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The Reactor — Chapter Ten
September 1st—two weeks after the reactor
Leland Khamchanh was hunched over the toilet when his alarm went off.
He silenced it with one hand, the other braced on the rim. The headaches had been going on a couple of weeks now—long enough that he’d stopped thinking of them as headaches and started thinking of them as just the way his head felt. A rusty nail behind his eyes, aspirin doing nothing, and he’d stopped taking the aspirin because it wasn’t doing anything.
But this morning something was worse. Every smell coming through the bathroom ventilation hit him like something physical. The sound of a car starting three floors below was too loud, too close, all of it arriving at a volume that had no business being possible through concrete and glass.
He flushed, washed his face, looked at himself in the mirror. Bloodshot eyes. Red splotches on his cheeks. He had to be at work in an hour and there was no one to cover his shift.
He went to the closet for his uniform and remembered he hadn’t done laundry. He dug through the basket for yesterday’s polo—and stopped.
Maggie’s work shirt was on top. She’d left it there last night. Her scent was all over it, which made sense. What didn’t make sense was the other smell underneath it. Something masculine. Someone else’s.
He’d been noticing things for days that he couldn’t account for. Conversations from other rooms arriving fully formed. The smell of someone he’d just met, still in the room long after they’d left. He’d looked up the symptoms twice already. Pregnancy, PMS, brain tumors. The results hadn’t changed, and none of them fit, and he’d run out of explanations and started just living with it.
He told himself the shirt was another one of those things. He threw it back in the basket and pulled out yesterday’s polo.
He was not the kind of person who got suspicious for no reason.
He reminded himself of that on the way to work.
The day was the same grinding misery it always was, his senses making it worse. By midafternoon every conversation in the building felt like it was happening directly in his ear. His boss called to yell about last week’s labor budgets and somewhere during the call the rage just arrived. Deep and sudden. When he hung up he slammed the handset down until it was in pieces, then sat looking at the wreckage on the desk.
He’d googled the symptoms. Twice. The results were the same as before. He closed the browser.
Maggie texted at the end of his shift. She’d be late. Could he stop at the pizza place?
He could.
The guy at the counter—name tag said Todd, forearm tattoo said the same—looked at Leland with a flicker of recognition that made no sense. He smelled like cigarettes and something else, something that sat at the edge of Leland’s awareness asking to be identified. He ordered the pizza and waited.
From the back of the shop, clearly and impossibly, he heard Todd make a phone call.
“Yeah, he’s here right now. Just cashed him out.”
A pause. Then a voice Leland recognized: “So he won’t be home for at least another half hour. Are you coming?”
“Five minutes. Wait for me out back.”
Todd clocked out and left. Leland watched him get into a beat-up red car with a mismatched door and pull out of the lot.
He left the pizza that was cooking in the oven and followed.
He found the car parked in a handicap spot outside Maggie’s supermarket. He sat in a regular space and watched through the window. She was at her register. She checked her phone. Something shifted in her expression—small, private, not for him—and she said something to her manager, took off her apron, and went outside.
She didn’t look toward the parking lot.
He followed at a distance, around the side of the building to the loading dock. He got behind a stack of wooden crates and stayed still.
He watched long enough to understand exactly what was happening. That was enough.
He stayed crouched behind those crates until it was over, unable to look away, unable to announce himself, every part of him rigid and still. When it was done and they were straightening their clothes, he heard Todd ask when she was going to leave that loser.
“Todd, come on. You’re on parole,” Maggie said.
She went back inside. Todd started back toward the lot. Leland shifted his weight and his shoe scraped on the concrete.
Todd came around the crates and found him.
“What the fuck?” Then the smirk. “You enjoy the show? They say you Asian guys have small—”
Leland hit him.
He got his knee into Todd’s chest and kept punching, felt cartilage give, kept going. Then his hands were around the man’s throat and he could feel the pulse under his fingers. Todd’s face was changing color. His eyes went wide. He understood what was happening to him.
Leland looked at him.
Then he let go and stood up.
Todd coughed and gagged, pulling air in ragged.
Leland watched him for a moment, then walked back to his car.
She came home an hour and a half later. He was on the couch in the dark.
“Sorry I’m late. It was really busy.” She set her purse on the counter. “Did you eat?”
“Don’t bullshit me, Maggie.”
He watched her face change. Surprise first, then the harder thing underneath it.
“You weren’t busy,” he said. “I saw what you were doing.”
“You’re an asshole, Leland.”
“That guy is on parole. What is wrong with you?”
“Don’t act innocent.” Her eyes narrowed. “I’ve seen the texts from your groupies at work.”
“You already knew about those. I showed you the messages myself. I didn’t hide anything.” He stood up. “I wasn’t cheating on you.”
“Yeah, well it was only a matter of time. I decided to beat you to the punch.”
He stared at her. “What the hell is wrong with you? Beat me to the punch? That’s ridiculous.”
“I don’t have to explain myself.” She came toward him, her face doing the thing it did when she’d committed to the fight. “I don’t owe you anything.”
“We’re engaged, Maggie. Remember? Your mom already calls me son. So yeah, you owe me an explanation beyond ‘beating me to the punch.’ You owe your whole family an explanation.”
She punched him in the face.
