He was naked in the tub, legs splayed, penis slumped on the inner thigh. A chunk of his lip was chewed away, exposing teeth in a kind of sneer. Blood from his opened left arm had spilled over his torso and pooled in the tub.

I’d never seen a wound like this, never imagined one. At the edge of the photo I saw the blade he’d used to make an incision on the wrist. Then he must’ve dug his fingers deep in the wound, blood pulsing out, and pinched what looked like plastic straws, a hideous pink.

They were his veins, made stiff, and it appeared that Zeke had stripped them from his arm, plastic bursting up through the skin like a cable from the ground, all the way past the elbow. His arm hung open in two jagged flaps. The hard white bone caught camera flash. His fist still clutched bent plastic.

THE HOLES

1.

Before my flight to Denver, I shipped everything—tapes, notes, photographs—care of Gordon Stone at the Bystander. I called him at the office and told him to sign for the package and leave it on my desk.

“Roger.”

“I’m heading into a sort of dicey situation,” I said. “I’ll try to check in when I can, but I might not be able to call every day. Do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“If I’m incommunicado more than forty-eight hours, start the search here.” I gave him the name of the hotel I’d booked in Arcade.

Gordon laughed. “You sound like something out of Le Carré.”

I pictured him at the office with a copy of the New York Review of Books, liking and disliking.

“For the love of god,” he said, “be safe, Whitney, no story is worth it.”

I thanked him for everything and hung up. Gordon’s a brilliant man, I thought, and he has exquisite taste, but he doesn’t know the half.

—

I was relieved to get through security, onto the plane, into the air. I felt able to think clearly for the first time since seeing the photos.

In certain very limited respects, what Dr. Kriss had concocted really could be called a medical breakthrough. Unlike the abortive blood substitutes I’d read about, the solution didn’t fail in a matter of hours or even days. For a few weeks, at least, the subjects were stable, more than enough time to impress a journalist on a deadline. But once that period elapsed, the solution appeared to—I don’t know what—settle or coalesce or congeal. It began in the mouth, where tissue regenerates fastest. Having lost all feeling in the lips, the subjects chewed them away. Zeke had sensed it coming, the hardening of his bloodstream. I wondered what would’ve happened if he hadn’t killed himself, but my mind refused to overlay the image of Ray’s dogs on a person.