This is Part 1 of a three-part serialization. Read Part 2 here.
The man wakes up woozy and bandaged on a cot, his head throbbing. He has the sensation that he’s on a boat, but otherwise his mind is blank, pounding with unformed questions that he doesn’t have answers to. As his eyes adjust to the dank little room, he becomes aware of voices outside. Men’s voices. They sound upset about something—stressed, tired. The man strains to make out the words. They’re bickering over who was supposed to wash the dishes, whose turn it is to make breakfast. In a flash, the man knows exactly what he must do.
He flies off the cot and out the door, stunning the fishermen who stand talking in the kitchen. Before they can even react, the man is at the sink. He washes the dishes, whips up perfect omelettes with goat cheese and dill, and then settles in to give the fishermen back rubs—and he doesn’t phone them in, either. He’s super-present for it, intently focussed on giving a relaxing, stress-melting massage.
Afterward, the fishermen are dumbfounded. They hadn’t thought that this man was going to survive, much less give them a morning off that they didn’t know they needed.
As he dries the second round of dishes by hand, the man tentatively questions the fishermen. He learns that he’s on an American fishing trawler off the coast of Long Island. That the crew found him floating in the water three days earlier with twin gunshot wounds in his back, an iPhone still wedged in his pocket. That they’d patched him up, poured some whiskey down his throat, and left him to live or die.
They ask him who he is, what he does for work, what kind of trouble he’s in—but the man is at a loss. He has no idea about any of it, not even his name. Only one thing is crystal clear to everyone: this man possesses advanced boyfriend skills.
A day later, the trawler stops to refuel. The man goes ashore so he can walk and think, and also buy some flowers for the crew—just because. It’s while he’s bending down to inspect a bunch of tulips in a stand outside a grocery store that he feels a click against his left kneecap. He kneels, rolls up his pant leg, and investigates. There, just below the skin: a small, hard object. He slips a utility knife from his pocket, flicks out the smallest blade, and makes an incision. He works the tiny cylinder out from beneath his skin, then cauterizes the wound using a lighter.
What the hell?, the man thinks as he squints at the bloody piece of metal. He turns it over in his palm; it seems to be engraved with something. Holding it between his thumb and forefinger to get a closer look, he notices a tiny green light shining from a lens on its surface. He aims the light at the side of a flower bucket and reads the flickering letters that it projects:
FOX AND FIG
103 GREENWICH AVE.
RESERVATIONS: 212-478-1839
He racks his brain, but the words mean nothing to him. Taking out his phone, he punches in the number and listens to it ring once, twice.
“Fox and Fig reservations line, this is Mara,” a voice says. She sounds cute, early twenties. The man fights the urge to ask her how her day’s going and to really listen to the answer.
“I need to make a reservation,” he says, unsure but hiding it.
“Of course, Mr. Anderson. We can accommodate you at any time.”
Anderson. So that’s his name. Well, it’s a start. The man checks his phone, calculates the time it’ll take him to get into the city, and makes a reservation for six o’clock.
An hour later, he’s on a bus to New York. He is shivering, having given his sweatshirt to a middle-aged woman who said she was cold. But his mind is burning as he peers at the logo engraved on the cylinder: +1. What could it mean?
Thousands of miles away, on a wild, forested island off the coast of Seattle, an octagonal compound made entirely of black glass juts up against the sky.
A golden eagle soars over the sleek fortress. As it glides down to its nest, one of its wings tilts momentarily inside the hundred-foot radius around the building. The next instant, it’s gone, incinerated in a blaze of fire. Sizzling feathers rain down on the glass below.
This is the headquarters of the Plus One Project.
Deep inside the compound, in a secure room, a dozen agents sit in silence around a conference table. The air crackles with tension as they watch a shimmering projection in the middle of the room: grainy surveillance footage showing a man buying flowers outside a grocery store in Greenport, then stooping down to examine something.
