Mao II (11 page)

They drove across Iowa and Illinois and Scott looked at the doubled landscape of his original journey in search of Bill and his return with a character out of Bill’s fiction. They saw a horse galloping on the highway, empty-saddled. Karen had her blood pressure taken at a mobile clinic because she liked to feel the puffy tension of the cuff tightening on her arm.

You have the transfixed gaze.

But if being deprogrammed meant getting back home to a quiet room and a bed and regular meals, then maybe for the time being, because her parents loved her and she didn’t want to do another winter in the van, she might just let them bend her mind a little.

They brought in Junette, a former sister, carried off by parents, deprogrammed, turned against the church, now used to soften others to the message. She wore the great stain of experience. Karen watched her rush into the room pretending to show deep empathy is the word but actually feeling superior and aloof. They went on with it anyway, falling into their scripted roles of sisterly and intimate, with three weepy embraces. The men waited outside, their shadows mingled on the drawn curtain. Junette tore down Master’s teaching. She read letters from disaffected members in the important voice of the dead. Karen saw her teeth needed work, the spaces plugged with yellowish deposits. The famous tartar problem, of tartar and plaque. She was sitting craftily inside her own head, looking out at buttery Junette.

Maybe you know the feeling of being deeply, as they say, conflicted, like you wanna stay but you wanna go, and they bring in a person you’d like to stab in the neck with something jagged.

They stopped at a motel in mid-Ohio and the mood turned uneasy. They were tired and untalkative. Scott knew she was wondering why she was here at all, traveling with a stranger, some suspiciously helpful fellow, who is he anyway, and sitting in a room that was identical to the brown box where they tried to turn her mind inside out like a paper favor at a party. The same room repeats itself in a crosscountry chain and he’s going to make me stop at every one.

So he told her about Bill, everything he knew, the man, the work, the murk, his own deep involvement. She didn’t say anything but seemed to be trying to listen, to recall another world, the place of language and solitude and wet sedge meadows.

They went out for a real dinner in a restaurant with tasseled menus and a footbridge to the main room. She looked at him for the first time. In other words took him in retroactively, absorbing the accidental wonder of the past day and a half as it registered on his face. They went back to the room. The time was still not right for the sex of compassionate rescue, the sex of self-effacement, and he wondered if he was doing something wrong. She talked and slept and then woke him up to talk some more.

They told her, The trouble with postcult is that you lose your link to the fate of mankind.

They said, We know you’re a good person who’s just going through a rough adjustment while your parents are waiting and praying and writing a steady stream of checks for your emotional rescue.

They forced her to agree that the church had made a drone of her. She chanted, Made me a drone, made me a drone. That night she got out of bed in a glow of tingling light and tried to say something to the woman with the headset but could not speak and found herself some time later on her hands and knees on the toilet floor, vomiting foods of many nations.

They told her, Okay you are going to a deprogramming center where the lost and wan and wounded of many sects and movements are gathered for humane counseling.

Rick arrived with clothes and spending money and a box of specialty foods packed in impressive crinkly straw and they all drove to the airport. Karen found a cancer coloring book in the door pocket and leafed through. When they got out of the car she saw a policeman and decided to stroll over and tell him she’d been kidnapped. She pointed to the perpetrators, who looked—what is the word that sounds like it means calm and assured but actually means you are baffled? They looked nonplussed. Also guilty, which they were, including the cousin with the slash of green hair. So a multivoice discussion starts on the sidewalk outside the terminal with the normal airport scramble all around. One of the men tried to tell the officer about state conservatorship laws, which entitled them—and Karen was running, gone, through the terminal, down some stairs, feeling light and swift and young, hand-paddling through the crowds, then out a lower-level door and into a taxi, softly saying,
Downtown.

She didn’t know what city the downtown area belonged to but when she got there she put fifty dollars aside and spent the rest on a Greyhound ticket—ridin’ the dog—and got off three hours later in White Cloud, a name in the sky, where Scott found her walking zigzag on a nearly empty street.

Brita said, “I have an Eve Arnold photograph of White Cloud, Kansas. It shows the main street, I’m fairly certain, and a structure that could be the brick building where Karen was standing when you approached her and there is definitely a tractor or combine or some other high-wheeled farm machine in the picture.”

“But we’re not there, she and I.”

“And there’s the small sign you mentioned on one of the stores with the funny word on it, the Indian word or whatever, and in a way the whole picture, the wide sky and wide street, everything so lonely and eloquent and commonplace at the same time, it all flows into the strange word on that sign.”

“I remember now. Ha-Hush-Kah. A Bill Gray touch. It’s a Bill Gray place. It really is.”

They drove on these same roads finally, going the other way of course, and she asked questions about Bill. Scott realized this was the first time she’d said more than ten words about anything outside herself. He didn’t know whether Bill would let her stay. It turned out the subject never came up in so many words. They walked in and talked to Bill about the trip and he seemed to take to Karen. His eyes showed a detached amusement that meant there are some things that just have to happen before we know how smart or dumb they are.

After she read Bill’s novels she moved from the old sofa into Scott’s bed and it felt to him as though she’d been there always.

 

 

Bill lay smoking in bed, the ashtray resting on his chest. Every time he did this he thought of old rummies in single-residence brownstones expiring in the slow smoke of mattress fires.

Karen came in wearing her briefs and an oversized T-shirt.

“Feeling any better, Mr. Bill?”

