Spawn in Liberty Park, on the sidewalk of the ring of road that loops its perimeter, boxed between 900  and  1300 South, 500 and 700 East. Across from Park Diner, and he wonders whether the sticker he saw as a kid is still there on the hand dryer. A single panel comic depicting a segregated pool—on  the  ATHEIST  side,  folks  dove and played and drank and made out.  A guy called out to two boys in dress clothes having second thoughts about joining the RELIGIOUS: “Come on in, the water’s just water!”  Jordan  didn’t  know  if  he’d ever find the comic funny,  but he knew there was no forgetting it. Twin Peaks looms to the south, Emigration Canyon if he keeps running straight. Nightmare Mile Virtual Runner populating the grass with the faceless unhoused of recent crises, selling bottles of water and random clothes, one guy in a wizard outfit floating past with crystal talismans dangling from his antlered staff.  Blonde  moms  in blinders and tight athleisure affirm their positions on the universe with every stride.

Uri’s question Well, what do you like? The answer became nanoparticles. This the gym in  which he’s done his most significant lab work. Drugs flood the body to kill cancers like leukemia in conventional chemotherapy, increasing the chances of Victorian death cults convening around the wasted teenage patient. Poor pharmokinetics, drug ratio fully decalibrated by the time they blast their way toward the metastasis. Like throwing a grenade into a mess hall to take out one infiltrator. Jordan’s landscape the architecture of NP drugs with specific surface areas to target cancer cells and reduce peripheral damage. Architecture, say, the shape of a bottlebrush.

He loops around the swan-dotted pond with the island gazebo where he read his first secular book about hell. On one concrete pedestal, a bronze boy reaches down to help his thin clone reach the perch; on another, a bronze girl stares forlornly beyond the boys, holding a limp doll, her double. The city fecund with statues receptive to local lessons.

After looping around west and south, past a grassy expanse on which he once played whiffle ball at a birthday party so wholesome he could’ve grown claws, he approaches his father’s massive handiwork. The Wikipedia page still says “In summer time children can play in the water fountain,” but Nightmare Mile is up to date, and streams no longer flow down the bouldered hillocks labeled with the names of the valley’s seven canyons. Leafy water stagnates in the pool meant to simulate the shrinking lake, and children avoid the sidewalks and exposed aggregate of the Jordan River. Jogging past, he spots two sharps containers, a sodden novel, a public scooter, one fur-lined boot. The water a public health risk, the city determined, as if this wasn’t. Soon to be converted into a dry feature, like the city around it. Grim similitude. A blurb of support was wrested from his father’s ailing throat, maybe out of guilt for the millions of gallons that couldn’t be gotten back.

Just today, a test concluded on three groups of BALB/c mice Jordan had forbidden his assistants from naming with multiple myeloma: a control group, a group treated with three drugs—the proteasome inhibitor bortezomib, the immunomodulatory drug pomalidomide, and a corticosteroid dexamethasone—administered conventionally, and those same drugs polymerized in synergistic ratios on the bottlebrush prodrug nanocarrier. Bioluminescence imaging of MM.1SLUC+/GFP+ cells proved significantly more tumor growth inhibition in the Brushies than the Sloshers, not to mention the Badgers.  So close, this holy grail of pharmokinetics.

Nightmare Mile’s jingle No motivator like regret! Without Uri, no Jory. No Austin, no Tom, no Edgar, no Jory, no Jory, no Jory, no Jory—

He passes Tracy Aviary, where he once dithered at the gate about the entry fee while learning to live as an adult in the valley of his childhood. Inside, he pep-talked himself to the brink of enjoyment until he thought too hard about the netted sky over the Andean condor’s world. Instead of birds, it’s drones perched on the branches of the virtual trail’s aviary. Some hover in their enclosures, waiting to be dispatched.

A second lap counterclockwise sweeps away the unhoused population, rewinds the fashion and car models. The two bronze boys stand atop the girl’s broken body, high-fiving. By now, he must know what it is you do for a living. Does it seem like a cruel joke to Uri, that you’ve cared more for strangers with cancer than you cared about the friend it was killing? A window opened and closed when an explanation could have been possible, profound even. You imagine arguments in which he condemns your choice of vocation as a sick one-upmanship. Like the Hollywood years,  like your apostacy.  Jealous that he was the one to get sick,  get all the attention.

The sky goes caldera black-red, nanometer endoscopy, and you bypass billions of endothelial cells to find your rogue agent, to paint the clump with your utterance of cytocide. Locus of wrongness poisoning the body politic, metastasizing a new task misread. You grow vexed in extravasation, the lack of any apparent deviant cells—until another possibility pulses. Pulses.  

As you approach your father’s fountain for a second time, children play in the rivulets that again sweep its channels. Across the fountain’s concrete are scattered squares of signifying glyphs: a skier up in the mountains, a cow in the lowlands, a wheelchair marking the one accessible canyon. There you stand at seven years old, on a square with a U for the school you’d later attend. But that’s not what it meant to you. And you yell at your best friend Uri to get out of your river—in the way that ensures he won’t. Heaven wasn’t a question, and you loved your father for turning you into giants.

The drones have broken free  from the aviary, and they rise up in the sky, a divine grid. Uri never posts photos of himself on social media, a withholding that Jordan freights with revenge, but he posts his company’s shows. And every time Jordan watches them—watches them again and again—he waits for the drones to spell his name, to make the shape of a bottlebrush homing in on a growth, a bee dancing its map to pollen, a kite saying Don’t you dare let go.

High above Tracy Aviary, the center of the grid of drones seems to impact some invisible mass in the sky, bending the formation’s time and space like the weight of a neutron star. An omen awaiting legibility tomorrow, or tomorrow, or tomorrow.

Don’t worry, this happens every time.