Sing A New Song

Javier was getting sick of hearing Lev say the same thing over and over again.

The steady rise and fall of picks biting in the earth offered a rhythmic solace; handling the shovel, working deeper into the soil with a pick in his now-calloused hands, gave Javier as much of an outlet for his fury and grief as his weakened body would allow. Even the taunts and threats of the guards, uttered in voices that crackled with contempt, had taken on a certain regularity that, folded into the rest of the noise generated by workers and machines and dogs, was almost musical.

But Lev insisted on uttering his discordant notes at the wrong tempo.

In better days, that might have been what they once called a First World Problem. Javier - the son of a third-world migrant - was lucky to have ever had First World problems. When he was very young, his parents had promised him great things. They were in America, after all, a place where those who worked hard would be rewarded - a place where anyone could grow up to be president. Before he started high school, however, new anti-immigrant laws had curtailed his prospects sharply. Even though Javier had been born on American soil, he lost his citizenship to the only country he'd ever known, thanks to new policies championed by the Theopublican. The law no longer made a distinction between Javier's Honduras-born parents and himself, born in San Diego. Things had gotten steadily worse since then - and a lot worse since the election. In the last fourteen months, what little opportunity there remained had vanished, leaving only punishment in its wake.

Javier had not grown up to be president. He hadn't even been allowed to go to college. He, like his father, became a day laborer. He built apartment complexes; he worked as a hand pollinator in California's great agricultural fields; at one point he even took security jobs in sports arenas, before jobs in security and law enforcement required government clearance and so dried up for anyone who was not white, heterosexual, and ostensibly Christian. Javier was none of those things, and though he might have tried passing he knew that the technical aspects of such a deceit were well beyond him. Besides, he didn't think he'd have the patience for such a life of deception. He went back to day labor construction and demolition gigs. His career choices turned out to be useful; he was better off than many in the camp, thanks to his skill set, his ability to work hard, and his youth.

As long as he remained strong and kept his wits about him, Javier might survive. Already he'd outlasted... how many others? Hundreds? Thousands? Old faces disappeared and new ones swam into focus all the time. In the yard, the laborers looked alike, sounded alike, suffered alike - and yet there was a steady process of replacement, as some collapsed and then disappeared and others wasted away before simply dropping out of the herd. At the day's single mealtime - if one wanted to dignify their miserable, thin rations with the fiction that they constituted a meal - a circle of companions was always wavering, rippling with departures and arrivals. Bullies would show up to try to take food from others; haunted, vacant-eyed men would flicker into their midst and then, before long, simply seem to evaporate. In the bunkhouse, a stranger could suddenly take the rough, unfinished wood palette that a familiar man once occupied, and that stranger might no sooner become familiar than he would be replaced in turn. That was life in the camp. It was a surreal haze of repetition interrupted only by terror and pain.

The work camp outside Decatur, like dozens of similar camps around the country, was supposedly a detention facility for "undocumented" people, a classification that could mean anything. For Javier - and thousands like him - what it meant was that his birth certificate, driver's license, and tax card had been summarily revoked. That made Javier "undocumented" by definition, but politicians used the word to suggest that he and others were in the country illegally. That being the case, they were automatically considered to be criminals. Sometimes Javier reflected on how every "criminal" he knew was brown or black, or had a Hispanic surname, or spoke with an accent. Conversely, the camps guards and administrators - the "real Americans" who had been allowed to retain citizenship - were uniformly white.

But the camp's overall complexion had been lightening up quite a lot lately. Latinx Americans were among the first to face mass arrest, but as wave after wave of raids, detentions, and internments followed both blacks and whites had been caught up - first African Americans but then, increasingly, Anglos. The trains and buses brought hundreds more prisoners each day, and with every fresh arrival of convicts there were more people of white European descent: People who had spoken up, acted out, advocated for the downtrodden, sought relief in illicit drugs or forbidden literature, or made use of technology that had been outlawed.

They, too, were now "undocumented." Among them were people of faith who had the bad luck not to belong to the dominant Protestant denominations, and who had refused to renounce their deeply-held beliefs in order to survive. The new "Freedom of Faith" laws provided harsh penalties for those who clung to their old beliefs. That was Lev's story, and Lev told it, with minor variations, a dozen times each day, his voice a mutter punctuated by the sound of his pick tearing into the soil, making the great hole wider, longer, deeper: A hole that would swallow them up, their bones the foundation of a brand new prison complex.

Javier had heard Lev's recitation more times than he could count over the last two... or was it three?... months. Anyone whose faith had not been documented beforehand was required to register and declare a religious conviction. The rules were simple, and brutal: One accusatory report from a certified believer, or even a cleric's refusal to sign off on a person's credentials, and they'd lose citizenship, freedom, and perhaps their life. Lev was a known Jew; he wasn't even given the choice offered to atheists and agnostics. He was simply declared an enemy of the American faith tradition. That was how he had ended up here, a "fake American" who had to be penned up lest he pose a threat to "Authentic Americans" with his treasonous and spiritually contaminating religious views.

