ord from Washington is that the asset is to be put to sleep, chopped like a steak, shipped off in samples to labs around the country. Hoffstetler has one week to wrap up his research. Strickland leans back in his office chair and tries to smile. Mission’s nearly finished. A better life waits on the other side. He should use this week to relax. Find a hobby. Get back to where he was before the Amazon. Maybe even visit the doctor like Lainie keeps nagging, get his fingers checked out. He strikes that idea. Looking at the fingers reminds him of jungle rot. Better keep them hid under bandages, just a while longer.

So he comes home early. He’ll surprise Timmy and Tammy by being there when they get back. Strange thing is, Lainie’s not there. He sits in front of the TV and waits. It’s the opposite of what he planned. He waits and crunches painkillers. What’s the point? He might as well be at work. Late afternoon, she finally returns. By that point, he doesn’t know what’s what. The pills smudge details until they are as unintelligible as General Hoyt’s shrieked orders: **** ** *****, ***. Strickland doesn’t see groceries in Lainie’s arms. The dress she’s got on, it doesn’t look familiar. She’s clearly startled to see him, then laughs and says she’ll have to go back to the store tomorrow, she’d forgotten her pocketbook.

Observation is what Strickland does. He can tell you which scientists are left-handed, what color socks Fleming wore last Wednesday. Lainie is talking too much, and Strickland knows that’s the truest tell of any liar. He thinks of Elisa Esposito, her soothing silence. She’d never lie to him. She hasn’t the power, or inclination. Lainie is hiding something. Is it an affair? He hopes not. For her sake, and also his, because of what might happen to him, legally speaking, after he dealt with the adulterers.

He compresses his emotions for the night. Next morning, after the kids catch the bus, he kisses Lainie good-bye over the hot ironing board and drives the Thunderbird to the next block. He parks under a giant beech tree. Not the cover he’d prefer. The limbs are skeletal from lack of rain. But it’ll do. He’s had his four breakfast pills, but that’s it. Needs to keep his observational ability sharp. He kills the engine. He silently prays that Lainie doesn’t appear on the road in front of him. This is their marriage. This is their life. Please, just stay home, clean the kitchen, unpack the boxes, anything.

Fifteen minutes later, she appears on the cross street, suddenly done ironing. He feels a needle of shame. He’d once promised her that no wife of his would have to take public transportation. He forces the needle from his mind with a mental flex. They’d both made promises, hadn’t they? He’s the one who forced his wedding ring back on only for his finger to bloat around it. He fights the Thunderbird for a good minute to get it started, then rolls out, creeping a block behind his wife. He idles as she waits for the bus, and when it pulls out, he follows.

The bus lets people off in front of a grocery store. Lainie isn’t among them. Strickland reminds himself that good surveillance requires an open mind. Maybe she doesn’t like the prices at that store. When the bus leaves an entire downtown shopping center without expunging Lainie, Strickland’s mind snaps shut. If his wife had some special errand today, she’d had all morning to tell him about it. Whatever she’s doing, she’s doing it behind his back. He grips the steering wheel so hard he feels a snap in one of his injured fingers. One of the big black stitches, perhaps, ripping from rotting flesh.

Then the car dies. No dramatic deathbed scene. It coughs weakly, one last time, and then Strickland is coasting. He throws it into neutral and tries to reignite it, but there isn’t a wisp of life. The bus swerves back into traffic with a noise like the asset’s squeal of pain, and there’s not a thing he can do about it. Through engine smoke far thicker than Lainie’s ironing steam, he muscles the Thunderbird to the curb. The only spot is in front of a fire hydrant. Just fucking perfect. He slams the gear into park. Shoves his way out of the car. Stares down the road. Vehicles swarming like wasps. People scurrying like roaches. The whole city a venomous nest.

He kicks the car door. It leaves a dent. His toes sing in pain and he hops in a circle, running every cuss word invented into a single, vulgar masterwork. He finds himself turned around, looking across the street. What he finds is a white-hot fireball. Beneath it are giant plates of liquid fire and smooth runners of lava. His head throbs from the overkill of light. He has to shield his eyes to make sense of it. Sunshine sizzles from the rotating-earth sign, floor-to-ceiling windows, and endless chrome trims of a Cadillac dealership.

Strickland doesn’t recall crossing the street. But he’s wandering the car lot. Under garlands of snapping flags. Beside an actual palm tree. Staring into headlight eyes turned angry by the V-shaped emblem between them. Trailing his fingers across the Cheshire grins of front grilles, those hundreds of slippery fangs. He pauses before one of the cars. Seals his hands to the scalding hood. Feels strong and smooth and sharp. Even his damaged fingers feel reinforced. He leans over the hood and inhales. He likes the hot-metal smell, like a gun after being fired.

“Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Most perfect machine mankind’s ever made.”

A salesman has joined Strickland. Strickland registers thin hair, razor burn, a flabby neck. Further details melt in the too-bright sun. The man is perfectly automatized, as metallic as the vehicles he sells. He sidles alongside the Caddy as if he, too, moves on hubcapped wheels, the creases of his suit and pants as sharp as tail fins. He strokes the hood, his watch and cuff links as bright as the chrome.

“Four-stroke spark-ignition V-8. Four-speed gearbox. Zero to sixty in ten-point-seven. Clocked at one-hundred-and-nineteen on the straightaway. Runs as crisp as a fresh dollar bill. AM/FM stereo sound. Have the whole London Philharmonic in your backseat. All deluxe interior. White leather. It’s a presidential suite in there. Those aren’t seats. Those are sofas. Davenports. Divans. Settees. Air-conditioning good enough to keep your drink cold, heater good enough to keep your little lady warm.”

His little lady? She’s trundled on down the road to who knows where. Leaving him behind with an Occam job that’s nearly complete. Whether he chases Lainie or drives himself, all alone, out of this execrable burg, he’ll need wheels to replace that heap illegally parked across the street. This man of metal is stronger than him. Is it any use fighting? He protests because that’s what you do in car lots, but it’s pitiful. “I’m just looking.”

“Then look at this, my friend. Tip to tail, here to there: eighteen-and-a-half feet long. That’s two basketball hoops, the second balanced atop the first. You think you could sink a basket that high? Look at the width. That’ll fill a car lane, won’t it? Look how low it sits, like a lion. Two-point-three tons, it weighs. You drive this darling out of here, you rule the road, simple as that. Power windows. Power brakes. Power steering. Power seats. Power everything. Just plain power.”

That sounds good. It’s what any American man deserves. Power means respect. From your wife, your kids, flunkies who don’t know anything harsher in life than a car breaking down on the road. He’s better than that. All he needs is a way to tell everyone to steer the hell out of his way. He’s starting to feel better. Not just better, but good, for the first time in a while. He manages one more demurral, though any good salesman can hear his capitulation, and this is the best salesman of all time.

“I’m not sure about the green,” Strickland says.

The lot confirms that Cadillacs come in as many shades as Elisa Esposito’s shoes. Stardust gray. Cotton-candy pink. Raspberry red. Oil black. This one is green, but not the solacing glass-green of his hard candy. It’s silkier, like a creature that ought to have died centuries ago glimpsed through still waters as it trawls a riverbed.

“Green?” The salesman is offended. “Oh no. No, siree. I wouldn’t sell you a green car. This, my friend, is teal.”

Something shifts inside Strickland. The salesman has shown him the way. Power: He had it as the Jungle-god. He still has it now. He thinks back to one of Lainie’s jabbering pastors. What was one of God’s first displays of power? To name things. The Jungle-god can name things, too. They become what he wants them to become. Green becomes teal. Deus Brânquia becomes the asset. Lainie Strickland becomes nothing at all.

He leans down to peer inside. He’ll be sitting inside it in a moment. But it feels good to tease himself. The dashboard has a hundred dials and knobs. It’s F-1, packed into a single front seat. The steering wheel is whip-thin, the strap of a nightie. He imagines wrapping his fingers around it, how easily the red blood from his torn fingers will wipe from the white leather. The salesman has moved behind him. He whispers like a lover. The limited-edition color. Twelve coats of hand-polished paint. Four out of five successful men in America drive a Caddy. Forget the rockets everyone’s shooting into the sky. Sputnik’s got nothing on the de Ville.

“That’s the business I’m in.” Even with the deed all but signed, Strickland feels the need to impress the man.

“That right? Now, how about you slide in there.”

“National defense. New initiatives. Space applications.”

“You don’t say. You can adjust the seat—there you go.”

“Space stuff. Rocket stuff. Stuff of the future.”

“The future. That’s good. You look like a man who’s headed there.”

Strickland draws a long inhale through his nose. He’s not only headed into the future. He is the future. Or will be, once his job as Jungle-god is complete, the asset is gone, his family matters are resolved, and the pills are no longer required. He and this car will be joined together, a man of metal, same as the salesman. Fused on a factory assembly line of the future. A future where the world’s jungles, and all of the creatures therein, are modernized by concrete and steel. A place void of nature’s madness. A place of dotted lines, streetlights, turn signals. A place where Cadillacs just like this, just like him, can roam free, forever.