by Richard Farr
“All they have online is a website made from a freebie template and a couple of half-dead social media pages. Nothing else there.”
“I’m only asking you to look harder, that’s all.”
He looks around the room. “Nothing else to do while I’m here in prison. But you have to do me a favor in return.”
“What?”
“Worry less. Get out more. Go get some, you know, serious aerobic exercise.” He arches one eyebrow. “With Kit.”
“You’re a bad influence.”
“What friends are for.”
I am getting exercise with Kit, though not what Rosko has in mind. Theory was, she’d keep running while I was in Patagonia, I’d get a workout from the climbing, we’d be doing twelve-milers together by now. But my knee’s still puffy and sore. First couple of sessions, when Kit comes out of afternoon classes we go for a slow, painful jog, which turns into a fast walk, which turns into me enjoying three ibuprofen and an ice wrap while her beautiful long legs carry her up and down the Howe Street steps.
Lying in the park afterward, grass tickling my neck, I find myself trying to count bright-white Styrofoam clouds as they float in a swimming-pool sky, because it’s a good way to avoid looking at Kit’s damp hair, tight black running shorts, spray-on white tank top. Suddenly she rolls over on one elbow and looks at me. “I liked meeting your sister,” she says. “She is maybe not easiest person in world. Ambitious, like wow yes. And so smart. A bit awkward. But I can see she is wearing mask. Something hard, for protection. Underneath, I think her real face is not so sure of everything.”
This is the best description of Morag I’ve ever heard. Something that none of my other friends, not even Rosko, has noticed.
“Also, Daniel, I am sorry about your mother. Actually, I know what this is like.”
“Nobody knows what it’s like.”
“You are wrong. You watch your mother fall from mountain. I watch my father drown.”
“I’m sorry—I had no idea. How did it happen?”
“Slowly. It take a whole year.”
I roll over and face her. “He took a year to drown?”
She holds my look for a long moment, then says in a flat, deadpan voice: “Traditional Russian story. He fall into bottle of vodka. Bottle has narrow neck. Cannot get out.”
It’s a kind of grim joke—permission for us both to see a flash of humor shining through the darkest imaginable material. It loosens something in me, makes me feel she’s the one person I can be frank with.
“At least you were left with the functional parent.”
“Your father is difficult? Yes. I see that. Containered?”
“Self-contained. That’s a polite way to put it.”
She nods, then pushes me to talk more about Mom, Morag, Rosko, the climb. I do—and then, because I like her, because I need to spill, also probably because I’m deeply in lust, I go on. I describe the nagging sense that Rosko and I are both missing something that happened. I even mention hearing Mom’s voice. And the insomniac nights I’ve spent researching the disappearances. Everything.
Too desperate to hear someone say I believe you, I guess. But Kit doesn’t say she believes me, any more than Rosko did. Instead she says:
“Daniel, I think you are basket cake.”
“I’m what?”
“Basket cake—going crazy.”
“No. It’s, ‘You are a basket case.’ ”
“Is so? You are basket case? I thought it was from being, I don’t know, a kind of funny cake, like a small cake, and that a cake is not intelligent and makes the bad personal decisions. No?”
“No.”
“Listen. You say everyone you are fine, everything OK. But cannot sleep, have anxieties, then you are saying me you cannot stop thinking about some news stories, maybe have memory loss, hallucinations, whatever. So this ‘fine fine fine’ is like, total bullshit, Daniel. Stop being the machismo guy, yes? You need help.”
Does Kit’s way of speaking make her seem more special than she is? Or more vulnerable than she is? Dunno. But my irritation that she too has reduced everything to a set of symptoms liquefies and dissolves in the heat of my desire for her.
Wouldn’t everything else just go away, if I pulled her toward me and gave her a serious, in-depth, twenty-minute kiss?
Trust your instincts—that’s what Mom always said. Fairly sure she wasn’t talking about sucking face with beautiful Russian girls in the park, but still. I lean across, put one hand on the back of her neck, look into her eyes, and draw her toward me.
She doesn’t look shocked or surprised. She just laughs, pushes me off, jumps up.
