But that wasn’t me, not anymore. The outline issued effortlessly, as if on a sheet of tracing paper placed over my mind. No matter why Dr. Kriss had spared me, I was going to write this story. More than ever before, I felt loyal to the unadorned truth. It didn’t matter what I was or what I’d been. The story was mine. I was going to tell it.

The writing came easily, trancelike and time-annihilating. I opened with Zeke’s stabbing, an emergency to snag the reader’s attention, and the strange white blood transfusion. Without going into too much detail, I gestured toward the significance of the solution, the Holy Grail of medical science. And then, to complete the introduction, I cut to an image of Zeke in the tub at the House of Brothers. The friction between these elements would spark the central mystery.

Despite the data being shown to corporate executives and top military personnel, I wrote, the solution was a catastrophic failure, an elaborate deception that’s left a trail of gruesome fatalities from one coast to another.

I set about dismantling the fiction, piece by agonizing piece: Jules’s eaten face, Ray and his dogs, the burned-down homes and the new developments, Rainer posing as Pavel, the holes, the bodies, and Amos, trembling beneath a Confederate flag.

The piece unspooled unlike anything I’d written before. But at the same time, I felt the presence of an alternate narrative, a shadow side to the story filling my pages. I’d experienced so much in the course of my reporting, I knew I’d be left with countless impressions that would never be written, that would never resolve. Even the shooting, even the wildfire, didn’t belong in print. And then there was Lane. No matter how the piece turned out, I’d have another story on the tip of my tongue forever.

3.

While composing the draft, I got a call from Gordon Stone.

“I know you’re on leave,” he said, “but is there any chance you could come into the office today?”

“What’s going on?”

“Have you seen the Times?”

There was only one story he could be talking about. On the front page that morning, a report by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller had appeared, stating Saddam Hussein had stepped up his quest for nuclear weapons and embarked upon a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb. The report centered on the purchase of aluminum tubes, which, the reporters wrote, American officials had identified as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.

The piece seamlessly transitioned into the case for war. Certain hard-liners were quoted as saying Washington shouldn’t wait until evidence of Saddam’s program was verified. The first sign of a “smoking gun,” they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.