The Cause by Roderick Vincent

arm was straight. Then I stood, moving the light farther from the Earth on the floor until my hand hit the ceiling, the Earth accepting the darkness, yet I could still see the faint glimmer of atmosphere, the cerulean blue marble as still as a whisper, refusing to rotate. Then the match went out, and I bent down and picked up the photo and moved it close to my heart.
    After a minute, I moved the flame of another match over the book. The book was
The Call of the Wild
, and I spent the next hours devouring it until the last match was gone. Then I used the first pages to provide light for the next until the book was finished.
    The next set of hours turned into loneliness. Some of them Islept, but when I awoke, the fictional dog Buck barked in my head—out on the tundra, the lead pack dog plowing through mounds of fresh snow. Hazy and still partially in a dream, I plunged through an ocean of snow, through its thickness and permeability. Dappled spots of white frost blew across my face, the snow bite of a fierce Artic wind before me weaned and the darkness returned pure and heartless through the sub-arctic winds of the North Pole. I came out of it to find the animal in me, the Buck I struggled to understand.
    My mind drifted from one thing to the next, floating from the dog Buck and his lesson with the club, to the fight with Seee and my own lesson, to two weeks ago at the hangar, saying goodbye to the America that was burning in the flames of riots and chaos.
    Then I heard Seee’s voice. “So you’ve decided to stay?”
    “Yes.”
    “You haven’t been outside yet. Perhaps you’ll want to reconsider.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Wait and see. I’ll be honorable and give you one last chance once you reemerge.”
    “Honor is for losers. Evolution—extinction—remember?”
    He laughed, and the sound of it bounced through the corridor. “You’re right. Should I bury you now then?”
    I said nothing, and the walls grew silent once more. Each of us held his breath. It felt like the moment before our first clash, everything standing still, an instant stolen from time.
    “Tell me how you became known as The Conductor,” I said, breaking the silence awkwardly.
    “Do the men really gossip like this? Like schoolgirls?”
    “There were rumors, but you never know what the truth is.”
    “In this case, I do,” he said. “Tell me what you heard, and I’ll tell you how accurate it is.”
    “I heard that for ten years you stalked a target. I don’t know where exactly it was, but it wasn’t a simple mark.”
    He finished opening my cell door which squealed on the rollers. I heard him step into the room, the shuffling sweep of bare feet. He sat down, his back scraping against the cinder-block wall with the lidless toilet. The darkness was immovable, yet I felt I could see the expression on his face, the muscles in his cheeks relaxing. A light I imagined shining over his face showed a curling smile.
    “If I was authorized to snipe the target, it would have been a simple job. But they wanted more discretion. They wanted deniability. As well, the CIA used the assignment as a punishment. They wanted to sweep me away after the ordeal with Hassani, but that is another story for another time.”
    “They told me you dressed yourself up as a bum, rags for clothes, dirt under the fingernails.”
    “No. The story is veering off course already.”
    “So how was it then?”
    “I wore a threadbare brown second-hand tweed double-breasted suit. In fact, I had others—flea-market clothes, but not rags.” From there, he described his wardrobe, how nothing in it was ostentatious, yet not completely cheap. He bought his items from a Saturday market held out in the open space in the Plainpalais area of Geneva and paid cash. He kept an unshaven look (stubbly but not bearded) and used special eye drops to make it seem as if he had cataracts. He dyed his hair gray and smoked cigarillos down to the nub. He made himself look like a man in