As Lev told it, in his ceaseless monotone mutterings, he had pleaded with his businessman father, Nathaniel, to vote for Emily Crenshaw. But Nathaniel, like so many others, focused on the economic message Winfield Kirsch offered. According to Kirsch, Authentic Americans - the people who did the work, the people who created the wealth that was pocketed by others - those Authentic Amerians had been abused and plundered for too many generations. When Kirsch spoke of the "fake Americans" working to undermine values of liberty and patriotism, Nathaniel failed to hear what Kirsch's white, Christian supporters heard: A condemnation of non-Anglos; an accusation leveled at non-neogelicals; a threat made against anyone whose doctrine was not that of economic selfishness and brittle moral rectitude. Somehow, Nathaniel didn't see himself as counting among the "faith traitors" and "fiscal predators" that filled Kirsch's fiery speeches. Javier could sympathize; his own family included many small businessmen and -women, industrious denizens of virtual commerce. They, too, were blinded by Kirsch's happy talk of prosperous days to come; they, too, failed to understand that when Kirsch talked about "the enemy," or "the interlopers," or "the living stain" that polluted pure bloodlines, he was talking about them.

Such labels were abundant and easily applied. Javier wondered how long it would take for Authentic Americans to turn out to be in short supply. Kirsch's government had access to the most comprehensive archive of a nation's deeds and doings that had ever existed -- decades' worth of permanently preserved phone conversations, FacePalm postings, Interweb chat forums, PicStic shares, video uploads, text messages, purchase records... not to mention the geosat and RIFD implant logs that traced and tracked everyone's physical whereabouts. A person's values and opinions were there to be read in bold declarations made on social media, or teased out of browser histories and shopping records. And porn tracking... above all, porn tracking. What you said in public might differ dramatically from where you went online in the middle of a lonely night...

What the metadata analysts couldn't uncover, they could fabricate with just one or two invented details. Who you were, what you believed, who you found sexually attractive, what your ideals might be - nothing was private any longer. Everyone's thoughts and feelings were subject to official review, any impulse toward privacy was a matter of keeping secrets, and secrets were viewed as suspect.

No one could run. No one could hide. And from what Javier had pieced together - from snatches of overheard conversations among the guards and news of the outside brought in by fresh detainees - the government's deep dive into that enormous trove, and the metadata it allowed technicians to assemble, was making criminals out of more or less everyone. Complex patterns were emerging, it seemed, of loyalties, payoffs, and other criteria to determine who, among the universally guilty, would be on permanent probation, and who would be sent to the camps.

Javier hadn't really seen this coming, but Lev had - or so he claimed, in his horse, mumbled narrative. Lev suffered nightmares with increasing frequencies, his terrifying dreams becoming more and more details and realistic. Eventually his night visions leaked into his days and he would have hallucinations - or presentiments - of the life he was living now, a life in captivity and forced labor. Lev's father had advised him to see a psychiatrist; quit drinking; get a haircut. And two months after the election, as the new administration was making sweeping changes, aggregating power, and marginalizing the courts, Nathaniel had died of a heart attack. Lev's recitation varied with each telling, but the final verse was always the same: "The son of a bitch died without ever having to face the consequences of his vote. He left that to me. He left others to suffer for his only true sin." The overarcing theme of Lev's mantra was the injustice meted out by all paternal figures, from his father to the state to God Himself.

Lev had, for some reason, attached himself to Javier as soon as he'd arrived, but he seemed utterly traumatized. Lev never said a word to anyone, though he muttered to himself constantly. Javier knew Lev only as "Jew" for four solid days before learning his name, because that was how the guards addressed him.

There was a curious caste system at work in the camp. The guards seemed to label all whites with a certain ideological class of offense, calling them out as Catholics, unionists, atheists and scientists, university professors and "social justice warriors. People of color, on the other hand, were tagged with other labels: The guards called them drug fiends, gang members, thieves and arsonists and stone-cold killers. Those labels served as names. No one was a person here. Everyone was a vice, a crime, or a perversion, and that was how the guards addressed the prisoners. "Hey, Druggie! You better step it up!" "Come here, Pusher!" "Faggot!" "Feminist!" "Raghead!" "Commie!"

Some days Javier dreaded having to hear Lev's same old song. Other days he scarcely noticed. But today - today of all days, when the most arrogant and sadistic of the guards, Strohmeier, had chosen to linger in their work area - Lev had begun to sing a different tune. As the day wore on, Javier's anxiety grew sharper and his heart became heavier than the shovelfuls of earth he threw and the wheelbarrow he trundled. Any change in the camp's rhythms heralded disaster; Javier, superstitious, saw Lev's new screed as a hex and an invitation to catastrophe.

