Miles down the road, she takes off her seat belt, ignoring the car’s bleating protests. She spins around up on her knees, nestles into the seat back, and films the interstate disappearing behind them. She speaks to the vanishing landscape. “How can I thank you, Mister? You saved me. You were the only one I could call. I was letting them kill me a little, back there.”
“I did nothing. I just love you.” His militant demurral pops out of him before he hears it. Blood runs uphill into his face, and he wants to red-pen his whole existence.
She swings back down onto the seat, facing him. Weight lifts off her, and for a moment, she’s invulnerable again, converting all the world’s madness into grateful play. She clasps his right thigh near the knee and shakes it, making him accelerate. “Don’t you think I know this thing, Russell Stone? You are a very amusing fellow, sometimes.”
It takes another twenty miles for his pulse to return to base rate. She stays aloft for the whole stretch, scribbling into an art notebook, smiling to herself. “Always keep a journal of your day. You never know when you might experience something you want to remember!” How she can work without carsickness is a mystery as profound as the rest of her physiology.
In the jutting nub of Pennsylvania, Thassa pulls a phone from her purse and calls her aunt. Stone can decode nothing except the otherworldly, musical cadence, the switches from French to Arabic. She’s relating some story with no emotional tie whatsoever to the nightmare she has just escaped. Stone listens, grateful for every note that sounds like the woman who sat in his classroom last fall, reminding the entire roster that only a fool tries to decide more than God.
If she mentions an estimated arrival in Montreal, it must be on some scale of mountain time that Stone has never experienced. She hangs up without any explanation aside from “Good food waiting for us at home, Mister.”
They pass billboards for everything-clothing outlets, telcom packages, medical supplies, fast food and faster drink, starter homes, recreational vehicles, casinos, lottery tickets, psychological counseling, secret surefire investments, teen abstinence, sex-toy warehouses, partnering websites, and cutting-edge prophecy services.
“Give in to the Present,” Thassa reads.
“What?” he snaps.
She flinches, then giggles. “It’s just a sign, Russell. ‘Give in to the Pleasant. Pleasant taste of ’ ”
“Oh,” he says. “Of course.”
“Avoid hell,” she says, her affect falling again. “Repent. Trust Jesus now. Next exit sixty miles.”
Somewhere between Fredonia and Angola, New York-in short, smack in the middle of implausible invention-they stop to get more gas. She’s edgy again, in the parking lot of the service station. She dons the sunglasses and head scarf before she gets out of the car, as if disguise is just common sense. Maybe she’s right. Proliferating pictures of the bliss mutant long ago stole her freedom of movement.
The nineteen-year-old behind the cash register does gawk at her, but only, Stone hopes, the way any young American heterosexual hormonal firestorm from upstate New York would gawk at a twenty-three-year-old Berber in a drab olive sweat suit and bad hair dye.
The map suggests they shoot north at Syracuse and cross at a place called Thousand Islands. Thassa measures the distance with a barrette and calculates the remaining travel time on her fingers. They’re halfway home, and if they push, they could pull into Montreal before sunrise. She breathes easier, seeing how close they are to the border. But even an Algerian-especially an Algerian-ought to know this genre.
They pass through archaic resort towns, famous ghost wrecks of American industrial history, collapsed utopian and religious communities. They talk about everything now-her parents’ infatuated anger toward the French, his long fascination with the Unabomber, the mythic origin of the Kabyles, a fantastic Egyptian film he saw eleven years ago and has never since been able to identify, an old family car that he and his brother once wrecked, the varied agendas of the world’s great cities, the odds of humanity soon cooking to death, a thrush that once threw itself at her bedroom window at ten-second intervals for the better part of two days.
The camera is long since packed away. Thassa needs to keep talking now, about anything at all, so long as it dates back before the last three months. She’s like some infected farm animal, brought low by something it can’t even imagine. Microbes without borders. Her system struggles to reject this invasion, as it would any alien tissue. His job is to keep talking, to hold up his end of the trivia as if everything will come right again, if they only imagine.
