The plane touched down in the desert far beyond the forest, and then we all hopped into another black car. A single inky road led us over the flat earth, past a tall wire fence and a security post to a building that looked like a giant beetle with a white, geodesic dome for a shell. And where the hell in California were we? Weren’t there supposed to be palm trees and models/actors everywhere? I could only guess that we were on some big-budget set. The car rolled into an underground parking garage where the three guys in black took a hike, leaving Yusuf as my only tether through a maze of white halls, bleached overhead lights, and glass doors marked with white block lettering. Cold storage. Dormitories. To Theater.

My duffel bag bounced against my hip as we passed people in white lab coats who gawked at me like a pair of nuts were dangling from my forehead. One woman actually spun away into a side room blabbing a “sorry” behind her. The bike chain started winding around my stomach again. My tongue was a slab of jerky in my dry, salty mouth.

Just as I started to wonder if Yusuf was lost, he flashed some badge at a heavy white door that led down another hallway.

“Good luck,” he said.

“You’re not coming?”

His only answer was to leave me in my dirty sneakers in front of a plain white door that looked like a broom closet. What the hell. I came all this way, I might as well walk in.

Inside was a small white room with a single circular conference table and a huge screen stuck to one of the walls. The only person there was a slim, white-coated woman with dark hair who turned from one of the big screens to face me.

The screen must’ve been a live security feed of the room or something, because on it I stood by a wall of glowing hard-candy-colored buttons. But I was wearing some long green coat instead of my traveled-in clothes. And the room didn’t look quite like here. And—what the actual fuck—the guy who was maybe me but also definitely not leaned over what looked like a giant mechanical spider pounded out of shadows, fiddling with some dials.

“Perhaps you can tell me,” the woman said, her asymmetrical bob swaying by her chin as she tipped her head, “why this is you.”

The bike chain grinding around my gut hit a snag, and the floor dropped out from under me.

3

STAGE

In the editing room in my head, I have a tough time stringing together these early bits of Dr. Nakamori, through all the flash-forwards, and flashbacks, and flash parallel-universes—storyboarding and re-cutting to figure out just who the hero is in all of this.

Not that I think it’s me.