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and a shot of Jameson. There was, however, no scar; only a deep, consuming pain that expanded then exploded when he swung his legs over the side of the bed and onto the floor. Gritting his teeth, he managed to weave his way to the shower.
    Stepping under the piss warm water dribbling from the motel shower-head, Campbell felt a new pain, one that dwarfed the discomfort in his leg and drove him to his knees. Staring down into the drain, he noticed the water collecting around a hairball missed by the maid was pink. A cold panic washed over him, twisting his stomach into knots, and he began running his hands over his arms, his legs, his torso, searching for the source of the blood:nothing. The panic mushroomed and he saw stars, little explosions of light dancing across his field of vision as he tried to retain consciousness.
    Campbell managed to stumble out of the shower before collapsing, bits of broken tile piecing his skin as he hit the floor. That’s when he saw it: Reflected back from the cracked mirror fixed to the ceiling, running the length of his back, was an enormous tattoo—still fresh, the skin still raw—of an asterisk in a circle. He had been marked.
    In the following years, Campbell would court oblivion, trying to escape the things he had done and the things that had been done to him. And yet, no matter how deep into the American night he sank, the mark remained, both a reminder and a warning. Yet Campbell believed the mark was also a promise that, one day, he might be forgiven.
    Until that day arrived, he would remain a shadow, a former colossus consigned to the fringes of the fading century. Specific details from his days in exile were impossible to recall; his memories were a blur of biker bars, methamphetamines, and cocktail waitresses. Eventually, Campbell had found himself on the edge of the Vegas Strip. He overdosed once, twice, but even the third time wasn’t the charm. He bought a gun and on more than one occasion, wrapped his lips around the barrel. One night, however, stood out from the rest.
    He had been at some strip club on the outskirts of Vegas and it was the pre-dawn crowd, with the pre-dawn dancers presenting their decidedly pre-dawn wares next to a picked-over buffet table. Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades” pumped from a decade-old sound system while junkies and single mothers flashed tit on stage, feigning arousal at 4 o’clock in the morning to a crowd of exhausted second shifters, bikers, and ageless drunks sulking in the shadows. Campbell was in the corner, chasing Benzedrine with bourbon, and then bourbon with Benzedrine, just trying to build up the courage to die, when he saw it: Mounted over the bar was an ancient CRT television monitor, the only one not tuned to a horse race or ballgame—or maybe it had been and the news feed had interrupted the broadcast. Regardless, there it was: The press conference of his old pupil, Michael Morrison, announcing that Morrison Biotechnology would break from its long-standing tradition of political neutrality and endorse a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
    It wasn’t seeing Morrison grinning through the flickering satellite feed that sent Campbell stumbling back to his motel room to finally pull the trigger; it was the young congressman—a Robert Fitzgerald, the screen informedhim—standing next to Morrison at the press conference. Campbell had seen this man before, only he hadn’t looked quite so dapper. But, considered Campbell, it’s hard to pull off dapper when you’re half-formed and floating in a vat miles beneath the Chihuahuan desert. Even now, Campbell could remember laughing hysterically at that notion, laughing and crying until a bouncer dragged him off his bar stool and cast him out into the moonless night; the radioactive glow of neon from the crumbling core of Vegas was Campbell’s only guide as he weaved back toward his motel and the single bullet that would allow him to fade into the blackness he so desperately sought.
    When he