Closing his eyes, Ames could view a sequence of bodies whirring with their last moments of life: soaping a flabby back in a shower; carefully removing skin from a mango; feeding crumbs of toast to squabbling sparrows; struggling to right a window shade, belly exposed by an uplifted shirt. At the time, such glimpses had meant no more to him than the development of a target. But unbeknownst to Ames, those flashes of humanity were collecting inside him. There came a day in 2023 when he’d crouched in a tree for several hours, tracking his target in glints through windows and waiting, with reptilian patience, for him to come outside. At last the man did, sat down in the sunlight with a book of poems, a small gray cat fumbling into his lap. Ames hesitated. Through the man’s thinning hair, he caught a glitter of perspiration on his scalp, and all at once, it was not his right to take this life. The discovery arrived incontestably as night: a recognition, at forty-three, of what his work had forced him to become.
And so he returned to the Upstate New York town where he’d grown up. His mother had just listed their old house for the third time since she and his father divorced more than twenty years earlier. On a lark, Ames went to the open house: young couples with children, professors at the college where his father used to teach. Wandering among strangers through the rooms of his childhood felt like returning to Oz or Ali Baba’s cave: the laundry chute where he and his brothers sent messages up and down in a basket on a string; the garage smelling of walnut rinds and gasoline; his own room, where the “x” he’d carved with a penknife inside his closet door was there, under layers of paint. How could anyone live here but him? Ames decided, on the spot, to buy this memory palace （he knew the broker, after all） and begin his new life where he’d begun the first.
So Ames moved back into the family house and married and began having kids—filled the living room with rubber balls that had to be kicked aside by visitors approaching the worn-out couch, and the years flew away like calendar pages blown by the wind in old movies, his wife mopping his sweaty brow when he woke up screaming. But there’s a false bottom under this happy ending, a hollowness around the words. Can you hear it? There was no wife （although he did track down Cecily, his childhood crush, online: an unrecognizable mother of four now living in Tucson）。 There were no children except the ones Ames imagined he heard when he sat in his father’s old study: a snuffing and sighing from the hallway that made him wonder if a house somehow retains the memory of everything that has happened inside its walls—in which case three curious boys still prowled outside that office door, their smudged fingers streaking the paint as they listened, listened, for the beating of their father’s heart. There was a point beyond which the trappings of conventional life became hard to assume, and Ames had passed that point. His mother understood. In the kitchen where she’d packed his school lunches thirty years before, they played Scrabble and gin rummy; in the family den, they watched nature shows about puffins and pandas, and she knitted sweaters he actually wore. Even as Susan mourned the life he might have had, she was relieved to have him back and kissed the thinning hair at the crown of his beautiful head each time they said goodbye. And maybe we should end here, at this conjunction of love and sorrow between a mother and her middle son （P2liv）， but that’s too easy—another false bottom—because there’s more.
Four years after his return, in 2027, Ames decided to have the government-implanted weevil removed from his brain. He knew the device was dead—knew, as any insider to the world of intelligence knows, that surveillance requires too many resources to waste on people who don’t matter. Yet he wanted it out. A small surgery with an overnight stay for observation, and then! Rejuvenation! A buoyant renewal that could be explained psychologically, as a by-product of having been cut open and sewn back up. Online forums were crammed with testimonials from former soldiers and spies about the salutary effects of removing defunct weevils to treat depression and PTSD. Among civilians, terror of weevils was rampant in the post-pandemic years, a figment of the mass psychosis that characterized that dark time in American life. Ames spent months designing a low-frequency imaging device. With the help of his cousin Sasha’s husband, Drew, he built a prototype: a machine to salve the dread of paranoids and ease the minds of people who felt unlike themselves; whose dreams had gotten strange; who believed they were being watched from within or used to watch those around them; who could no longer concentrate; and with each stroke of solace （and, a handful of times, detection） he was able to provide, Ames felt a step nearer to absolution.