Below is “The Reckoning” — the second part of Manuel Lugoni that recapitulates the first part and expands from there. It also stands alone as a short story. Engaged fiction of the present moment — ranging from New York City to the countryside to the besieged streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“Whether the quick concern for human rights, that was the novel bequest of our fathers who had drunk of the waters of French romantic faith, will be carried over into the future, to unhorse the machine that now rides men and to leaven the sodden mass that is industrial America, is a question to which the gods as yet have given no answer. Yet it is not without hope that intelligent America is in revolt. The artist is in revolt, the intellectual is in revolt, the conscience of America is in revolt….”

—Vernon Louis Parrington (1927), Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920

If the real Jesus Christ were to stand up today
He'd be gunned down cold by the C.I.A.

—Matt Johnson, The The, "Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)"

The pain was what I remember most – not the recoil, not his face, not the sound of my own breathing through the mask. Just the white fire in my lower back where the screws sat wrong, where they’d always sit wrong, grinding bone against metal with every step I took through Manhattan that morning.

I’d taken all three medications by 6 a.m. Swallowed them dry in the bathroom of the hostel where I’d been staying under a name that wasn’t mine. OxyContin. Gabapentin. A muscle relaxer I could never remember the name of. The pills sat in my stomach like stones, and still my spine screamed.

The streets were already crowded. December in New York. Holiday shoppers, commuters, tourists taking photos. I was just another face in a sea of faces, just another hood pulled up against the cold, just another mask protecting against whatever virus was making the rounds that season. Invisible in the way only cities allow.

I’d been watching the building for three days. Knew his schedule. Knew he arrived between 6:45 and 7:00 a.m., always on foot from his hotel three blocks away, always with the same leather briefcase, always checking his phone as he walked. A creature of habit. The wealthy usually are. It’s the poor who have to be unpredictable, scrambling, adapting.

He came around the corner at 6:52.

I was already in position. Had been standing there for twenty minutes, shifting my weight from foot to foot, trying to keep the pain manageable. A coffee cart was set up nearby. The smell of burnt espresso and car exhaust. The sound of a jackhammer somewhere to the south. Normal morning sounds. The world going about its business.

He didn’t see me until I was right there.

I pulled the trigger twice.

The sound was quieter than I expected. Or maybe the city was louder. He went down on the sidewalk, his briefcase hitting the concrete first, then his body. His breath misted in the December air. His eyes were open, surprised. Not afraid yet. Surprise comes first. Fear comes later, if there’s time.

There wasn’t time.

I walked away.

Just walked. Like I’d planned it, like I knew what I was doing, like there was some version of this where I actually got away.

The first mistake was the water bottle.

I’d been so careful. Wiped the gun, ditched it in a trash can six blocks away along with the fake IDs. Changed my outer layer of clothing in a store bathroom. Removed the mask only when I was underground, in the subway, surrounded by a thousand other faces. But the water bottle – I’d bought it that morning, drank from it while I waited, tossed it in a trash can two blocks from the scene.

DNA. Fingerprints. Everything they needed.

By the time I realized the mistake, I was on a bus heading west. The news was already breaking. “Health insurance executive shot in Manhattan.” “Manhunt underway.” “Suspect still at large.”

They had me on camera. Of course they did. Cameras everywhere in the city, every corner, every building, every traffic light. They tracked me to the subway station, lost me in the crowd, picked me up again at Port Authority. Watched me buy a bus ticket. Watched me board.

But then something strange happened.

The cameras at my destination bus stop – a nothing town in Pennsylvania, place I’d picked at random – they were broken. Had been broken for weeks. And the bus had faulty internal cameras. Technical difficulties. Budget cuts. The kind of bureaucratic failure that happens a thousand times a day in a thousand different places, except this time it happened for me.

They lost me.

And I kept going.

I got off the bus three towns past my ticketed destination. Walked to a different stop. Paid cash for a ticket to another random town. Did it again. And again. Moving west, always west, away from the city, away from cameras, away from everything.

By the second day, I was in a small town whose name I didn’t catch, standing outside a liquor store at a bus stop, trying to figure out where to go next. Trying to figure out if there was anywhere to go next.

My back was on fire. I’d run out of pills. Hadn’t slept. Hadn’t eaten anything but gas station food. My hands were shaking and I couldn’t tell if it was from pain or fear or exhaustion or all three.

I was adjusting my mask – just for a second, just to breathe – when the car pulled out from the intersection.

A dark sedan. Nothing special. It drove past me, and I didn’t think anything of it. Why would I? But then, three blocks down, it turned around. Came back. Pulled up beside me.

The window came down.

“Get in.”

A woman. Small-framed, dark hair, eyes that looked like they’d already made every calculation and knew every answer. Her voice wasn’t loud but it cut through everything – the traffic, the pain, my own panicked thoughts.

“Get in,” she said again. “If I can tell it’s you, everyone can.”

It wasn’t true. She’d only seen my face for a second. Nobody knew I was in this town. But something in her voice – the certainty, the command – made me move.

I reached for the passenger door.

“The back,” she hissed. “Get in the back.”

I got in the back.

“Lie down. Face down on the seat.”

I lay down.

The car started moving. Smooth, not fast. The kind of driving that doesn’t attract attention.

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “What are you, stupid? This is your great escape plan? Wander around downtown America?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Yes, ma’am. Shut up.”

I shut up.

The car hummed. The engine was quiet, expensive. The leather of the seat smelled like coffee and something floral I couldn’t place. Lavender, maybe. My back throbbed in rhythm with my heartbeat. I’d been running on adrenaline for forty-eight hours and now, suddenly, in the back of a stranger’s car, face-down and helpless, the adrenaline drained away.

I fell asleep.

I woke to silence.

Not city silence – the constant hum of traffic, voices, machinery. Real silence. The kind that presses against your ears until you hear your own heartbeat.

I was still face-down on the back seat. The car had stopped. Through the window, I could see bare tree branches against a gray sky. Smell cold air and earth.

“We’re here,” the woman said.

Her name is Angel. It’s not. But that’s what I’ll tell you it is.

I sat up slowly. My back protested. Everything protested.

Through the car windows: a white farmhouse, paint peeling but solid. A barn so weathered it was almost black. Empty fields running up a hillside toward dense forest. No other buildings visible. No power lines. No sound except wind through bare branches.

Angel was standing outside the car, looking at me through the window. She was smaller than I’d thought. Maybe five-foot-four. But the way she stood – feet planted, shoulders back – made her seem larger. Her hair was the color of wet bark. Dark brown with hints of red. She wore jeans and a canvas jacket and work boots that had seen actual work.

“Get out,” she said.

The ground felt strange under my feet when I stood. Too real. Too solid. Too far from everything.

“You live here now,” she said.

The words hung in the cold air.

“Ma’am, I don’t–”

“You live here now,” she repeated. “You’re the new caretaker. House-sitter. Whatever you want to call it. You’ll maintain the property. You’ll meet no one. If anyone comes around – and they won’t, but if they do – you hide. You interact with no one. You exist for no one.”

“Why are you–”

“I’m not finished.” Her voice was hard. Not angry, just hard. Like stone. “You’ll use my credit card to order anything you need. Supplies, food, equipment. Everything delivered. That’s your payment for caretaking – room and board and necessities. You’ll learn to farm. Organic permaculture. If you don’t know what that means, you’ll teach yourself. You’ll develop this property. Make it productive. Make it beautiful. Make it matter.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand. You need to survive.” She started walking toward the house. “Come on. I’ll show you around.”

The farmhouse was old but maintained, white clapboard siding, flanked on the north by four giant Canadian spruce trees a hundred feet tall. Two floors for living plus a full attic and a basement dug mostly into the ground with a root cellar. Inside – mixed old hardwood floors and carpets, a wood stove in the living room by the dining room, a bay window room, two back rooms, a modern kitchen that looked out of place in a building this old. The furniture was simple. Cloth couches and chairs, wooden tables, end tables, a coffee table. An antique China closet. An old pine cupboard. Wood box. Widescreen TV. Mixed nineteenth century and twenty-first. Floral wallpaper. A bright quilt on the wall beside old family portraits from 150 years ago – gloomy, austere, not a smile to be seen. German-American. The patriarch killed by lightning while washing up in the kitchen in 1895, Angel told me, her great-great grandfather. And his father-in-law killed decades prior when thrown by runaway horses while taking a harvest to town. Just up the road, dirt still today. Rough, hard-working people, I would learn, not unlike Angel herself. Upstairs, five small bedrooms and a bathroom along two narrow hallways. Beds made up nice, quilts pulled tight.

“You’ll stay in this one,” she said, pointing to a bedroom facing east and overlooking the road and hilltop entrance to the property. “The other one on this side of the house is mine. For when I visit.”

“How often do you visit?”

“When I need to. Maybe when you need me to.” She went back downstairs. I followed. My back was screaming. Each step on the old stairs sent jolts through my spine.

In the kitchen, she opened a drawer. Pulled out a credit card. Set it on the table.

“Memorize the numbers. Keep the card hidden. Never use it in person. Only online. Only for delivery.”

“What name–”

“My name. You’ll use my name for deliveries. If anyone asks – and they won’t – you’re Manuel Lugoni. Experienced farmer. Odd guy. Keeps to himself. That’s your whole story.”

“Manuel Lugoni,” I repeated.

“That’s you now. From now on. To me. To anyone who might ever exist in your life again, which should be no one.” She looked at me. Really looked at me. “You changed your appearance every time we met before. Shaved your eyebrows. Cut your hair different. How was I supposed to know who you really were?”

It was a script. A story for if things went wrong. For if she needed distance.

“I understand,” I said.

“Good.” She went to the window. Looked out at the fields. “I need to teach you about this place. The property lines. The water sources. The neighbors – not that there are any close by, but the few people who live over the hill. You need to know about them. Know how to stay invisible.”

“How long will you be here?”

“Few days. Long enough to get you started.” She turned back to me. “Then you’re on your own.”

“Why?” The question came out before I could stop it. “Why are you doing this?”

She was quiet for a long time. The wind rattled the windows. Somewhere outside, something metal banged against something wooden.

“I thought I could save a life,” she said finally. “Seemed like the right thing to do in the moment.”

“You know what I did.”

“Everyone knows what you did.”

“And you still–”

“Yes.” She cut me off. “Don’t make me regret it.”

We spent the next three days walking the property. Ninety acres, she told me. Most of it old sheep pasture gone wild. Some of it shale cliff-edge. Rock overhangs. Shallow caves. The fields sloped north, away from the sun – the worst orientation for farming. Rocky soil. Acidic. Hard-packed from decades of overgrazing.

“It’s a terrible farm, isn’t it,” I said on the second day.

“It’s a perfect farm,” she corrected. “For what I want it to be.”

“Which is what?”

