The fear he feels is primordial.
The next morning, he is in the living room, watching dust motes shiver in a shaft of light. It has been days since he had a shower or a bath, and the smell of his own body makes his eyes water. He lifts his arm to wipe them but doesn’t have the strength to raise the limb higher than parallel to his shoulder, so he turns his head and wipes his face on his sleeve. Through a gap in the curtains, he sees the house next door. It has a concrete walkway and two short stairs. The front door is blood red. As he watches, it opens and Rose emerges, a plastic rain bonnet on her head. She steps down one stair, then turns and locks the door from the outside, one lock, then a second, then a third. She heads up the walkway and out the gate, turning right and disappearing from sight.
Thirty seconds later he hears a key in the lock as she opens one dead bolt, then a second, then a third, and then she is inside, stomping rain from her shoes and muttering to herself in Filipino. He hears the crinkle of the rain bonnet as she slips it from her head and hangs it on a peg, and then she is in the room, smiling her forced smile and clucking.
“Coo-coo,” she says. “Coo-coo. How are we this morning? Ready for a little soup?”
Sometime later—days? months?—he is in his wheelchair when the lights go out. Rose is with him, on her knees clipping his toenails. The clippings are collected in a jar along with his hair. Why? What does she do with them? The bathroom goes dark. Rose curses under her breath, stands. Instead of leaving him alone, she rolls Simon into the kitchen and sets his brake. He has never been in the kitchen before. The back door has three locks on it that must be keyed from the inside. It’s even colder in here, vents blowing arctic air onto his ankles. Rose crosses to the wall beside the fridge. There is a gray breaker box on it. She lifts the latch and swings open the cover.
They are in the final minutes before Simon’s next shot. This is the morning routine. After breakfast, Rose changes him, grooms him, then gives him his next tranquilizer. Which means that at this moment, Simon is as close to a human being as he will be all day. He studies the kitchen: a four-burner gas stove in the corner near a dirty window （barred）， low counters covered in cheap tile. Plywood cupboards, locked. Linoleum floor. He tries to memorize the layout. The drawers have locks too. He sees no knives, nothing he could use as a weapon.
A quote pops into his head. Words he read on a plaque that used to hang on the wall outside the yoga studio in Float. Anxiety is not fear, being afraid of a definite object, but the uncanny feeling of being afraid of nothing at all.
He realizes now that his anxiety was a luxury. A high-priced item, out of reach to most, who have to settle for cheaper fears—fear of hunger, fear of hatred, fear of crime. Anxiety was an abstraction that consumed him when he was younger, because his whole life was abstract—free of challenges, free of debt, free from what most people call reality. What he had was unlimited options, unlimited choices. The paralysis of abundance. But on some level isn’t that what being a teenager is all about? Staring into the chasm between where you’ve been and where you have to go. A future you yourself must define. An endless wasteland of choices he would someday have to make. A self he would have to define. But how? And what if every choice he made was wrong? This is what used to keep him up at night. How much simpler it is to be afraid right now. Afraid of the needle. Afraid of the Witch. Afraid of his father. Of the police. He is a boy in a wheelchair, trapped in an unfamiliar house, trying to memorize the details of a kitchen in hopes it will help him escape. His mind feels like a rusty wheel. Think, he tells himself. But then the lights come on and Rose is there, unlocking his wheels and rolling him back into the empty living room. And then the needle goes in and the ocean of forgetting pulls him down. But just before he drowns, he sees it—the missing piece.
And he knows how he will escape.
*
“We are at the center of the cosmos.”
Simon stirs. He is lying on his mattress. His mouth tastes like old pennies.
“The sun is barely three dozen miles wide. The world is a plate, not a globe; otherwise you would see the curvature of the Earth every time you rode an airplane. Any fool can see the truth. Did you know that beyond the antarctic ice wall lies thousands of miles of land? Science wants you to think these are lies, but science is just an excuse for people to be stupid.”
Simon tries to rub the metal taste from his mouth. “I wanna talk to my father,” he slurs.
“Your father has said everything he’s going to say to you,” says the Witch. “Until you repent.”