“Will you go see doctor, at least? For me?”
The smell of her skin lingers on the air like fine, sweet smoke. I breathe in deep, feeling dizzy.
“Will you? Daniel? You are not even listening.”
“Sure.”
“Not ‘sure,’ ” she says sternly. ‘Sure’ is like, pathetic. Is American way of say yes when you mean no. You have to promise.”
The word catches in my throat. “I promise.”
“And knee is feeling a little better now, yes?”
“Eighty, ninety percent,” I say, exaggerating wildly.
“Good! Race you to top of water tower, basket cake.”
CHAPTER 10
MAY YOU JOIN THEM
A promise.
For exactly no other reason, I go to the family doctor. We talk about Mom. We talk about The Nature of Loss. In an attempt to be at least halfway honest, I even mention both the nightmares and being saved from them by insomnia. But I leave out half of what I said to Kit; I leave out the fact that this pure thing called grief feels more like a dirty mix of anxiety, acute loneliness, and a crawling nameless dread.
Dr. Lovecraft has a gray buzz cut, round steel glasses, an open shirt, one diamond earring; considers himself a dude. His whole attitude of lazy, I-was-once-a-pothead good cheer makes it obvious he’ll never understand what I’m experiencing. Still, apparently I “need some help,” and his prescription for my continued sanity, or stability, or faked-up happiness is that each morning for the next three months—or six, or possibly the rest of my life—I should spike my morning espresso with 500 mg of Zampodex, a hot new billion-dollar molecule from one of our own biotechs.
On the way back to the house I text Rosko, yet again.
Anything?
Not on the Colberts. Something on me, though: freedom, tomorrow afternoon.
When I get back, Dad’s off at a faculty meeting and Morag’s in the kitchen, reading a paperback while doing serious damage to a pecan pie. She puts the book down; the cover features a long-haired beefcake not-quite-wearing a ruffled shirt—Cynthia Bland’s deathless classic He Stole My Heart.
“Let me guess. The sequel’s called Then He Came Back and Stole My Pancreas.”
“Hilarious, D.”
“Those things can destroy your brain.”
“You’ve never read one.”
I drag her out for a walk. In the park she gravitates toward a giant sequoia that stands at the back of the Asian Art Museum. It’s one of the biggest trees in the city; the space around its trunk, a circle of fallen material, is muffled, private. You can’t be seen easily, but there’s a view out to where people are biking, jogging, being walked by their dogs.
Morag looks at me, seems about to speak, breathes in deep. “I think I can get used to it here, D.”
“You don’t like cities.”
“No. But big trees are good. You can pretend the city’s just a temporary clearing in the forest. I missed trees so much in Iraq. Nowhere to climb, nowhere to hide.”
“I keep trying to take you hiking in the real forest. Out at Lake Quinault I could show you the biggest spruce in the world. But you’re too busy.”
She looks at me apologetically, but doesn’t apologize. Instead she bends down, picks up a chunk of bark the size of a brick, starts stripping the salmon-colored fibers from the underside a
nd examining them minutely. Then, with an agility that surprises me, she jumps up, grabs a low branch. A second later, she’s standing on a higher one, directly over my head. She balances there on one leg, her arms at her side, looking down at me.
“Be patient,” she says. “The Akkadian materials are a big deal, but once we’re done—”
I’m about to interrupt, about to tell her that the desperate impatience I feel is mainly not about her, when we hear chanting.
I can tell where it’s coming from—a grass slope on the other side of the museum that’s a popular spot for concerts, rallies, guys in tights declaiming that To be, or not to be is definitely the question. Morag jumps down from her perch, landing neatly next to me like an acrobat.
“Let’s go check it out.”
I feel my phone buzz, glance down at it: Correction. Think I’ve found something. Later.
“Rosko?”
“Yeah. He’s—he says they may be letting him go as early as tomorrow.”
“That’s great.”
A crowd of people is milling around under a line of chestnut trees, along a roadway in front of the museum. And it’s clear now that the voice coming up from the other side of the park is no amateur Hamlet. The tone’s too hectoring, too motivational for that. We’re in among the crowd before I notice that some of them are holding banners. Then I get the point.
