Can we really be surprised then that the boy shot two cops before he was fifteen? Heart in his throat, pulse jacked and racing as he clicked off the safety on the AR-15. He heard his dad’s voice in his head as he raised the barrel. They’ll be wearing Kevlar, so aim for the head.
Pop, pop, pop.
And then out of the truck, moving fast.
Pop, pop, pop.
Self-defense. That’s what Avon called it. The Feds are coming for all of us, he said. First they take our guns. Next our souls.
You did good, kid. You did all right.
In the truck that day, Avon told Samson, now Felix, that the wisdom he’d given him was a gift, the last in a series of gifts, starting at birth with invisibility. Samson, now Felix, was the boy with no birth certificate, no social security number. As far as the US government was concerned, he was the boy that didn’t exist. And yet think that through fifteen, twenty years. What happens when the boy wants to go to school or get a job? What happens if he wants to travel outside the country and needs a passport?
As Samson, now Felix, has discovered, it’s easier for an immigrant from a foreign land to prove their identity than it is for a boy born off the grid in central Florida. You are stateless in your own home. Luckily, identities can be faked. A new name chosen, a social security number stolen, someone else’s birth certificate unearthed. Which begs the question, when a child who technically doesn’t exist disappears, who misses him?
He was the boy raised with a mindset that the black helicopters were coming, that needles were how the one world government implants the microchip. The boy who thought it was normal to run bug-out drills in the middle of the night, who learned to set booby traps and trip wires, who knew to aim for the head.
As far as Avon DeWitt was concerned, God was an American and he was pissed. Pissed that the global elite had undermined his American freedoms, pissed that good-hearted, hardworking, honest citizens had been enslaved, brainwashed, lied to. Avon resolved that he would become a weapon of retribution, and his son would be a soldier of righteousness. So, they drilled. They trained.
A year later the boy chose a new name. He painted his invisible face with face-colored paint. He gave his voice a voice. Samson DeWitt died that day. Felix Moor was born. Or born again, his sins washed clean, his complicity removed. He was a tiger that escaped the zoo. A Manchurian candidate who flew the coop. He moved to Austin, using a dead kid’s birth certificate and high school transcripts to get into a state college, met a nice girl. A beauty from New York City.
In this way he became real.
The nightmares still come. The smell of cordite and the sound of the F-150 peeling out, and his daddy’s voice—hot damn, hot damn. But when he wakes, Felix tells himself those are someone else’s dreams. A stranger’s. He is a new man now, guiltless and free.
If we can deny our own death, we can deny anything.
Today is his twenty-fifth birthday.
Felix has come to Marfa, Texas, to save his sister from a Wizard.
They are parked outside the Hotel Paisano, he and Story. She of the summertime smile and the Yankee jeer. Story Burr-Nadir, the judge’s daughter, who once sang in a clear high voice—Oh, say can you see.
A county ambulance loiters on the corner beside them, rear doors ajar. As they watch, paramedics wheel a body on a gurney from the hotel entrance. The body is covered with a sheet. Hanging, the girl at the café told them when they got their coffee this morning. The third one this week. They nodded and asked for whole milk and sugar. Around the world the global death toll was ramping up. Wanton acts of self-destruction.
Pedestrian and inventive.
Self-immolation.
Suicide by cop.
It started with cigarettes. Where it will end, no one knows.
Beside Felix, Story rattles the ice in her cup. For her coffee is an excuse for chilled vanilla flavoring. She’s thinking about her mother again, Felix can tell. Story gets this look in her eye, a slight squint with the left lid, pupils cast down. Remembering. Worrying. Guilt. He’s talked her out of calling at least a dozen times in the last three weeks. It’s too risky, he tells her. A federal judge, given the connection of money and politics. They don’t call him the Wizard ’cause he wears a funny hat. He’s got power. The power to make his problems disappear. To make people disappear.
“You sound like your father,” she tells him. And by father she means the fictional father he has invented for her, dead now five years. The Fox News junkie and golf-casual supporter of the God King. Not a white supremacist exactly, but no friend to the Black man. This version of Felix’s father falls within acceptable parameters. A gun owner, yes, but not a man who fires explosive rounds at paper targets printed with the image of federal agents. The reality of Felix’s youth is too radical, too foreign, like a report from some distant killing field. And so, Felix has kept the truth from her. The truth of his identity. The truth of his lineage. The truth of his crimes.