Memories of the outside world came to me more as glimpses of people I’d never really known. The man who drove me to the storage palace. The woman behind the counter at the storage palace who wanted my ID. The barista who handed me Silvina’s note. But Charlie at the gym most of all. The one I’d seen so often but only ever really exchanged pleasantries with. Perhaps I puzzled over them because they might be alive. Or because they’d existed on the fringes of a mystery so central to my life.

I came across people rarely, I had struck out so far into the roadless interior. Often, I kept to high elevations, coming down to the same streams as the bears and deer. I learned to travel during moonlit nights and sleep during the day. People unsettled me. Gruff or polite, friendly or wary—didn’t matter to me. Had nothing to say to them—sometimes drew my gun as a precaution. Didn’t want to meet their gaze, know their stories. Just waved them on, or stood aside on the trail, amid moss lumps and thick stands of giant ferns, waiting for them to leave.

Still a paranoia about Vilcapampa, some lingering doubts that Langer’s death had closed that account. But mostly Vilcapampa. Because even in the midst of crisis, when I came to places where my phone worked, I could tell that the Vilcapampa companies soldiered on. It might be short-term, but in the moment, they had converted over to making vaccines, to making masks, to providing essentials like bottled water. Even fossil fuel extraction, even this late in the game.

The sting of guilt came less often, unexpected but sharp. Washing my shirt in the stream, wringing it dry, and, in the twisting, the twisting free of anguish at having lost so much in return for so little. All the usual, useless things. Because I couldn’t shake Silvina’s letter. No matter how I tried. Kept the photo, though I felt I was better off without it. Felt that Silvina had broken a contract with me. Even with the relief that there was no “ground zero” event with her fingerprints on it. As if Unitopia had been the actual pinnacle of what she could accomplish.

I told myself that sometimes powerful forces pass through your life that speak to you but, in the end, keep their own counsel. That they wash over you like an extreme weather event, then are gone.

No analysis can fill in the rest.

[103]

In the spring of the fifth year, things changed for me. The winter was harsher, or felt harsher. A near disaster slipping on some rocks and falling twenty feet down a steep slope made me less sure of my existence in the King Range. The way my body felt for weeks after. How I moved in more tentative ways and how that affected my judgment. In short, I felt old.