“A food forest. Permanent crops. Trees, shrubs, perennials. Things that will outlive us both. Things that don’t need replanting every year. Things that feed people and animals and build soil instead of depleting it. And provide shelter and habitat. The wind is fierce on this elevated north slope, the shadows are deep, the terrain is unforgiving, and the days are long. You’ll make it livable for all.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“You’ll learn.” She handed me a book she’d pulled from her car. Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture by J. Russell Smith. “Read this. Then order more books. Watch videos. Figure it out.”

“What if I can’t?”

“Then maybe you starve. Or get caught. Or both. Or I kick you out.” She wasn’t being cruel. She was being herself. “This is your life now, Manuel. Make something of it or don’t. But if you don’t, don’t expect me to save you twice.”

We walked to the highest point of the property. A rocky outcrop at the edge of the forest. From there, you could see for miles. Ridge after ridge falling away into hazy blue distance. Mountains to the west, mountains to the east, mountains to the south, a wall of forest to the north, backed by invisible mountains. No sign of human habitation except the farmhouse, barn, and outbuildings below us.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“Somewhere between Pennsylvania and New York.”

“Between?”

“That’s all you need to know.”

“What if I need to run?”

“Then you run. But there’s nowhere better to run to. This is the safest place you’ll ever be.” She looked at me. “Unless you make it unsafe.”

On the third day, she left.

I watched from the porch as her car drove down the dirt road, disappeared over the hill. The sound of the engine faded. Then there was nothing but wind and the trill of hawks and the vast empty silence of the worn and ancient land.

I went inside. Sat at the kitchen table. Looked at the credit card. At the book. At the window overlooking wild fields I didn’t know how to farm.

I was alone.

Completely, utterly alone.

And I had no idea what to do next.

The first week, I barely went outside.

I sat in the farmhouse and watched the news coverage on the big LED TV in the back room. My face was everywhere. Grainy security footage. Enhanced images. Artists’ renderings. They had my real name now. Had tracked me to my apartment, my job, my family. My parents were on TV, crying, confused. “We had no idea,” my mother kept saying. “He never told us he was in pain.”

But I had told them. Over and over. About the surgery. The screws. The constant agony. The denied insurance claims. They’d listened the way people listen to things they can’t fix – with sympathy and helplessness and eventual exhaustion.

The news anchors called it “brazen.” “Calculated.” “Unprecedented.”

None of those words felt right.

It felt like desperation. Like the only thing left after every other option had been exhausted. Desperate calculation.

By the second week, I forced myself to move. If I sat still too long, my back seized up entirely. So I walked. Paced the property lines. Learned the layout. There was a spring down a north slope. Stone walls running along the eastern, southern, and northern edges and cutting through the middle, half-collapsed. The barn was full of old tools – rusted saws, hay mow pulleys, broken handles, metal wedges, wooden machines, and other things I didn’t recognize.

I started reading the book Angel had given me. Tree Crops. It talked about working with nature instead of against it. About regeneration. About creating ecosystems instead of monocultures.

I was skeptical that I could make it work.

But I kept reading.

I read Bill Mollison’s Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual, a foundational text. I watched videos by Geoff Lawton, permaculture guru, and many others.

By the third week, I started planning. Drew maps of the property on paper. Marked where the sun hit longest. Where water pooled. Where the wind came from. It gave me something to do besides watch the news and wait for the knock on the door that would end everything.

The knock never came. I hoped it never would.

By the fourth week, I placed my first order. Seeds for cover crops. A broadfork. Work gloves. The packages arrived on the porch while I hid in the house, or in the wood’s edge, or lay flat in a field shielded by goldenrod and dogbane, patchy hay and yarrow and milkweed. If weeds were gold, I was rich.

No one saw me.

Winter was so long on the mountain. Six months. A double season. A mini ice age, every single year.

I planted my first seeds in April on the north slopes, late March on the south slopes. Crimson clover. Too early but what-the-Hell. Thick April snows buried everything. I planted again. Not everywhere – trial patches. Hairy vetch. Things that would put nitrogen back in the soil. I had no idea if I was doing it right. But I did it anyway.

By mid May, tiny green shoots were emerging from the cold earth.

It felt like a miracle.

Angel came back then.

From the back room, I heard a car crunch on the gravel and park, and my whole body went rigid. Police? FBI? The end? You never really know until they step out of the car, truck, or delivery van. But it was her. She got out and looked around, hands on her hips, evaluating.

“Cover crops look good,” she said.

It was the first compliment I’d heard from her.

“Thank you.”

“That’s the easy part.” She walked to the garden area. “Show me your plan.”

I showed her. The swales I wanted to dig to catch water. The plant and tree guilds I wanted to put in. The fruit and nut hedges with nitrogen fixers. Rows and rows of garden vegetables.

She pointed out everything I’d gotten wrong. The swale contour was off. I needed more diversity. I was working too small.

“You’re still planting like conventional agriculture,” she said. “Too many row crops and annual vegetables. That’s fine for supplementing. But I want permanent systems. I want this place to feed people fifty years from now when neither of us is here.”

“I might not be here next year,” I said.

“Then plant for whoever comes after you.”

We spent two days walking the land, refining the plan. She brought more books. More tools. More seeds.” This is going to be one giant trial and error, isn’t it?”

“The plan will change year to year based on your observations. It will need to. You need to scrabble it together.”

“Scrabble?”

“It’s not plug and play, Manuel. Life is what you cobble together.”

Angel showed me what she had already planted – four dozen species of fruits and nuts, a little of everything, a lot of berries, and especially what I would understand come fall to be spectacular stands of pawpaws and persimmons – Appalachian dessert fruits unparalleled. And native bush hazelnuts. Apples and peaches. Impressive. Angel knew what she was doing. She needed me to maximize it. Expand and intensify, diversify and protect.

On the last evening, we sat on the porch. The sun was setting over the western ridge, turning everything gold.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

“No promises I’ll answer.”

“What do you do? For work. For money.”

She was quiet for a long time. “I manage investments. Corporate portfolios.”

It was vague enough to be meaningless. But it was an answer. Not a full answer.

“Do you have family? People who care about you coming here?”

“None of your business.” The words were flat. Final. Cold. “You don’t mess with my life. I saved yours. You are privileged to be here alive on this farm, isolated though it is,” she said. “You can thank me for that.”

“You sound lonely.”

Her look was hard. “Says the fugitive hiding in the woods.”

I laughed for what felt like the first time in months. It felt strange. Foreign. I wanted more of it.

She left the next morning. I watched her drive away, and the weather seemed to empty of anything warm and then settle on the farm like heavy fog.

Samuel appeared on a morning in late May.

I was driving bamboo stakes into the ground for bean trellises. My back was aching but manageable. The sun was warm. I was thinking about nothing in particular – just the work, the rhythm of it – when I felt eyes on me.

I looked up.

There was a kid standing at the edge of the woods. Maybe twelve years old. Skinny. Wearing jeans and a t-shirt and hiking boots. Earth-colored hair. He stood completely still, watching me.

Fuck. Too late to hide.

We looked at each other.

“Can I help you?” I called out.

He didn’t answer. Just kept watching.

I set down the stake. I stepped toward him. He didn’t move. Didn’t run. Just stood there like he belonged and I was the intruder.

“You’re on private property,” I said.

“I know.” His voice was calm. Matter-of-fact. “I’ve been watching you.”

My chest tightened. “Watching me.”

“Since you got here. Since the beginning.” He shifted his weight. “I know who you are.”

The world tilted.

“My name is Manuel Lugoni,” I said. “I’m the caretaker here.”

“Sure.” He almost smiled. “And I’m Samuel. I live over the hill. Well, not over. Around. In the woods, kind of. Everywhere.”

“Does anyone know you’re here?”

“Everyone knows I’m here. I’m here all the time. These are my woods.” He said it with the confidence born of the knowledge and experience of someone who’d walked every inch of this land. “But I’m the only one who knows who you really are.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do.” He smiled then. “But it’s okay. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“Why not?”

He shrugged. “Why would I? You’re not hurting anyone out here. You’re just growing stuff. Everyone was told to leave you alone. Told that you’re some kind of artist. Sensitive type. Mental problems.” He looked at the garden beds. “You don’t look crazy to me. Bad at farming, maybe. But not crazy.”

“Thanks, I think.”

“You’ll get better,” he said. “The cover crops were smart. Last year this was dead dirt – compacted clay mainly.”

“You’ve been coming here awhile?”

“Long before you got here. This is my territory. Was, anyway.” He backed toward the woods. “I should go. Just wanted you to know. That I know. So you don’t freak out if you see me around.”

“Wait–”

But he was already moving. Not running, just stepping back into the woods like he was part of it. One second he was there, the next he was gone. No sound. No trace.

I stood in the field, bamboo stake still in my hand, and realized: I’d just been compromised by a twelve-year-old who knew the woods and whole area better than I ever would.

I was completely at his mercy.

He came back three days later.

I was weeding when he emerged from the tree line. Same silent approach. Same calm demeanor.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Can I help?”

I looked at him. “With weeding?”

“Sure. I’ve got time.”

“Don’t you have school?”

“Summer break. And my parents don’t care what I do as long as I’m back by dark.” He walked over, crouched down, started pulling weeds. “I don’t always make it. They’re busy with their own thing.”

“Which is?”

“Growing pot. Underground operation. It’s legal nowhere in this state. Especially not what they do. So.” He pulled up a handful of grasses. “We all have our secrets.”

I didn’t like the implication but couldn’t say anything. At least he and his family had something to hide too. Maybe secrets balance out sometimes.

We worked in silence for a while. He was good at it. Fast, efficient.

“Your parents know you come here?” I asked.

“They know I go everywhere. They trust me. I don’t tell them specifics.” He sat back on his heels. “They wouldn’t care about you anyway. They’re not exactly fans of – a lot of things. Society.”

“Still.”

“Still nothing. You think you’re the only person around here done something really–” He looked grim. “There are meth labs in these hills you don’t want to get anywhere close to. There are people shooting people in the face for crazy–” He looked around uncomfortably. “Never mind. You’re just a guy growing vegetables.”

“You say you know that’s not all I am.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “But that’s all you are now. That’s all that matters.”

“Who are you? Jesus?”

No reaction. Just kept weeding. “Jesus of the woods,” he said.

We worked until the sun got high. He showed me which plants were edible weeds – lamb’s quarters, purslane. Said his mom had taught him.

“She sounds smart.”

“She is. And careful. Like you should be.” He stood up, brushed dirt off his jeans. “I’ll come back if that’s okay. And not just at harvest. Which, around here is pretty good.”

“How so?”

“You’ll find out. Fruits and nuts like you never had before, never seen, never tasted. Home grown, wild, and some that’s rare for these mountains. Have to say I help myself. Most everything here I’ve transplanted back to my folks’ place already.”

“You’re a thief of the woods.”

“No, man. I’m the greatest forager that ever lived. I can help with the planting and pruning because I’ll help myself to the harvest.”

“You really don’t care what I did?”

He thought about it. “Everyone around here is old and boring and you’re not that. And what you did–” He stopped. Started again. “My mom’s friend died last year. Cancer. Insurance wouldn’t cover her treatment. Experimental, they said. Too expensive. So she died.” He looked at me. “I’m not saying what you did was right. But I understand why you did it.”