A Seraphim rally.
“Jesus, they’re everywhere,” Morag says, like someone who has just discovered an infestation of bugs. She immediately turns to leave. We walk north toward the Victorian white-and-glass wedding cake that’s the plant conservatory. At the edge of the crowd, under the statue of William Henry Seward, we run into a smiling, moon-faced young man with a “Know It Is True” button and a stack of leaflets. Morag jumps away from him as if she’s been bitten, but I’m impressed by the guy’s calm, his sincerity:
“Learn the truth, ma’am. Reverend Quinn is leading us toward the light. Showing us the stairway. Leading us to our fullest potential as ascended beings.”
I take the leaflet. “Thanks. We’ll look at it.”
He offers me a slight bow. “May you learn the language of the Architects, and in their language forget your own. May they hear you, and may you join them. Dir-pan-uk, Ek-lim-u, Lim-go-qa, Yi-che-rin.”
Listening to his chant, I feel as if my whole body has pins and needles. Morag is tugging at my arm before he even turns away. “Let’s get out of here.”
I’m fascinated and frightened at the same time, but I don’t want her to see either emotion. So I try to act casual. “You’re worse than Dad. Religion’s not contagious.” And I walk back a few paces, until I can see the speaker.
He’s a prominent Lutheran pastor who has switched allegiance to the new faith. Behind him there’s a white banner, big enough to carpet half a tennis court, with a twenty-foot image of Quinn’s face on it. We check out the crowd as best we can, but we’re at the back. I’m not looking for anyone in particular, just want to stay a bit longer. Morag tugs my sleeve again, uncomfortable as always with what she calls public displays of religion.
“OK, OK. Let’s go, before you lose your lunch or break out in a rash.” We turn and walk right into Dad’s Aussie philosopher colleague.
I’d naturally say something like, ‘Professor Maynard Jones—nice to see you.’ Morag, who has already met him on campus, beats me to it, waves enthusiastically, gives a little skip.
“Hey, Mayo! What the hell are you doing here?”
“Daniel, Morag. An unexpected pleasure.” And he deadpans: “To answer your question, Morag, I’m here because I woke up this morning and decided I wanted to find out about becoming immortal.”
I like the way he takes Morag’s greeting totally in his stride. It strikes me again: Aussie men are supposed to be big, loud, sunburned, casually dressed, and interested mainly in beer. Mayo so utterly fails the stereotype. Slight, pale, soft-spoken. Talks like a diplomat and dresses like a high-end banker. Despite the warm afternoon, he’s wearing a crisp white shirt under a suit. As usual, despite the suit, he looks comfortable, casually stylish, relaxed.
Morag’s on his wavelength: “Just for insurance, Daniel and I decided to join all the religions.”
I nod earnestly and we all have a good laugh.
“Actually,” Mayo says, switching to more or less serious mode, “I do find religion fascinating, the Seraphim especially. We philosophers love to dismiss other people’s beliefs as irrational, and we always assume it would be better to have rational beliefs—by which we mean our own. But these people seem happy, wouldn’t you say? They have a profound sense of community. They have hope. Energy. Purpose.”
He’s making a serious point, while also teasing. I can see Morag is going to let this go, so I put an oar in: “Even if they’re happy, you still think they’re wrong.”
His eyes twinkle; he likes to be challenged a bit. “I do, I do. My views are even more extreme than your father’s. It’s taken us more than a hundred and fifty years to get comfortable with Darwin—who replaced the lovely but false idea that we are God’s handiwork with the unlovely truth that we’re primordial slime plus mutations. It’s going to take even longer for the general public to swallow the implications of modern physics.”
“Which are?”
“That the universe is a computer, and we’re subroutines within it.”
“Great,” Morag says drily. “It’s going to suck if we’re badly coded.”
“Oh, but we are! Total screw-up. An entire Creation that’s like an early version of Windows. And yet—” He spreads his hands approvingly over the crowd. “And yet Quinn is definitely onto something. Every religion’s a theory, you see. A big, ambitious, overweight theory. It wants to explain what the gods are. And how they created us. And what they plan to do with us. Past. Nature. Destiny. Quinn’s offering a seductive alternate to all those traditional destinies, and people love it.”