Even now, just riding alongside her helps him recognize himself. If he could drive with her in this car until he learned the habit by heart, the certainty of who he is, equal to the brief, scattered days he’s been given
She means more to him now, stunned, than she did when she rode the world.
Pointless tenderness, evolution’s ultimate trick. The product of a handful of genes, hitting on strategies to keep themselves in play. A force three billion years in the making, coughing up a thing ridiculously makeshift and erratic, more wasteful than the peacock’s tail. Stone tags along behind a caravan of SUVs, tooling north. Maybe even love is just a minor node in a vast network pushing toward new and unimaginable exploits
Candace should be with them. She loves this woman as much as anyone.
In the neck of upstate New York, Thassa falls asleep. She goes slack in her seat, slumping onto Stone’s shoulder. There’s a burr that sounds like a problem with the engine. Then he places it: she’s humming in her sleep. A simple, repetitive tune built on no scale Stone recognizes. He thinks he hears her chant the word vava When she wakes ten minutes later, he doesn’t ask her what song she was dreaming, and she doesn’t volunteer.
They track north along the edge of Lake Ontario. Late afternoon is done and evening layers in. The sun falters, and they’ve been driving so long that the highway starts to float. They pass through an enfilade of pines flanking the road. They roll down the windows. The dry, cool air plays on their skin and their hearts crack open.
The day is late, and they know each other now in the way that only two people stuck together in a car forever can. “You know,” he tells her, his eyes three hundred yards down the road, “it’s funny. I think about that old woman all the time. I go through long stretches where I think about her almost every day.”
“What old woman, Russell?”
He’s shocked that she can’t read his mind. “The one you wrote about for your first paper. The one who took forever to climb a few stairs of the Cultural Center.”
He feels her studying his profile. She asks, “Why do you think about her?”
He’s wondered about this, too, almost as long as he’s wondered about the woman. He can’t say why, but he can say something. “You did, in two pages, without effort, what I’ve wanted to do my whole life. You took the simplest, most ordinary thing-something I’ve rushed past a thousand times a day-and lifted You made her next step the only thing in existence worth worrying about. I think about the woman, whether she’s still alive, what she’s doing right now, whether she could still make it up those stairs, nine months later.”
“No,” Thassa says. “She can’t.”
He turns to look at her. The car hits the right shoulder rumble strip, and he jerks it back into the lane.
“There is no woman,” Thassa says.
“I don’t There’s what?”
“You said creative.”
He keeps his eye on the median, watching his past revise. “You’re saying you made her up?”
She waves to a tinted-window minivan passing them. “I assembled from some separate parts. Things I’ve seen.”
“But the real ” He has to stop talking. They pass a mile and a half in silence. She studies the thickets of pine. He does the two breathing exercises that Candace taught him.
A lentil-sized thought at the base of his brain swells to a chickpea. “Your father,” he asks, as calm as midnight. “How d
id he die?”
“You read about it,” she answers, just as calmly.
“Yes. I did.”
“He was shot,” Thassa says. “In the civil war.”
“By someone else?” Those two finch-eyed holes in the man’s skull
She doesn’t confirm. Or deny.
He thinks: the depression gene, just waiting for the right environment to flower. But his own native spinelessness overcomes Stone, and question time is over. They drive for a long time, through no more than a hair’s breath, on the map. The flanking pines and spruce fall away to a sunny clearing. He asks, “Has this ever happened to you before?”
She smiles at him, an echo of her smile on the first day of class. “This?” That radiance again, hounded by the hungry, clutched by the desperate, reduced by the scientific, dissected by the newshounds, stoned by the religious, bid on by the entrepreneurs, denounced by the disappointed. “ This? Antecedent, Mister Stone!”