Before I could respond, he was gone again. Back into the woods like smoke.

Samuel became a regular presence after that. Once a week, sometimes twice. Always through the woods. Always silent until he wanted to be seen.

We didn’t talk much, but when we did, we covered a lot of ground. Both his life and mine. Mainly though, we just worked. He helped me dig swales. Helped me plant trees. Showed me the best spots for wild mushrooms. Where the deer bedded down. Where the bears came through.

And then in the way of people who spend time together outside of any forced reason, and with no real agenda, we talking more in unguarded ways.

“Why’d you really do it?” he asked one day in June. We were planting aronia – the nicer name for chokeberry. Improved native varieties. My gloves off, my hands grimy, my back aching, the question came out of nowhere.

I’d been expecting it.

“You know why.”

“I know what everyone says.”

“What’s that?”

“Everything you can imagine. But I’m asking you. What made you specifically do it? What was the moment?”

And suddenly I was back there. I’ve told this story in my head a thousand times. Written it and rewritten it. You’d think the details would fade or shift, but they don’t. They stay sharp. Fixed. No matter how many seeds I plant or how tired I am at night, I’m back on that corner. The loop never stops.

I didn’t feel the recoil.

I barely registered his face.

What I remember most from the moment I killed that man on a Manhattan sidewalk is the pain in my back – grinding, total – as if my spine was trying to reject the metal they’d drilled into me three years before.

People on TV, online ask about the motive, the planning, the morality.

Not many ask about the screws.

They sit wrong, those three sharp pieces of hardware. They always have. They press into the bone at a bad angle, grinding with every step, every jolt, every breath. That morning they burned so fiercely I almost didn’t make it out of the hostel bathroom, much less to the corner where his life ended and mine changed into something I still don’t have language for.

I swallowed my meds dry from my palm over a cracked sink.

And then I walked, just another hunched figure in cheap clothes.

Nobody can see that you’re about to commit a crime you’ve rehearsed hundreds of times in your head and not once in real life.

I knew his face from newspapers, from corporate profiles, from the PDF of a company internal memo that I shouldn’t have been able to access.

I knew the numbers attached to his signature.

I knew the denial codes.

He came around the corner, right on schedule.

I was already in position – a phrase that sounds precise and professional until you realize it means standing there like an idiot for twenty minutes, the world utterly uninterested in the fact that it was about to tilt by a few degrees.

He almost ran into me.

Up close his briefcase looked both slight and dangerous. His hair had more gray. His coat was expensive. It looked like battle dress but flimsy. He had no security – why would he? The danger, in his mind, lived in data breaches and shareholder lawsuits, not on a wet sidewalk with a stranger in a hood.

He glanced up, annoyed, still half in his email.

He didn’t see the gun because I raised it behind him.

Later, commentators would say I fired “calmly” or “without hesitation.”

The truth is more embarrassing: my hand shook and I was terrified I’d miss.

I didn’t.

I pulled the trigger twice.

The sound was swallowed by the city. Car horns, a bus brake, somebody laughing, a distant siren. His briefcase hit the concrete first – the impact made a dull, scratching thud. Then his body followed with a sound I can still feel in my teeth.

I turned away.

I walked.

Just like I’d planned, like this was something I knew how to do, like there existed a version of the story where I never had to explain to a twelve-year-old boy why any of it happened.

Or what might have been.

“Why did you do it?” The Kid wanted to know.

“I did it on principle. To stop the killing. Killing to stop the killing, yes, I get the irony. Wicked, is it? Wicked irony.”

“It’s something,” he said.

I set down my shovel across from the Kid. Looked at the aronia stuffed in the holes we’d dug.

“I was twenty-three when they operated on my spine. Herniated disc. They said it would fix everything. Get me back to normal.” I moved soil around the roots with my hands. Make it firm. Don’t compact. “They put three screws in wrong. Wrong placement, wrong angle. I woke up in worse pain than before. Constant pain. Forever pain.”

Samuel nodded, listening.

“I went back. Said it wasn’t right. Something was wrong. They did another scan, saw the placement was off, said they could operate again. Fix it.” I laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Insurance denied the claim. Said it wouldn’t help. Classified it as cosmetic. Not medically necessary. The same company that paid for the first surgery that ruined me wouldn’t pay to fix what they’d approved in the first place.”

“That’s fucked up.”

“I appealed. Three times. Denied every time. I got a lawyer. They denied that too. Said I signed the consent forms. Assumption of risk. By the time I was twenty-five, I was on permanent pain medication. By twenty-six, I couldn’t work most jobs. By twenty-seven, I was angry all the time. And by twenty-eight...”

“By twenty-eight you shot someone.”

“Yes.” I watered the little aronia bushes.

We planted more bushes in silence.

“My dad says the system’s designed to make you feel powerless,” Samuel said finally. “That’s the whole point. Keep people scrambling. Keep them desperate. Keep them too tired to fight back.”

“Keep them in debt. Your dad’s right.”

“But you fought back.”

“Yes.”

“Did it help?” He looked at me. “You better now?”

I looked around the farm. At the bushes we’d stuck in the ground and the companion plants, radishes and wild strawberries, one annual, one perennial. At the fields starting to green up. At the life beginning to take hold in this place.

“It wasn’t supposed to be about me,” I said. “It was supposed to help. Did it? Hard to say. I feel more powerless now than ever, and more angry, when I think about it.” I pointed to the plants, newly in ground. “But not out here. It’s good to build something, create it. Can I take credit for anything from what I did? I don’t know. Do I have only myself to blame for what I did or didn’t do? I don’t know about that either. I don’t think so.”

By July, the garden was producing well. Lettuce, zucchini, onions, broccoli. More food than I could eat. And berry season was out of control – all colors of currants and gooseberries, plus blueberries and black and red raspberries, blackberries, goumi, and haskap. Samuel was welcome to take almost anything he liked.

“My mom asks where I get all this,” he said one day, filling a few bags.

“What do you tell her?”

“She knows by now. She knows I forage.”

“From gardens?”

“I tell her the raccoons give it to me. ‘Just don’t get shot,’ she says.”

For a moment, we considered those words. “Your mom sounds tough. Does she wonder why you’re gone so much?”

“She’s just glad I’m not underfoot. And I think she knows I need this. Somewhere to go that’s mine.” He picked a small cucumber, examined it. “She says everyone needs a refuge. Even kids.”

“This is your refuge?”

“The woods are. But yeah, here too.” He bit into the cucumber, crisp as could be and so sweet. Nothing industrial about it. Fruit of the earth. “You’re not so bad at what you do here.”

“Thanks,” I said dryly.

“I mean it. You’re trying.” He wiped his chin. “To try is all. People don’t always get that. People can be so stupid.”

“Maybe it’s not their fault.”

“Maybe it is.”

Angel came back in August. Samuel was there when she arrived. A moment of tension – her seeing him, him seeing her.

But she just nodded at him. “Samuel.”

“Ma’am.” He was polite. Careful.

“Your parents know you’re here?”

“Here, there, and everywhere.”

She looked at me. “We need to talk.”

Samuel took the hint. Disappeared into the woods.

“How long has he been coming around?” Angel asked.

“Since May. He knows who I am.”

“He would. Not a problem?”

“His parents grow marijuana. What can they say?”

“I know it. Let’s hope. Everybody knows everybody’s business in these hills. Or they pretend not to. You’d be shocked.” She sat on the porch steps. “He’s not a threat, I think. Not yet.”

“He seems like a good kid.”

“Are you a good kid?” said Angel. “What does that even mean?”

“I’m not a kid.”

“Well, he’s a smart. He understands consequences.” She paused. “And he’s a lawbreaker like you. Not a killer.” She paused again.“A rare bird, my mother would say.”

We sat in silence for a while.

“I need to tell you something,” she said finally. “I won’t be back soon. Maybe three months. Maybe longer.”

“Your life is elsewhere. I get it.”

“My work is elsewhere,” she said. “And things are – complicated.”

“What kind of work again?”

She looked at me. Really looked at me. “The kind I can’t entirely talk about. Not yet.” She stood. “You’ll be fine. You’ve learned enough. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

“Angel–”

“You’ve got all the money you need on the card. Use it. Don’t get careless.” She walked to her car. Paused with her hand on the door. “The trees and bushes you’re expanding with. The perennial plants. They’re good choices, in good positions. In the coming years, this place will be something. In twenty years it will be epic.”

“I won’t be here in twenty years. How could I possibly make it that long?”

“No,” she said quietly. “Probably not. But someone will be. And they’ll eat from trees and vines and everything you planted. That matters.”

She drove away.

I stood watching until the dust settled on the empty road.

Angel didn’t come back in three months.

September passed. The garden produced its last harvests. I canned tomatoes, froze beans, dried herbs. Samuel showed me how to use the root cellar – packed with damp sand and leaves. We stored potatoes, carrots, apples, and quince mainly. Beets and radishes.

“This is how people used to survive,” Samuel said, arranging potatoes in layers. “Before refrigeration. Before grocery stores. Just what they could grow and preserve.”

“Your parents teach you this?”

“My grandpa. Before he died. He lived through hard times. And he knew about the Great Depression, what his father lived through. He said you never know when you might need to survive off the grid.” He looked at me. “Guess he was right.”

October came. The leaves turned. The news coverage about me had dwindled to almost nothing. I was a cold case now. An unsolved mystery. Sometimes a true crime podcast would cover it. Sometimes someone on social media would post a theory. But mostly, the world had moved on. The officials were still hunting though. They were hunting for me and for the people who they assumed must be hiding me. They couldn’t figure it out. No one from my past knew anything. There was speculation that I was dead.

I wasn’t.

“The killer who vanished.”

By November, I was worried about Angel. By December, I was certain something had happened.

“Maybe she’s just busy,” Samuel said, one gray afternoon. I was splitting wood for the winter.

“She said three months. It’s been four.”

“People say things. Life happens.”

“What if she’s dead? What if someone found out she was helping me?”

Samuel took the maul from me and swung it himself. “Then you’d know. They’d be here. Cops would be here.”

He was right, but I wondered. Some days alone on the farm, the wind, felt like it could blow the whole world away.

The first snow arrived. By mid-December it fell heavily. I watched it come down from the kitchen window and thought about the anniversary. One year. One year since I’d shot a man on a Manhattan sidewalk and changed my life forever. Not only mine, of course.

Had it been worth it?

The news that day mentioned the victim’s family. His widow had started a foundation. His children were being raised by her and their grandparents. His company had appointed a new CEO who’d immediately announced stricter claim denial protocols, though other companies had loosened theirs in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

But what had really changed?

Insurance premiums were rising, always rising. The whole system needed to go, not one man.

I turned off the TV and sat in the dark farmhouse and wondered what the hell I’d accomplished besides ruining multiple lives, including my own.

Angel came back on a Tuesday in late January.

I was repairing fences when I heard the sound of the car from over the hill.

