Woke Up Lonely

by Fiona Maazel

  They made it to the outlays of the house, where management started: a gate, a path.

  “What now?” Max said, though he got no answer.

  There were bighorn in the mountains; they lowed and baaed, and the sound traveled for miles.

  They neared the barn. Ned was the first to stop. He cocked his ear. They were twenty feet from a window open a crack. He was about to press on when a child’s voice sniped at the air and decked his parents. They were on their bellies fast. He just stood there.

  “Ned,” Max whispered, and he reached for his son’s calf.

  “Neddy,” Larissa said, and she reached for the other.

  He looked down at them. Max had served in Korea and been awarded a silver star. Larissa had served as a nurse at the Eighty-Fifth Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon. They knew how to take cover. A man’s face in the window, and Ned got on his stomach, too. Listened hard. The voice, after all, was his nephew’s. His nephew, Willard. He tried to memorize its timbre. The high notes. The jazz. He’d been told the boy was just over two. He heard running through the house and a man saying, “I’m gonna get you!” and the child shrieking and laughing and yelling, “No no, Dada,” and collapsing on the floor while his mother nibbled his arms and neck, threatening to eat her boy for dinner because he was soooooo tasty.

  Ned rolled on his back. So did Max. Larissa, too. They were soaked and filthy and staring at the nimbus overhead. For everything he’d been through, it was hard to imagine it was clouds up there and not a larder of tears.

  He went back to listening. This family inside was a miracle. The boy romping through the house, saying: “Willard’s bear. Willard’s shoes.” The parents keeping an eye on him but retreating to the kitchen to talk it over. The man who’d come to see them before? He was a representative from L.A. County’s flood control division saying that if it rained big again, tonight or soon, probably there’d be a debris slide headed right for their barn. The fire season being what it was, the basin uphill was just not basin enough. Tracy saying, “You believe that? I don’t believe that,” and Phil saying, “Me neither,” but both of them watching their son and believing it wholeheartedly.

  “He said if there’s rain, we’ll have just twenty minutes before the mountain comes down,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “He said in ’seventy-eight, there was such a bad flow, all the graves at Verdugo went loose and there were dead bodies upright in people’s living rooms when it was over.”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe let’s make an emergency bag if we have to leave in a hurry? Sort of like how when I was pregnant, we had that bag ready?”

  “Okay, but what should we pack? There’s nothing important in this house but the memory of us in it.” He touched her cheek.

  “I’ll grab the pictures of Mom and Dad in the living room,” she said.

  “You’d better. Your parents will have a fit if they find out you didn’t save their pictures.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  They reconvened on the couch, him with the albums and her with a box of miscellany. Will’s first rattle. A corsage from their wedding.

  They went through everything, and the hours went by. Finally, they put the pictures and mementos, title to the house, and some insurance papers in a duffel and put it by the front door. Only then did they turn on the radio. A severe storm alert was in effect. Rain imminent.

  “I’m scared,” she said. “This house is all we have.”

  “I know.”

  “I love you?” she said.

  “Check.”

  Their son came waddling into the living room and mounted the couch. He sat between them.

  “Willard’s book!” he yelled. “Oooooh, airplane! Flap, flap!”

  “No way,” Tracy said. “Who could fly in this weather? Come on, baby, let’s get your boots. We’re going on a trip!” She picked up her son, who flapped in her arms.

  “Flap, flap!” he said.

  Tracy smiled. “Silly boy,” she said, though she was wrong. Because not two hours ago, a twin brother had talked his parents into reboarding his Lear jet and racing for the cloud decks off the California coast. The plan? Seed the clouds to make it rain well afield of a ranch on Alpine Way, so that when his sister was spared, Ned would know himself equal in love to whatever the universe could do for her. He set their course, he kissed the sky. And their lives were bound up for good.

  Olgo Panjabi, a man sees, hears, feels, and absorbs

  as much as he can understand.