A woman in her mid-fifties sits at the head of the table, watching the footage from behind black designer sunglasses. Her austere platinum bob and high cheekbones, together with the glasses, give her face a remote, mannequin-like appearance. She raises a hand and makes a quick, deft gesture. The footage freezes. She gestures again and the image zooms in to reveal the man’s face, his brow furrowed in confusion. There’s a long pause, and then the woman removes her sunglasses, revealing piercing blue eyes fixed on the image in front of her. When she speaks, her voice is terrifyingly soft.
“What am I looking at?”
The agents seated around the table are silent. Their fear is palpable. A trim man in wire-rim frames to her right shakes visibly.
“I know I can’t be looking at a rogue unit,” the woman continues, calmly folding her hands on the table. Only a twitch in her eyelid betrays her rage. “Because that would mean this entire operation is compromised.”
“Barnes,” she addresses the shaking man in glasses, “he was your problem.”
Barnes sputters to life. “I had verification. I had eyes on. That fucker was dead!”
The woman gets up, paces, rubs her face. She turns away from the agents and stares out of the floor-to-ceiling windows at the fog snaking through the treetops.
“How do we stay alive?” she asks.
The agents glance at one another. Is she leading them down some theoretical line of thought? You never know with Imogen. One thing they do know is to keep their mouths shut.
“Why do we get a blind eye from the Feds? Why do we consistently beat back competitors? Because we execute flawlessly. No surprises. No mess. We’ve never had a fuckup.” Imogen turns back to her team, her voice an icy singsong. “Until now.”
At this point, Barnes is noticeably sweating. He clenches his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering.
A young woman with a pixie cut punches a few keys on her laptop. “We have close to a billion dollars in contracts slated for the next eighteen months. We need to contain this.”
Imogen nods, solemn. “Plus One has a one-strike policy. It applies to our units. It applies to management, as well.”
Tears stream down Barnes’s face as she turns to him, shakes her head sadly, and then nods to a pair of guards standing at attention by the door. Without a word, they stride over to Barnes, lift him up by the shoulders, and drag him away.
The other agents stare at the table. Somebody coughs. Imogen keeps her back to the room, gazing out at the wilderness.
A moment later, one of the guards pops his head back in. “Just wanted to triple-check—”
Imogen swivels to face him. “Kill him by shooting his head with a gun and then throw his dead body in the Sound.”
“Yep. Copy that!” the guard replies, briskly.
Imogen turns back to the surveillance footage and stares into the man’s eyes.
“I’m cleaning this up myself.”
Walking down to the Village from Port Authority, the man catches sight of his reflection in the glass façade of an office building. He pauses, taking in his square jaw, big, soulful eyes, sensual mouth, and five-o’clock shadow. He looks at his broad shoulders, sculpted arms, and flat stomach. All right, Mr. Anderson. Who are you? A trainer? he thinks. A professional soccer player? All he knows is that he’s handsome, muscular, empathetic, and that he’s often had orgasms simply from performing oral sex on women, during which time flies by and fifty-six minutes actually doesn’t feel that long at all.
A buzz against his thigh jolts him back to the present. He’d thought that his phone was dead, but when he pulls it from his pocket there’s a text from someone named Katie.
“Where are you, baby? You missed brunch! [Crying emoji, kiss emoji, heart emoji]”
The man’s mind races. Who is Katie? Should he respond to her text? If so, what should he say? Is she someone he can trust, or is this some kind of a trap?
He pockets his phone, deciding to reconsider his options after Fox and Fig, whatever that is.
Upon arrival, the man sees that it’s a restaurant. He steps cautiously inside and is greeted warmly by a beautiful young woman in a cream-colored suit. As she smiles at him, an image flashes in his mind of the two of them lazily browsing a farmer’s market for rhubarb. He pushes it away, wary, but returns her smile automatically. Have they met before?
Without a word, the woman ushers him into a private room and waves him into a body scanner, watching a monitor as he passes through. Shit, he thinks. Is she going to notice that he dug out the cylinder? But the woman just nods, satisfied, and opens a second door on the back wall, motioning for him to enter. Then she leaves.