Was this it? The end? It always could be.

I set down a roll of fencing wire, stepped behind a tree, and waited.

Who was it? Not the mailperson. Not a delivery truck. Not the trash man in his pick-up. Samuel only came on foot. The few neighbors over the hill never came this way.

It was her car. The same dark sedan. She parked and got out. She looked different. Thinner. Older. There was something in her face that hadn’t been there before – something hollow and decided.

I met her on the shoveled brick walk as she came toward me. “You’re alive,” I said.

“So are you. The place looks good.”

It did. Even under snow, you could see the design emerging. The swales on contour. The pit and mound water spots. The orchard trees and bush hedges, now dormant. The gardens mulched for winter. The new flowerbeds. The insect hotels and bird feeders. The specimen spot plantings. The property was transforming from abandoned pasture into something with intention – something more dense and diverse and ever more alive. Something more complex and comprehensive. More caring. More able to care for others. People and creatures, plants of all kinds. And something invisible too. Something more.

“I didn’t think you were coming back.”

“I wasn’t sure I was.” She looked out across the fields. “Can we go inside? I need to talk to you.”

We sat at the kitchen table. I made coffee. She wrapped her hands around the mug like she was cold, even though the house was warm.

“I need to tell you what I do,” she said. “What I really do.”

I sat back. “Okay.”

“I’m an executive. Health insurance industry.”

The world stopped.

The mug in my hand. The snow outside. My own breathing.

“Not the company you – not that one. A different one. Smaller. Regional. But the same business model. The same–” She stopped. “The same problems. That’s part of what I do. I’m not only an investor.”

I set down my coffee slowly. “How long?”

“And I consult for the larger ones too. Thirty years. Started in claims processing. Worked my way up. Then went back to school. Returned. I’m Director of more than I would like to be now. Or I was.”

“Was?”

“I’m thinking of quitting. Going out with a bang. Not your kind of– I mean, that’s why I didn’t come back for a while. I was figuring out how to leave. How to do it without raising questions. Without leading anyone here.” She looked at me. “Maybe it can’t be done. They might audit my finances when I speak out. Examine my properties. This place.”

“You think?”

She shrugged. “Maybe I rub people the wrong way sometimes. I have enemies. I’ll be making more.”

“I need to leave then. Now.”

“And go where?” Her voice was sharp. “You think there’s somewhere safer? Somewhere they won’t find you?”

“There has to be–”

“There isn’t. Not that you know of. But maybe I can help you out again.” She leaned forward. “Listen to me. I’ve been trying to reform the industry from inside for years, decades. Pushing for better claim approval rates. Fighting the worst denials. And you know what happened after you shot that CEO? After you made national news? After people got talking again about healthcare injustice?”

I waited.

“I thought every company in the industry would double down. More aggressive denials. More profit protection. Stock prices up. Shareholder value increased. Your action – what you did – would make things worse for the very people you thought you were helping.”

The words hit like a fist.

“That’s not–”

“I know. You know what actually happened. The murder spurred intense public backlash against insurers. Polls show many Americans blamed insurance-industry practices – denials, profit over care – as contributing factors – even if indirectly. Media coverage and experts describe the killing as catalyzing widespread outrage over the healthcare system – including renewed scrutiny of denial practices, prior-authorization burdens, and corporate greed in insurance. The insurance company’s stock price dropped significantly after the assassination. But guess what–”

“It didn’t last.”

“Not entirely. I watched it happen. I was in the meetings. I heard the conversations. ‘We can’t let fear change our business model. We can’t let terrorists win.’ They used you to justify getting harsher. Now prices are shooting up again. And I kept showing up. Kept cashing the checks. Kept telling myself I was making a difference from inside.”

“Were you?”

“No.” The word was flat. Final. “I was complicit. I was part of the machine. And it took me this long to admit it.”

We sat in silence. Outside, a hawk screamed, and the little warm beasts snug in the ground trembled, I imagined. The wind rattled the bubbled old window panes even through modern storm windows.

“So what now?” I asked.

“Now we decide.” She pulled a piece of paper from her jacket. Unfolded it. Set it on the table between us. “There are people. Not many. But some. People who think what we’re both doing matters. What we might do. People who want to help.”

I looked at the paper. Names. Addresses. Phone numbers.

“Who are they?”

“Activists. Organizers. Some of them underground. Some of them public. People who’ve been fighting the healthcare industry for decades through legal channels. Through protests. Through legislation.” She tapped the paper. “They know about you. And me. No details – but indications. They don’t necessarily like you. But they want to connect with others. Build a network.”

“I don’t– I don’t think I want that– Not right now. I’ve done– What I’ve done– I want to be left alone for now. I feel better out here.”

“No,” she said. “You can’t be left alone anymore, Manuel. And neither can I.” Her voice was hard again. That endless stone quality. “If they audit my finances, they’re going to find payments to this property. They’re going to ask questions. I have a cover story – you’re a caretaker I hired for your permaculture design skills, I never met you in person, you changed your appearance. But if they dig deep enough–”

“They’ll find me.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re saying I should get ahead of it.”

“I’m saying you should decide what you want to be. For whatever time you have left.” She stood. Walked to the window. “You can keep hiding here. Keep farming. Keep trying to build something small and good. That’s noble. That matters. Take your chances on these old grounds.”

“Or?”

“Or you can fight back. Not the way you did before. Not with violence. But with visibility. With testimony. With the truth about what these companies do to people.” She turned to face me. “There are people who would protect you. Hide you better than I can. Move you when necessary. Let you be part of something bigger than one man’s revenge.”

“I’d be caught. If I move they’ll get me– The more I move–”

“You like it here.” Angel suddenly seemed to realize. She was surprised. “This is a cold, cold mountainside, Manuel. Don’t think it’s not. The end of the Earth.”

“Not to me. It’s where I live now.”

“Goddamn.” Angel turned and looked out a window into the valley. “I took in a puppy dog.” She faced me again.

“No. I’m not– I just feel that if I move, I’ll be caught.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. These people have been doing this for decades. They know how to move people. How to keep them safe.” She came back to the table. Sat down. “I’m not saying it’s a good option. I’m saying it’s an option. And you need to think about whether dying alone on this farm or dying as part of a movement makes more sense.”

“Those are my choices? Die alone or die publicly? I just got here.”

“It’s been a year. A long year. And those were always your choices. From the moment you pulled that trigger. You gave more than one death sentence that day.” She pushed the paper toward me. “Read it. Think about it. Decide.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to fight them. Legally, publicly. I’m going to testify. I’m going to name names. I’m going to expose every dirty practice I witnessed.” She smiled, but it was bitter. “Not for vengeance. For change. I’m probably going to get sued. Maybe arrested. But I’m done being complicit. I’m done letting them hide behind people like me who tell themselves they’re helping while the machine keeps grinding.”

“That’s brave.”

“It’s long overdue.” She stood. “I need to go. I shouldn’t be here at all. But I owed you the truth.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“I do. We owe each other. We all owe each other. The bare truth, not least.”

“Will you come back?”

She paused at the door. “I don’t know. If I can. If it’s safe. But don’t wait for me, Manuel. Decide what you’re going to do. And do it.”

I sat at the table looking at the paper. At the names. At the choices.

Outside, the snow kept falling.

And then I told her – “I’ve got a better idea. Come look at this.”

Angel hesitated before following me into the living room to my laptop on a stand by the wood stove. I played her a collage I edited of the most bloody and violent, brave and powerful moments from the ICE siege of Minneapolis, Minnesota. We watched in awe, the resistance, the many people monitoring the patrols and sweeps and attacks. We watched Immigration and Customs Enforcement masked agents maraud through the streets while the people tracked and hounded them with their piercing whistles and witness cameras, their taunts and chants and barricades, their mutual aid, their full human beings and bodies, their outraged minds and hearts.

I said, “That’s where I need to be.”

“No way. You would be recognized instantly.”

“I would wear a mask 100 percent of the time. I would wear two masks. Give me your credit card, or give me some cash, and I’ll go. And if I get caught or killed, let it be there – in the middle of the fight. They’re killing people point blank on the streets. Point blank.”

“They’re always killing people, Manuel. Do you know the history of this country? Black people, brown people, killing them especially. Poor people. So many people. Every day. It’s imperial.”

“It’s supremacist, capitalist–”

“It’s a bad idea. The fight is everywhere – not just on the bleeding streets of Minneapolis. And don’t you see? That’s exactly what the regime wants – escalation. It’s a police state. It wants an excuse to intensify all the way to full-blown tyranny – martial law, Army and Marine occupation, canceled elections, closed courts for anything but crooked state prosecution.”

“They just do what they want when they want anyway.”

“There’s always an excuse though. A very visible excuse makes it easier. And more likely. More sweeping. More harsh.”

“So the people should not fight back?”

“You pick and choose your battles, Manuel. There are different ways to resist.”

“Well, I need to go join that battle there in Minneapolis.”

“It’s a good battle, but do the people even want you with them? You’re a killer, Manuel, an assassin. You would be nightmare PR for the people of Minnesota.”

“You don’t know that. Maybe it’s the opposite.”

“You’re the one who doesn’t know. You would not be good for the social resistance, not there or anywhere else.”

“You sound defeatist, Angel.”

“I’m a realist.”

“Well, I’m like them, not like you. Willing to fight back. I’m not part of the problem.”

Angel pointed straight at my chest. “No? They don’t shoot back in Minneapolis. Not yet, at least. The state has a monopoly on force, and everyone knows it. The official guns can always one-up you. Ten-up you. Nuke you if they want to. Anyway, you’ve got one issue now, and you need to ride it to your grave. Universal health care.”

“Just because that’s your issue.”

“Fine. My issue. My house. My farm. My money.”

“My life.”

“Not yours only. Goddamn it.” She looked away. She looked at the contact sheet. She looked back at me. “I think it’s best that you stay right here now after all. You can do good things here. Things that matter each and every day – and in the long run. Okay? Stay put. Go nowhere. Give me that paper.” She took back the contact sheet and stuffed it in a pocket of her jeans. “I can track you by my credit card, so don’t even try it.”

Angel looked out the window again. And I wondered if either one of us knew what we were doing. What we could do. What we would. What we should.

They come at dawn, they come at midday, they come at night. That’s when they always come. All the time. You hold your daughter tight as the boots thunder up the stairs. You worked the double shifts at the hospital for years, saving lives during the pandemic. None of that matters now. Neighborhoods, families torn apart. Apartment complexes surrounded. Schools put on lockdown – not to protect the children, but to trap them. They use children as bait! They hold kids to force parents out of hiding! The vans line the streets like a military occupation. ICE everywhere is what the regime wants – the largest domestic police force in history. Flooding every city simultaneously. Not to protect anyone. To control everyone.

In the detention centers people are stuffed in cages. Fathers separated from sons. Mothers from daughters. Human beings treated like cargo to be shipped away. The cruelty is the point.

