Carter walked up out of the subway station toward his brownstone, just a few blocks down West 48th St. But there was a tension in the air—a certain spark he couldn’t quite identify but also could not ignore. Around him, all was quiet, peaceful in that suburban part of Manhattan, where trees were green and traffic minimal, where he could live like a human being even in that den of animals and demons.

But as he approached the stoop of his building, a familiar figure stepped out from behind the stoop—the downward staircase into the basement apartment. He was well-dressed as always, an expensive Armani blazer over his incredible frame. Carter stopped, knowing that face as well as he knew his own. He slowed to a stop, only a few yards away from that knowing grin, those winking blue eyes.

“Houston,” Carter said, feet stopping in their tracks.

“Carter.”

Carter turned, but he already knew what, or who, he’d find there. “AJ.”

“Carter,” AJ said, the perfect image of his twin brother. Carter could only stand as the matching marauders closed in on him from either side.

Carter calmly asked, “How can I help you two?”

“We’re here to help you, Carter. It’s time…it’s time to settle up.”

Carter smiled, the twins leaving a few feet of space between them and the man they believed to be their captive. But Carter had other ideas. “I owe you nothing.”

“You owe us your life,” AJ said from behind Carter, taking one step closer. “It’s time to make good on that debt, Carter.”

“Don’t be so sour about it,” Houston said with a charming smile. “It won’t be as bad as you think. Just sort of…let go, y’know, leave it all behind. It’ll feel like…like falling asleep in a nice, warm bath.”

Carter shook his head, glancing from one twin to another, hands flexing open and closed, readying for action. He strained his head to the left, a series of cracks rising up from his spine. Another turn of the head and shoulders released another cluster of clicks and pops.

“I prefer showers,” Carter said assuredly.

“Carter, Carter, Carter…” Her voice came at him from the side as Meadow Fields strode across the street, casual, knowing, long legs in an easy stride. “Why won’t you just come to your senses?”

“Meadow,” Carter said with a subtle shake of his head. “I knew you’d turn up. Wherever the Tweedles are, so goes Alice, straight through the Looking Glass.”

She snickered, pretty and pleasant and venomous. “Sweet burn, Carter. Don’t you see you’re wasting your life on this…torrid nonsense? That Tia McBride is nothing more than a high-class pimp—”

“And that makes you nothing but a high-class whore,” AJ said to Carter.

“Dad’s sick about it,” Houston said. “You’re driving him to an early grave.”

Carter said, “It’s his life, it’s his death. I don’t approve of either one and you all know it. He’s dug his own grave, same way we all do.”

“He wants to see you.”

“He already knows me,” Carter said. “What’s to see, and why? Just tell him I haven’t changed and leave it at that!”

Meadow approached Carter with a gentle smile. “Is that true? Haven’t you changed? I can see it in you, Carter. Something in you, it’s…dissatisfied with all this, tired of your childish rebellion. This isn’t a serious life, and it’s beneath a man of our capability—a mind of your depth and breadth.”

Carter huffed up a bemused chuckle. “What makes you think you know anything about what I want?”

Meadow put her hand on his arm and gave him a gentle squeeze. “Because you’re my brother, Carter. Because I love you, and because I want to take care of you.”

“Help me be all that I can be?”

Meadow smiled, shaking her head. “That is what we want, yes. Dad especially. You know you were always his favorite, Carter. Why go on breaking his heart?”

“If he had one I might give it some thought.” Carter sneered at Meadow, then at his brothers, the twins. “Because what he’s doing is wrong, and because you’re all just as culpable as he is for playing along.”

“Carter, meds are just expensive—that’s life; it’s not our fault.”

“But it is, Meadow, it is precisely that—his fault, your fault and everyone who builds mansions on the bodies of the poor and the unfortunate. This man you love so much, the man who shelters you, the man you’d think I’d allow to shelter me?” Carter gave that some thought, but there was no surprise to the revelation. “What a good man, courageous and forthright, decent and true. So he sent his goons to come pick me up.”

