I am in the bed I grew up in, in the house where I was raised.

My condo is still uninhabitable. It had been ransacked, torn apart in the search for the flash drive. I hadn’t seen it, but Ingrid had shown me pictures on her phone. Every cabinet was dismantled, every food container emptied, every cushion shredded, every wall systematically cut away, every inch of insulation ripped out. Every nook, every cranny: opened, searched, and then destroyed.

My mother’s henchmen had ample time to search the house. They had from 4 a.m. on June 18th — the time Lassie, Ingrid, and I boarded the plane headed for Fairbanks, Alaska — until 10 p.m. that same day, when Ingrid and Lassie finally shook off their sedation and Ingrid called the police. An eighteen-hour window to find it. To find the supposed flash drive.

While Ingrid and Lassie were sedated and stashed in the car, I was transported to an unknown location — the White Room — where my mother administered what I can only describe as a synthetic nightmare. For the next twenty-three hours, or what felt like twenty-three days to yours truly, I attempted to survive in the Alaskan wilderness.

Even half a month later, it is hard for me to believe the events were fictional: the earthquake, the river, the wilderness, Opik, Lassie, all of it, a neurological trick. My own brain, stimulated by whatever was injected into my bloodstream — a concoction perfected by an outfit my mother called the Sleep Control Program — had betrayed me.

If I closed my eyes I could still see Opik lying on the sand bank. His breathing ragged, the gaping wound on his side blistering red and oozing death. I could play the footage of Lassie and the canoe in slow motion, floating away, never to be seen again.

I gaze to my left where the black and tan cat is curled into my hip.

I gently rub one of his ears between my thumb and forefinger. God, I would have missed him.

Anyhow, after Lassie and Ingrid woke up in the car, Ingrid called the police and they came to the private airfield. The plane was gone, and after hours of investigation, it turned out the plane had disappeared off the radar completely.

And with it, one Henry Bins.

It wasn’t until Ingrid drove back to our condo that she discovered the carnage.

But the condo was of little concern.

I was missing.

She called in all her favors at the Alexandria Police Department, the DC Police Department, even the Feds. Twenty-four hours after I went missing, everyone within a two-hundred-mile perimeter was looking for me.

The search wouldn’t last long.

I was found the next day — at 8:30 a.m. on the morning of June 20th — by a farmer. I was asleep in his tomato garden.

In Michigan.