Someone jumped off the bridge one evening when Rhea witnessed it. Her arm was still in a sling, and she had gone downstairs to the alleyway when she saw a man on top of the structure. She walked out to the street just as he jumped. A sickening crack erupted as the man's body contacted the cement. He lay still on the ground, slumped awkwardly between the sidewalk and the street, still wet from a passing storm. She approached the corpse, legs bent like broken tree branches, and a bleeding head turned to the side. Rings in his eyebrows and bleeding lips were all she could make out of the crushed expression. The dogs got to him first.
A car swerved into a puddle and sprayed murky rainwater onto her, laughter coming from the vehicle. Rhea didn't bother changing, entering the bar in her wet form and sitting down at the counter where Delton stood, impulsively wiping the surface again; impulsively needing to do something with his hands. Upon this detection, Rhea gave him the Rubik's cube, which she had obtained at the flea market. He had accepted it casually, not expecting to use it, but found himself toying with it more and more. Rhea offered to show him the trick to completion, but he enjoyed using his own logistics to move the pieces. It was now a permanent companion stuffed at the bottom of his pocket. A new face had covered Nikos' picture: Fedelmid Timotei; eyebrows and lips lined with piercings—six million rupiahs.
"I feel I need to apologize again," Rhea said to Delton, "for your car. I know it meant a lot to you."
"It was unfixable until you came along. I pushed it past its lifeline."
"Are you going to get another one?"
"Cars here are hard to find. But I'll keep my eye out."
"You can always buy a piece of shit and I can fix it up for you."
Delton smirked. "I will keep that in mind."
Keith entered the bar—already wasted as shown by the loose movements of arms and legs—and took a seat next to Rhea. Keith, unlike Mirek, was a relaxed drunk who could lose control of his movements fast, but it took a lot of alcohol to affect his mind. With a freshly poured glass of Bacardi in hand, he turned to Rhea.
"You look a little better," he stated.
She nodded. Everything was hard with one arm, and since she was left-handed that made everything all the more a pain in the ass.
"How's work?" she asked.
"It's…good. I mean, how good can it be? Took over a cargo ship to gather data on their shipment courses and containments, and Mirek killed one of the crew members. We were all kind of disappointed since he'd had everything under control for a while. I hate it when he goes off like that. Madmen. Thought I'd be able to leave them behind, but everywhere I go, the maniacs follow."
"What do you mean?" Rhea asked, good elbow perched on the counter. "Where does it follow you from?"
"Home, I guess."
"Where's that?"
"Grand Lepic: a small town a little east of Whitehorse."
"What did you do there in a place as remote as that?"
"I was a hunter. Quite a good one too. I researched and surveyed every inch of game territory within a fifty-mile radius, using GSI techniques to create digital maps of the best spots for various game. But it wasn't easy work; that far north with frost threatening to snatch your fingers and toes and storms that can last days if not weeks. My mother was not from the north. She liked warm weather and long days in California. But after she got pregnant with me, my father insisted on marriage and brought her to his home beyond the Canadian border. I remember her as a pale woman with a stony face. She never really smiled, not even when she looked at me.
"I never found a problem with the cold. I spent time outside, getting to know the frigid environment I called my home. I was thirteen when a storm drove my mother over the edge. We were stuck inside for three weeks. My father liked to occupy his mind with books, and I would use the time to learn languages like Python and Java on my PC. My mother made clothing. Jackets, hats, hoodies, sweaters, scarves, vests, ponchos; anything to help keep us warm. She was always afraid my father and I would freeze every time he took me hunting. She had been making wool hats for days, hardly moving, scarcely eating, her hands beginning to shake like an onset of essential tremor. My father tried to comfort her, but he had never been the gentle type. She'd cry at night, then sneak out of her room to knit in the living room, then go to the bathroom to cry again, then sit for seven hours with her eyes on the window where there was nothing but white. 'It's like we're trapped in a lifeless void,' she'd say to me. 'Just emptiness, we might as well be dead. Maybe we are dead.' She would complain about how she missed the sun. 'Have you ever seen a summer day on the Santa Cruz coast?' she'd ask me. 'All you've known has been the cold. You're so lucky you are not cursed with the knowledge of what real warmth feels like. If you felt it, you'd never want to come back here.' I'd try to keep her warm with my own heat. I liked curling up with her in wool blankets, telling her things weren't that bad. I tried to tell her how happy I was there, how I wanted her to be happy too. And then, one morning, she was not in her chair in the living room; not in bed with my father; not weeping in the bathroom or gazing out the window. I couldn't find her anywhere. My father panicked, but the storm was still raging. We thought it impossible she would leave; open that door to the white oblivion and disappear. But she was nowhere in the house.