“We’re your siblings,” Meadow said. “We love you. We want you to come home.”

Carter stood among them, feeling as cold and alone as he had at any time in his life. Even among his closest relatives, the people who, genetically and culturally and practically speaking, were as close to him if not closer than anybody else on Earth.

AJ Fields was the only exception.

Yet Carter stood there as if surrounded by strangers, by predators, the last man standing. There was no explaining himself to those three, or the man they represented. He’d tried and failed too many times to recall or recount. This wasn’t the time or the place for explanations. For Carter, this wasn’t the time or place for anything.

So he walked up the steps to his building’s front door, and turned. “I’m already home,” was all he had to say.

* * *

George and Shirley chirped loudly in their cage to see him, and Carter was happy to open the cage door. The parakeets jumped onto his hand, eager to cuddle their little faces against his relatively tremendous cheeks and chin as if he’d given birth to them himself. His big fingers were delicate and loving as they lightly scratched the backs of their heads, George’s yellow and green, Shirley’s blue and white. They looked up at him with their little black eyes, tiny beaks yellow and tucked into their necks. He gently stroked their backs and their wings as they fluttered in place, little clicks and chirps decrying their joy. They jumped onto his shoulders, just enough power in their clipped wings to do so, one on each side, nuzzling the backs of his ears.

Carter tried to get his mind off his siblings and their unwelcome appearance. They should know better, he told himself. Why won’t they just leave me alone? They hate me, and so does the old man. What’s the point of coming at me time and again? I’m not of their tribe. I never was and I never will be. I’m not a liar. I may be something of a performer; I may hide behind a persona, a facade, but I am what I am and I do what I want. I make people happy, I help them get through their lives, and that’s everything the Fields family stands against on every front.

Carter sat down and picked up a copy of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Longtime one of his favorite stories by his single favorite author, he felt a kinship with Swift and his perspective. Like Carter, Swift took on other names, other personae. And Swift was a rebel, like Carter, gleefully flinging satires like A Modest Proposal in the faces of those pompous, corrupt, soulless authorities like his siblings and his father. A Modest Proposal had suggested eating poor children as a remedy for both overpopulation and widespread famine and a drain on public services. As far as he could see, his own family were ready to eat their young, and they were just the audience, and subject, for such a satire.

But on that day it was Gulliver, the man who became a giant in a world of little people—a story which spoke to Carter on so many levels. He felt alone in the world, misunderstood, different from the population around him.

Only Kathleen Le Fleur seemed to want to know more.

No, Carter told himself, feed the birds and read your damned book!

The pages had that familiar smell and feel, rough edges and ink that would smear with a hard push. And in those pages Carter saw himself, his own perspective, his past and his present, his life, and perhaps his death.

I enjoyed perfect health of body, and tranquillity of mind; I did not feel the treachery or inconstancy of a friend, nor the injuries of a secret or open enemy. I had no occasion of bribing, flattering, or pimping, to procure the favour of any great man, or of his minion; I wanted no fence against fraud or oppression: here was neither physician to destroy my body, nor lawyer to ruin my fortune; no informer to watch my words and actions, or forge accusations against me for hire: here were no gibers, censurers, backbiters, pickpockets, highwaymen, housebreakers, attorneys, bawds, buffoons, gamesters, politicians, wits, splenetics, tedious talkers, controvertists, ravishers, murderers, robbers, virtuosos; no leaders, or followers, of party and faction; no encouragers to vice, by seducement or examples; no dungeon, axes, gibbets, whipping-posts, or pillories; no cheating shopkeepers or mechanics; no pride, vanity, or affectation; no fops, bullies, drunkards, strolling whores, or poxes; no ranting, lewd, expensive wives; no stupid, proud pedants; no importunate, overbearing, quarrelsome, noisy, roaring, empty, conceited, swearing companions; no scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices, or nobility thrown into it on account of their virtues; no lords, fiddlers, judges, or dancing-masters.