Lev's mutterings jolted out of him a few words at a time as he wielded the pick, and seemed, as ever, to proceed from some other, distant place - as though Lev's body and his mind were light years apart, and the words nothing more than a kind of dim static, vestigial and ghostly after a long transit across the void. But in place of the well-worn story of his feckless father, now Lev was telling a tale of himself. More, he seemed to be talking about things that hadn't happened, things as they should have been. After hours of half hearing Lev's whispered monologue, Javier came to understand that he was telling a tale about parallel worlds. That, too, worried Javier. He'd seen plenty of others lose their minds and erupt into screaming, thrashing frenzies - outbursts quickly extinguished by the guards with their ever-ready guns. Encomiums about alternate realities seemed likely to be a prelude to just such a meltdown. Javier didn't relish the thought of standing next to someone who went howling, shrieking mad and drew a hail of bullets their way. Fate and chance could cut with a scythe, Javier thought, just as easily as with a scalpel.

Frightening as the occasional screaming frenzy might be, the opposite was even worse. Javier had also seen men slowly, slowly glaze over, retreating into sluggishness and silence until they simply stopped moving, or toppled over in a catatonic state, or stood blankly, not flinching as guards shouted and cursed in their direction, screamed into their faces, delivered a backhand or a punch to the face... not even blinking as a guard would finally raise a weapon and discharge it, at point blank range, into their foreheads. Strohmeier, even more than the others, was always eager to deal out what he referred to as "third eye justice."

Javier kept a wary eye on Strohmeier's whereabouts as he listened with growing anxiety to Lev's quiet, erratic monologue. "Cold spots," Lev grunted between swings of the pick. "We know they're out there... we've found them... places where our universe... rubs up against... against other universes... " His pick swung, bit into the hard ground. "...points of contact... the primal heat... of our realm... bleeding away into... into others... into more ancient realities... places where physics... might not be the same..." His eyes glazed, his face expressionless, Lev swung the pick tirelessly, mechanically, and yet his story possessed animation, conviction. "...divergent outcomes... collapsing wave functions... newly born strands... of time and causality... all outcomes realized... as real as this one..."

Javier watched with quick, uneasily glances as Strohmeier paused near a group of three men trying to roll a huge rock. The guard commenced to scream at the prisoners for their criminal lack of effort, and when he yanked his sidearm out of its holster Javier was certain that someone's brains were about to splash across the great stone. But Strohmeier pistol-whipped one of the men instead, and after the prisoner fell Strohmeier kicked and stomped him, then walked away from the unmoving form to another group of laboring men. With curses and threats, Strohmeier ordered them to join the first group in the task of removing the boulder.

Strohmeier's course kept him away from Javier and Lev for most of the day, which seemed a kindly turn of chance. Meantime, Javier heard, in bits and pieces, all about Lev's work in radio astronomy. Javier realized that Lev was a physicist - in fact, he was a cosmologist. Javier could almost follow Lev's free-form commentary about separate, distinct universes bobbing around in a multi-dimensional cosmos, and how even in this universe a multitude of potential realities co-existed, twining about one another, histories that branched and varied, split apart and rejoined... or sometimes shot off at wild tangents, unsustainable, destined to evaporate...

Javier had been a fan of popular science. It was part of the reason his family thought he might go to college - that, and his gift for music. Javier had excelled in school, had devoured the classroom material, had even paid visits to the decrepit library that was open for a few hours three days a week. He'd scoured the Interweb looking for episodes of an old television show about science and the cosmos... in fact, it was called "Cosmos," and there were three different versions of the show, made at roughly thirty-year intervals. If the world were a little different, it occurred to him, it would have been just about time for a fourth version. Javier had spent months trying to find all the episodes of each of the three "Cosmos" series, but it wasn't easy. Scientific material had been banned online ever since the introduction of the Religious Incitement Laws.

Still, Javier had pressed on. But his hobby had come to an end - along with his freedom, along with everything else familiar - early one morning when a gang of uniformed men flooded the corridors of the apartment building where Javier lived with his family. Javier had woken up early and was surfing the Interweb on an old laptop. His family members slept in two rooms; their still forms were around him, discernible in cold pre-dawn twilight. Then, all of a sudden, a ruckus: Men wearing black body armor swarming in, doors smashed in, chaotic shouts, weapons fire...

Weapons fire. The men and their guns. Always the dogs and the gas grenades and the guns. Javier had seen his own grandmother, startled and leaping to her feet, cut down by a masked man covered head to toe in body armor, as if Abuela, with her frail wrists and weary, veined hands, could possibly do anything to harm him. The man came barging into the room, weapon blazing - flashes of light that stitched bleeding holes in her thin, starved body. Javier had thought he would be next, and he wondered, as the man with the automatic weapon stepped toward him, demanding that he kneel and put his hands on his head, whether it had been his online search for episodes of "Cosmos" that had drawn the men here. Surely his grandmother, who only used the computer to find recipes and religious texts, would not have provoked their wrath.