They think fear will break us. They aim to shut us up. Instead networks form of safe houses, people with supplies – first aid, food, water, blankets, gloves, coats. Neighbors who’ve never spoken became allies. Church basements became sanctuaries. Teachers refuse to hand over attendance records. Lawyers work around the clock. Crowds chant: “No human being is illegal!” Digital networks spring up – encrypted warnings when ICE vehicles enter neighborhoods. Rapid response teams form. They come for one family, and fifteen witnesses appear with cameras. Whistles, alerts, car sirens, chants of “ICE out!”

They say they come in the name of peace and order. Pax Americana. At gunpoint. But there’s no peace in terror. No greatness in cruelty. No purity in hatred. Doctors refuse to release patient information. Bus drivers refuse to transport detainees. Workers walk off jobs at detention facilities. Resistance in the darkness, in the daylight. Thousands fill the night streets with candles and flashlights. The regime wants to flood the country with fear and violence. Instead, conscience and mutual aid pour out everywhere.

At the hospital when ICE agents show up demanding employee records, every single staff member – doctors, nurses, custodians, everyone – walks out and forms a human chain at the entrance. Let the world see what’s going on here.

They want to control the elections, the courts, the future. They forgot something. The power of the human spirit. They don’t have it. They have violence, official violence.

A young girl holds a sign reading “MY MOM IS NOT A CRIMINAL”. The resistance elders’ faces are set: “We see humanity. And we won’t look away.” Barricades of dumpsters block streets against the rampaging cops. This is not the America we were promised. This is not the America we’ll accept.

The raids continue. The resistance continues. And every morning, people make a choice: Complicity or courage. Silence or solidarity. Fear or freedom. History is here. What side are you on? Death violence and tyranny? Or life and cooperation, democracy?

The words are Manuel Lugoni’s now. They feel as strong as the gun ever did. Stronger.

Manuel prepares the recording. He will transmit by Signal – smuggle it out, basically.

Angel, his guardian, is long gone. He needs to decide what more he must do. What more he will do. What more can be done.

Okay, so maybe not my most brilliant idea. To shoot that health insurance CEO. I mean his company is a monster, denying claims, denying health care, denying life and limb — and pricey. It’s all so monstrous. I was on three pain meds that day doped out of my mind trying to numb the fire in my back where those butchers put their nails and solved nothing. That’s what happens when you profitize health care — destructive profiteering. It gets you coming and going — ruins care, denies care, kills your health. Boy did they. It all needs to change, and so I tried to change it. Did it work? Tell me it’s working. Did I think things all the way through? I guess not. How did I expect to get away? There was no possible way. And yet I did, unlike that other poor fellow. I got away but only because I got lucky. They’re still hunting for me after all this time. They can’t believe it. How could a person walk up on a big-time CEO smack in the middle of New York City and shoot him down and then disappear and not get caught? I did. But only because I got lucky and not because I was thinking things all the way through.

My guardian angel found me. She wasn’t looking until she was. She saw me by accident, my head down, hood up, walking away from the bus stop two states beyond the city, looking to get some food, mask on. I was adjusting my mask when she pulled out from the intersection and went straight past me. What did I know? Only later would I realize she was my guardian angel. I’m three blocks down the street before she gets turned around and comes back and pulls up beside me. “Get in!” she says. “If I can tell it’s you, everyone can.” But it wasn’t true. She saw me with my mask down briefly. No one knew I was anywhere near that town. It was a fluke thing. I got away with it, if only for a while. But she had me cold. The tone of her voice, it was hard, it was tense but she sounded like she was looking out for me, this sudden stranger, knowing me and reaching out to me, and so I thought what the Hell and I looked at her through the window, and she looked like a person who knew shit about people and the world, a lot of shit, and she does, and then I started to open the front passenger door, and she hissed, “The back! Get in the back.” And so I did. “And lie down! Lie face down on the seat!” And so I did. “Jesus fucking Christ! What are you, stupid?! This is your great escape plan, wander downtown America?”

“No, Ma’am,” I said.

“Yes, Ma’am!” she said. “Shut up!”

And I did. And I had been so go, go, go for 24 hours straight, running, totally running hard in mind and body, and I was run down and fell asleep as she drove on and on. I passed out there on the back seat of my guardian angel’s car. I got lucky. Totally lucky. The next thing I knew, I woke up on a small hillside farm at the end of a dirt road.

My name is Manuel Lugoni, and I shot that health insurance CEO to his death in the streets of New York City. This is my memoir. When you read this, I will either be dead or in custody or imprisoned, or all of that. In the meantime, you may have seen some of my missives that my guardian angel secrets out to the public via Wikileaks. This is the story of life now, and the life I came through to get here. I’m writing my own story because I don’t think I can make it anymore. I need to get out. I need to get off the farm. I need to go.

Thou shalt not kill. I broke the taboo. I killed.

Thou shalt not kill? What about all the people the so-called “health” insurance industry kills by denying claims and by buying government officials to block universal health care?

Killing is taboo for the people but not for big business. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. When corporations kill, it’s called profit. When people kill, it’s called murder. When the rich rob and kill the poor, it’s called business. When the poor fight back, it’s called violence.

How do the poor get poor? They are impoverished by the rich. There are no poor — there are only the impoverished. Low income people are made by policy, by the immorality of the rich. By monetary exploitation. By capitalist murder. When do the big capitalists ever pay the price for their great devastations, genocides, ecocides, omnicides?

I’ll tell you when. When I show up. When the fighters fight back. I don’t recommend it for everyone, but let’s be real about what’s going on here.

Big business and high finance buy senators and representatives and Presidents and their Vice Presidents and cabinet and military appointees, and big business and high finance sell an endless variety of hyper expensive killing machines and profiteering policies and products of death in every industry. Kill for money! They are not killing for any good reason! They are not killing to stop the killing. They kill for ever more profit!

Did I get a buck out of my killing? Nothing! Nor will I! I can’t even show my face on this planet, let alone profit off it. So don’t you accuse me of killing for profit. Who are the real killers? I ask you. Who are they?! That’s right. You know as well as I do who are the real killers. And fuck you if you’re going to lie about it, you gutless loser.

So, I’m a farmer now. That’s what I tell myself. And that’s what I do so it may be true. But let me back up to the beginning of the story of my new life underground. I don’t know why they call it that. I walk on the ground everyday. I’m rarely underground, only when I go into the root stellar to store and retrieve apples, carrots, potatoes, nuts, and other sturdy fruit and root crops that can last through winter in the dark humid conditions of damp leaves and sand. Kind of my life now I guess — I’m in a figurative root cellar except for the sky — I have all the sky I want whenever I want. I walk the grounds of this planet, I breathe the air, I am free.

I don’t need to do this but I do. I farm. What else is there? Much of my food I order anonymously online, but I can only farm now in this life and you need to live with purpose, and so I do. Because of my growing I’m healthier than ever. Farm and write, write and farm, and record videos of my thoughts and views on the world. So I farm like my life depends on it because maybe it does. That’s what she told me, my guardian angel. I’ll give you this moniker for her, of course, not her real name. She’s not to blame for anything I’ve done. She’s not responsible for any part of me. I don’t know why she saved me from the clutches of the police state. I don’t know if she knows. She had little time to think. She acted, you know like you do, and rationalized it later, for the good or the bad. I feel like I was high out of my mind when I shot that CEO and somehow sane as could be. Maybe that’s how Angel felt, I’ll call her Angel, when she picked me up off the street and drove me far away, out here to the farm, to my salvation, my living death, my life alone.

The car stopped seemingly with a jolt, and I woke up face down on the back seat.

Angel turned and sighed.

She looked down at me. Then I sat up. Her hair was the color of earth. She was small compared to me but not small in general. She looked fearless. I looked outside across the farmstead — old white farmhouse, old blackened barn and outbuildings, yard, orchard, garden plots, flower beds, fields, forest, side-hill, dirt road, end of the road, dead end by the old barn and chicken coop. An old pigsty. An outhouse. Three seater — big, medium, and small circles cut into a two hundred year-old board. Of course the farmhouse has modern plumbing, but in the moment it seemed Angel had driven me into the nineteenth century, the Victorian age, if not the eighteenth, the Enlightenment — apparently very far from modern times and the contemporary cares of the world.

“You live here now,” she told me. “You will house-sit. You will be the new caretaker. But you will meet no one, you will interact with no one. If anyone comes around, you will hide. You will live out here alone like a hermit farmer of old, like the old farmer widowers my grandmother and great-grandmothers would occasionally look in on with a pie and to see if they were still alive and might need anything that they didn’t know they needed. Like a face and a moment of human interaction. I will be that face and that moment to you, and you will know no one else, or you will be caught. You will be caught anyway. My lawyers will take care of me. You duped me into staying on as caretaker here with your great farming handyman skills and growing know-how which you should have time to develop now. You changed your appearance anytime we met, shaved your eyebrows, cut your hair. How was I to know? How? You changed your name of course. What do you call yourself? You call yourself, say, Manuel Lugoni. That’s you from now on, to me. Manuel Lugoni. Great modern day farmer extraordinaire. Perfect to tend to my meditation retreat center for one. And now two. You. You will use my credit card to have delivered anything you need to survive. That will be your total pay for caretaking — room and board and necessities. Do you understand me? You are a hermit farmer now. Your life is over. Or you can go back on the run, back on the street and take your chances with every cop in the country. How long can you last out there or around here? I don’t know. You’ll probably go crazy in a few years, if you aren’t already. But you’re not my responsibility.”

My Guardian Angel. I was entirely her responsibility. She saved me. And now I would do everything possible to remain invisible on her hidden old defunct farm and save her from any fallout. “Are you dropping me off? How often do you come out here?”

“Dropping you off? I’m teaching you, like a toddler! You don’t know how to take care of this place. I need to teach you. I need to show you. I need to warn you about the neighbors. Well, there are no near neighbors, but you need to know about the few people, the old people who live over the hill. Get out of the car, Manuel. You’re on the farm now like a hermit of old. Your time has come and gone and here you are.”

I suppose you want to know why I did it? And what my life is like now? And what I was hoping to achieve? And where I’m living for real and how? And did I achieve it? And why can no one find me, not even the greatest surveillance state in the world? And will I do it again? And how have I survived for so long on the run? And am I really a threat to anyone anymore? And how long can I survive? And what am I living for now? And who knows about me and where I am? And am I a danger to anyone in any way? And who do I interact with and talk with now, if anyone? And did I consider what my family would think, my parents? And am I in touch with them secretly now? Or anyone? How do I survive and stay alive? And how long will I keep sending my anonymous Wikileaks missives to the public? And what do I do for money? And did I really think I could fight all that money and power and meanness that is the health insurance industry and the big money high tech police state? And who do I think will be elected the next President of America? What do I think will happen if they win? Anything new? And how is it possible that I have not been hunted down yet and captured or killed?