For a moment, he sees her on the night of the ice storm. But he wipes away that memory, a nuisance spiderweb. “Is this the first time you’ve ever felt yourself coming apart?”
She puts her sunglasses back on. Her fingers rake shaky lines through her colored hair. “Is that what’s happening to me?”
They’re saved from themselves by the sealike St. Lawrence. They glimpse the islands multiplying on that broad boundary, wooded, still, and sovereign. The spread of highway collapses into a clogged line of vehicles waiting to pass the border check. Under her breath, Thassa half chants a thanksgiving that Stone can’t make out.
It dawns on Russell that he’s about to cross a national border with an Algerian. The press has been diligent these days with rumors and counter-rumors, factions linked to Al Qaeda, an entity that is itself either a finely tuned worldwide network or a fake post-office box. Stone never even noticed the reports until this woman dragged him into the world. In a minute he’ll have to convince an official that he and this woman aren’t sworn to the destruction of any major Christian industrial democracies. With luck, the official might be an Oona fan.
The four lanes of traffic lengthen to a dozen vehicles deep. New cars arrive faster than the old ones clear. A jitter on the newswires, maybe, or Canadian retaliation for some American slight. Every third car is routed off to a holding area and searched. If everyone came out of their protective shells to mill around in political confusion, this would be one of those great scenes of collective meltdown from contemporary developing-world fiction.
They pull up to the border guard, whose day has clearly been longer than their own. But Thassa’s bright “Hello, bonjour!” softens him some. She hands over her Canadian passport, and Stone surrenders his driver’s license.
The guard hands back Russell’s license. “Passport, please.”
Stone laughs, then doesn’t. “I’m sorry. I’m an American. We don’t ”
The guard does his own deep-breathing exercise. He’s more or less ready for the system of nation-states to break down, and Stone, the millionth ignorant prince he’s had to deal with on this matter, has been put on earth merely to mortify him. “The rules have changed, sir. You can still get into Canada with a driver’s license. But you need a passport to get back into the States.”
“What’s happened? Has something happened?”
The man looks at Stone as if he’s dropped down from another planet. “Read much?”
“You’re kidding. So everybody’s a suspect now?”
One glance from the border officer indicates that if Stone speaks another word he will be strip-searched until his skin comes off. Only Thassa’s apologetic smile pacifies the official. He gives the American another chance. “You wouldn’t happen to be carrying a birth certificate?”
Stone has no option but to proceed to the holding area. He and Thassa get out of the car and review their choices. But choice is exactly what they don’t have. Thassa calls her aunt; no one in Montreal can drive the two hundred and fifty kilometers until tomorrow morning. She’s ready to sit in the border detention holding center until then.
She sits on a plastic scoop chair inside the grim concrete room, alongside a platoon of the equally lost, under the eyes of two watchful police. She starts to get the shakes. Her hands are like broom bristles, sweeping the air. “Russell, I’m so sorry. I’m making your life miserable.”
“You aren’t,” he says, confirming with lameness.
“I’m making millions of people miserable. Russell? I can’t seem to stop that.” She curls both arms across her narrow chest and cups her shoulder blades. “Kill the smiling Arab bitch. Dot com.”
He takes her by the elbow. “Come on. It’s nothing. We’ll turn around and find a place for the night. I’ll bring you back tomorrow. Your uncle can come down and take you home. Everything will be fine.”
“Fine?” she asks. “You think this is still possible?”
“I’m sure,” he says. And they walk back to the car.
The motels near the border are full. They find a place on a winding state highway about six miles off the interstate, nestled into the side of a wooded hill. It’s a motor lodge, one of those wormholes back into the sixties, a place right out of Stone’s parents’ Ektachrome slides, from when his folks were young and in love and still vacationing, before the kids came along and soured that show.
An elderly desk clerk with a growth the size of a honeydew melon coming out of his neck is using a magnifier to read an enormous volume of Boccaccio illustrated by Rockwell Kent. He’s surprised by customers and irritated by the interruption. He holds up the magnifying glass as if to fry them.