Of course, Javier understood - after he regained consciousness; when the men in the deportation and detention center started to speak to him in Spanish, which he didn't speak very well; when they asked him about his green card and his immigration status, things they could easily have looked up - he understood that people of his complexion, with ethnic names like his own, could have looked up anything online, or nothing at all, and it wouldn't have mattered. Even then he'd been struck by how pale all the officers were, how their light skin and blue eyes stood out against their bulky black uniforms...

Javier shifted his thoughts away from those unhappy memories and tried to focus on something more melodious and pleasing. Sadness only drained what little energy a man possessed in the camp; Javier had learned that early on. It was better to recall, or to craft, a bright tune, something to sustain one through the grueling day.

Lev's mutterings went on: "Every choice, every option... explored and fulfilled... just because we live here... doesn't mean this is the only... only thing we're doing... the only path... that opened to us..."

Yes, yes, Javier thought, not interrupting his work. To pause was to invite a guard's attention, and that could lead to hours of harassment... or beatings... or, if the guard happened to be Strohmeier, summary execution.

"You hit a decision... decision point where it's... it's live or die, well... of course you live... you think you live... no version of you continues... into the realm where... where you die... But when it comes... to other things... like elections... like who won that... that last election, well... why am I stuck here?... In some other... version of events... Crenshaw beat Kirsch... I mean, she did anyway... if you heard the news... the free news, the... the nonpartisan news... before they shut it down... poisoned journalists... they reported... Crenshaw beat Kirsch by six... by six million... by six million votes, but... the electoral college... they handed it over to... to their boy... But in some other... version of events... some reality not... not our own, it's... it's President Crenshaw, and... and we're still free..."

Lev was working harder now, faster. That was almost as bad as working too slowly. He was going to draw a Strohmeier's eye, a dangerous thing no matter what the reason. He was also going to wear himself out and be unable to endure until the end of their fourteen-hour work day, a day Javier was sure would be even longer if the camp had more guards to keep watch over their slave labor.

But then Lev seemed to pull himself together. His work returned to the regular pace and he kept silent for a while, catching his breath even as he continued to heft the pick, bring it down, haul it aloft, bring it down again...

Javier wondered what Lev thought about as he wordlessly worked his pick. Were his labors divorced from his monologue? Was his mind really so separated from his body that the mechanical labor of his muscles continued even while his musings flew in circles?

When Javier worked the pick, imagined putting its steel point though the face of the masked man who had killed his grandmother. Sometimes he imagined bringing the pick down on Strohmeier's skull. Other guards called Javier detestable, racist names in a bored tone, as though the words meant nothing; not Strohmeier, who used not only racist slurs but also sick, insane accusations. "Hey, rapist," he'd greeted Javier a few days ago. "You shit-crawling little rapist worm," he'd gone on to say, before painting an elaborate fantasy involving white women and raucously, supernaturally energetic men of Javier's ethnic background.

That was enough to fuel Javier's rage and spark an especially upbeat, driving melody in his imagination. When he began to tire again, Javier summoned the root of all the evils that beset him: Kirsch. He visualized the body of the president... the dictator, really, since there were not going to be any more elections... yes, he imagined Kirsch sprawled before him, staring up in horror as the pick hove in an arc of blurred speed, its savage momentum aimed toward Kirsch's malice-filled heart...

"So why am I here?" Lev started up again, suddenly, working his pick without a change in rhythm. "Why am I here?... If there are so... so many parallel... threads of history... cause and effect... patterns of event and... and outcome... why am I here?... When some other... other version of me... is living in... in that other place... where Crenshaw won... and Kirsch went down... and we're still free?... It's not a matter... of what I want... I don't want to be here... I want to be there... in that other place... that other place... that other place..."

Lev fell silent again and didn't speak up for the rest of the day.

Later - much later - in the bunkhouse, Javier watched Lev, who lay on a nearby palette, staring up into nothingness, frowning, seeming to be working something out. Some equation? Some ethical problem that explained his plight?

It wasn't as though Javier hadn't thought, on fleeting occasions, along the same lines himself, wondering about the theory of parallel worlds and all possible outcomes being actualized, with infinite universes the result. In some edition of reality, Javier thought, he did go to college, he did study math and music, he did explore the intuition he'd always had that at some level the two disciplines were really one - the proportions of music, so gorgeous to the ear, existing in the ghostly plane of numbers, too - a music of the spheres, so to speak.