The man peers inside the small room. There’s a single chair, and a table with a steel case a little bigger than a shoebox sitting smack in the middle of it. The man studies the engraving on the lid: +1. Here goes nothing, he thinks, and opens the box.
The first thing he notices is the cash. Huge bundles of fifty-dollar bills, with labels on their bands. He flips through the stacks of money: “One-Month Anniversaries,” “Two-Month Anniversaries,” “Birthdays,” and “Just Cuz.” Beneath them, several jewel-tone V-neck cashmere sweaters. A worn, annotated New York magazine article titled “The Perfect Afternoon in the West Village.” A list of maître d’s names and e-mail addresses. And a pile of driver’s licenses, from all over the country. His head spins as he reads the different aliases. There’s Michael Anderson, from Denver; Ben Schwartz, from Michigan; Dave Seiger, from Illinois; Dan Carson, from California. And under the I.D.s, the man finds something even more disturbing: a sheaf of photos.
There are at least thirty, all of him with different women. He studies one where he’s standing on a dock, arm-in-arm with a white woman with red hair. On the back is written, “Mike + Maggie, 8/7/20.” Neither he nor the woman are wearing rings.
“I have a girlfriend named Maggie,” the man says slowly. He stares at her face, trying hard to remember anything. His mind is blank. “Maggie,” he repeats, determined for it to spark a memory.
The next photo shows him and a Black woman on a swing set with their backs to the camera, laughing as they turn to face the photographer. “Dan and Lauren,” the note on it reads. Next is “Ben” and an Asian woman clinking margaritas at a Mexican restaurant, with a mariachi band playing behind them. There’s “John” with his arm around an older white woman in a sports car. And dozens more, all of him with different women—all apparently at the same exhilarating-yet-cozy three-month mark of a relationship.
The man feels his sense of reality collapsing around him. What were these pictures? Who were these women? And why did he feel the urge to make them homemade birthday cards?
He rifles through the photos again, checking the inscriptions for a “Katie.” There aren’t any. He closes his eyes, thinks Katie, and has a dim recollection of an apple orchard . . . a thirty-something woman with ombré hair. . . . He knows what ombré hair is. . . . Why does he know what that is? . . . but, beyond that, nothing.
Suddenly, the man feels an urgent need to get out of this place. At the bottom of the box is a Ralph Lauren gym bag; he shakes it open and dumps the contents of the box inside, then zips it shut. Trying to control his breathing, he steps out of the room—and notices the woman in the cream-colored suit eyeing him strangely. She smiles and waves him over. “Hey, there’s a spider in the bathroom,” she coos. “Can you kill it for me?”
He nods, and her look of gratitude is like a heroin injection straight to his heart. It feels so good that he almost doesn’t notice her reaching under her desk and pressing a little red button.
The man locks eyes with the woman as her expression changes to a cold, dead stare. He backs away, stumbles, and then turns and sprints for the exit, just as a swat team bursts through a set of doors at the other end of the dining room, spraying bullets.
Terrified patrons scream and take cover as the man somersaults out the door and dashes across the street, car horns blaring after him as he goes. He bounds onto a taxi and then leaps to the roof of a passing box truck, just as the swat team spills out of the Fox and Fig entrance. Flattening himself against the truck’s roof, the gym bag dangling off its side, the man hears the agents’ shouts fade as the truck drives away. Soon it slows to a stop and reverses into a gigantic garage. Raising his head, the man sees that he’s in some kind of loading bay. He drops silently down and disappears through a set of swinging doors into the building.
Inside, he pauses to take in his new surroundings. Fluorescent lights. Pallet trucks. Colorful boxes of food. He peers down an aisle and sees two people chatting, both wearing Hawaiian shirts.
Holy shit—he knows this place. Knows it well. He’s in Trader Joe’s, on Sixth and Spring.
From “Big Time,” by Jen Spyra, to be published by Random House.
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