But I missed the number and the button to go back was broken. “Help!” came on instead.

“Well, this is a pretty good song too, don’t you think?”

I adjusted the volume until it overrode the woman’s moans next door. Zeke watched me nervously.

“Is this okay?” I asked.

When he closed his eyes, tears escaped.

6.

I awakened the next day to find that Dr. Kriss had left the city. At Ocean General, I was met by Dr. Warner, who told me she’d flown to Arcade on the Rubicon jet. In the meantime, it seemed he’d been instructed to minimize my contact with Zeke. He provided updates, but I didn’t get back into the room. When I asked why, he cited Rubicon protocols.

“Dr. Kriss has authorization that I don’t,” said Warner. “If the company found out I was granting you access, I’d be finished here.”

With Dr. Kriss away, I was aimless. I realized how much I’d come to depend on her to organize my time and make meaning out of what I was seeing. I decided to conduct some other interviews, things she didn’t know about. For one, I wanted to meet with the mayor of Retreat, Benny Klausmeyer, to get a sense of how Rubicon had been attracted to the city. I thought my interview request would take a few days to process, but he was ready to meet the next day, as if he’d been waiting. But first, I decided, it was time to pursue the tip Lane Porter had slipped me at the Donut Shop: the former employee named Raymond Rix, who’d posted with such anger on the Retreat Examiner forum.

I drove out to the address on Snowy Egret Place. The dogs ranged freely in this neighborhood, lounging in front yards as if to tempt gunshots and then bolting off in crazy diagonals. A blue boat called Funny Valentine was parked in the driveway, a man up on the deck washing it down. It’s always important to remember in which states you can be summarily shot for trespassing. I stood at a distance. Soapy rivulets funneled down the driveway into the road.

I called, “Mr. Rix?”

The man looked up from his brush. Face crisscrossed with acne scars, he wore a Seminoles T-shirt and a green canvas hat. He jumped off the side of Funny Valentine and vanished into the backyard. Soon another man came out, flip-flops smacking asphalt. He wore a straw cowboy hat, khaki shorts, and a long turquoise button-up opened to reveal a chest of corkscrewing hair. He held a bottle of Corona loosely by the neck. Like many white people in Retreat, his face was a burnt mask.

I introduced myself as a reporter.

“Who with, the Examiner?”

When I told him about the Bystander, he said, “Never heard of it.”

“It’s a magazine in New York.”

“You’re from New York?”

“Yes.”

“What’s this about?”