But that was all a fantasy, Javier thought. Even if it were real, it was like God: Removed, meaningless, impossible to know or touch, and really - was this cynical of him? - none of his business. He was here, in this horrible nightmare, and however it had happened this was the way it was. He had to deal with the here and now, not go chasing off into some imaginary place of wishes and would-haves.

Javier settled back onto his palette. There was no electricity in the bunkhouse, but the bright lights that flooded the complex provided illumination within the four hastily assembled walls. The windows were nothing more than large square holes, holding no panes of glass to keep out cold or damp, just strands of razor wire. The leaky, minimal roof also allowed light to seep in. It was more than bright enough in the bunkhouse to see every man, and clearly discern nearby faces. Javier stared into the thin shadows and tried to imagine the alternatives he thought Lev was summoning in his mind.

That was where madmen went, Javier thought. That was where the men went who frosted over and slowed down and eventually died - some alternate reality where they still had homes and families, jobs, a place in the world. Where they still had names, and were not reduced to a catalogue of imagined crimes. That's where they went... a family, a snug little house with a green lawn, with sun and life and a decent blanket. That's where they went... in their minds.

Javier shut his eyes, feeling himself sliding into sleep. He hoped not to dream of the men who smashed their way into his home, murdered his grandmother, terrorized and herded his family, stole his life and his freedom. He hoped not to dream of parallel worlds where he played brisk etudes and gentle love songs to young men like himself, with glossy black hair and playful, dark eyes - the men he'd grown up admiring, the men he had always wanted. This world was the real world, and all he wanted was to escape it in sleep. Not pretty visions... sleep. True darkness, rest and respite.

***

Weeks passed and Lev's new song was beginning to grate as badly as his old one had. His rasping, vague lyric was plaintive and distant, but distinct: Why was he here, in a world where such evil flourished, where men so artfully and artificially distinguished others from themselves and then punished them for it? Why was he not in some other world, a world of light and liberty? He wanted it badly enough that he should be there. He wasn't one of these soulless men who'd simply surrendered, who'd said of Kirsch and the Theopublicans, "Give it a chance," and "Let's see what happens," right up to the moment they sank into mental quicksand and disappeared, leaving only their bodies, shuffling and tentative, to wander the earth. Lev had passion! He had conviction!

His body and face betrayed no such fire, but the words, even muttered and only vaguely audible, were charged, and his work was metronomic and unceasing. Lev's pick thudded with a vengeance into the earth, and the earth absorbed his rage and anguish, absolved him of his foolish ramblings and the enraged tears that sometimes cut silent tracks through the grime on his face.

The great hole grew larger. Soon the sprawled mass of laborers in their thousands would be shoveling and raking concrete. Then building walls, ceilings... creating a huge prison they might not even live to inhabit...

Meantime, there were mutterings among the guards, too, more varied and interesting than Joshua's litany. They weren't getting paid, hadn't gotten paid in over two weeks. Strohmeier, of all people, went so far as to say that Kirsch had made him hopeful again, given him back pride in being white, in being a man; he'd hoped Kirsch would do great things, bold things, like Hitler and Trump before him... but, Strohmeier added bitterly, Hitler had made the trains run on time, and even Trump - that crass idiot - had made sure the police and military had gotten paid, even before they were merged into the same uniformed cadre.

Javier was shocked to hear a guard, even the brash, swaggering Strohmeier, openly say such things. A few days later he was shocked again when he realized that among the new internees was a pale, well-fleshed fellow who seemed familiar despite his newly-shaven head... it took Javier a few moments to place him: It was none other than Strohmeier, now one of the luckless inmates he'd once cursed and thrashed. Javier wondered how long Strohmeier would survive in his new surroundings. Both guards and internees hated him like poison, were going to be gunning for him... and though guards were the only ones who had actual guns, a construction site was an inherently dangerous place where accidents of all kinds could happen, accidents that guards who didn't care about detainees wouldn't much care to look into. Even away from the work site there were plenty of detainees who had figured out how to fashion crude weapons from scavenged or stolen materials.

Sure enough, it was only a few days before Strohmeier ended up dead, his bloodied body simply seeming to materialize in the middle of the workday. Had a guard done him in? Or had some vengeful prisoner? The body lay a fair distance away and Javier couldn't see it too well; he might not even have noticed it, so minimal was the uproar - just a brief gathering of three or four guards who didn't seem much perturbed. Then a cart took the corpse away and that was that - no more Strohmeier. Javier didn't feel like making inquiries about his fate, and no one volunteered any information. Even the ever-industrious rumor mill was silent on the matter.

But Strohmeier's fate still exerted a kind of dampening effect. There was less chatter from the guards after that - certainly no one was going to offer an opinion about a lack of payment, not now - and for days there was a tension over the camp that even Lev seemed to pick up on. He still muttered, but even more quietly; even when Javier stood right next to Lev, straining to help shift a large rock, he could only hear the hard click of consonants and pick out the occasional syllable. He couldn't make out whole words.