  Say you had this cult whose impetus to knit people together had turned terrorist—did that mean you forwent the instruments of community the second things got rough? That you divested your cult compound of a way to reach the outside world? If no, then what the hell, the Helix House was a nightmare; it had no cell-phone reception, no bars, which was colossal in the extent of its horror for Olgo Panjabi because if he could just get his voicemail, his life would start over. He had a rash, he was scared, but still, this kidnapping in its grandeur was like the Christ birth, a demarcation of time. Whatever had happened before belonged to a different epoch, and what tragedies it sustained were receded into it, among them adulteries committed by his wife. In this new era ushered in by High Event, his wife would come back, she was on her way, he just needed it confirmed by the message on his voicemail.

  He had heard the others leave—Anne-Janet brawning her way out, Ned following suit—and he had wanted to go, too, only he was frantic and when frantic, paralyzed. If not for the expected message from his wife, he might not have left at all. As it was, he’d crawled his way across the floor and poked his head through the exit Anne-Janet had made for them. Looked left, right. The rash meant he’d been released from his hood ages ago; likewise the handcuffs, because he had to scratch, and so he was versatile with the actions required for this escape. He’d crawl all the way home if he had to.

  Phone in his pocket. Checking for bars every few feet. Meeting no one. Meeting someone, a tree of a woman with an accent from the heartland telling him to make for a closet, find the hatch, something something tunnel, which did not appeal to the logic of finding high ground for best reception but which did mean a way out of this dead zone.

  It was dark in the tunnel; he had no idea where he was going. He worried he’d deplete the battery for checking the phone every three seconds. Couldn’t remember the directions but kept walking. The plan?

  Go home posthaste. Wait for his wife unless, oh-ho, she was waiting for him. Debrief in bed with kefir smoothies. The tunnel went on and on, but he could hear the rumble of cars overhead, and soon: a manhole. Ladder, life. A cover that could not be moved without a crowbar. Several such, and so he got filthier and angrier and more exhausted until, at last—a temp cover, resin grate, he could easily remove.

  He ran to the sidewalk. Ran with no regard for the spectacle of himself sprouted from the nethers, waving his phone. Not that anyone cared and probably not that anyone even noticed. He waved his cell for the interminable seconds it took this device to realize it was aboveground. One bar, two. He called his number and listened to the outgoing, dialed his password, got it wrong, fingers like egg rolls, got it right, thank God. Many messages, jumping for joy. The first from Erin—Dad, where are you?—and another—Oh my God, Dad, are you okay?—and finally just her crying, saying everyone was so scared, she knew he wasn’t going to get this message, but she loved him, they all did. All? A call from the fraud department of his bank, because there’d been so much activity on his debit card—had it been stolen?—and then a reporter from ABC news, just in case.

  Ah, choices. In every negotiation, there were plenty. Be the guy who reneges on what small powers of deduction separate man from ape, or the guy who accepts what’s what and acts accordingly and in everyone’s best interest. Trouble was, if you recognized these options as a choice, it wasn’t yours to make: You were the latter guy, the reasoning guy, the unhappy, paid-to-arbitrate guy whose wife had not called on purpose. He rang
his daughter. Did so outside an electronics store with TVs in the window showing a photomontage of the Helix hostages: Anne-Janet before the cancer, in pastel tank top; Ned at some dress-up convention, brandishing an action figure statuette like an Oscar; Bruce with tripod braced over his shoulder. And Olgo? Olgo smiling hugely into the camera with Kay by his side, the red-eye spangles of the shot doing little to vandalize the joy coming off them in torrents. Didn’t the others have family? Couldn’t the news upturn a single candid of Olgo without Kay? Of course not. Not if they wanted to reproduce his likeness in good faith.

  Erin shouted into the phone. “Dad? Dad?” She was incredulous and then she was sobbing, and he could hear Tennessee in the background, screaming in empathy, and then Erin calling out for someone, saying, “It’s my dad! On the phone! He’s okay!”

  Her enthusiasm was nice but also highlighting of the enthusiasm he would have liked to hear from someone else.

  “Erin, I’m fine. I’m fine, sweetheart”—and while he meant to say that he was coming home and that he loved her and that the whole time he was kept hostage he thought only of her and Tenn, of family and love, he popped out something different. He said, “But let me just ask you this: Who is that person you’re talking to in my house?” Because he suspected it wasn’t a woman, and if it was Erin’s asshole husband, Jim, he’d lose it.