“Yes? Can I help you?”
Thassa pushes forward and slips off her sunglasses. “Do you have room for us tonight?”
The man glances down at an ancient ledger grid, the day’s blocks more or less empty. “Double?”
Stone freezes. He’s on the South Rim, unable to say just how many rooms they need.
“Yes, please,” Thassa says, pleading with Stone by clasping his wrist bone. Do not abandon me tonight.
The clerk looks up, scrutinizing them. Stone thinks he’s going to demand a marriage license. “Queen or two twins?”
Thassa stumbles on the idiom and Stone blurts out, “Two twins, thanks.”
They sign in and get a dense metal key. On their way out of the lobby to the room, the desk clerk calls after them, “Ahlan wa Sahlan.”
I look it up, two years later. It means, Welcome. You’re with kin.
Thassa stops, slapped by the words. She starts to tear up. “Yaïchek,” she calls back, shaky with gratitude. “ Shukran, shukran.”
The room spins and shakes as Stone lies on his bed. Pine trees still whip by in his peripheral vision. His blood sugar is all over the place, casualty of the long road fast followed by a fried-dinner binge. The dingy room, filled with a stale stink when they first checked in, now smells fine, either because they’ve opened the windows or because he’s habituated.
She’s in the bathroom, under the shower for close to thirty minutes. At dinner, she was listless. He wants to knock on the door to makes sure she’s all right. He’s thinking: Her beautiful essays for me were lies.
All right: not lies. Invention. What did that make them? Less beautiful? More suspect? Unfair, misleading, personal
Performance, in place of the real. Devices, in place of facts. The events she described were all fabricated from whole cloth. Not what happened: what could have happened. What might have.
Her father was shot, but maybe not by someone else.
Then, a thought that sits him up in bed. Those essays are not her only fiction. She has been authoring something else. How high is her real emotional set point, by nature? How happy is she, really? All of that testing, out in Boston, the psychological measurements so carefully correlated with the rigorous gene sequencing: nothing but self-reportage. Even science asked her to tell them a story.
Maybe she has faked a good half of her bliss.
And now, when he m
ost needs time to think, to process the causal chains rippling through his head, she chooses that moment to come out of the bathroom at last. She’s in a loose, rose-colored shift that falls to her knees, a towel wrapped around her head. She tries to beam at him, as if she were the same content creature she ever was. Only now, the act exhausts her.
She sits on the end of her own bed, loosens the towel from her head, and squeezes clumps of hair in the roll of terry cloth. “You know, Mister Stone, if this were Algeria, my brother and uncle would have to come here tomorrow morning and kill us both.”
A forced laugh escapes her. She tilts her head and begins running a hairbrush through her now red tangles. Her hand moves slowly, as if combing oatmeal. He can see the outline of her tiny breasts through the billow of her shift and looks away.
He thinks of anything but her, listens to anything but that brush wicking through her ruined hair.
She stops dead still. “What is that beeping?”
“What beeping?” he echoes. He sits up, and his bed rustles.
“Shh. Listen. There. That.”
He titters, in case she’s joking. She isn’t. “That? That’s a bird, Thassa.”
Her words come out flushed and wild. “A bird? Oh my God, Russell, you’re right. It’s a bird. A bird, beeping.” Something small hits the floor with a soft thud. The hairbrush. And something larger falls back on the squeaking bed: Thassadit Amzwar. These sounds are followed by another one, even stranger. It starts as almost a whistle, then a low wail turning terrified. Weeks of bombardment, and she breaks.
She tries to turn the keening into words. “Something’s happening to me, Russell. I have to get out of this place.”
He does not move. He feels himself go weirdly calm. “Tomorrow,” he promises. “It will be okay. You’ll feel stronger. You should call your uncle now.”
“I can’t. I just can’t.” The words are clayey, distorted through a horrible mouth that can’t hold its shape.
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