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sense of where we might be. I couldn’t see anything except a layer of cloud cover. Did helicopters fly above the clouds? I didn’t think they typically flew that high but I also didn’t really know anything about helicopters.
    There were a lot of questions I wanted to ask but Grimes had forbidden me to talk to him so I guessed they would go unanswered.
    My mission seemed suspect and ambiguous. Perhaps I preferred not having my questions answered. To ask questions and then have them answered could imply that I knew what I was doing. I would rather not know what I was doing and use the explanation that no one told me what I was supposed to be doing than to know what I was doing and do it poorly. I wasn’t a soldier. I didn’t have the slightest idea what it meant to be a soldier. I didn’t have the slightest urge to be a soldier. Therefore, I was pretty certain that, whatever I was about to do, whatever mission I was about to carry out, would be done as poorly as any mission in the history of Everything.
    I wasn’t sure, but I thought that could be something to be proud of.

 
    Ten
     
    Time was nebulous inside the helicopter. I got tired of staring at the back of Grimes’s head and the cloud cover below was extremely monotonous. I thought about my days at the library. I had worked there for the past ten years and had grown relatively comfortable with it. At first I enjoyed the strange mix of people who came in to borrow or steal books. As the book supply dwindled, never to be replaced, I began to enjoy the solitude of it. Only a few people came in every day. Mapes stayed sequestered in his office for the most part. I was able to read and listen to music. Or simply wander around the library, picking up that occasional book too unpopular to steal. Anything to take my mind off this same solitude that would follow me home and there, in the darkness of the evening, the neighborhood asleep, that solitude would leak slowly from my head and down my spine, spreading out through all my bones and manifest as something that could probably be called depression. And, just before sleep, I would have to convince myself this was life. And these things—loneliness, solitude, depression—were my life’s obstacles just as some people’s obstacles were health issues or poverty or addiction.
    Did all of these things lead to a singular path of insanity? Or was it the realization of this path that makes certain people veer off in another direction and find something that appears as enlightenment?
    Damn it. I wished I had my music or a book now. Those were what kept thoughts like that away.

 
    Eleven
     
    My stomach lurched as the helicopter began its rapid descent. For a brief and panicked moment, I thought we were crashing.
    Now angled forward, the helicopter dived down through the clouds and I could once again see the earth below. It was a mind numbing expanse of brown the color of mocha. Somber, dingy, depressing.
    Grimes stood up from his seat and faced me. He wore aviator sunglasses and I couldn’t see his eyes. I didn’t think I wanted to see his eyes. I hoped the helicopter had some sort of automatic pilot setting on it. He grabbed my shirt and pulled me to my feet. It was hard to stand up. The ceiling of the helicopter was too low to straighten out and I was wildly off balance. Grimes grabbed the machine gun up from the floor and pressed it against my chest until I grabbed onto it.
    “ This is where you get out, Dressing.”
    I was seized with fear. This was real. It was happening. And I was the most pathetic man for the job.
    “ I’ve never done this. I don’t even have a parachute.”
    “ The gun is all you need. I told you that earlier. You could have been exploring instead of wasting your time on soft thoughts.”
    How did he know my thoughts were soft? What constituted a soft thought?
    He opened up the door on the side of the helicopter and began pushing me toward it. I fumbled with the gun. I thought about shooting