Mission to America (8 page)

The flashlight beam raked us again, then swung away. I watched its white circle trail across the yard, bringing out the texture of the grass, and then climb the side of a house across the way whose blinds were drawn but whose lights were all flared on.

“He's a registered sex offender,” Sherri said. “That's why they bug him. He's cured, though. Got the surgery. All he does is eat pot brownies now and role-play on the Web. His gaming name used to be Grodel, but now it's Frantus. At least it was Frantus last month when I was Zyla and I fucking zworked him in the Zone. I neutralized his last Mixadril. With urine.”

This was fierce deep Wicca, beyond far Neptune. This was Andromeda business, and not for me. I wondered what tarot deck these people used. Who were the figures? I knew they weren't the old ones.

Sherri rested a cheek on my bare stomach and gazed up at me across my chest, whose muscles looked thicker than normal from my angle. I liked the whole picture, everything about it, and I wished that Sherri had shushed before the Mixadril. I petted the side of her head. I pitied her. The outskirts of Casper weren't the place for her, or for anyone, it seemed to me. I decided the neighbor had drawn her into zworking by slumping along the walks here looking hangdog about how lonely and shunned he felt and how he didn't deserve the surgery. (They certainly did have their laws out here, oh boy.)

She must have heard me thinking this. “If I was older, I'd make you take me with you. I hate it here. I hate my shitty friends. I hate doing spells. I hate my dad's fat girlfriend. I wish I was off in college in some nicer state. Where trees have leaves. With squirrels.”

“It won't be long,” I said.

“To me it feels like forever.”

My stomach soured. A plume of acid rose and bit my throat.

“How old are you, Sherri?”

“Fifteen. Fifteen last week.”

Sixteen would have been kinder on my gastric pipes. Fifteen burned. Fifteen last week burned holes. Something sizzled inside me—my pancreas, I thought. Sometimes I was able to feel it. My mother taught me.

“You drive a car, though.” Wanting any balm.

“That's Mike's, from across the way. Castration man's. I'm his sweetie. He lets me borrow it. I sent away for a pretty great fake license. He says it's not fair that I'm stuck here when my folks split, and plus he has the bracelet until Thanksgiving. He can't really drive until then, unless it's medical. I buy his groceries. I pick up his prescriptions. Sometimes he flips me a monster oxycodone.”

I looked down across my muscles at Sherri's face, which had suddenly lost its close-to-grown-up architecture. It was a moon now, full behind thin clouds, and though, like the moon, you could see it as a person, its features formed no fixed pattern in themselves. Whatever young-ladyness I'd seen in her I must have added for my own purposes. Now that mask was misting off. Even her skin, regarded honestly—seen with cold and legal eyes, not lust's whatever-I-need-here eyes—looked wetly plump and nursery fresh. And the harder I stared, the more babyish it got—not only the skin but the entire specimen—until its young freshness flipped over into ancientness and I was alone in a bad Wyoming bedroom with some kind of flippery sunless jelly porpoise that had just finned its way up onto the sand.

“I'm getting away.” This was gallant, in such a place.

“Don't. I want you to teach me.”

“I'll leave some books.”

“I saw you with your phone. It has a number.”

“Don't think that way, Sherri.”

“So write it on my arm here.”

My floating mind, my prompter, saved me then. No books, it commanded. Your number is in those books.

“You can't even fly but you always try,” she said.

I interpreted this as grudging odd Wiccan permission to organize for a few seconds before I bolted. As I buttoned my shirt and pocketed my tie, rolling it up beforehand, which was pushing things, Sherri lay on her back in her slivery black crotch strip and sleeveless half T-shirt with the dancing elephant and stretched out her arms so her fingers touched the headboard.

“Look how long I am. I'm a tree,” she said. “I'm a thousand feet tall, with roots and limbs and buds. I draw up the waters and bear them to the sky.”

I opened the door to the hall and looked around for Karly and my partner. They'd gone off. I heard Wiccan love music playing, low and churning. I turned back to Sherri, who was sitting up now, brushing her hair out with her back to me as though facing a beauty mirror that wasn't there.

“The worst thing is that you upset the woodland balance. The stag hath had its pleasure and its romp, while the doe receiveth naught.” She pointed her hairbrush handle at the window. “Look at that,” she said. “You seeing that?”

