 I can take you there. I'll do all the digging if you'll just stay until I've hit bone if only to prove that I'm not crazy. I understand if you won't, of course. Ignorance is a privilege. I can't blame you for clinging to it. You know, I was profoundly ignorant once. Back in the good days, when I was a bartender, that was my whole identity for a while. A single guy, no family, working late nights with a weird sleep schedule. My older friends went for early morning runs and bragged about owning expensive juicers while my younger friends somehow embraced hedonism without experiencing back pain or gum soreness. How did they do it? When did I get too old to party? When the bars all shut down, I lost everything. Losing my income was one thing and losing my social outlet hurt. But what really stung was losing my identity. Who was I without my job? Who would I become? I took up gardening to pass the time. It seemed like an innocent enough hobby. There was a small plant bed outside my front door, maybe a two by four foot plot with some ratty half-dead shrubs in it. My landlord didn't mind if I made some changes, just as long as unemployment kept covering my rent. I trashed the shrubs and gave myself a clean slate to work with, then spent the back half of spring developing a green thumb. When fall rolled around, I had a design plan and I executed it flawlessly. It felt great. By new years, I was through waiting for things to get back to normal. I'd made my resolution to quit smoking, cut back on drinking, and to finally quit bartending and get my life back on track. I swore to start running in the mornings, even buy a juicer. I took a job at a local nursery to put my newfound interest in gardening to use. It was grunt work, loading and unloading trucks, hauling trees and dirt, but I loved earning money again. But then, that once in a century freeze hit back in February and everyone's plants died. My plants died. And by the time the weather broke, everyone in town was looking to replace what they'd lost. Suddenly, business was booming. I'm telling you all this wistfully, mind you, more for my benefit than yours. I'd just like to be reminded of a hopeful period in my life. Maybe I can get back there someday. Landscaping was in high demand come spring and there simply weren't enough landscapers to keep up. To compound the issue, the city was also full of new residents, seemingly a thousand a day moving in and they were looking for landscapers too. So I wasn't surprised when I got offered a side gig doing some planning. I just said, sure. This is where I'll freely admit that I should have been more suspicious. It was a big job, first of all, well beyond my level of competency. It came to me outsourced through a legit landscaper who said he couldn't handle the sporadic on-demand workload from the client. He said they'd call him up on a whim and need a few hundred square feet planted that next morning and he just couldn't keep up without blowing off other jobs. He referred me and I got a call that afternoon from a private number. A woman named Kira told me that she was the personal assistant to the client and she asked if I'd be available to do some work early the next morning. I told her I had to be at the nursery by nine, but she insisted that I quit that job and just work for them full time instead. She told me to name my price. So I did. I aimed high, too, expecting her to balk, but she accepted without hesitation. I started work the next morning, showing up with my few cheap tools, hardly looking the part. Only then did I realize that it was the site where the new botanical gardens were being developed by the billionaire Errol Zane. Between it and the transitional housing community he just opened, he was trying to make amends for the years of construction hell we all suffered through so he could build his stupid high-rise downtown, but I digress. Kira sent me the passcode to get in, a schematic on where to work, and the rest was pretty self-explanatory. The design was mapped out and the plants were already on site. There were plenty of tools handy and a massive hill of soil. All I had to do was plant stuff in designated plots and get paid. The site was steady, but not overwhelming, and I got a weekly salary whether I worked much or not. There'd be days where I didn't hear from Kira at all, which left me with mornings to go out for a run. I even bought an expensive juicer and bragged about it online. In unseasonably wet summer meant fewer calls though, I started to worry that the next thing I'd hear would be that the gig was up and I'd be left to piece together a new identity for myself. But then Kira called one afternoon, despite a respite from the week's deluge and insisted that I catch up on some planning. The site was a mess when I arrived. The soil mounds hadn't been covered properly and were reduced to mush. It was late in the afternoon and more rain was in the forecast so I trudged through the soft mud to the plot and got right to work and did the best I could with the resources available to leave a good impression I needed to keep the job after all. I worked for hours non-stop until I completed the section and by then the sun was setting. I needed to put down some mulch to protect the plants from the heat but everything on site was too soggy and more rain was starting to fall. I checked my watch and realized that the nursery up the road was open for another half hour so I rushed over to get a few bags on my own dime to set my mind at ease. But by the time I got loaded up the rain was coming down in sheets. I stayed nearby to wait it out, popping into a restaurant for a quick bite and a beer. One beer became two, then three and halfway into my fourth the weather cleared up. It was dark outside. I drove back to the garden, punched in the code and flipped on my high beams. I drove down to the work site, pointed my truck towards the spot and set about laying mulch under the headlights. That's when I heard the work trucks on the other side of the property. I'd always wondered when these sites were prepared for me to plant but I guess I'd never considered that it was done overnight. When I was through and felt confident that I'd done all I could I decided to get a peek at the machines in action. So under the influence of four beers I innocently wandered across the property toward the bright lights and warring motors. I hung back behind some trees and watched as a large van backed up to a deep hole. It was from Errol Zane's transitional housing charity and at first I assumed it was there to ferry workers to and from the site as a way to get people to work. That's great, right? But then someone opened the back doors to the van and a couple guys started shoving bodies down into the pit. I ran blindly through the dark. I got back to my truck, hopped in and sped off. I was terrified. I went home and locked myself inside. I didn't know what to do or who to tell. I mean, how many bodies were out there? It made me sick to even wonder and to think that I'd been an unwitting accomplice. I convinced myself to sleep it off but I couldn't sleep. I just laid in bed and worried, who could I tell? Who would believe me? The next morning I drove to the last pay phone in town and I called the cops. I tried to tell the woman everything I knew but not who I was, who could I trust, you know? What if everyone knew what was happening, like it was the plan all along? The woman who answered didn't believe me so she transferred me to a man who didn't believe me, who then transferred me to another man but eventually I hung up and waited in my truck until they left. I tried calling the news but they wanted me to come in and speak in person. They said they could protect me if I was a credible source. If my claim hit pay dirt for them but they seemed to think I was making it all up. It was too sensational to claim that a philanthropic billionaire had been slaughtering and burying the city's homeless population. Sure, I told them, when you put it that way it does sound nuts. That's when they disclosed that Errol had a voting stake in their parent company. I hung up and came here. Look, I wish I hadn't seen what I did. I wish I was ignorant to the whole operation. Right now, I wish I were you. I know it's not your job to listen to me ramble. I mean, it kind of is, but not like this. Like I said, I was a bartender once too. Like when I had a proper identity, before I owned a nice juicer and routinely enjoyed the benefits of restful sleep. I just need you to tell me that I'm not crazy, even if it's a lie. Hold on, I've got a call coming in. Oh, it's a private number. I guess it's time for me to settle up my cab.