  “Dad,” she said. “Where are you? Are you okay? Oh, thank God,” and she started to cry anew.

  He was afraid to squander battery life on her sobbing and was about to press on when closed captioning from the storefront began to ticker news of interest: The hostage Olgo Panjabi has a wife; this wife has joined the Helix.

  He took a deep breath. The cold seemed to nip his lungs like frost starred to a windowpane. “Has your mother called?” he said.

  Crying stopped. A long pause. Erin scouring her mind for the right way to put it. Olgo gawking at the TV.

  “No,” she said. “I think she’s gone.”

  “Don’t be silly,” he said.

  “She’s with the Helix, Dad. Jim told me. She’s in Virginia.”

  The last of the ticker onscreen: Living at whats thought to be a helix commune in richmon by the riber, sources close to teh case say, which wasn’t a case so much as Olgo’s hell spelled out in third grade.

  “Dad, just tell me where you are. There’s nothing on the news saying the hostages were released, and Jim says no one knows anything, though I know he’s full of shit. Is it a secret?”

  “Yes,” Olgo said, though it had not been a secret until now. He watched onscreen as one of Kay’s friends from yoga—she did yoga?—said how kind and vibrant Kay was, as though Kay were the tragedy here, the one taken. Though maybe—and here Olgo’s spirits rose like mercury in the thermometer—she really had been forcibly severed from her life by the brainwashing fury of the Helix, in which case she could be forced back.

  He stomped at a snowbank and nearly fell in. He had not once been hysterical at the Helix House, not until the moment he realized he could get out. He clamped down on his voice with success.

  “Listen. Don’t tell anyone you heard from me. Everything’s going to be fine, but I have to go.”

  “Dad, you’re scaring me. Wait, oh my God, are you—is someone making you say these things? Are you, how do you put it, are you under duress? Just say I love you if I’m right.”

  “Duress?” he said, sneering. “I thought you were a big fan of the Helix! You and your mother both. Their biggest fans ever!”

  “Dad, I didn’t know they were armed or whatever. I didn’t know you were going out there. I didn’t know they were like that! I’m getting a divorce; I just wanted some friends. If you’re upset about what happened, that’s natural. But don’t take it out on me. What were you even doing in Cincinnati? All this time pretending to be a nobody when really you are CIA? At first I thought you went after Mom, but then when you were gone for so long without calling and then suddenly the news everywhere and the press and Jim feeding me ten different stories every ten minutes—I guess you are CIA. I know you can’t tell me, so all I’m saying is: I know.”

  Olgo rapped the phone against his head and hunkered down. It was freezing. Kentucky in winter. No one around except a guy down the street smoking outside a garage, and in the driveway, a car with a For Sale sign in the window.

  “I have never pretended to be a nobody,” he said, and then he lost his breath for the agony those words drowned him in.

  “I didn’t mean it like that. When are you coming home? I’m just here with a girlfriend.”

  “I need a few days.” In the meantime, he had started for the garage. The smoking guy was in coveralls and rolling a second cigarette before his first one was out.

  “One good thing?” Erin said. “I think Jim has to leave town. Maybe even the country. So me and Tenn are home free.”

  “Great,” he said. “Now listen: when your mother calls, tell her I’m fine.”

  “Okay, but, Dad? She might not be coming back. Like, ever. His name is Jonathan. Just so you know.”

  Olgo stopped midstride. He’d almost forgotten. So enamored had he become with the idea of his wife absorbed into a cult, he’d lost sight of the recruiting lothario at the start of it all. Jonathan? What could be more homogenous and totemic of the white man and his intolerance than a name like Jonathan?

  “I have to go,” he said. “Give Tenn a kiss for me.” And before she could respond, he flipped his phone shut.

  By now, he was within voice of the mechanic, who took one look at him and said, “You like this car? ’Cause I got a better one in the back. Cheaper, too. Want to see?” He flicked his cigarette into the gutter and plucked shreds of tobacco from his tongue.

  Olgo nodded. Buy a car, hit the road. He struggled to keep pace with the mechanic. It wasn’t his way to move this fast, but it was refreshing so long as he could establish in their shared stride and silence the preconditions for talk. He needed to talk. More now than ever. If it’s true that stress makes you sick, there were polyps massed on the wall of his gut like barnacles. His bones were punchboard. He had coronary heart disease. Was getting a clot. Morbidity gorged on his despair.

