When I click on the TV I see his beef. On Patriot TV the familiar machine-gun report indicating a new segment fires away, rat-atat-tat. Then Doreen is on the screen, BREAKING NEWS posted under her gobbling visage. Hovering above her shoulders, like angel-devil figures, appear two images. On the left is the familiar rat icon, and, on the right, my Janus ID picture with a caption that says WANTED.

“Rat Burglar accomplice Otto Starks, formerly of the Manhattan specialized security firm Janus, is a fugitive from justice,” she says. “At two fifteen p.m. today Otto Starks escaped from his guarded room at an undisclosed CDC facility. Severely injured in the escape were two police officers...”

I click it off.

No wonder Deke is pissed. Now he knows I’m a pulse. And, he thinks, I’m also the accomplice to the Rat Burglar, and liable to bring the cops to his doorstep.

The idea of waiting around for Deke to do to me what he did to my upholsterables isn’t attractive. Neither is being apprehended by the police, who—you would think—should be staking out my apartment right now.

I wish I had friends I could flee to. I wish I had a family. I wish I could call up the K’plua and ask him what to do. He’d know. If I were Amish I could take one of those buggies to a distant village and they would hide me from nasty cops and robbers. Maybe even from my own past. That’s exactly what I need, I realize. A whole new life. An obliteration of all my memory harvesting. At first I don’t take it seriously. At first I’m just horsing around with the idea while I contemplate the manifold dooms awaiting me, but then—

Lightbulb: I can do this. This could actually work.

All I have to do is wrangle up every item of value I have, pawn them, and get a bus ticket. I’ll call my dealer and cash in all my toxins for a bonanza of heavy-duty memory suppressants. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll get a bus ticket to Dutch Pennsylvania and the motherlode of ipurfan. On the bus I’ll write up a note that says my name is Jonas and I lost my wife and children in a terrible barn-raising accident in Illinois. You lost everything, the note will say, and it sure is sad, but you came out here to start a new life. It won’t say anything about talent or muscle or moneymen. It won’t say a word about betrayal or deceit or falsehood.

You have always been loved, it will say.

Now go love someone else.

Next I’ll scarf down all the ipurfan.

And then: blotto.