After a few weeks the mood shifted and settled into its usual place, and Lev's monologue - never loud, by any means - shifted on his palate, drew forward in his mouth, and eased from his lips. Swallowed words were now out in the air once again, and Javier noted that Lev had taken up a new riff on the question of how and why he was here, in this purgatorial existence, rather than in some preferred reality.

"Studies proved it... experiments showed it... human subjects... just by concentrating... could shift the flow... flow of electrons... affect the spin of... of particles... could influence prob... probability, so... so if I... so if I wish it... hard enough, or if... if I imagine it... with enough detail... hold enough particles... in my mind, their... their spin and pattern... their energy states... the reality they... they represent... if I identify how... how to spin the particles... how to shift... shift the quantum state... of the world I'm... I'm trapped in... if I find the... cold spot... turn myself at... at just the... right angle... trust and feel... imagine and intuit... my mind can... remake the outcome... I don't have to... to be here... I'm just a placeholder... this new reality... isn't set yet... it's still hardening... maybe, maybe... a placeholder... anyone... anyone could be... be here instead... "

Javier wasn't so sure about that. But he was certain that any guard overhearing this line of thought would execute Lev on the spot, and maybe Javier too. Strohmeier was dead and gone, but there were more like him among the guards these days - more all the time, as sociopaths found their way into the ranks and decent men lost their moral footing. That night, as Lev lay awake nearby whispering inaudibly to himself, Javier slid off his own palette and made his way across the floor. He sidled onto Joshua's palette, cozied up next to him, and whispered in his own nearly inaudible tone of voice:

"You listen to me, and you listen good for your own sake, you stupid son of a bitch. You're gonna get us killed with all that fairy tale talk about some other reality where Crenshaw won. You're fucking whacko if you think you can wish yourself into some imaginary alternate universe. Even if it exists, you're stuck here. You think if I could be somewhere else by wishing real hard that I would still be here? But here I am. We're both stuck here. We're probably going to die, and the only thing you can do to change that outcome... maybe... is keep your head down, keep your pick swinging, and keep your trap shut. You read me? Am I coming through to you?"

Lev didn't look at him, but his muttering stopped. He was silent, except for his breathing, which was slow and metronomic. Had he fallen asleep? - with Javier upbraiding him, actually fallen asleep right in the middle of it?

"Clear the static out of your mixed-up mind, damn you," Javier whispered.

Lev remained silent a moment more, then said - in a soft, but perfectly normal tone of voice - "I'm not crazy. The world is crazy. If I find the way to do it - just in my thoughts - I can think the world into straight lines and sense again. It can all make sense."

"Friend, you can make sense by keeping quiet," Javier said, and then sidled away.

The following day, though he worked as hard as ever, Lev said nothing. A week passed; two weeks; Lev labored in silence. Javier wondered if Lev was now fixated on the things that Javier had whispered to him. Maybe he was planning revenge on Javier? He never looked at Javier - but then, he never had. He'd never looked Javier in the eye or said a world to him directly, except for that night when Javier delivered his warning.

Javier pondered the thought that he had snuffed the one thing Lev had to hold on to. Had he? Had he quenched Lev's only spark of hope with his harsh comments? He considered saying something - something to mitigate his earlier words; but what would he say? Please go back to your ravings? Please start muttering nonsense again, nonstop nonsense that you repeat over and over until I could strangle you myself? Better to say nothing, leave the situation as it was. Even so, Javier kept an eye on Lev, looking for any trace of the sluggishness that marked out the men who'd disappeared so far into despair they never returned. But Lev never seemed sluggish: He struggled as hard as anyone to keep working on the minimal calories their rations provided, but he didn't seem to be drifting vacantly the way the doomed men did.

Then Lev vanished - suddenly, completely, like so many of the other men had. One morning, guards and their dogs rousing the inmates as they did every day - with shouts and curses and hard blows dealt out using the butts of their automatic weapons - Javier awoke and pulled himself stiffly off his palette and into an upright posture on rough planks of the bunk house floor. He looked for Lev and didn't see him. But he did see some other man rolling swiftly off Lev's palette - some new kid, someone who still had enough energy in his body to move quickly.

Had something happened in the night? New arrivals? A cull of the prisoners? That didn't make sense. Apart from the one new kid, everyone in the bunkhouse seemed the same. And culls didn't happen with any stealth: They were nosy, disruptive episodes by design, intended to shock internees anew and remind them of their place. Had Lev made an escape attempt? He surely would never have made it out of the compound. But he might have made it to another bunkhouse... had he and this new kid switched places for some reason?

