Nobody says anything, it’s so obvious. The few weeks of the year when their godforsaken nowhere becomes world famous.
And I haven’t even told you the key: when I was going door to door with the note? There was somebody…Somebody kept popping up, although never exactly…
It’s like Rupp isn’t even listening. Doesn’t even follow the logic. Just asks: How do you know it’s the government?
This is exactly what Mark is trying to tell him. He’s been followed around for weeks by someone who can only be Daniel Riegel. The Bird Man. Plus, the guy has conveniently gotten involved with the fake Karin. And you know exactly who he works for, don’t you?
Daniel? Danny Riegel? He doesn’t work for the government. He works for the damn Crane Refuge.
Which is a government…which gets most of its money from…
You know, I think it might actually be a government operation, Cain says. Come to think.
You are totally whacked. Rupp tries to laugh, but it comes out small-caliber.
Public outfit, anyway, Duane says. Public sanctuary.
It’s not public. It’s a foundation. A privately funded…
It’s definitely got some kind of state affiliation…
Everybody shut up for a second? You’re missing the point. Suppose this guy I picked up was a terrorist. Months after. Trying to strike at something really…American. And suppose the government…
You never picked anyone up, Rupp says. There was no hitchhiker.
How do you know? You told me you weren’t fucking there.
Maybe Mark Schluter yells a bit. Rupp and Cain, too. It’s a little distressing, truth be told. They all chill for a minute, just sit and watch the turkey vultures pick at the squirrel pile. But the picnic is basically over.
We should get back to your place, Rupp says. Check out that Guard letter.
Don’t do me any favors, Mark tells him.
But they pack up and pile into Rupp’s ’88 Chevy 454. Rupp drives, Duane rides shotgun, and Mark takes one of the jumps, like old times. Only he’s beginning to see there are no more old times, if there ever were any. Rupp has the new Cattle Call CD on the player, Hand Rolled. A song called “I’ve Had Amnesia for as Long as I Can Remember.” It sounds like gelded goslings, the same old crap CC has been singing since the band got paroled. But Duane gets all jumpy and Rupp punches the player to skip the track, like it embarrasses him. Which only makes Mark want to go back and listen closer.
They’re coming back Route 40, just before the Odessa turnoff, when a big buck breaks from a copse and leaps across the road in front of them. It’s dead for the truck, a missile aimed at the hood. Not even time to scream. But just as the creature reaches them, Rupp twists into a power skid that takes them over the center line and back twice. The deer stops, on the far shoulder, baffled. It so badly expected to be dead that it doesn’t know what to do with the changed itinerary. Only when the thing shakes itself and runs off into the trees do the three humans revive.
Jesus fuck.
Both friends look at Mark. Rupp grabs his knee, Duane his shoulder. You all right, man? Damn it, we were gone. Finished.
But nothing’s happened, really. The truck isn’t even scratched, and the deer will get over it. He’s not sure why they want him to be so upset.
God damn, Duane keeps jabbering, cranked. We were done. Life insurance payout time. How the hell did you do that? Turning before I even saw the thing.
Rupp is shaking. Duane and Mark try not to look, but there it is. Mr. Natural Guardsman, quivering like a Parkinson’s guy on stilts in an earthquake. Deer tried to kill us, he says. Faking his old self. But they see now, see him. I’m telling you, that maniac tried to jump through our windshield. The fucking video game saved our life. He looks at his hands, which are triggering. If I hadn’t played hundreds of hours of that video game, we’d all be toast.
Rupp restarts the truck and pulls back into the right lane. Cain howls like a coyote. He can’t believe he’s gotten lucky, for once in his life. He punches the air. Jesus, Jesus. What a trip. He punches the glove compartment, which pops open. He pulls out a little black communicator, something Mark’s seen before. Duane presses it up to his face, chewing into it like some kind of cop. Yo, there, Saint Peter, good buddy? Cancel those three reservations you were holding for this evening? Goat-head.
At the word, Mark is up out of the jump seat, grabbing at the communicator. Give me that. But he doesn’t really need to hold it. He’s held it before. Or one just like it.