I couldn't because Sherri blocked my view. I hoped her scripture voice had had its say. The notion that I'd romped was overdone. I'd scampered some, but so had she. She'd scampered all over me, in fact.

“The neighborhood watch guy is taking down your license plate. I hope he didn't peek inside my room and see your buddy with my little sister.”

The word “little” overburdened my mind. Somehow I managed to fashion a departure by calling forth an immensely peaceful memory of standing in a buffet line at a Church lunch, loading my paper plate with three-bean salad. Everyone was there, my entire town, my family, even the Seeress, propped up in her wheelchair drinking red punch from a yellow paper cup. I was young, maybe ten, and was wearing a clip-on bow tie. My pockets were heavy with interesting rocks I'd found.

I was back in the van when I let the memory pass. My partner was at the wheel. We'd made it out. I seemed to recall him opening his wallet and putting money into Karly's palm as a sort of panicky last courtesy. Or maybe she and Sherri had required it. They'd been Andromeda's children at the end there, nothing Wiccan about them. Elder Stark's stance, after we were free, and set to be free of Wyoming in two hours, was that we should have known they'd change and that in many ways we had known, especially once they'd pursued invisibility. Since I hadn't recovered enough for a debate yet, I let my partner's side be the one and only side, whether it was true or not. I had to admit, though, that if he'd argued a different side, I would have taken it myself.

Elder Stark was describing
the
doctrine of Preexistence, that life-out-of-time when the soul puts on its armors, chooses a body, a family, and a fate, and then plunges mindfirst, like an otter from a ledge, into the cold water of the world. His presentation was lyrical and beyond anything that I ever could have mustered, and he capped it off by miming a great dive, hands pressed together, head bent, toes curled, back arched.

“And so it begins: our swim back to our source,” he said. He'd been taking his drug again; he had that fire.

The woman he was addressing was in a state, and we'd come to her house on the edge of Snowshoe Springs to sit with her and see her through the night. Two hours earlier, at dinnertime, Lara Shirer had swallowed thirty allergy capsules, drawn a hot bath, perfumed it with lilac bath salts, and climbed into it with a book, prepared to die. Instead she threw up and decided she wished to live. She dialed a crisis hotline but lost her nerve when an intermittent clicking sound convinced her that the call was being taped. Her second call was to our cell phone, whose number she'd gotten from a tract she'd found on her Audi that morning outside a downtown coffee shop.

“If I've already chosen everything that happens, why can't I see how all this comes out?” said Lara. “Do I try this again tomorrow, but with a gun? Does my mother drive up from Tucson with Dr. Grof and try to commit me to that same place she went where everyone has to hike six miles a day and sing in a big circle and take B vitamins?”

“It isn't like that,” my partner said. “The moment a person's born a screen comes down. Absolute amnesia. Total blindness.” He looked at me for backup on this point but I was busy with a washcloth, wiping up a splash of foamy vomit stained brilliant blue by the half-digested pills. I set the cloth in the sink, turned on the tap, squirted some liquid soap into my palms, laced my fingers together, rubbed, and rinsed. I dried my hands off on a purple towel and tried to refold it as neatly as I'd found it.

“If you plan your whole life but forget the plan,” said Lara, “that's the same as no plan. What's the point?”

Lara didn't look well; she looked crazy. Her knees were tucked up tight against her chest, squashing her breasts out sideways into her armpits, and her head was tipped back against the tub lip, her hair hanging down in a sheet to the wet floor. Her eyes were little tar pits of melted makeup and in one of her nostrils a bubble of bright blood exactly the color of her fingernails inflated and contracted as she breathed. I wished she'd either inhale the bubble completely or let me blot it off with toilet paper, but I doubted she knew it was there.

“We only choose the big things,” Elder Stark said. “Our relatives, our place of birth, our body. The smaller decisions are made in earth time. What will I eat tonight? Should I paint my bedroom? There's enough that's ordained to give life structure and enough that's left open to keep it interesting.”

Lara's body slid lower into the cooling gray water. I was becoming impatient with my partner, who couldn't seem to see that what she needed was food and dry clothes, not a lecture on theology. Even to me, Preexistence was a muddle, another sign that the Church had spent too long talking only to itself.

“You see it?” my partner said. “You grasp it now?”

“I'd like to.”

“That's good. If you'd like to, then you will.”

I had to interrupt. “You must be hungry. Can I get you a robe? I think you're chilly, Lara.”