So many questions, and I the killer, and Angel my savior and boss — she got out of the car and looked around and moved like she owned the place as she did, and she knew where she was going and what she was doing, clearly at home, one of her homes apparently, meanwhile the ground felt unfamiliar and almost unreal, surreal under my feet. Time warped, was warping. What had I done? I knew what I had done. Where was I for real now? And for how long? Where was I going? Nowhere fast. No — just because I was going nowhere did not mean I was going nowhere fast. Time was out of whack. It was so slow and rushing all at once. And the old farmstead was totally strange to me, then. It was as strange to me, then, as it is wholly familiar now. And yet wholly tenuous because I know, by law, it can all be taken away from me instantly at any moment and I can be thrown into the worst dungeon of my most disturbed dreams. I can be taken from nature sometimes so severe and thunderstorm frightening and sometimes so blue-sky-breeze-loving, and I can be thrown into a cage, utterly alien, wholly inhuman, and be rendered all but dead to life. A killer thing.

I feel as if I myself have been assassinated. Bitter and bad irony, I know. Bitter and brute, like lethal medicine, too much like life now, and I feel that I have passed through and am living the afterlife of whatever you want to call it that came before. Crime and principle? Damnation and salvation? Twisted, fearsome, all too real, the killing, exalted killing, debased killing, the killings of this life.

“Well, why did you do it?” she asked, my guardian angel. We were sitting at the kitchen table in the old farmhouse.

“Allegedly did it,” I said.

“Oh come on. Somebody shot that health insurance CEO. It wasn’t you?”

“You know why,” I said. And she did. Everyone did. There’s no mystery. A young man suffering from permanent health problems inflicted by the health care industry shoots the Chief Executive Officer of DeadlyHealth Incorporated, the massive vampiric profiteering health insurance company that has no business existing in the first place, that should have no power, no rights, no existence, that should be wholly outlawed and replaced by free universal health care. “You know why I did it,” I told her. And she did. I don’t know why she even asked. If she didn’t know, she never would have picked me up off the street, and rescued me, saved me.

“I had to ask,” she said. But did she? Did she need my confirmation? What was the value of my explanation or lack thereof, of my denial or non-denial? The deed was done. She had rescued me and now faced me. “Did you think it would have any effect? On anything?” she asked.

“I thought it was justice.”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know. At the time, I thought it was.”

“That was only two days ago. Two days only. Has your thinking changed so soon.”

“I’m on the run. I don’t have time to think.”

“You’re not on the run anymore. Not here and now. So think. What are you going to do with the rest of your life, Manuel? What can you do?”

“I can’t turn back time.”

“Do you want to?”

“I can’t. No one can. Not even my guardian angel.”

“Me? Do you think I’m so powerful as to be your guardian angel?”

“I guess you are. I might be safe here.”

“What if I’m undercover CIA, FBI?”

“You’re not.”

“What if I’m a violent revolutionary like you — if that’s what you are?”

“Are you?”

“I’m no Manuel Lugoni.”

“So what are you then? Some kind of remote farmer? Where is this place exactly? What if I need to flee?”

“Aren’t most farms remote? Do you see many farms in the city? Big ones? Little ones?”

“Farms aren’t remote to the people who live on them. If they do.”

Angel told me I would know soon enough where I was. This was her former life. Not her current life, which was far from here. “And that’s all you need to know about me. You and I will never be close. I’m doing you the favor of your life. What you do from here on out is up to you.”

So what could I do? Choose another target? “Isn’t all life always up to you? To what you do and don’t do?”

“Some people are more lucky that way than others — more privileged.”

“Did I do a good thing, do you think?”

My guardian angel looked at me like she thought I should not ask her that. “You killed a man. And one hundred percent it does not matter what I think. What’s done is done. Now you’re going to take care of this farm, this would-be farm. You are going to develop it, grow it. You are going to use all organic permaculture principles. If you don’t know what those are, you will learn, teach yourself. You will attempt to make a solitary life here for yourself. I don’t see that you have any choice. No better option, at least.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Sometimes we act before we think. Do we not?”

I considered the question, of course, as it was a plainly pointed question. I thought a lot about a lot of things. “But looking back—” I asked her “—why did you do it? You turned around and stopped for me, took me in.”

“To save a life,” said my guardian angel. “I thought that maybe I could and should save his life — your life. I guess I did.”

“You were playing God.”

“Who was playing God? You? We’re all little gods, aren’t we. The way we act, what we do, what we think. You call me, Angel. But maybe you ought to call me, My Fellow God.”

“I tried to save lives by doing what I did.”

“By taking a life,” she said.

I spread the fingers of both hands, palms up above the kitchen table. The span of my hands dwarfed her narrow collection of knuckles, but I felt like with one punch from her, I could go down.

“That’s my only explanation,” I told her. “The best I got.”

Then the next day after we both rested and recovered from the seeming head trauma of the previous day, or, in my case, several days, we toured the farm, such as it was.

The old farmstead — it was quite a project. Sort of a non-existing project until I got there. It was less of a farm and more of a semi-abandoned slice of, I don’t know, the 1840s. I mean there was electricity and indoor plumbing, and all very modern, especially for a 200 year-old farmhouse. But I could have no car. I could not use the phone. Anonymously, I could access the internet that came through the phone line, and I had my guardian angel’s credit card and could use her name remotely with the post office, UPS, FedEx, and so on. A big LED TV sat in the cold little back room. Modern kitchen, and washer, dryer, and fuel oil furnace. What more did I need? Human companionship? Flesh and blood society? Apparently not. There would be none of that so deep in my internal exile, wherever it was that I proved to be. Well, I’ll tell you, sort of. Turned out I was tied to the side of a mountain somewhere within a hundred miles of either side of the Pennsylvania and New York state border.

Now go find me — or, never mind — I’m caught already.

Angel and I walked the grounds of the old farmstead, and it was rough and rugged, wind-blasted, hard-packed old sheep pasture become abandoned hayfields on steep slopes in patches between forested shale ledge-rock cliffs and glacial boulders. The main fields, they slope north-facing away from the warm sun toward the brutal wind. A herd of deer roams, and black bears. What could you grow within a deer herd? Fencing would be required. Coyotes, foxes, hawks, bald eagles, and every other creature imaginable, it began to seem, over the weeks and months — every creature imaginable crossed over, under, above, and through the grounds. Including me.

The etymology of garden is “enclosure.” I would be enclosing ground space like I was enclosing my life to save it for some hopefully productive purpose. My guardian angel had done all she could for me. Survival and life — I would be on my own again soon.

“What do you want me to grow here?” I asked her.

“Something permanent.”

“Like an orchard? Fruits, nuts?”

“And roots and shoots,” she said. “Especially nuts. Tree crops. Tree seeds, tree nuts, tree fruits. And perennial hedges of bush fruits and nuts and plants with root crops and shoot crops, all through the fields to the forest edges. And mushrooms and ginseng and ramps in the woods. And whatever you like for annual crops. Those for you.”

“Hedges of nuts? Do any nuts grow on bushes?”

“Hazels and chinquapins. Figure it out.”

“What’s your purpose here, Ma’am? What’s the plan, the overall plan, the real plan, with me and the farm.”

“With you — I don’t know. With the farm — to grow life,” she told me. “To create forever food and habitat, edible landscaping. A diverse permanent food forest and crucial habitat, for survival — we all need survival — critters large and small. And humans. To make this place a worthy preserve of all life. Bountiful of plants and creatures. A garden of eating, for living, and loving. A wild and domesticated world of natural beauty and strength. Maybe one day it will be a public park, a county park. How ironic would that be? From outlaw refuge to public park.”

Okay, I got it then. I could see her vision and begin to know the place and its potential for life. And purpose. Maybe even for myself. From killer outlaw to life-giving world creator. From seemingly barren grounds to near-paradise, a full creation, a creation in full. My guardian angel, she might be as hopelessly idealistic and doomed by way of her dreams as me. Or as entirely sensible and practical. Except, she would not kill, I assumed. She was not me. Not entirely. Not at the moment.

Would I, though, again? Kill. Could be too soon to say.

Or not as soon as I might have hoped.

“Am I a science experiment to you?” I asked her, before I realized I was thinking the thought.

Isn’t that something — when you first hear your thought leave your mouth and not your mind?

“If only,” she said.

“I don’t know how to do any of this stuff,” I told her. “How to grow a whole world out here.”

“Neither do I. You need to figure it out. We both do. Run by me what you learn. We’ll make the mistakes together.”

“I thought you wanted to minimize contact with me.”

“Not about the land. We need to treat the land carefully and well, you and I, and everyone. All things come from it. Most things. All the things that you need to care about now, come from the land.”

Coming down off the highest ridge toward the old farmhouse, I looked out across the multiple ridges falling away around the steep tight valley, the near ridges leading to the hazy blue and most distant mountain range, so much higher and farther, and I studied the opaque cloud horizon across the tops of trees, and I waited for the horizon to speak, and I’m still waiting.

Some days I wonder if I’m living at the end of the world.

We finished our walk of the old farm at the point where we started — on the porch by the farmhouse kitchen. I was impressed with how my guardian trusted me to the place, or seemed to trust me, with her old farmstead, and her whole life. And then it occurred to me that I was trusting her too, that technically I was still on the run, and always would be. And so I needed to think — did she really know what she was doing? Did I? Was I safe? How safe could I be? All my time and calculations — it really wasn’t so much — have gun, have mobility, have schedule, have intent, get in position, do it, then run — it was all too limited to the deadly act itself and not to the aftermath. What was I thinking? Everyone feels invisible but no one is. You’re constantly observed by the high tech police state. And then on occasion you are flesh and blood hunted down. Well, I had created this occasion and had given too little consideration to surviving my own hunt.

I was still being hunted there on the farm, even if I couldn’t feel it, even if I felt invisible, more invisible than ever. The hunt was on — guardian angel or no — and I needed to act like the most savvy prey in the world if I were to survive for very long at all.

You should see how the young rabbits live on the farm, so happy and free, cavorting with one another in the yard, zipping and hopping around the bushes, playing chase in spring and early summer. And then the hawks come in the heart of summer and deadly talons and terminal beaks rain from the sky, dropping death.

And the big red male fox cruises by too, looping the scene, inspecting the fields, and the coyotes howl and hunt and mark their land.

And the pilated woodpecker tangles with the milk snake too large for it to hit and survive.

And the eagles scour the top of the sky and threaten all but the bears who are timid and wary of even you mad human, except when they are not.

Death is violent and brutal and when not it is violent and casual. The most efficient hawks simply fly down from the tops of the dead ash trees and sit on the old stone wall and wait for the voles to poke up their heads, and the hawks pluck them out and fly back to the treetops with a little meal of life, in one instant, nothingness the next. I see it, I hear it all around me, all the time, all seasons, all hours — death, death, death.

Humans don’t need to be this way. Humans choose it anyway. Certain types of humans. Under certain pressures.

And it needs to change, be changed, and it can be, must be.

Finally she left, my guardian angel, she went back to her real life, whatever it was — oh, I searched online when I saw her name on a piece of mail but she had a common name and I couldn’t figure her out, not entirely.

So I guess I would trust her. And that’s what I did.

