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shouldn’t watch so many cartoons,” his mother would say, “they make you too angry. Go play with your bricks.”
    In the corner of his bedroom—the many he had over the first twelve years of his life, bedrooms in four American states as well as in England and Germany—he built forts of two walls with no exit or entrance where he would sit for hours, fortifying and refortifying them with successive layers of cardboard brick until he had exhausted the whole collection, leaving himself almost no room to move.
    “You’ve boxed yourself into a corner,” his mother would say. “Now what you gonna do?”
    “Stay here. Put a blanket over it.”
    Dolores would drape a sheet over the opening at the top of those cardboard walls, sealing her son inside until some bodily need forced him to punch through the structure, growling and roaring as he emerged into the world of whatever house they were then occupying. “Too many cartoons. You get
so
angry. It scares me, Pablo. What did I do to make you angry? Why you biting me all the time? Why you hitting me?”
    In the years before they settled in this city, they always lived in tiny impersonal houses that his mother struggled to domesticate, in one case gluing lids from aluminum cans over holes in the baseboards to keep out mice, or dyeing burlap bags to make navy blue bedroom curtains for Paul in another, where the houses were so close together they could hear everything happening in their neighbors’ lives. There was nowhere to retreat, no place of refuge. Every man should have a bunker to protect himself and his family, but Paul’s own family has now fled. Before the foreclosure was final he received the divorce papers and restraining orders, keeping him away not only from his wife and sons, but even from his in-laws, safe in their gated community on the other side of the continent. Now he is not even allowed to speak to his boys.
    The noise seems to grow louder, the helicopter getting closer, readying itself to land. The police are coming to drive him from his hiding place, to flush him out so that sharpshooters can mow him down, spraying him with flamethrowers, burning down the woods to drive him from his lair. He has committed no crime. There is no reason the authorities should come after him, but the noise continues to grow louder, pulsing, rhythmic and mechanical. The streets of Dolores Woods were designed to accommodate a helicopter in case of a newsworthy happening in the neighborhood, or in the event of a major civil or natural disaster requiring the immediate evacuation of the development’s residents, or even the prosaic emergency of a neighbor needing a lifesaving medevac to one of the city’s several private hospitals. At one point, when things seemed to be going well with the business, he even imagined clearing more trees to make room for his own private helipad.
    Closing his fingers tighter around the rifle resting against his chest, Paul reassures himself that the gun is where he remembers placing it. The seven-pound weight of the arm seems to have changed so that its numbness has become a part of his own numbness, the failure of feeling that extends up from his hands and along his forearms to his shoulders and chest. He is lucid, clear of mind, knows what he is doing, where he is, what weapons are in his possession. If he has to, he will flee out the back entrance and into the woods, through the shallow river and across this sparsely populated state until he is no longer traceable. At the county line several miles away, the trees of the reserve pile up against the edge of a cliff that drops to the river. Some of the cottonwoods uproot themselves, tumbling into the brown water where they lie submerged and hidden, rising as snags. In earlier days they drew sternwheelers down into the mud and silt that consumed luggage and china and silverware, a horde that later generations, hearing apocryphal stories of a submerged cargo of mercury, dredged into life, cleaned,