She stood up, walked to me, and crouched so that her face was level with mine. Her hand moved, and I thought she was going to touch my cheek, but she only wrapped her arm around her knee. She studied my face.
“I know what you thought,” she said. “I’ve thought the same things myself.”
“What, with me?”
“With everyone. I was possessed at least fourteen times, Del. I’d wake up in a hospital room holding the face of a dead woman, knowing that my lips had just touched hers. That I’d just murdered her. Sometimes I lost an entire week. The years between my tenth birthday and my twelfth are riddled with holes. I learned that anyone can disappear at any moment, replaced by a monster.”
“You’re too old for the Little Angel now,” I said. “You should be safe from her.”
“Maybe from her, but not the others. I became an exorcist, didn’t I? Looked too many demons in the face. Once you’ve been noticed, once you’re familiar to them, they like to find you again. You come to understand that they can take you at any time, anyone you’re close to. So. You stay on guard. You start watching for that change of expression, that alien voice.”
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“Well, you were acting sort of different there,” I said, and laughed, then quickly cleared my throat to stop the laughter. “It’s just that, there’s that vow of celibacy thing.”
O’Connell said nothing. I looked up, and then she laughed. Her own laugh, dry and light. “I never said I was perfect.”
We locked eyes. Maybe trying to figure out if there was anybody else watching. She never looked away from me, but her expression slowly changed.
I could smell her, heady and rich.
I touched her calf, the underside of her thigh. Slid the edge of my palm into the folds of her. She was wet.
I wanted to roll her onto her back right then, but not on that awful carpet. I stood and pulled her to her feet.
I was hard again. So fast, despite all of this. The body has its own imperatives.
She touched my cock through the shorts, ran a fingernail along it, making me shiver. Then she gripped hard and stepped in close, holding me hot against her hip. She spoke softly into my ear. “I don’t want you inside me,” she said, almost whispering. “You have to be all right with that.”
“Okay,” I said, gasping. “Just . . . go easy.”
14
Kansas had the purity of a sixth-grade math problem, an exercise in scale and stark geometry. I couldn’t stop picturing our progress from above: the blue dot of the pickup creeping along a thin black line, bisecting a checkered expanse of barren fields regular as graph paper.
“So, this is Kansas.” It was the first thing O’Connell had said since we’d started driving this morning.
“We’re not in Missouri anymore,” I said. She didn’t get the reference. I glanced down at the map on my lap, then back out through the dust-bright windshield, looking for a mile marker. Playing navigator. Del led, I thought.
Paradoxically, the extreme flatness of the terrain made me acutely aware that we were living on a big round spinning planet. Though the horizon looked as level as a windowsill, I could sense the Earth curving out of sight, the vast sky bending over us. We rode toward an immense wall of clouds, unguessable miles away. My arm rested on the back of the seat. I leaned toward her, started to rub the back of her neck. She didn’t quite flinch, but after a moment she leaned away.
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“Okaaay . . . ,” I said. Dropped my arm. “So what’s going on. Last night—”
“Was last night,” she said.
Ah.
After we made love, she rested her head on my chest and I rubbed my hand up and down her fuzzed skull. I told her I’d wanted to do that from the moment I saw her; she mock-sighed and said, “Everybody does.” We fell asleep spooning like old lovers, but I woke up alone, my mouth tasting of cigarettes. O’Connell was already up, dressed, and packed. She didn’t speak during breakfast except to order and to answer my questions about the route we’d take.
“Is this about your vows?” I said. Maybe she was pissed at me for leading her into temptation. Which made no sense—she was the one who’d jumped me while I was sleeping—but I knew well enough that shame and guilt didn’t have much to do with logic.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, and turned on the radio. Ever since we’d left Kansas City we’d been unable to pick up anything on the FM dial except country, Christian, and—weirdly—
seventies hard rock. She quickly switched to cassette and jammed in another of her jarring mix-tapes: Pogues followed by the Clash and Nirvana, then Joan Baez, Lead Belly, and Jan & Dean. She would have loved Lew’s mash-ups.
Twenty miles and thirty minutes later the Beach Boys were dootdooting through “Heroes and Villains” (Part 2). O’Connell turned down the volume, a lit cigarette between her fingers, and said, “I think you’ve misunderstood something.” Her scholarly voice. I tried to keep my expression neutral. “Yes?”
“Last night was about physical desire, Del. A collar doesn’t alter your chemistry, and I haven’t touched a body in six years. I shouldn’t have done what I done, but neither should you construe a physical act as some kind of . . . romantic overture.”
Overture? “I’m not,” I said. “I didn’t. I just thought that—”
“Why is it so hard for men to believe that a woman can just be horny?”
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Men? Now I was men?
I turned away from her and stared out the passenger window, a frown holding my mouth in check. It would be a very bad time to laugh. But Jesus, what a relief! O’Connell just might be as fucked up as I was. All the things about her that kept me off balance: the costume changes from high priest to rock chick; the sudden lurches into hard Irish aints and yes; the abrupt swing from pastor to sexual aggressor and back again. She didn’t know who the hell she was, kick-ass exorcist or shell-shocked possession survivor. Maybe everyone in the world was this inconsistent, this fragmented. All we could see of each other—all we could see of ourselves—was a ragged person-shaped outline, a game of connect-the-dots without enough dots.