“I won an Emmy once.” Her words were faint, just trembling webs of phlegm. “That trophy out in the hall you must have seen? On the little mahogany pedestal? My Emmy.”

My partner smiled and nodded, clearly ignorant, but I, for some reason, knew what an Emmy was. The seal around Bluff was loose. A lot leaked through. The other morning in the Billings paper I'd read the name Cher and a face had come to mind that I learned, from TV, was Cher's real face. I'd known she was a singer, too, but how? Solving the puzzle took a while. The faraway radio signals that whizzed through Bluff in certain rare weather conditions were a part of it—and a magazine I'd found fluttering by a road once—but the biggest part was a nicely boxed-up card game, Trivial Pursuit, that I'd rummaged from a trash can outside the co-op ten or eleven years ago. The oddity had dropped out of the stars, it seemed. I stashed the game, wrapped in a tarp, out in the woods, and I played it with myself for several months, until an owl that kept roosting and hooting there, directly above the spot in a dead pine, haunted me into burning it one evening. The cards had a coating that resisted flame, though, and many remained readable, just browned. I left them out there to rot and blow away, but I was still coming across them here and there as recently as a year ago. They'd scattered all over, beyond the woods, and I'm sure quite a number wound up in drawers and pockets. Once I spotted one wedged between two boards in the white fence behind Celestial Hall. I was afraid to remove it for some reason but someone else was unafraid. The singed blue card wasn't there a few nights later when I snuck back with a flashlight to check on it.

“You're an actress?” I said.

“I did a network soap. I quit because I got heavy and couldn't lose it, and then I moved here to ski and get my head straight. Then I met a guy. Now I'm suicidal. You're right, I might need a meal. Electrolytes. The last thing I ate was a pita chip with salsa after kickboxing on Tuesday. When was Tuesday?”

“Three days ago,” my partner said.

“Then it was Wednesday,” Lara said.

She gripped the sides of the tub and tried to rise but didn't get far until her second try. I could see from a pale indentation on one of her fingers that she'd worn a ring once, probably recently. I held out the biggest towel I could find as Elder Stark stood behind her in case she slipped. There wasn't much left of her but joints and knuckles—she'd gnawed herself down to the gristle—but once the towel went on I thought I could estimate where the flesh had been. My reconstruction convinced me she'd been a beauty once and could be beautiful again, perhaps, if everything were restored to the same place. Were such backtrackings possible, though? I had my doubts.

         

Lara went upstairs to dress while Elder Stark and I waited in her kitchen. We'd ordered a family-size pizza without the cheese because Lara had said she was sensitive to dairy products. To compensate for the loss in richness we asked for extra sausage and extra ham and added a double thing of Pretzel Puffs. We'd tasted pizza before, but only the yeastless, tomatoless variety prepared in accordance with Revealed Nutritional Science. We were disappointed by the prospect of having to eat our first non-Apostle pizza without its traditional main topping.

With nothing to do until the food came, we studied the photos on Lara's refrigerator, moving the magnets around to see the faces. I was right, she'd been very pretty once, with lively features and peppery dark eyes, but with something too condensed about her body. She had all the right parts and all were the right size, but they were positioned slightly too close together, as though she'd fallen from a height and been compacted by the crash.

Seeking a story, we puzzled through the photos—dozens of them that overlapped like shingles. One series seemed to have been taken in California and featured palm trees and houses with red tile roofs. Lara had had a dog then, a German shepherd, with a broad affectionate pink tongue that was always out of its mouth in some capacity, either to lick her hand or happily hang there as the dog stood tight at her side, its ears straight up. There were cars in these pictures, and men and other women, all of them slim and spotless and expensive looking. Every one of the figures, even the machines, glowed all over with promise and ability, and together the photos evoked a world so blessed, so soaked with careless glad good fortune, that I wanted to steal one and keep it as a talisman to ward off heavy moods.

Lara's bad change came in the cluster of pictures that included two people we took to be her parents. The woman we guessed was her mother liked to pose with something in one of her hands: a glass, a tennis racket, a cigarette, a plate of grapes, a cat. The mother's hair was always blond, but never the same blond, and though her skin was tan, it wasn't a healthy tan, won from sun and air, but a beige tone she must have acquired from a beautician, dull and stagnant and uniform. The man we supposed was the father rarely looked at her, though he usually stood dutifully at her arm, and he seemed to be shy about his face, which he kept tilted down or angled or in shadow. Lara seemed tense in the company of these people, her smile like a wire, her hands in fists. Some of the pictures depicted holiday feasts, with roasts and cakes and turkeys in the foreground, and I sensed they'd been taken by remote control, with the help of a timer, rather than by a person. The compositions were off a little bit, like scenes one might see through a hole cut in a wall.