Javier thought back to Lev's wild ramblings about other realities, about wanting to somehow magically shift himself out of this world and into some other variant on the universe. Had he, in his delusion, stumbled into the night? Had he, in his foolish, blind good fortune, made his way unnoticed and unharmed to some other bunkhouse? Had he displaced this kid, who seemed like a newcomer and who might have been so confused that he agreed to leave his own bunkhouse and make his way back to Lev's? Did Lev, wherever he was, now fancy himself in that other, better world, that alternate world of peace and sanity presided over by Emily Crenshaw? What would Winfield Kirsch be doing in such a world?

Javier waited for the guards to discover the substitution. He dreaded the retaliation they might take against the bunkhouse inmates as a group. That fool, Lev! Had he no sense of what everyone else would suffer as he pursued his own mad fantasies?

But the guards made no mention of it. They didn't seem to notice. They simply herded everyone out to the construction site as they always did, and the daily routine began - grueling and tedious for detainees and guards alike, Javier thought to himself. At least, he couldn't imagine that these men who found themselves in charge actually enjoyed the work they were doing... not because he doubted their cruelty, their sadism, or their malice, but because guarding slave laborers was dreary and dull and it must have been draining, just as the hard labor of digging the foundation for the new prison complex was draining, especially when the work went so slowly because detainees were not allowed to operate heavy machinery.

Once in the pit, his pick and his shovel in hand, Javier situated himself in the same spot as the previous day and resumed his labor. He watched for Lev, but Lev did not appear. He wondered whether the new kid would take Lev's place, but that didn't happen, either; nobody seemed to take Lev's place. Workers were scattered all over the site, and it was possible that Lev had been dispatched to some other area or tapped to perform some other job. Wherever he was, Javier didn't catch so much as a glimpse of him.

Over the coming days, as Lev remained disappeared, Javier resigned himself to the thought that, however it had happened, Lev had been taken away and... and what? Executed? Buried, or interred in concrete in one of the other foundations for smaller structures that were already in later stages of construction? Or... Javier's mind flashed to the huge industrial microwave incinerators that the internees sometimes spoke about in hushed whispers. No one knew whether they really existed, but there was always someone who claimed he knew a guy who, in turn, knew another guy who had seen the full set of plans for the complex. An array of such incinerators were said to have been the first part that was built; camp lore had it that the incinerators were already in operation, staffed day and night by guards who were the most vicious of the vicious, guards who used detainees to dispose of the bodies of their murdered compatriots.

Such rumors, such mutterings... What Hitler did to eleven million people would be dwarfed by Kirsch's ambitions, here and in the other camps across the continent. Rumor had it that Kirsch had sworn that once he disposed of America's excess population and unwanted people - the old, the ill, the chronically unemployed, the dissidents, the Jews and gays, the opinionated women and the Catholics, the pagans, the godless, the sexually licentious, the idealistic and individualistic - he would then extend his vision of righteous force to Canada and Mexico, then South America, and eventually Europe. For those trampled and discarded along the way, there would be no bones to resurrect, to sit white and silent and accusing, offering evidence to the future. There would be no memorials, and no memories. There would be only ashes, which swept to fragments and vanished on the wind. The world would sing a new song, one in which their verses were blacked out, erased, redacted.

Could all if this be true? Could any of it? In this world, or in any other?

Javier didn't doubt it. He found himself entertaining the idea that maybe Lev had managed to find that cold spot he had obsessed over - the place where worlds intersected. Maybe he'd turned himself at just the right angle to slip through a crack in reality and into some other, better universe.

But Javier didn't allow himself to dwell on the thought. It was a fiction and a fantasy - and short as his life was going to be in this insane world, wishing for a different one would only hasten his demise.

Then he met the older man, a man who stood out because so few his age survived the initial processing. But this man - older as he might be - was powerful. He looked strong; his movements were athletic and decisive. Like Lev had been, he was called "Jew" by the guards. Like Lev, he seemed to keep his own counsel - though he did not utter it aloud. He joined the work crew in Javier's area when they started mixing and pouring the concrete. Javier was moved to one of the big mixers, to shovel gravel and sand. The older man worked nearby. Sometimes the workers shuffled around and redistributed themselves slightly. The guards didn't seem to care. But talking was forbidden among the detainees, so Javier kept his introduction brief.

"You're a Jew?" he asked in low tones one morning as they two of them worked side by side.

"That's what they call me," the older man replied. He seemed a little sullen.

Javier allowed an hour to go by before his next sally. "What else do they call you?" he asked.

A long while went by before the older man responded. "Nat," he said.

The rest of their conversation played out in similar quick snatches that punctuated long stretches of silence.

"I'm Javier. / I knew a Jew called Lev. / He disappeared."

"I had a son by that name. / Lev. / He died two weeks after the election."

Nat, Javier thought. Nat? Nathaniel?

Javier, tingling, forced himself to wait until he was sure no guards were looking their way before he dared ask the question.

