“What’s the guy’s name?”

I grimaced a bit. “Earther bro underscore ninety-nine.”

Patton surrender-frowned like a parent who’d finally had to accept that their kid was an idiot. “You realize that I’m the guy who’s gonna keep you out of the pit in that trucker’s basement, right? He probably asked you to moisturize ahead of time, didn’t he?”

“He did, actually,” I said. “Been getting moist all day.”

Patton headed to the door. “Going to bed now, dude.” Making it nearly one wakeful hour for Patton.

“See you tonight,” I said.

* * *

When the shop closed, I headed back home. Patton had the right idea, getting some sleep ahead of time. If I tried to push through until three a.m., I’d be a zombie.²⁸ I set my watch alarm and laid down.

It was dark outside when I was awakened by my own snoring. I squeezed the button on the side of my watch in order to backlight the numbers using Timex’s proprietary Indiglo® technology. Just after midnight.

Unsure what theories Earthrbro_99 and I might discuss, I collected my notes from A World of Flies and a pile of my top reference books, all of which I stuffed into a shopping bag and set by the door.

Out on the porch I ate a carrot snack to cancel out an earlier candy bar snack while the cicadas sang. I took a moment to reflect on the many choices I’d made in my life, up to and including what might end up being the most consequential: the conscious decision to rendezvous with a possibly insane skinsuit-wearing trucker at a remote crossroads in the middle of the night. Every single detail of this scenario screamed Don’t do it! My bubbling gut issued the same warning, telegraphing the identical message over and over to my dumb brain: This ends poorly.

But that’s why we have brains: to provide us with rationales for overriding our instincts and gut reactions. All that stuff served us well when we were still hunter-gatherers, when reliance on our fight or flight impulse was essential to avoiding the inside of some megafauna’s stomach. We still have that primitive coding that controls our basic functions, from breathing and balance, to running from predators. It’s often dubbed the “reptilian brain”, because it is found in physical structures that we share with reptiles.²⁹ It is reliable, but compulsive – doesn’t get nuance. Good for basic survival stuff. After millions of years, humans evolved higher order thinking, which allows us to consider those reptilian impulses and ignore them. Like I’m doing right now.

Regardless of the danger, I had to know the truth. Decades of wondering, researching, and little else. Year after year, it had been the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing at night. It was a form of paralysis, arresting all of the other things I might have done with my life if I hadn’t been so single-minded about solving the mystery of my jumbled psyche.