What appeared to be the most recent series of shots was set outdoors, here in Colorado it looked like, and ranged from wintry ski scenes to sunny party scenes, all but a couple of them pairing Lara and a long-faced young man a good six inches taller than her and distinguished by a stunningly wide mouth always stretched in extreme hilarity, with a knock-you-back set of enormous jaunty teeth that maybe weren't quite as white or nicely spaced as he seemed to feel they were. His self-confidence was monstrous and all of his postures were Person One, the Parent. Next to him, Lara looked timid and unsettled, even in her cheerier robust time, before the gray crescents spread beneath her eyes and her breasts pulled apart to show a bony gap.

After learning all we could from the refrigerator, we started opening drawers and cabinets. We discovered that Lara collected salt and pepper shakers shaped like small wild animals—squirrels, primarily—and that she once threw a summertime party that must have drawn fewer guests than she'd anticipated. The shelves held a stockpile of paper plates with stars, firecracker-pattern paper cups, and plastic utensils with old-time bells molded in their handles. The Independence Day. I wasn't ignorant. The bell was the one they'd rung to warn the king to stay back in London with his hounds and jesters and keep his old claws off their daughters and their tea.

Still hunting, we learned that Lara liked to can, but only jams and jellies, no vegetables. The quilted glass jars were labeled “From the kitchen of . . .” and bore their production dates in neat red script. I imagined that they were intended as gifts for friends, but there were so many of them on the shelves—the bulk of them dated last October—that I wondered if Lara had suffered some catastrophe and found herself not widely liked as winter came on.

“Answer that,” Elder Stark said when the doorbell chimed. He went on snooping while I paid the delivery boy with the last bill in my wallet that wasn't a one. Our budget was sixty dollars a week per person, but I'd been spending at twice that rate. My partner, I happened to know, was doing worse. When the pizza boy, not a shy one, said, “Hey, my tip,” I gave him five quarters and he frowned. Then I dumped all my irksome pennies into his palm and shut the door on him.

Elder Stark was back studying the pictures when I returned. I called upstairs for Lara and opened the box. It hadn't been handled properly; half of the pizza sauce was smeared all over the waxy cardboard lid. I found a knife and scraped it off, spread it back on the crust, then licked the knife blade. A pungent, unfamiliar herb caused my throat to constrict and made my eyes run.

“Don't eat that,” I said.

Elder Stark was somewhere else. He touched an index finger to one of the photos, shut his eyes, and turned his head away. “I see it. The whole situation. I see it all.”

“There's a spice in it. I had a spasm.”

My partner just stood there. With his right hand he touched and rubbed the photo. With his left he fingered the glands under his jaw as though he was checking for an infection. “He's here,” he said. “He's with us, in this kitchen.”

“We need to make more of an effort nutritionally. I said that before, but I'm going to keep it up.”

“This Lara is walking in darkness, he's telling me. This whole town walks in darkness.”

“Worse than Casper? How much of that drug do you have left?”

“I'm going upstairs. The woman needs to know. New powers are on the scene. She needs to know.”

“To me, after Casper,” I said to Elder Stark, “darkness is just a glass of chocolate milk.”

He cracked his spine by twisting at the hips and the sound was like popcorn popping under water. He left me standing there with the cheeseless pizza, whose smell alone was choking me by then. I found this reassuring. There were some things out here that my system just wouldn't stand for. Revulsion, watch over Mason. My new prayer.

As I wandered through the house, I paused at the foot of a staircase with a turn in it and tried to make out at a distance and through closed doors the tone of the conversation in Lara's bedroom. It rose and faded at intervals but always resumed with a new warmth. More doctrinal debates? It sounded too personal. It sounded to me like confession and consolation. Soon the voices began to overlap, but not impatiently, not competitively. “Humans on Earth,” Lauer had instructed us, “fundamentally abhor apartness.” We tend toward union. And we don't just want each other's company, we want to slide inside each other's muscles, pooling our bloodstreams, aligning our very skeletons. He was on a tear that day.