Put it away, Rupp commands. Cain scrambles with the glove compartment, keeping the communicator from Mark. But there’s no putting it away again.
Mark’s finger swings between the two of them, a waving pistol. You? I was talking to you two? You two were the hitchhiker? I don’t get…how am I supposed to…?
Rupp lays into Cain. You stupid shit-for-brains. He’s driving with one hand, grabbing at the communicator with the other. In the scrimmage, he comes up with it. He chucks it out the driver’s-side window, like that’s the answer to all questions. He glares at Cain, ready to kill him. You pointless gamete. What were you thinking?
What? I was just…what? How was I supposed to know?
You told me you weren’t there, Mark says. You lied to me.
We weren’t there, they say, together. Rupp silences Cain with a look. He turns to Mark, begging. You had one in your truck. We were just…we’d just bought the things.
That was the game? Your little walkie-talkie speak? That was you? Goat-head?
You invented it, man. It made you laugh. We were just doing the CB thing, yakking at each other at a distance, when you…
Mark Schluter is a statue. Pure sandstone. You, too. You’re in on this whole thing. They start talking at once, trying to explain, clouding the facts. Mark puts his hands over his ears. Let me out. Stop this truck. Let me out right here.
Marker. Don’t be crazy, man. We’re two miles from Farview.
They argue, but he’s not listening. I’m walking. I’m out of this thing.
He gets violent, so finally they have to drop him. But for a long time they trail alongside him in the truck, at walking speed, trying to talk him back in. Trying, as always, to further confuse him, before the Chevy pulls off in an angry squeal.
They didn’t touch each other, the night of the restaurant fight. The next day, they talked in kind, obliging monosyllables. They slunk through the house, doing small favors for each other. All the next week, Daniel was self-effacing, patient, devoted, pretending they still inhabited that sunlit upland safe from their old nightmare. He acted as if she were the one who had slipped, and he, selfless, were forgiving her. She let him, encouraged him, even as it enraged her. That’s who she was.
Obviously, he had no idea what was best for him or what he needed. He had only that maddening mask of selflessness. She wanted to scream: Go, sample, taste. Find yourself. I know I’m not good enough; you tell me as much, in every patient acquiescence. Instead, she said nothing. The truth would only have incensed him. She understood him now. Saint Daniel: needing to transcend the rest of the race. Needing to prove that a human could be better than humans, could be as pure as an instinctive animal. But he needed her confirmation. Some part of her was willing to grant that he might be as good a man as she had any chance of meeting in this world. She loved his sad insistence that any bruise might be healed. But his glance of doubt, of vague disappointment, that constant looking for something a little more worthy and shining…Virtuous, sacrificial, long-suffering: and slowly choking her.
Her smallest suggestion that Daniel might be as frail as anyone threw him into a tailspin. Panicked, he worked to please her, labored for the relationship as if it were endangered. He cleaned and cooked, splurged on delicacies—morels and macadamias. He found her articles on Fregoli syndrome and indulged her every fear. At night, he rubbed her back with tiger balm, finally pressing her almost as hard as she asked.
She made love to him, imagining herself the
woman whom he was imagining. Afterward, she was seized by frantic tenderness, a last-ditch effort to catch herself and fix them. “Daniel,” she whispered in his ear, in the dark. “Danny? Maybe we need to think about something small. Something new. Something a little of both of us.”
She touched his mouth and saw him smile in a sliver of moonlight. Ready to go almost anywhere she needed him. He spoke no objection aloud, but one, minute muscle in his upper lip was wrong, saying: No babies. No more humans. You see what they do.
She saw, at least, what he thought of her chances as a mother. Saw, at bottom, how he really imagined her.
At week’s end, Mark told her he was quitting therapy. The news blindsided her. She felt as she had at eight, the first time Cappy Schluter went bankrupt and the repossessors came to auction off their living room. Her last hope for rehabilitating Mark vanished. She pleaded with him, so drained from prolonged lack of sleep that she actually wept. Her tears bewildered Mark. But finally, he shook his head. “This is mental health? What we’re shooting for, here? Not for me, brother. Last thing I want is health that good.”
