But then one day, the daily emails started to get weird. "I don't like it when you wear your hair up," it said. Carla looked around quickly, as though to catch the writer of the emails in the act, but of course all she saw was her fellow day traders going about their business. Slowly, hesitantly, she began to take her hair down. It was a weird message to receive, and really over the line, but she had come to depend on these inexplicable, anonymous emails that told her which stocks to buy and which stocks to sell, emails that had been responsible for her spectacular success over the past three months, making her clients (and therefore her) insane returns. She had paid off her mortgage. She had bought a new car. She was better-dressed, well-rested, practically glowing. And so she took her hair down.

In retrospect, she saw that that had been a turning point. Now emails still contained stock tips -- just enough to keep her hooked -- but now they said other things, like "Don't wear those shoes again" or "Skip lunch." She obeyed. "Don't go to happy hour. Go straight home." She obeyed. They started to accelerate in frequency: instead of only once a day, now she got them almost every hour, dictating her entire life. She broke up with her boyfriend. She stopped calling her mom. It got so that she didn't do anything without consulting her email first. Could she go out to lunch? Maybe -- she had to check. No, sorry, not today. The whole situation made her feel terrified at first, and then resentful, and then relieved. Wasn't it better to just give it all up like this? Is this what people meant when they said to put their trust in God?

Please can we go a little faster, the passenger said. Her knees were squeezed very tight together. Sometimes the body prays even if the mind doesn’t. The cab driver ignored her. Maybe he didn’t speak English? Excuse me, she said, and this time his eyes flickered to meet hers in the rearview mirror. Can we please, she said. She could taste blood in her mouth. Can we please go a little faster? Still no response. Houston was the least exciting place in the world for a car chase, thanks to the heavy traffic. Well, if even if she couldn’t move quickly, neither could They. She twisted around to see if she could still see Them. There. Tinted windows, so she couldn’t make eye contact, thank god, but she knew They were looking back. Sometimes, in moments of great stress or pain, she would find herself mentally chanting the alphabet, like the mantra of an idiot. Which made her an idiot. A B C D E F G all running together. The driver turned the wheel almost lazily. Please, she said. Sir. He didn’t even look at her this time. For a moment, she wondered wildly if he were working with Them, if all of this was a conspiracy, but no — then he wouldn’t be driving her around in the first place. No, he wasn’t actively working against her: it was his indifference that would be her end. The pain from the pounding of her heart made her dig her nails into her seat. A B C D E F G. The universe was a callous place, and nobody was listening.

Sam was, deep down, a narcissist, as he suspected everyone else was, too, and the first thing that occurred to him was that the hallucinatory sight must be, somehow, a sign for him. The universe communicates in mysterious ways, and so this was its way of telling him -- what, exactly?

He studied it: a grand piano, ornately decorated, plopped right into the middle of the beach, not too far from the tide's rhythmic reach. He stood there and thought. What could it mean? He didn't play piano. He didn't know anyone who played piano. He wasn't a particular fan of classical music, or jazz.

Maybe the point was its incongruity? Like surrealism? Was that the message -- to think outside the box?

When he finally arrived at the coffee shop to get his daily coffee, he was disappointed by the banality of the solution: a pop star was making a music video. Of course. Always, always, he tried to listen to the universe, but never did it seem to be speaking to him. He was well used to social loneliness, having experienced it for most of his life, but this was a grander, more devastating kind of loneliness: the growing certainty that, despite all he had been taught during his ultra-religious childhood, there was nothing watching over him, no invisible audience rooting for you. I could die right now and nobody would notice, he thought suddenly, but that thought was immediately followed by another: I can do whatever I want.

The only sound that could be heard now was the plop and splash of her oar and the heavy sound of her breathing. “Kayak for your life” was the phrase that kept popping into her head, and Louisa wanted to laugh because it was so stupid, it was such a humiliatingly amateur thing to happen to her, a pathetic version of a high-stakes car chase, and yet here she was, kayaking for her life. Her arms began to ache. She didn’t want to look behind her because she didn’t want to know and also because it was pointless, like when you’re crossing a busy street and you realize that it’s better to just run, run for it, and if they hit you, they hit you, but you should keep your eyes ahead, eyes on the prize, don’t trip. The velvety water seemed to want to hold her back. Sometimes it felt as if the whole world were conspiring against her. Louisa had inherited this from her father: a suspicion of objects. “They won’t let me click,” he would complain, when his computer’s mouse stopped working, or “The table didn’t want to stay up.” She had thought him paranoid, but now that she was older, she realized that he was right: the whole world was full of enemies, and if you were foolish enough to let them catch you, you deserved everything that came to you.

As they stepped into the arena, they could hear the crowd screaming in a language they could not understand. Jim thought it was Japanese but John insisted that it was Korean. “It’s China, Vietnam, Korea,” he insisted. “That’s the order. Japan isn’t until next week.” They were so tired. Every night it was the same: bright lights, lights so bright they couldn’t see the masses producing those howls, but they could see each other, every crease, every hair, almost every atom. Jim knew John’s moles now, could draw them by heart. He knew this because he had: it was something he’d started to do after every match. A way to decompress. Know thy enemy. But was John his enemy? Jim wasn’t sure.

Here’s what they were supposed to do: fight. But with no gloves, no protective equipment. Neither of them was particularly strong. That was the gimmick: two middle-aged men, both out of shape and with visible potbellies, put into a ring with no equipment and told to have at each other. The fight lasted until one of them gave up. The winner would get $5,000. Every night he won after that, the prize money would double for him. But if the other guy won, then it would start again at $5,000. This was to discourage them from taking turns. But it didn’t work. They had agreed somewhere in Eastern Europe that they would write up a schedule. It couldn’t be too regular or else Management would catch on. They decided to use radioactive decay to generate their sequence. “It’s a metaphor,” John said. Jim didn’t ask what for. He was so tired. At least this way, if they knew who was going to win, they didn’t have to try so hard; if you went in as the loser, there was a certain comfort in it, you relaxed, you put your faith in the hands of the winner and trusted that he would make it all okay. He would do what needed to be done. All you had to do was trust him with your body, was give yourself over. It was just teamwork.