He woke up, leaning against the wall, his spine feeling as though it had been scraped with a dull blade. His watch said it was three o’clock in the morning. The only light in the house was a slight trickle coming from under the front door. In that trickle Dobbs noticed something that hadn’t been there before, a torn envelope folded over once. On the inside was that same familiar handwriting.
Three weeks. Be ready. Don’t fuck it up this time.
* * *
In the morning light, the paper-covered windows glowed like Chinese lanterns. Dobbs drank what little was left in his canteen. The house had no pipes, let alone a faucet.
It would be like camping, he told himself. Like being back again at the lake as a child, roughing it in the middle of nowhere. The scenery outside right now didn’t even look that different from what he remembered of the view from his grandfather’s cabin. Dobbs could recall the long drive north from St. Paul, past weedy logging roads and the sagging gates of ancient sawmills. Northern Minnesota. By the time Dobbs was a child, the forests all around his grandfather’s place had been reduced to pincushions. The quarries looked like meteor strikes. Along the backcountry highway, all that had remained were cinderblock shacks with rusted tin roofs and hand-painted signs offering diesel and bait.
His grandfather’s cabin had been off the grid, but Dobbs had loved every bit of it: lying on a cotton-stuffed sleeping bag on a slab of peeling plywood; peeing on trees and eating everything out of the same dented tin bowl; washing off in the turbid lake and fishing for dinner and building fires out of twigs and branches. Maybe nothing else lasted — not veins of iron or swaying pines — but the cabin itself had seemed as if nothing could touch it. After a week there, Dobbs had felt he could survive anything.
The guys who’d readied the house hadn’t bothered to paper the upstairs windows. From the second floor, Dobbs could see for miles. To the south were the warehouses, the importers and exporters. Beyond them, the neat and tidy downtown, the slim pocket of tourist attractions. In every other direction stretched the emptiness, interrupted only occasionally by a house or a distant smokestack.
What stood out most to him, though, were the trees. Some, he could tell, had been anchored there for decades, old and barnacled, scraped away by tire swings. But it was the new trees that surprised him, saplings springing up even from cracks in the sidewalk.
For several minutes he’d been standing there, studying it all, when suddenly he was startled by a rustling in a thicket of undergrowth at the corner. At first there was nothing to see but a ghostly shaking in the web of branches. But then a white beak poked out, set upon a green head half-hidden behind a red eye mask. The neck that followed ended in a thick white ring. The body was a gradient of golden russet brown, stippled with white and black spots. The bird stepped cautiously out into the dew, and Dobbs watched it stroll, almost skipping, to the curb, dragging a tail almost as long as its body. A grouse? A pheasant?
What else was out there?
He ate the last of his food, half a granola bar and two-thirds of a spoonful of peanut butter. He ran his finger inside the jar.
And he waited. It was spring, and the days kept getting longer. Nightfall seemed to take forever to come.
§
He started with a mattress, a small table, a chair. An abandoned city was an easy place to find cast-offs. Dobbs carried things back one at a time, going out only at night. It wasn’t hard to avoid getting spotlit by streetlights. Most of them didn’t work. There was the occasional shadow crossing a distant intersection, tinted cars shaken by their stereos. But mostly it was dogs he saw roving the empty streets, many of them too hungry even to bark.
Late one night, several miles from the house, Dobbs came across a whitewashed brick building. Out front there was a display window, still intact, behind a grille of steel bars. Books. They’d been sitting there so long in the sunlight, he had to squint to read the bleached titles: gardening manuals, Beat poets, a thick, unjacketed tome by Marx. The placard in the window said CLOSED, but Dobbs could see a faint light burning somewhere deep inside.
A black van was parked at the curb, a hi-top conversion job with chrome rims and a fresh coat of wax. Everything on it shone, except for a small, peeling bumper sticker pasted in the rear window. BRICOLEUR, it said in a typewriter-like script set beside a crude sketch of an ordinary office stapler. No particular interest in being understood.
Dobbs was standing up on his toes, attempting to peer into the van’s rear window, when the door to the bookstore opened. He ducked, slinking across the dark street just in time.
They emerged from the bookstore with the glazed disorientation of an audience strolling out into the falling dusk after a long matinee. There were three of them at first, an odd mix. There was a tall, thin blonde who looked pale and fragile, except for the thick, black strokes she’d painted on her lips, as if she had something to prove. The brunette stood two heads shorter. Stepping onto the sidewalk, she raised the hood on her sweatshirt, framing a face worthy of Japanese anime: tiny, doll-like nose and mouth little more than smudges under the huge reflecting pools she had for eyes.
The black man between them was big but unimposing, a softness to his movements and gestures. The way he matched his strides to theirs, he and the girls were friends but nothing more.
Two more men appeared in the doorway half a minute later. There was a second black guy — black from his sneakers to his stocking cap, too. A revolutionary look suited to Beats and Marx. The white guy behind him looked like a reader of neither. He was tall and blond and prep-school handsome, his hair artfully mussed. His torn, faded jeans looked like the kind that cost three hundred dollars a pair.
The revolutionary flipped through a key ring, looking for the one that would lock the steel accordion security gate.
They seemed too old to be college students. Too aimless to be working. To quiet to be looking for trouble.
The five of them lingered for a moment beside their van, the Scooby-Doo gang gone underground. Dobbs could hear them talking, saying their goodbyes. Then three of them climbed into the van and drove away. But the anime girl and the revolutionary were walking. Dobbs was too far away to hear much of what they were saying. The woman repeated the name Myles. Every sentence she spoke either began or ended with his name. She used it exhaustedly, sighing. She kept stabbing her finger back in the direction of the bookstore, even once it was well behind them. She seemed to be complaining that Myles had said or done something back there to upset her. Myles in turn called her McGee, speaking the name as though it belonged to a sullen child.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Myles kept repeating. “Nothing to worry about.”
They walked for at least a mile. When they finally stopped, they stood in front of a brick building with a loading dock overlooking a gravel lot. They approached the overhead door, and Myles unlocked it. A few seconds later two cloudy second-story windows lit up.
Not homey, Dobbs decided, but it seemed it was there they’d spend the night.
He was back at the house just before dawn. He’d been walking all night, and he couldn’t walk anymore. He sat down on the mattress, head against the wall, eyes as wide as he could make them. He’d gone two days without sleep. He thought he had it in him to manage two more.
He reached into his bag, hoping there might be something in there he could eat, something he’d forgotten. But the bag was empty, except for a square of brown paper that hadn’t been there before.
Stop fucking around, it said. Get to work.