"The sun came out four days later, and when skies cleared and snow settled, we asked around town, but no one had seen my mother. I found her frozen body one hundred and seventeen meters from our house, cracked and curved in a huddled ball.
"My father didn't know how to cope. He may not have been passionate, but he loved my mother, and he was riddled with guilt. He stopped hunting, stopped leaving the cabin, stopped bathing, and eating. I had to work him through every movement. I took on the role of parent, my father having reverted to the role of the helpless child. I remembered what my father taught me, and learned from my experiences. Moose, caribou, bighorn sheep, pumas, bobcats, wolverines; I brought them all down. It was around then that I had also been introduced to the dark web, where I was paid a great deal as a hired hacker to attack other computers and sold usernames and passwords to buyers. I did whatever I could to keep me and my futile father afloat. All he ever did anymore was read."
Keith's eyes were swimming with recollection as he continued.
"I also had a best friend named Jean-Jacques (I called him JJ). He liked to drink and hunt, often at the same time. But he was an excellent tracker. I'd lead us to an area my mapping suggested as popular grazing spots, and he would go to work. He was good at thinking like an animal and connecting evidence; he'd find prints, snapped limbs, scattered rocks. His eyes were that of a hawk, and when I went out with him our trips were always fruitful. One day, he did too well a job and led us into the den of a mother grizzly. I wanted to flee, but JJ was entranced. 'I want her head on my wall,' he said. He had been drinking a lot, and I couldn't hold him back. The grizzly came at him, JJ with his gun in the air and prepared to fire. He made one slim shot on her shoulder before she reached him, and just about ripped him to shreds until he managed a bullet in her skull. I carried his disfigured form the fifteen miles back to town. I don't know how he hung on so long. 'I'll kill her, I'll kill her,' he sobbed over and over. It was the only way I knew he was still alive. He was in the hospital for months. He worked hard to heal himself, and the day after he was discharged, he went back out into the terrain in search of the grizzly mother. 'I'll kill her and her cubs,' JJ hissed at me when I tried to stop him. That was the last day I saw him."
"What happened to your father?"
"I don't know. One day I woke up and he was gone. I thought for sure I'd find him frozen in the same position my mother had been. But there was no corps to be found. None of his things were gone, and both cars were still in the garage. I waited five days for him to return. When he didn't, I packed as little as I needed and disappeared like my father and JJ. Wherever he is now, dead or alive I do not know."
"Do you want to?"
"No. In those last few years leading up to his disappearance I began to grow disdain towards him. He just sat in his chair, not even reading anymore, letting his mind corrode. I'd yell at him to get off his lazy ass. To do something with himself, instead of behaving like a piece of furniture. I yelled at him a lot. When I realized he was gone, it was like a massive bolder lifted off my chest."
"I know what it's like to lose family. I did what I could to keep it together, but some things can be out of our control."
Keith gave a soft smile. Rhea tried to picture him in camo getup, rifle over his shoulder as he trekked through Canadian wilderness. She could see it if she thought hard enough. But Keith was a compassionate soul, and like her he tried to avoid taking life. "Family is never easy," he said, "woven into our lives since the beginning. They control how we develop. And sometimes results are flawed."
"It's all flawed. Everyone is messed up."
He nodded and swallowed his drink.