  He took three steps for the mechanic’s every one, but they were on pace. “So, how’s it going?” he said.

  The mechanic glanced at him. “Car’s over there,” he said, and he gestured at a pea-green sedan. A Ford, maybe. He reached in his pocket for the keys. “You seem like a good guy, so let’s just call it an even three K.” He stopped several feet from the car, and when Olgo moved ahead, he called him back, saying, “Better yet, two K.”

  “Fine,” Olgo said. “Just give me the keys so I can make sure it works.”

  “I’m not out to get you,” the mechanic said. “But I do have to get back to work.” He held out his hand but still would not approach the car.

  “The keys?” Olgo said. “I have to get to a bank anyway. It’s not like I’m carrying.” He was in a hurry, but he was not stupid. The car had New York plates. Probably the car was stolen, though he couldn’t imagine who’d want to steal a pea-green sedan.

  “Done deal,” the mechanic said, and he tossed him the keys.

  Olgo got inside and immediately felt something like oatmeal wet his pants. Then came the smell. Cloying and rancid. He flew out of the car, shut the door. His eyes watered. “What is that?” he said, and pressed his face to the window. The glass was hazy and the lighting dim, but still, he could see inside. An army of fungal spores was encamped in his new car.

  “You can’t be serious,” he said, and turned around. But the mechanic was gone.

  Olgo circled the car and began to stack reasons for why this wasn’t so bad against a feeling that this was terrible. As if he could show up at Jonathan’s like the Swamp Thing.

  He opened the trunk. Luckily: towels and aerosol. He was on the road shortly. The car smelled as though many drag queens had passed through it. Nine hours to go. He was headed to Helix Pack 7, Richmond, Virginia.


  According to the radio—which worked, thank God—P7 convened at the Fulton Gas Works factory off Williamsburg Avenue. It was only two hours south of D.C., which meant Kay might have been commuting for months. Months! He could have hurled with the thought, though now, driving down the highway, windows up, then down—the cold was unbearable, but the smell was immortal—he thought he might hurl anyway. Olgo had never known himself to be an angry man or even a man with the stamina to anger for more than a few minutes, so the imprecations launched from his mouth at every car that passed and every one that didn’t; the slamming of his horn, plus coda, “Chingchong, CHING-CHONG!” because half these drivers were Asian and no Asian could drive; the tailgating of family vehicles signed Baby on Board—none of these behaviors, nor the presence of mind to deal with them, was part of his repertoire. It was not long, then, before he veered into the emergency lane and blew a tire. The asphalt was serrous, littered with glass.

  He punched the ceiling. His knuckles came back wet. Good thing he could not call AAA. Good thing he’d insisted the expense was lavish when Kay pressed for it; good thing she’d called him a miser cheapskate and turned her back to him in bed that night and for a few nights thereafter. Good thing in the year since, he’d refused to go on vacation, buy a new fridge, pay for Kay’s landscape portraiture classes at Wash U, or even contribute to Tennessee’s college fund. He wasn’t a cheapskate, Kay’s shrieking opinion notwithstanding, but just planning for the long haul. Sixty was the new forty; he’d have to make their savings and income last for another half century of life together. Together! Even now, stalled and shivery and strewn with hives, he smiled. And warmed up from the inside. He would just have to hitchhike.

  Five minutes passed before the anxiety of his circumstances returned. He hoisted his thumb, then jammed it in his pocket. There were some evil people on the road. People who might be the last you saw on earth if you got in their car. Oh, this was absurd. He thrust his thumb back in the air.

  Success was immediate; a car pulled over. Olgo bent down to look inside. “East,” he said. “Virginia,” and he probed the man’s eyes for murderous intent. He was old. His face was like granite, and the lattice of declensions in his skin was chiselwork. The car was a station wagon. Mutts in the back—a Weimaraner and a medieval-looking dog with no hair—and in the front, where once was a radio and AC console, the dash had been gutted to accommodate a humidifier that plugged into the smoke socket. When Olgo opened the door, a plume of dew came at his face.