Lene’ll be in touch.