A sign flashed past my window. “That was our turn,” I said. She slammed on the brakes—which wasn’t a problem, since the highway was empty. We’d passed maybe five cars since leaving the interstate. She made a three-point turn and rolled back to where another two-lane road met the highway.
On the green sign was a white arrow pointing down the road and the words, olympia 15 mi. Below it, a smaller sign that said hospital.
“Hospital?” O’Connell said.
I shrugged. It wasn’t on the map. “Let’s see.”
As O’Connell drove I scanned the distant fields to either side of the road, eyes primed for a red silo, but I saw nothing but bare fields and distant clumps of trees.
The first sign of a town was a white, rusting water tower squatting near railroad tracks. The crossing was unguarded; we nosed up the rise in the road, looked left and right. One thing about Kansas at noon, we could see miles of clear track in either direction. Low buildings rolled into sight ahead of us. We passed a handful of houses, an Exxon gas station and convenience store, a two-story brick building with an-ti-qu-es spelled out in peeling white paint between the upper windows—and suddenly we were at a stop sign, a four-way intersection that looked like it marked the center of town. I hadn’t seen even a welcome to olympia sign.
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“Which way?” O’Connell said. It didn’t seem to matter: left, right, and forward, the buildings petered out, giving way to open fields. Unfortunately, nothing looked familiar. I didn’t need a voice whispering to me like in Field of Dreams, but I thought I deserved something. Some sign. At least a vague sense of déjà vu. A Toyota pickup much newer than O’Connell’s pulled up to the intersection opposite us, stopped. The driver, a ro
und-faced woman with long brown hair, waited for us to pull forward.
“A Toyota’s a Toyota,” I said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Just drive up to the edge and then we’ll turn around.” Drawn onward.
As we passed the other driver, she waved, and I waved back. It seemed like the Kansas thing to do.
We covered the entire town in ten minutes. The stores tended toward the practical and cheap: Tire store, used bookstore, fabric shop, pizza place, bars. A tiny grocery. The biggest commercial enterprise was a John Deere dealership: a long sheet-metal building on a gravel lot stocked with a dozen old and new tractors and many large, seriouslooking bladed attachments that, as an American male, I ought to have been able to identify. We only saw a few people on the street, and maybe a dozen parked cars, most of those near the elementary school, a new-looking building a few hundred yards south of the center of town.
“Anything ring a bell?” O’Connell said.
“Not really.” I ran a hand through my hair.
“Pick a direction,” O’Connell said.
“You think I made this up?”
She sighed. “Which way do you want me to go?”
“The town’s here, isn’t it?” I said. “I know that doesn’t mean Dr. Awkward’s secret laboratory is under the John Deere distributor, but it’s got to mean something. You’re the Jungian mystic—you should be digging all this synchronicity. This is your cue to jump into spiritual guide mode. Do some priest stuff.”
“Priest stuff.”
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“I don’t know—pray or something. Dish out some ancient wisdom.”
“Fine. You start chanting, and I’ll get out the I Ching and throw some coins. Now which fucking way?”
I pointed north.
The problem was that I didn’t know what we were looking for. My whole thinking was this: the Painter kept drawing the farm; I drew the farm; therefore the farm is important. Back in the Waldheims’ library this had seemed like irrefutable logic. And when I opened that copy of RADAR Man, Olympia was waiting for me like a promise. Jesus. First I’d hung all my hopes on shrinks, then Dr. Ram, then O’Connell. Now I was clinging to a fucking comic book. We passed the mailbox-marked entrances to two farms, both with the name Johnson stenciled on the box. The houses and barns were set far back from the road, but the silos were silver and the configurations of buildings were all wrong.
A mile or so later we came upon a suburban subdivision plopped down in the middle of a field. Eight or nine houses, each of them newer and larger than any of the homes we’d seen so far, huddled together for protection against the wind. The stone and cement slab at the entrance said, castle creek.
I didn’t see any creek, though a quarter mile later the road crossed a narrow cement bridge over a wide, rocky ditch. In the middle of the dry bed was a large round boulder like a hippo’s rump.
“What is it?” O’Connell said. “Did you see something?”
“What? No.”
“Do you want to keep going?”
“Forget it.” I gestured toward the building up ahead. At the top of a slight rise was a square gray building that had to be the hospital.
“Let’s turn around up there and then try to find lunch.”
The circle drive took us up to a 1920s Greek temple: three stories of stone, with a jutting, peaked entrance propped up by white columns. The wooden sign posted out front read olympia sanatorium.
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“Does that mean crazies or TB?” I asked. “I can never keep them straight.”
“TB, I think.”