No choice really. Not much. They say you have choices in this life, but how much do you really have? How much do you really know?

Well, I tried to push the bounds.

And now I needed to learn to live in a world apart from the world entirely, on my own, a world both not of my own creation and entirely so.

A year passed. The officials were going nuts. No one could find me. They couldn’t even figure out where they lost me exactly. The bus cameras were faulty. The cameras at the bus stop by the liquor store were broken. The surveillers assumed a couple, three places where I could have gotten off the bus but they didn’t know for certain. And they had no trace of me beyond those points. Sure it was dumb luck on my part but it was luck, and sometimes that’s all you need.

And then my luck ran out. A twelve-year-old kid walked out of the woods — literally walked out of the woods — walked right up to me while I was shoving bamboo stakes into the damp spring earth for some light fencing, and he said, “I know who you are.”

It was near the edge of the woods. He stepped out of the edge of the woods, surprised me. I was caught. Pointless to run. He totally saw me. He stood ten feet away. I don’t know how he moved so silently, though I would later learn. He said, “I know who you are. I know exactly who you are.” And he kept himself there on the edge of the woods as if to make a break for it if necessary.

He looked like he could go fast. He looked like he knew the woods better than me, and he did. The cliff edges were not far away, and he could get into them and over in ways that I could not easily, quickly, or at all. So he had outs, this little skinny kid, and I had none. He looked like my guardian angel’s son if she would have had one, same earthy colored hair, and face like he knew the world and the world knew him. He knew how to get away and through the woods and back to his life, wherever that was, and here I stood, caught, with nowhere to go.

He explained all this to me later, long after, when it seemed to safe to do so, how he could get away, and that basically he had my number, and I was at his total mercy, and he knew it. I was on his home grounds that he did not own but inhabited more than anyone. He knew the land inside out and how to move across it, and I did not.

He stood there by the pale ghostly bark of a young sugar maple tree, a tree I could at least identify now after my long first year on the farm, and he told me who I was. And he was correct.

“No, I’m Manuel Lugoni,” I insisted but he knew better.

“That right?” he said. “I get it. Manuel. I got you.”

“Manuel Lugoni.”

“Hello, Manuel. What are you doing here? I’m Samuel.”

“For real?” I said.

“For real,” he said.

“I’m taking care of the farm,” I told him.

“I know that,” he told me. “I’ve been watching you.”

Why did my guardian angel not warn me about this kid? Does she even know about him? Who is he? Where is he from?

“Samuel, I need to ask, have you told anyone about me?”

Samuel ran his hand down one smooth side of the sturdy young sugar maple, as if it belonged to him and he to it. “Everyone around here knows you but I’m the only one who knows who you are. We were told to stay away from you, that you’re some sort of sensitive artist sort, with mental problems.”

“Who told you that?”

“People talk. Gossip is like Gospel around here. ‘It’s what we have,’ my Mom says. ‘We need to listen to it and shape it ourselves and share just enough of it to keep getting more because it might be true.’ Is it true?”

“Not really, no. Not to my knowledge.”

“Doesn’t look it. You look like Farmer Bob — whoever he was. You look super sane to me. But you’re a bad farmer, now getting better.”

“So how long have you been watching me?”

“From the start, of course. From as soon as I was told not to.”

Was this the work of my guardian angel? How much did she know about this kid?

“So you say you said nothing to anyone about who I am or who you think I may be and—”

“I already told you. No one knows who you are. Except me.”

“Do you always keep big secrets to yourself, Samuel?”

Samuel took that moment to loop his hands entirely around the sugar maple tree, and then he spun himself around it, his hiking boots flying through the air before he landed deftly, feet forward, facing me, directly.

“My parents grow pot underground. It’s not legal here. It’s their living. So, I keep big secrets when I need to.”

“Oh. Well, shit. Good for you.”

“Good for everyone. They don’t want me too involved in the business. At least not yet, maybe never. A little, not much. They tell me I’ll go to college and do my own thing, and for now they’re happy to let me roam. They think I might become a horticulturalist.”

“Will you?”

“I doubt it. Maybe. But I know these woods better than anyone. I know everyone’s property for miles around here better than they do. If I didn’t I would probably be shot by now. By a hunter or some other angry old bird. They go after so-called trespassers, some of them, like they do any old deer, bear, or squirrel. I don’t hunt. My family don’t either. What I know is where a body can go and where a body can’t, and when and how. I know what’s out there and what isn’t. The farthest I ever go on foot is about twenty miles east, west, south and north, a little more, a little less — all the way to the river, and the big park, and the two other mountain ranges. Twenty miles out and twenty miles back — bushwacking all the way except for some back roads but where’s the fun in that? All forest, some fields, all mountain, plateau, and valley. I go just to see what’s there and to be on the ground and beneath the sky like no one else, almost. And this whole time, here, you sit. Turning in circles, sticking things in the ground, taking things out. I admire that, the patience, the selectivity, but where have you gone this whole year? Nowhere. You could be out foraging anything you like — nuts, roots, bark, fruits, leaves, stalks, seeds. This whole time and you haven’t left this single patch of ground. And I know why.”

“You don’t know what all I do.”

“Is that a fact.”

“I live in my head, Kid. I write and record my manifestos on the world. Fuck, I can sit and watch TV and see all the world, almost. I got Netflix here. You? Who are you really, Kid? What do you want? What are you doing here today on my farm?”

“I think maybe it’s mine more than yours, but I’m just a kid. What do I know. All this land and woods and waters. I’m Samuel. Call me Sam.”

“Okay, Kid.” Samuel mentioned bears, and I felt like I was confronting a bit of a black bear in this boy, this man-boy, this ultra-local kid who could get me caught or killed, apparently, if he wanted to. Knowledge — a powerful thing. Samuel seemed to have it all over me, despite his age. Or he thought he did, which could be even more dangerous.

Who am I, again, in this world? No killer, despite the evidence. What I did was an act of — termination. Depose, Defend, Deny. Deny and depose those who would delay and deny treatment, for health, a human right.

Not a privilege — nothing pay for play — a right. A human right. Health care is a human right. Any society that denies health care to its people is an Evil society. Any institution that denies health care must go. And not just health care. There are lots of human rights. See the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And use your plain common sense. Housing, income, education, health, and more — so many human rights long denied the people, by the violators, the defenders of Evil, the violent ones, the big money that buys and controls the world by the high tech force of the police state.

Who am I? I am Manuel Lugoni — Public Defender.

So this kid, Samuel, he was safe from me even if I was not safe from him. I could only hope to win him over. Win him over or flee, but that would mean losing the farm and my guardian angel. And don’t we all need a guardian angel — maybe an angel armed, a killer angel. Especially nowadays. Especially me.

“I can’t help you,” the kid said.

“Do I need your help?”

“I won’t hurt you either,” he told me.

“That’s good. Good to know.”

“I’m just a kid,” he said. “What is it to me what you do to someone else who I don’t even know? But if I did know him, I might see it differently.”

“You won’t be a kid for long,” I told him.

He shrugged. “Maybe not. Does it matter? My parents smuggle pot. Who am I — I can’t mess with the police. Anyway, we don’t speak the same language.”

“You and the police?”

“Me and anyone.”

“I know how you feel.”

“I would think so,” said the kid. “I gotta go.” And with that he turned and hopped silent across a hodge-podge of rocks, moss and lichened-covered stone, hard to spot — mossy silent rocks over here, and over there silent bare gray stones and outcroppings. Through the trees he went, through the bushes, around and over the shale ledges and granite glacial boulders. He jumped off a high ledge and plunged out of sight, out of earshot to the steep and soft earth slope below. He was wholly gone.

And I was alone, again, more alone than before, than ever before.

Might as well face it — I’m a revolutionary. Whatever I was before — it’s what I am now. Health insurance is not health care. Health insurance is a denial of health care. I mean, if you have to kill yourself working a bullshit crap job to get health insurance to get treatment for killing yourself to get health insurance — what’s the point? And what’s the point especially when you need to pay a “deductible” on top of your monthly “premium” payment, and then the insurance doesn’t even cover everything anyway? I mean, what the fuck? Or you need to kill yourself fighting the insurance company to cover things they refuse to cover without fighting, or at all.

Deny, defend, depose — who can blame me — or that other guy — for engraving those fateful words on the bullet casings when insurance companies deny coverage of your health care needs!

Delay, Deny, Defend — insurance companies delay health care claims, deny them, and then defend themselves in court. See that book by Jay Feinman: Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.

I know what I can do about it. What I did.

Think how much lower your car insurance rates would be if there was universal health care totally supplied by the government. And why shouldn’t the government also provide basic car insurance for any car needed to survive? And basic house insurance? And free public transportation? And all free parks? And universal basic income? People have a right to live. A right to a decent, healthy, sane life. Any society would be crazy — or utterly vile — not to want to guarantee that to all people.

The people not only control all the money, they create all of it — that is, they should. And they should do what needs to be done with it — guarantee human rights, provide for comprehensive basic needs.

“Pay-for-play” health insurance, the health insurance industry, is sick. Time to get rid of it. Like, a century ago.

Any kind of insurance that is mandatory, like car insurance, health insurance, house insurance, it should be abolished and provided universally free by the government. There’s still jobs in providing for all that. Let them be good public jobs with good public benefits and good public results — for the people, of the people, by the people. People like to do good work, and they like to be able to work for particulars beyond the basics. But they need the option to do so — not the hope, not the chance, not the theoretical opportunity — the actual option.

Or what it government for? Mandatory insurance requirements instantly create exploitation, profiteering, abuse, confusion, and disastrous lack of coverage! Insurance itself is a disaster, a catastrophe. By the logic of the system, to be truly fully covered, you need insurance for your insurance for your insurance ad infinitum. And some people who can afford it, figure out a way to buy multiple layers of insurance and do so. The whole system is monstrous. And entirely unnecessary. That’s what good government is for — to kill the monstrous systems that would rise above us, and do — if we don’t end them before they get going, or once they’ve taken off.

The insurance people are not health care workers. They’re profit managers, scrapers, grabbers, and stealers. Some are fraud checkers, but the whole system is a fraud. So let’s replace every single health insurance job with a health care job. Government guaranteed work, government guaranteed jobs. Of health care, not insurance. You will still need fraud checkers. But they won’t be checking fraud in service of a greater fraud — the fraud that anyone at all is not entitled to health care by the very fact of being human.

And while we’re massively increasing the size of the actual health care workforce, we should double the number of teachers too. Heavens knows there’s plenty of good work to be done, and work that can be made more sane. But the private market can’t do a damn thing about it. Or won’t. Not when profit, not people, is the ultimate point of it all. It’s we, the people, who must intervene and offer ourselves everything that business cannot and will not.

And you don’t need to raise taxes to do it. You credit the money out of thin air, like even the retrograde American Constitution allows, and like the big banks do whenever they want to make a loan to someone they like. Well, it’s time to like all the people! Hit that button! And only the government can do that, and only the government should do that, not some rich guy picking and choosing who he likes or who likes him.

