I sat down at a no-limit Texas Hold ’em table on a Friday evening with $432 to my name. There were eight of us at the table, and as the dealer dealt the first hand, my gunshot wound started throbbing. Compartmentalizing the pain, I began to play.
I observed—even with the better players—the negligible raise of their eyebrows when they caught a great card they weren’t expecting. An imperceptible “sinking inward” when they didn’t. I built equations for each opponent to track their emotional leaks. If Fidel, the guy across from me, saw a card and reacted by exposing greater than ten percent of the whites of his eyes, I knew he had something better than a pair. Twenty percent? I’d fold, unless I thought I had the cards to beat him.
Different players leaked their secrets through different microexpressions.
One woman always gave her nose the slightest wrinkle of disgust when she saw a card that didn’t help her hand. As if it smelled bad.
A young kid’s pulse rate rose above 110 when he bluffed. Every time.
It took a few hands to get a read on each of them, but I quickly cataloged their varying reactions, watching their moods rise and fall with the flop, the turn, the river.
As I played my hands and my chip count grew, I couldn’t help wondering if this was what my mother had felt for most of her adult life. Like she was running, thinking, operating ten times faster than everyone else. I understood how that might build a fa?ade of arrogance, and deeper down, intense isolation. She hadn’t had my ability to emotionally compartmentalize, so the feeling of being apart from everyone—her postdocs, her friends, even her family—must have been crushing.
I left that first night with $1,907, and it felt as good as the first money I’d ever earned mowing lawns for neighbors the summer I turned twelve.
Each night, I went to a different casino.
Slowly rebuilding my treasury.
By the end of the second week, I had eight thousand dollars, and I was playing at more competitive tables. One player even tipped me off to a high-stakes underground game in Rio Rancho.
I moved out of the shelter and left them the biggest donation I could afford. Then I checked into the cheapest motel I could find, which rented rooms by the week.
Played poker at night, and during the day, began the process of building my new identity.
Making one from scratch was beyond my skill set, and I didn’t trust the dark web to provide me with reliable documents.
With my winnings, I bought a laptop and began looking for a very specific person whose identity I could steal.
This person needed to be approximately my age, with a face similar enough to mine so that I could augment my features to fool the ubiquitous facial-recognition AI. They needed to be born in a city that was far from my birth city of Berkeley, California, in a place I had never been and where I knew no one. This person needed to be dead, never married, no children. I needed someone with a light social-media footprint. And ideally, their death needed to have occurred out of the country, in some kind of mass-casualty disaster.
The idea being, if I could find someone who met those criteria, it was unlikely that their individual birth records had been connected to the record of their death. Which meant their identity and the freedom of movement it would afford me was just floating in the bureaucratic ether, there for my taking.
Of course, it would be a daunting search, but I now had the focus and bandwidth to plow through thousands of obituaries in a single evening, my concentration never wavering, not even for a second, as I listened to audiobooks at twice the speed and committed to memory every single word.
When I found this person, I would dig deeper to uncover their date of birth, place of birth, parents’ names, and mother’s maiden name.
Once I had that information, I would find the cheapest office space in Albuquerque, establish it as my residence, and write a letter to the vital records department in my namesake’s state, requesting a new birth certificate.
With a birth certificate and a few letters addressed to my Albuquerque office showing proof of residence, I could get a driver’s license.
Then I could request a new Social Security number.
And after that a passport.
I’d be on my way.
* * *
—
I reached the beach and headed north, making footprints in the cold, waterlogged sand.
The wind howled.
I was starving.
I thought I might walk into town for dinner. Sit at a bar. Order a drink.
The identity I’d found was for a man named Robbie Foster. He was from Duluth, Minnesota, and had lost his life on a trip of a lifetime, when a riverboat caught fire and sank in the middle of the night on the Amazon River in Peru.
I’d built my new identity from his.
Earned enough money gambling to buy a vehicle.
I was becoming known in the small poker community of Albuquerque, which meant it was time to leave.
The desire to go home to Beth and Ava was still present. But rationally I knew that if I let myself go to them, I wouldn’t be ending any pain. I’d only be creating more.
I’d be pulling them into my impossible situation.
I was sure I had earned the secret top spot on the Gene Protection Agency’s most wanted list. They didn’t know it was my sister who had broken me out of the farm, although if they were smart, they might have suspected as much and tried to track her down. But she was just an unsub. And my accomplice. From their perspective, I had killed numerous agents and security contractors, broken out intent on working with my mother to usher in a genetic upgrade for all humankind.
The mere act of letting my family know I was alive would be putting their lives at hazard.
And still—my weakness almost prevailed.
I only wanted to ease their pain, to let them know I was alive.
* * *
—
It seemed like such a small act.
But my way back to my family, my way home, was not through the front door of our house. Only through finding and stopping Kara, through putting the Ramsay curse to rest, could I ever go home again.
At least that’s what I told myself. But a deeper, harder, more painful truth had already begun to whisper itself to me.
Maybe you’ve already flown too far from home. Maybe there is no way back.
* * *
—
I was on the move.
Nomadic.
I went to parts of the country I had never seen.
The Ozarks.
The White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Seeing America from the road—the out-of-the-way places, the backwaters, the Main Streets—was a profound experience. I understood our collective suffering now in a new light. The empty storefronts and barren shelves. The hard and hopeless stares from front porches I drove past.
There was a stark unevenness to the quality of life.
You could stand in downtown D.C. and think you were living in the bright and shining future. Then drive to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, which had been hit by two cat 7 hurricanes in the last decade and left with no economy to speak of, and wonder how people found the will to go on.
In too many places, there was just grim survival.
And beneath it: rage.
I could’ve stayed in one place, but my curiosity pulled me on down the road.
I spent a month on a lake in Wisconsin, where the light of my lonely summer evenings stretched past ten o’clock, the water like glass until a fish leaped and the sun lingering, lingering—a guest who wouldn’t leave.