She drove out to Dedham Glen to consult Barbara. Months had passed since Mark’s stay, but Karin half-expected him to come shuffling down the hall, berating her. She sat on the plasticized couch across from the receptionist’s, primping anxiously, waiting for Barbara. When Barbara did walk by, her face clenched at the ambush. She had always told Karin to come to her for anything. Perhaps she’d been lying. But she rallied fast and managed a game smile. “Hey, friend! Is everything okay?”
They sat and talked in the community television room, surrounded by the dazed and incontinent. “I’m no lawyer,” Barbara told her. “I’m crazy even to think about advising you. I’m guessing you could force the issue, if you wanted. You’re his legal guardian now, right? But what good would that do you? Forced therapy isn’t likely to help. It would only convince Mark that you were persecuting him.”
“Maybe I am persecuting him. Just by not being who he thinks. Everything I do just makes him worse.”
Barbara covered Karin’s hand in the shell of hers. Her touch did more for Karin than Daniel’s. Yet even Barbara’s care kept its counsel. “It must feel that way, at times.”
“It feels that way always. How can I know the right thing to do, if I can’t trust how things feel?”
“You’ve written to Gerald Weber? That’s the right thing.”
Karin felt the urge to open completely to her, to tell Barbara the simple and defensible truth that she’d never felt so helpless in her life. But she knew enough about human brains now, damaged or otherwise, not even to think of going there. She needed a woman, someone to confirm her, to remind her of the worth of casual warmth, to save her from endless male dismissal. A girl’s crush. No, more: she loved this woman, for everything Barbara had done for them. But her first word would drive Barbara away. She listened to herself drop into a tone of pure invitation. “Do you have children, Barbara?” Ready, if rebuked, to deny all attempted intimacy.
Barbara’s “No” gave nothing away.
“But you are married?”
This time, no meant not anymore. Something in Karin leapt up at the admission, as if she might yet be able to give this woman something back. But she couldn’t be sure what she was allowed to ask. “You’re alone?”
Impulse broke across the woman’s face before she could suppress it. Someone isn’t? Her face softened. “Not really. I have this.” She shrugged, her upward palms taking in the television room. “I have my work.”
Karin snorted, before she could stop herself. She felt the real question she’d long needed to ask. “What do you get from this place?”
Barbara smiled. The Mona Lisa might have been a bouncing contestant on tell-all television, next to her. “Connection. Solidity. My…friends. New ones all the time.”
Her eyes said Mark. Karin flashed on something illicit, ready to suspect even Christian charity. If Barbara had been a man, the police would have been all over the situation. Mark, her friend? Connection, with these patients, trapped in their own collapsing bodies, people who couldn’t hold a spoon or pick one up off the floor where it fell? One harsh thought opened onto another, and she slipped into resentment. Resentment that this woman wouldn’t give her a tenth of what she happily gave a brain-damaged man fifteen years younger than herself. Resentment that Barbara had Mark and she did not. The thought pinched shut her eyes and twisted her face. Resentment: the family name for need. Couldn’t this woman see how close the two of them were?
“Barbara…How do you do it? How do you stay loyal, when everyone’s so…?” She would lose control, disgust the woman. She looked at the aide, trying not to beg.
But Barbara’s face showed only surprise. Her mouth opened in refusal. “I’m not the one…” Not crushed, not stroked out, no lesion. “It’s not me…”
Could anyone really have so mastered herself? How did she find such maturity? What had she been like, at Karin’s age? The questions piled up, none of them permissible. The conversation stalled. Barbara grew nervous and needed to get back to work. Karin felt that this might be the last time they would talk like this. She grabbed and hugged Barbara before leaving. But whatever connection was, that embrace held none of it.
That evening when Daniel came home, she was sitting on top of her three packed suitcases, five feet down his front walk. She had been sitting there for half an hour. She’d planned to be long gone well before he returned from work. Instead, she was camped out, twenty-five feet away from her parked car, unable to move in either direction. Daniel sprang off his bicycle, thinking she was hurt. But ten feet from where she sat, he figured out everything.