We rolled back down the drive, past a small parking lot that held about a dozen cars, and came out at the highway again. “So I guess . . . pizza,” I said. It was the only type of restaurant we’d seen in Olympia. O’Connell pointed us back toward town. She’d almost gotten up to speed when we passed a dirt road that I hadn’t noticed from the other side of the highway. The fields were unmown, and dried brush nearly engulfed an old mailbox. If it had been summer I never would have seen it through the foliage.
“Wait! Go back!” I said.
She pulled over without arguing. I hopped out and jogged back toward the dirt road. O’Connell put the truck in reverse and backed up to follow me.
I looked at the name on the mailbox again, then scanned the fields. In the distance, a picket of blackened timbers and a gleam that could have been the tin roof of a house. No silo. O’Connell stepped out of the truck.
I showed her the name on the mailbox, a palindrome spelled out in faded blue paint: noon.
“We’re here,” I said.
O’Connell maneuvered the pickup slowly down the uneven road. Tall grass whisked the doors.
Forms took shape. The line of thick posts became the charred bones of a barn, without roof or walls. And stretching away from the barn, a ragged jumble of curled and twisted sheet metal, half hidden by weeds and small trees: the silo’s cylinders, knocked apart and rusted by rain and years.
“You’re sure about this?” O’Connell said.
“Not a bit.”
She parked in a patch of former lawn that hadn’t grown quite as wild as the fields.
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I stepped out of the truck, holding one of the plastic sheets from the Painter binder, and slowly turned: the gray farmhouse and its rusting tin roof, two stories tall but cringing against the wind. The outline of the barn, the disassembled remains of the silo. I kept lifting the sheet, measuring it against the scene in front of me. The Painter’s drawings captured a vibrant, living farm, and this place was long dead. The barn and silo had burned, and the heat must have been tremendous. All that was left were the massive posts and beams of the barn, the heat-twisted skins of the silo. The damage had been done long ago—decades maybe.
But the bones were right. The buildings were the right distance from each other. In my mind’s eye, the silhouettes matched. The house’s windows were unbroken except for one in the center of the second floor: a starburst of cracks that caught the light, and a small hole in the middle like a dark pupil.
I stepped up onto the porch and looked back at O’Connell. She leaned against the hood of the truck, arms crossed, watching me. Behind her, the highway was hidden by the high grass, but the top floors of the hospital were visible a quarter mile away. I grinned and tried the front door. The knob rattled but didn’t turn all the way. I moved along to a window, cupped a hand to the dirty glass. It was too dark inside to see anything. I pushed up against the window frame, but it didn’t budge. “Have you got a hammer or something?” I called.
O’Connell fished under the truck bed’s tarp and brought me a jack handle. “Now you’re adding breaking and entering to your list,” she said.
“No, we are.”
A couple weeks ago I might have hesitated to break the law. Mom had raised me to be a good boy. Or at least a conventional one. But after Dr. Ram, after the Shug, after all the varieties of shit that had gone down in the past ten days, I didn’t give a damn anymore. I could raise a little hell.
I smashed in the window, then ran the jack back and forth along
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the edges of the window until the shards were cleared. I leaned in. The sunlight showed a dim room populated by hulking furniture. I put a leg through the window and levered myself inside.
“Coming?” I said.
“Why not.”
We were in a front room, surrounded by couches and chairs. It looked like the occupants had walked out of the house one day and never looked back. A cup sat on the end table. The lamp was still plugged in by its huge black plug. Everything lay under a thick coating of dust, and a faint animal funk hung in the air. I moved toward a bookcase crowded with knickknacks and squinted at a framed photograph that held pride of place. A man in a navy uniform, my age or maybe younger, stared h
umorlessly at the camera. He held the hand of a boy who could have been ten or eleven, head tilted as if he doubted the picture would come out. The soldier and the boy shared narrow eyes and a thin nose.
“Jesus,” O’Connell said. She stood just behind me. “That boy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The boy on the rock.” We’d been looking at pictures of him for days. We moved from room to room, through shafts of dusty light. The small dining room held a table and six chairs. In the middle of the table was a vase sporting a dozen dead twigs, the leaves long turned to dust and blown away.
In the kitchen was a low iron stove and a small round-shouldered refrigerator. The floor was decorated with mouse turds, and the counters were coated with dirt, accumulating topsoil. Dishes sat in the black, mold-covered sink. A nearly intact snakeskin curled against a baseboard.
I didn’t want to open the refrigerator, but I pulled open the cabinets. The shelves were full of white dishes and orange-tinted glass bowls and tall drinking glasses.
O’Connell nodded toward the calendar hanging near the back door: May, 1947.
“Shit,” I said.
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I’d expected an empty house, or a trashed hangout for teenagers, but not this museum. It looked like no one had entered the place in fifty years.
“Is any of this familiar?” O’Connell said.
“Not exactly,” I said. But it didn’t feel unfamiliar. It felt like a copy of a copy of someplace I’d visited, or maybe a place I’d read about in a book. “Let’s try upstairs.”
The stairs groaned and creaked under my weight, and I walked up gripping the gritty banister. At the top was a short hallway with four doors, two in each direction. The peaked ceiling was close, designed for smaller people.
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