We all turn to contemplate the scene, so I’m not actually looking at him when he says the next thing. It reaches my ears like an echo. I’m hurled back seven years, into that church in Heraklion. I hear his words in Mom’s voice, almost as if she’s speaking to me again: “Striking, isn’t it? That religion is so appealing. So successful?”
Morag gets into a discussion with him about the accelerating extinction of languages—how Quinn thinks it’s just fine, because it’s bringing us closer to Unity or something. While they’re talking I check my phone again. About a dozen messages have come in. They’re summed up by the one from Julia Shubin:
Rosko out THIS AFTERNOON!! Pizza at my house.
Julia hosting a pizza party means a guy at the front door with a credit card reader and a stack of greasy cardboard. So I let Morag get back to Dad, try unsuccessfully to get hold of Rosko again, then tell Julia I’ll handle the food. After biking to three different stores, I show up at her house with a backpack full of groceries.
Julia plays Bach for me on her expensive cello while I make tomato sauce and slap pizza dough around. Alex shows up with Aaron; Ella and Kit are right behind them. Ella has lime-green hair today—she gets it recolored once a week at a place called Scream—but mainly she’s wearing all-black Goth, including a long coat, platform boots, half a pound of eyeliner. Kit, flute case in hand, is wearing the usual too: zero make-up, old jeans, a neon-yellow running jacket over a T-shirt for her favorite hometown punk band, Leningrad.
“God, Daniel,” Ella says. “That smell is making me ravenous. Is it ready? Or do I have to lick the tomato sauce off your jeans?”
She’s flirting because she always flirts, but also to cover for what she’s actually thinking, which is that she ought to have found a way to ask how I’m feeling, ought to have actually said something about Mom, and just doesn’t know how to bring it up.
Can’t blame her. Nobody does.
She comes over and kisses me on the cheek, in a way that’s also flirty but leaves me stone cold. Then Kit comes over and does likewise, except that
her kiss is merely friendly, and feels like someone just ran a hundred volts through my boxers.
“Morag not here?” Ella asks.
“Woman on a mission. Working with Dad on the Babel tablets sixteen, eighteen hours a day.”
“Guess they do have the secrets of the universe in their hands,” Ella says, a distinct edge of sarcasm in her voice. “Babel Babel Babel.”
I wince at this, but try to act as if I’ve not noticed. Then she shifts her attention to Aaron, draping an arm around his neck because she knows it will make him self-conscious. “What do you think of my nails, snuggle-buns?”
“Uh, they’re, uh, nice. Kind of, uh, peach-colored?” Aaron says, vaguely aware that anything ever asked him by any girl is probably a trick question.
“Safe bet, gorgeous. But wrong. This is an all-new shade. See the way there’s orange and yellow streaking in the red? Comes right out of the bottle like that. It’s called Welcome to Hell.”
While I’m assembling the pizzas, Stefan shows up as promised to deliver Rosko, who receives a prince’s welcome. I can tell from his eyes that he wants to talk privately, but everyone’s crowded into the kitchen, wanting a piece of his attention. When Aaron starts eating anchovies three at a time, I shoo them all out.
“Go. Everyone. Go now, or no food.”
Rosko lags behind and for a second it looks like we’ll get a minute to ourselves, but then Ella comes back in and stands in the doorway, ostentatiously lighting a joint.
“How long, Daniel?”
“No wonder you’re hungry, Ella. Keep your munchies under control for another five.”
I make a face at Rosko—Later. Not long after that, I’m slicing fresh pie amid oohs and aahs of appreciation. Margherita with extra basil for the veggies. Pepperoni for the people with only a limited allocation of taste buds—Julia, Aaron. And, for the sophisticated people, my own riff on a pizza Niçoise, piled brightly with goodies: red onion, anchovies, arugula, capers, whole cloves of roasted garlic, two kinds of olives.
“This is awesome,” Ella says, snitching a hunk of loose topping from the Niçoise. “Is that lemon zest?”