"Did you vote for Kirsch, by any chance?"

To his surprise - and terror - the older man actually laughed out loud at that. A guard looked their way sharply, but the mixer was loud and its racket abrasive, and the guard could not be sure of what he'd heard. Still, Nathaniel waited for a quarter of an hour before responding.

"Me? Hell, no. I voted for that bitch. / I voted for Crenshaw. / And look where it got me. / As soon as she won she betrayed us."

Hearing that last, Javier stood dumbfounded for a few seconds before he collected himself and got back to his labors. His heart hammered and his mind reeled. Finally, he had an opportunity to ask: "What do you mean?"

"All was well for a couple of years, but then... / Well, I woke up here one morning. / So there you go."

Two hours elapsed while Javier tried to work out what he'd heard, what it meant. Placeholder, Lev had said... Javier looked at the concrete being poured into the great pit below. Reality had not completely set, Lev had said. What if... in another universe, where Crenshaw had won the election and Lev's father hadn't dropped dead... what if it was Lev, or at least Lev's counterpart, who had died? Would that have created a vacancy for Lev to fill... the Lev from here, the Lev Javier knew? Could Lev have done that? Slotted himself from one reality, thisreality, into another where he'd died?

Other worlds. Other realities. It sounded like science fiction, but so did heaven. The heaven Javier's grandmother had always talked about. Wasn't heaven where the dead went? Where resurrection was possible? Was that how people looked at Lev, in his preferred reality - as a man resurrected?

But what if anther dynamic were at work? What if leaving one reality for another involved balancing the cosmic scales? What if going there meant someone had to come here in his place? Someone like... Lev's father, alive and well in that other, better world, now snatched into this one?

Nathaniel saw Javier smiling. Finally, he risked a quick query. "What's so funny?"

"That son of a bitch," Javier replied. "He was just a placeholder. / Maybe that's all any of us are... / At least, until the concrete sets up good and firm. Until reality becomes permanent."

Nathaniel found another group to work with the following day. That was fine - Javier let him go. How would he have explained his theory anyway?

Lev. That clever, lucky son of a -

"Enjoying a little vacation there, rapist?"

Javier's head snapped around and his eyes grew wide. Strohmeier stood there, his body bulky and black, an imposing shadow gathered into solid form. Not dead. Not even cast among the damned of the camp.

"Thinking about your next victim, little brown rapist?" Strohmeier unholstered his sidearm as Javier watched with unbelieving eyes. "Should I maybe save us all the trouble and just take you out right now?"

Looking into Strohmeier's eyes - eyes that were lit by insane cruelty, by a delight in his ill-bestowed power - Javier's mind flashed to another section of Lev's long, interminably repeated lectures. If you were killed in one reality, your consciousness would naturally flow into another - a universe where you escaped death.

Strohmeier was laughing and Javier could swear he heard the gun make a sound - a pop, a click, a chime - he wasn't sure what it was, but a sudden sensation jolted him, a ghost of a blow that felt like he'd just been punched in the nose. Had some other reality just blinked out for him? Was he now continuing down another fork on a road that was nothing but forks and branches? Slipping from reality to reality like a drop of water following the course of least resistance?

Strohmeier was still laughing as he lowered his unfired weapon and put it into his holster. Then he stopped, with unnerving abruptness. "So?" he barked, the light in his eyes turning into something ugly and hot. "Are you planning to get back to work? Or should I give you some incentive?" His other hand came up - the hand that clutched a baton.

That jolted Javier into action. A bullet might send him still living into some new branch of reality, but a broken bone would be a consequence he'd have to live with - until it killed him.

And yet, even as he hurried to shovel sand and gravel into the mixer, Javier couldn't help himself. The words pushed themselves from his throat and he heard them with a sense of resignation even as he asked, "Don't you hate it when dictators don't pay what they owe you?"

Strohmeier, who had been about to walk away, wheeled sharply and looked at him with something keen and new in his expression. Respect? Amusement? "That's not something you can say about President Crenshaw," he said, almost jovially. "She pays quite well. She even stared down those watery idiots in Congress to get us overtime." Then, without so much as threatening Javier, Strohmeier walked away.

Strohmeier alive. President Crenshaw.

Tears fell silently onto the gravel around Javier's feet. It wasn't Lev who'd gone through a cold spot after all. It wasn't a wish that took him away to a better place.

It was Javier who'd somehow transited from one reality to another. And it wasn't better. It was the same - all the same craziness and cruelty, all the same homicidal madness.

Maybe there were no better worlds.

A song started in his head, a song in Spanish - a song his grandmother had sung to him when he was very young. A song about lost love, about a life that would never come to be. An old song that here - now - in this place - was something new.

For Jack.

"Half Light" returns for a sixth and final season on January 1, 2018.