And no — crediting money out of thin air does not cause inflation, because where there are real needs, real demands, there’s no inflation, only circulation. The money goes to and from, from and to the people without jacking up the prices! You can look it up. The studies have been done. The case studies abound. Been there, done that.

But, oh no, instead the big insurance profiteers, the modern day monsters, buy politicians and laws that wreak ever more damage! And more profiteering. They incentivize lousy treatment, lousy doctoring like the kind that butchered my spine. So I fought back. Right or wrong. I took the problem into my own hands. Right or wrong. Vigilante or revolutionary. Wrong or Right. It’s what I did. It’s who I am. It’s why I’m on the run, underground they call it, confined to this old farm for life — if I’m lucky. So far, so good.

Oh, it’s too political! No one would want to read anything so political in a memoir! Oh no, it’s too controversial! And too inflammatory! And too ideological! And too propagandistic! No one wants to read all this explicit overt political stuff in a memoir! Such propaganda!

Are you kidding me! This is my life! My entire life! In a way. And it’s our lives all tied up together. If you have a problem with that, then fine, GO AWAY! And leave me to my bloody political controversial inflammatory ideological propagandistic explicit overt life, which is mine not yours anyway — unless you open your eyes and see, unless you open your mind and think that this is actually your life too, it might be, and we’re all in this together. Most of us.

Well if my life is not for you, who cares? Maybe your own life is not for you. Maybe you’re too gutless to live the life you might, to actually live the life you do. The life you Deny, Delay, Defend. Good for you, you fucking freak. Go live whatever life it is you want to hallucinate. Bye now.

What kind of world are we living in where health insurance executives are allowed to roam free? Is it fair? Is it right? Is it tolerable? Can it be allowed to stand — the monstrosity of it all?

Oh, we live in a time of monsters. I got myself all lathered up, then cooled down. Then lathered up again. Cooled and lathered and cooled. Then I decided. And I acted. Or whatever way it happened. Everyone knows it. I was all over the news. All over social media. And sometimes still am. Many of you supported me. I appreciate that. Some of you even swooned over me. I’m flattered. Do you like farm life? Come on out!

Well, anyway, too late for that now.

Maybe you saw the poll numbers. In one poll, two-thirds of people judged my actions to be “unacceptable,” while in the same poll more than forty percent of those between the ages of 18 and 29 found my actions to be “acceptable,” and slightly fewer of that same age found my actions to be unacceptable.

Is health insurance acceptable? No it’s not. So how have we not gotten rid of it a century ago?

In another poll of American adults of all ages, more than forty percent had an “unfavorable” view of me, while more than twenty percent had a “favorable” view.

Nearly thirty percent expressed “sympathy” for me in another big poll and twelve percent “supported the murder.”

Support for murder? Why is that? Is it because the health insurance industry is engaged in murder itself and therefore needs to be eliminated?

In another poll, eighty percent said I was mostly “responsible” for the health insurance CEO’s death, while almost as many, seventy percent, said that health-insurance company practices — coverage denials or insurance profits — were “responsible” too. “Responsible” meaning, of course, causal. And half of those polled also blamed both wealth and income inequality for the shooting.

About a third said someone in their immediate family or close friend group had experienced problems getting coverage from their health insurer in the past year.

Another poll showed that more than sixty percent of Americans believe the government should ensure that everyone has health coverage.

Can we regard the other thirty-odd percent of people as being unfeeling vicious savages who think, what — No health insurance for you? Too bad for you then. You die. Or suffer. Suffer and die. Fuck those people and their fucked up brains and broken hearts and minds.

Fat cat establishment Democrats are too often terrible on these issues, but it’s mostly big money brainwashed Republicans who support these horrible things.

Many of the most brainwashed people in the world live in America, and are Americans, where the corporate financial propaganda system is by far the most intense and has been for the longest time. This produces the worst people in the world with the most demented and destructive minds and hearts. Who’s worse? Who’s more demonic? More genocidal? More ecocidal? More omnicidal? Look at the death tolls through the years and decades ongoing. And the intensifying danger. These mad terminal systems are long since out of control but oh so controlled and profitable for the plutocracy. Be grown-up about it. Or just go away. It doesn’t take a killer to tell you straight, but I’m glad to do it.

A poll of registered voters found that nearly thirty percent believe the shooting, my shooting, was “wrong but they understand the alleged shooter’s anger with the healthcare system.”

In yet another poll, one of every four people expressed sympathy for the shooter — for me. And among sympathizers, about eighty percent referred to “systemic injustices” in health care, while more than a third noted personal suffering — back pain — tell me about it — denied claims, and the like.

Is this a free country or what? What right do the big money machine overlords have to rule over any of us? None. None whatsoever.

Well, it’s time to get rid of them. I mean, that was my conclusion.

There are different ways we could go about this. I went about it my way. And I hope that you will go about it in your ways.

Okay, where was I?

Oh, right. The Kid.

Now — the kid knows who I am, and I need to decide. Do I flee again? Where can I possibly go? There will not be another guardian angel. Can be only one. You can’t flee your guardian angel, even if she cannot protect you in the end. She remains my whole world though I rarely see her. She’s all I have now. All I’ll ever have. Heaven help me if she dies suddenly. Or ever.

But this wild child stalks me, boldly. Friend or foe? I need to find out. I need to win him over. Or scare him to death — half to death.

There’s nowhere I could go in the woods to hide. Not for long. I could go over the hill and take a car from one of the old people who live there. It would be easy, it should be. What could they say? Take it and go, and leave me in peace. And so I would, with their car.

And not get far. To where? For how long?

My only hope was to remain here anonymous on the farm — more hidden than in plain sight. But those damn cameras are everywhere, and with my mask down that one time they could have got me. They got me other ways. Anytime someone drives over the hill I need to assume there’s a working camera coming straight at me.

Like on the city streets. Cameras everywhere, you could feel them breathing down your neck. But that’s where the exec was and that’s where I needed to be, swimming masked, anonymous in a sea of sharks posing as cameras. Perfect anonymity my only chance going forward.

At least I knew enough to wipe my fingerprints off the weapon and ditch it in a trash can along with my fake IDs that I used to move around and stay in the hostel leading up to the day of attack. They never found those. But the fingerprints and the DNA on the protein bar wrapper and on the water bottle — goddamn it. The cameras caught me ditching those, and then forensics did the rest.

I would be long since in prison if not for my guardian angel and her old farm. I owe her my life. I owe this place my life.

I don’t owe the kid anything. The wild child of the woods. Who would miss him? Who would know?

They can’t catch me now — except for the kid. So what to do? It’s cold hard light-of-day time, again. Throw him in a trash can? Bag him? Compost him? Plant a tree on him? That’s not who I am. That’s not what a good man does. A righteous man. Even a killer. A principled killer.

The kid says he is my friend and no threat. But words are cheap.

The kid and I need to have words. More words. Soon, before it’s too late.

So now I’m looking for him. I scan the forest edges, sweep the fields, explore the woods. The next time he comes by I need to be ready.

But damn the kid was clever. A real survivor. The next time he came over the hill or around the hill or parachuted in, however he moves — he waited — the next time he came by was when my guardian angel was there.

He purposely waited for her to return. Somehow he knew. How could he not? That I might be a real threat.

And so Angel and I were in the kitchen and we looked out the window and saw the kid walking out of the woods, through a field, and then across the yard to the house.

And of course my guardian angel, she goes onto the porch to intercept him, but he’s way ahead of her. “I know all about it,” he said. “I know all about him. We talked, did he tell you? He knows that I know. I know what’s going on. It’s none of my business. I just know. I can’t help knowing. I know everything that goes on around here. And who.”

And my guardian angel, she stared him into silence. And suddenly you could see him thinking, recalculating. Had he miscalculated, after all? Should he be equally afraid, more afraid of her than even me? But because she was a woman, he was probably misestimating, underestimating her. At least, I hoped he was.

“Is that a fact,” says Angel. “What do you want, Kid?” She call him “kid” too which I thought was funny.

“I’m Samuel. Samuel—”

“I know who you are, Kid. Your parents grow pot. Underground. I know everything about you. More than you know about me. I know you and your whole family. I always have. So you’ve got nothing on me or anyone else that I don’t already have on you, long since, Kid. So here we are.”

“Okay. Understood,” said the kid.

“Good.”

“We both have a lot we need to hide, then. I mean, I don’t, but my family—”

“Everyone does, Kid. Even you. You’re the great trespasser around here. I don’t mind. I kind of like it. But others — more traditional country folk — not so much.”

The kid looked, suddenly, I don’t know, distraught, or mad.

“Why is everything so messed up?” he said.

“What do you mean?” said Angel, though in her tone, it sounded like maybe she knew.

“Why is everything so messed up? Is it because people hide everything in the world from each other.”

My guardian angel looked past the kid off into the distance, up the hill, over the hill. Then she looked back at the kid. “No, Kid,” she said. “It’s because people are, like, traumatized — sorry to say. Everything is messed up because people are forced to be at each other’s throats to survive, to scramble and work like dogs to funnel money up to those who own the world, including your ass. Everything is so messed up because of the class war of the plutocracy that forces people into the cold hard dirt or to become desperadoes of daily life. Everything is so messed up because the people who own your ass block you from cooperating with others and using the resources and innovations of the world to everyone’s equitable benefit. Got it? It’s not fucking rocket science, Kid. This is your world, I’m sorry.”

The kid nodded. “That sucks,” he said.

“It sucks,” said Angel. Then she relented. She seemed to try to cut the bleak. She may even have sighed, for the kid, her back to me. “It’s not like this everywhere, Kid.”

“Seems like it to me.”

The kid had a point.

I mean really, why does this stupendously clever and bountiful country not extend to every person the full right to health care? Other less wealthy countries do it. And it’s a human right. That’s messed up. It stresses people out — and to death. So messed up. The kid knows. I know. Who doesn’t know?

And who is brainwashed not to know?

And how? And why? Why is there so much meanness? So much deceit? You need to be the worst person in the world to be like that. You need to be the worst country in the world. That’s messed up.

The kid knows.

I know.

You know.

Don’t you?

It’s all got to change. Now.

I tried to make it change. Now.

I was so mad.

I am mad — so mad.

And then the kid pointed at me, past Angel, and he said, “What does the dead man’s family have to say about what Manuel Lugoni did to him? Pop. Pop.”

Holy shit — the kid was reenacting the murder scene between us. The assassination.

I thought — or maybe I didn’t. Okay, fuck that. That was a fucking threat. If there’s going to be any threats around here, they are going to be made by me.

I pushed my guardian angel to the side and I lunged off the porch like a fucking linebacker, and the kid was fast, but I was faster, and I grabbed him by one arm and then by the other, and a fucking car came over the hill, you could hear it on the gravel and dirt, and I ripped the kid onto the porch and shoved my guardian angel aside again, and I threw the kid into the kitchen, and my guardian angel came inside and grabbed me, and I threw her off, and I locked the door, and I knew what I needed to do then.

I needed to disappear and silence the kid.