He was relentlessly noble, even in being abandoned. All the questions that he didn’t ask—Why are you doing this? Are you sure this is what you want? What about Mark? What about me?—burned into her as she sat, paralyzed. He didn’t even try to guilt her with talk or stroking. He said nothing at all for a long time, just stood two feet away from her, taking things in, thinking. He hunted for her eyes, trying to determine what she needed of him. She couldn’t meet his gaze. When he did speak, it was almost without accusation. Pure practical concern for her: exactly what she couldn’t bear. “But where will you go? All your stuff is in storage. Your place has just sold.”
She said what she had been rehearsing in her head for weeks. “Daniel, I’m breaking. I can’t do this anymore. For every little thing I do to help, I hurt him in three other ways. The sight of me makes him worse. He wants me gone. I’m sick and broke and in your way, light-headed and I haven’t slept well in six weeks. He makes me think I’m invisible, a virus, a nothing. I’m falling apart, Danny. I’m floating and buzzing. Like little spiders on my skin, all the time. I’m a mess. I’m disgusting. You just don’t, can’t, you have absolutely no…”
He put his hand on her shoulder to slow her. He did not say, I know. Only nodded.
Something like excitement propelled her. “The condo doesn’t close for another ten days. I can camp out on my floor. It’ll be so simple—just the essentials. I can use the money from the sale to line up a rental. I can get my job back, start reimbursing you for everything that you’ve paid for, all these…”
He shushed her. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder at the row of picture windows, through which the neighborhood now watched this piece of September-evening street theater. Now, on top of everything, she was making a scene, embarrassing him. She lunged up and grabbed at one of the suitcases, to drag it to the car. Her sudden speed pitched her over, into him. He grabbed her shoulders and steadied her. He reached down to take the bag. “Here. Let me help you.”
His stupid, brute charity made her lose it. She curled away from him, pressed two fists to her jaw, and began to hyperventilate. He stepped back toward her, to give what comfort he could. She fought him off with both hands. “Leave me alone. Don’t touch me. These aren’t real tears. Don’t you see, yet? I’m not her. I’m just a simulation. Something
you invented in your head.” She could not make out her own wet and rubbery words. It crossed her mind, in a seed of bright, spreading fear, that she was having that thing that she and Mark used to speculate about, in the terror of childhood: a breakdown.
But just as suddenly, all her wildness stopped, and she stood on the curb, becalmed. Something in her must have known all along: she could never get farther than going through these motions. Leaving would prove Mark right. Would strip her of every account she might give of herself. A great curiosity came over her, an impatience to learn what she might yet become, in staying here. Who she might still be, if she could no longer be the other. She sat back down on the toppled case. Daniel sat down on the lawn next to her, now indifferent to what any other human being saw or thought of them. “I can’t leave yet,” she announced. “I forgot. The note from Dr. Weber. He’s coming back next week.”
“Yes,” Daniel said. “True.” He made no show of even trying to follow her. And even that, in a way she could not name, was a small relief. They sat together on her packed clothes until the first fat drops of a sparse autumn rain began to plash around them. Then he helped her carry the luggage back inside.
The next day, Karin saw Karsh. She strolled down Central in front of his office, a stretch she’d avoided for months. The morning was glorious, one of those crystalline, dry, blue, fall days when the temperature hovers right at anticipation. She knew she would end up coming here, the moment Daniel had spoken those words during their disastrous dinner. Almost like he was daring her, flushing out all unfinished business into the open. New developer consortium. Local wheelers and dealers. You wouldn’t happen to know…? Well, she didn’t know. Didn’t know the first thing about anyone.
But about herself, there were things she could find out. She looped down the block in front of Platteland Associates, pretending to window-shop those few stores—hospital supplies, Salvation Army, used books—that hadn’t yet been euthanized since the Wal-Mart landed. He would emerge for lunch at ten to twelve and head for the Home Style Cafe. Four years would have changed nothing. Robert Karsh was habit incarnate. A first-rate mind knows what it wants. Everything else was chaos.
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