He caught her wrist as she pulled back, then caught the other one when she swung with that arm instead. He held them both, her face inches from his.
She jerked against his grip. “You think this is the first time? It’s not. There have been others. You were too stupid to realize it.”
He looked at her for a moment. Maybe it was true. Maybe she was just saying the worst thing she could think of. He realized it didn’t matter to him either way.
“Don’t ever touch me again,” he said. He let go of her wrists. “Get your stuff and go.”
She pulled her wrists free. “This is my apartment too.”
“Your name isn’t on the lease. Your mailing address is your mom’s house.” He held her gaze. “It’s not your legal residence.”
She stared at him for a long moment, looking for the angle. When she couldn’t find one she went to the bedroom and started throwing things around.
Twenty minutes later she came out with a suitcase and a backpack. She threw the engagement ring at him from across the room. He watched it bounce off the floor and stop by his foot.
He didn’t pick it up.
She left. He heard her on the stairs, the door at the bottom, then nothing. He sat back down on the couch and looked out at the balcony, the playground three stories below going dark as the lot lights switched off on their timer.
He lay down eventually. Sleep didn’t come—it hadn’t come all week—so he watched the ceiling until the night was over.
Todd was waiting at the restaurant when Leland arrived for his 5am shift.
His face looked the way Leland had left it—swollen, discolored, one eye nearly shut. He had two people with him in dark hoodies, hanging back near the entrance. He had something in his hand. A tire iron.
“You think you could do that and just walk away?”
Leland’s skin went strange—a full-body tingling, every hair upright. The parking lot sharpened. And then something happened to his vision that he had no category for: he could see Todd directly in front of him and simultaneously see the two men behind him, the cars on the street, a bird on the restaurant sign, all of it at once, his field of view expanding and wrapping until he was seeing in every direction at the same time.
It lasted about two seconds before the sensory overload hit like a wall and he went down. All three rushed him. He clenched his eyes shut but it made no difference—he could still see everything, the tire iron coming down on his back, the boots going into his ribs, a truck running a red light half a block away. It wasn’t the blows getting to him. He realized that he wasn’t really feeling any pain from that. It was the information. Too much. All of it simultaneously, all of it equally present.
He remained there for close to a minute, enduring the beating, until he finally started to gather himself together. He came up off the ground hard, elbows out. He caught the man on his right under the jaw as he rose, heard teeth clicking together, smelled blood. He shifted to the left and hit the other man in the throat. Both went down.
He caught the tire iron on Todd’s next swing, ripped it from his hand, and threw it across the lot where it kept rolling all the way out into the street.
Todd stared at him.
Leland grabbed him by the throat and lifted him one handed, without thinking about it. Todd’s feet came off the ground and his face went purple.
“If you come near me again,” Leland said, “I won’t stop next time.”
He released enough pressure for Todd to nod. Then he dropped him into the other two, who were climbing back up, and watched all three of them go down again in a heap. He stood there staring at them until they were gone. Then he went inside and started his shift.
He made it to noon before he walked out. He didn’t tell anyone. He just picked up his things and left, past his employees’ questioning faces, and didn’t look back.
He stopped sleeping entirely. Or rather sleeping stopped being something that happened to him. He’d lie down, the night would pass, he’d get up having never lost consciousness, and he felt fine. The headaches were gone. What remained was everything else, and everything else kept growing.
By the third week of September he could detect every person in the building. Their footsteps through the floors, their voices through the walls, the smell of their routines at the hours they kept them. He lay on the couch for hours at a stretch trying to filter it down to something manageable. Mostly he failed.
The hunger was worse. He ate everything in the apartment, then things that weren’t food. Dry ramen straight from the package, a quarter bottle of vegetable oil, anything with calories. His body processed it all in hours and came back asking for more.
One morning at 3am—the man two floors up vacuuming for reasons Leland had genuinely stopped trying to understand, the apartment across the hall full of people getting loudly high—he sat at the computer with a jar of mayonnaise and a spoon and opened his browser.
The homepage loaded and the top three stories were all about marvels.
He’d seen the word before, in the past few weeks, in passing—a headline here, a segment on television he hadn’t paid attention to. He clicked the first story. Then the second. He started searching, and the search results went on for pages, dozens of documented cases from across the country, video footage, interviews, a man named Alexander Corbin speaking in a clean office about a new brain organ called the annex and what Arcadia was doing to help.
He sat there for a long time, reading everything, the mayonnaise jar empty on its side.
He thought about the weeks of headaches. The shirt in the laundry basket. Hearing a phone call through two walls. The confrontation with Todd. The tire iron in his hand. Lifting a man by the throat with one hand. The strength had a name now and a company with a nice, clean office that was ready to explain it. But the calm he’d felt when he’d almost ended Todd’s life - that part wasn’t new. It had come up out of him at the loading dock like something that had always been there, waiting for a reason. He wasn’t sure yet what to do about that part.
The important thing is that world had been assembling the explanation while he was sitting here failing to find one. It had been there the whole time. He wasn’t going crazy. He wasn’t alone.
He closed the browser, pushed back from the desk, and sat for a while in the dark with the sound of the building all around him—every breath, every footstep, every voice—and for the first time in weeks it didn’t feel like an assault. It felt like information.
He’d figure out what to do with it.