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indeed what he needs to do next.

He turns back toward the dark, dusty sitting room.
    No. Not yet. He can’t face that quite yet.
Definitely
can’t face stumbling up the darkened stairs to the bathroom at the top of the first landing.
    He turns to the door to the backyard – back
garden,
he remembers, that’s what the English call it, what his parents always called it. It takes him a few frustrating minutes to get the lock unstuck, but then he steps out into the sunshine again, across the deck his father had built one summer.
    The fences of the neighbors on either side seem amazingly close after all the space his family had ended up with in their American house. The lawn itself is now a forest of wheaty-looking stalks and weeds nearly as high as Seth’s head, even as he stands on the low deck. At the back fence, Seth can only just see the top of the old concrete bomb shelter, standing there in its brave arch since World War II. His mother had turned it into a potter’s shed, which she never used all that much, and it quickly became a place to store old bikes and broken furniture.
    The embankment beyond the back fence rises up to a gnarled wall of barbed wire. He can’t see any farther than that because of how the land angles down behind it.
    But Seth doesn’t think this would be hell if the prison weren’t still there.
    He averts his eyes and steps to the edge of the deck. He leans forward a bit and waits to pee out into the tall grass.
    And waits.
    And waits.
    And grunts with the effort.
    And waits a bit more.
    Until at last, with a heartfelt cry of relief, he sends a poisonously dark yellow stream into the yard.
    And almost immediately calls out in pain. It’s like peeing acid, and he looks down at himself in distress.
    Then he looks closer.
    There are small cuts, small abrasions and marks all across the skin of his groin and hips. He finds a stray piece of white tape tangled in his thickest body hair and a larger one farther down his exposed thigh.
    With a wince, he finishes urinating, and starts examining his body more closely in the sunlight. There are numerous cuts and scrapes in the crooks of both his arms, and a line of them up the side of either buttock. He starts pulling at the bandages around his torso, trying to see underneath them. The adhesive is strong, but it finally gives. There’s a strange metallic foil on the inside of each bandage, and it comes away in a sticky mess, tearing off a few chest hairs he never thought much of anyway. The same is true for the bandages on his arms and legs. He works and works at them, leaving behind painful bald spots and finding more abrasions and cuts.
    He keeps at it until he completely rids himself of them, coiling them there on the deck, dirty from the dust but the metallic bits catching the sunlight and reflecting it back at him sharply, almost aggressively. There’s no writing on them that he can find, and the metallic part is like nothing he’s ever seen before in America
or
England.
    He steps away from them. There is something alien in the way they look. Something wrong. Something invasive.
    Seth crosses his arms tightly against himself, and he shudders, though the sun is beating down clear and hot. He is completely naked now, and that’s the next thing that has to be remedied. He feels unbelievably vulnerable like this, more so than the literal fact of it. There is threat here, somewhere, he’s suddenly sure of it. He glances back to the fence and the prison he knows lies hidden beyond, but this place is more wrong than even all that’s obvious. There’s an unreality under all the dust, all the weeds. Ground that seems solid but that might give way any moment.
    He keeps shivering under the heat of the sun, under a clear blue sky without a single airplane in it. All at once the energy he spent on eating and drinking catches up with him, exhaustion settling over him like a heavy blanket. He feels so weak, so unbelievably, physically weak.
    His arms still