She climbed on the bed, straddling Bill near the midsection, her upper body vertical, hands on her thighs.

Light folding in from the hallway.

“Want to put the cigarette away and smoke some of Scott’s marijuana? Might help you sleep if you’re still upset.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to sleep just yet.”

“I never took to dope for some strange finicky whatever reason.”

“It gives me heart-attack dreams.”

“Scott uses it mainly to settle him down when he works late on manuscripts or files.”

“The operational direction right now is up, not down.”

She bounced a little, making him groan, then sat back on her haunches.

“He says you are familiar with a number of substances that alter the biochemistry.”

“These are regulated medications. A doctor writes a prescription. All perfectly statutory.”

“I definitely feel a stirring under the covers.”

“Did I ever tell you what my first wife?”

“Don’t think so. What?”

“She used to say I was all dick. I spent so much time locked up and was so tight-lipped about my work and eventually about everything else that there was nothing left but raw sex. And we didn’t talk about that either.”

“Just did it.”

“She didn’t like writers. I realized this, stupidly, way too late.”

“If you were stupid, what was she? Marrying a writer.”

“She expected us to adapt to each other. Women have faith in the mechanics of adjustment. A woman knows how to want something. She’ll take chances to secure the future.”

“I never think about the future.”

“You come from the future,” he said quietly.

She took his cigarette and stubbed it out and then put the ashtray on the floor, sliding it toward the foot of the bed.

“What’s a heart-attack dream?”

“Panic. Rapid heartbeat. Then I wake up and I’m not sure if the heartbeat was dreamed or real. Not that dreamed isn’t real.”

“Everything is real.”

She shook easily out of the T-shirt, arms unfolding full-length above her head, and Bill almost turned away. Every time she did this, breasts and hair swinging, he felt the shock of seeing something full-measure, almost lost in the force of it. He advanced the action in time to give it stillness and coherence, make it a memory of shape and grace caught unaware. She wouldn’t ever know how deep-reaching that painted moment was when her elbows scissored out and she slipped free of the furled shirt and stretched to a figured yawn, making him forget where he was.

“I know it’s bad form to ask.”

“But what?” she said.

“Does Scott know you come up here?”

They were working him out of his pajama top, one arm at a time, then had to stop while he had a coughing fit.

“Is there anything in this house Scott doesn’t know?”

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

“The mice are his friends. He knows which window gets the best moonlight on any given night on the lunar calendar.”

She changed position to lower the bedcovers and undo the drawstring on his pants.

“And it’s okay with him,” Bill said.

“I don’t see what choice. I mean he hasn’t shot us yet.”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“And he wouldn’t.”

“No, he wouldn’t, would he?”

“And anyway and anyway and anyway. Didn’t he bring me here for you?”

Bill could find no cheery features in this thought. He wanted to believe she’d just found the words tumbling on her tongue, which was how she hit upon much of what she said. But maybe she thought it was true and maybe it was and how interesting for Bill to imagine that he was betraying Scott all along by the other man’s design.

His cock was dancing in her hand.

“I think we ought to have our intercourse now.”

“Yes, dear,” said Bill.

She went to the chest across the room and took a small package out of the middle drawer. She removed a condom and came back to the bed, straddling Bill’s thighs, and began to outfit him with the device.

“Who are you protecting, you or me?”

“It’s just the norm today.”

He saw how absorbed she was in the task, dainty-fingered and determined to be expert, like a solemn child dressing a doll.

Scott stood looking around the loft apartment. Columns extended the length of the room. There was a broad plastic sheet slung under the leaky skylight. Brita walked around switching on lights. A small kitchen and dining area and a half-hidden recess of files and shelves. He followed along behind her, turning two lights off. A sofa and some chairs in a cluster. Then a darkroom and printing room with black curtains over the doors. Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word “loomed” in all its prolonged and impending force.

“I will make tea for the travelers.”

“Now I finally feel I’ve seen New York inside and out, just standing here in this space and looking through the window.”

“When it rains out, it also rains in.”

“Brita, despite whatever inconvenience.”

“It’s small as these places go. But I can’t afford it anymore. And I have to look at the million-storey towers.”

“One has an antenna.”

“The male.”

“Tea is perfect, thank you.”

In the kitchen she took things out of cabinets and drawers, an object at a time, feeling as though she’d been away for a month, six weeks, a sense of home folding over her now. These cups and spoons made her feel intact again, reclaimed her from the jet trails, the physics of being in transit. She was so weary she could hear it, a ringing in the bones, and she had to keep reminding herself she’d been gone for less than two days. Scott stood at a table across the room looking at strewn magazines and commenting more or less uncontrollably.

The elevator clanked through the building, the old green iron gate smashing and rattling in the night.

They drank their tea.

“What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes.”

“You like to overstate.”

“I overstate things to stay alive. This is the point of New York. I completely love and trust this city but I know the moment I stop being angry I’m finished forever.”

Scott said, “I used to eat alone. It made me ashamed, having no one to eat with. But not only alone—standing up. This is one of the haunting secrets of our time, that we are willing to eat standing up. I used to stand because it’s more anonymous, it suited the way I felt about being in the city. Hundreds of thousands of people eating alone. They eat alone, they walk alone, they talk to themselves in the street in profound and troubled monologues like saints in the depths of temptation.”

“I’m getting very sleepy,” Brita said.

“I don’t want to get back in the car right now.”

“You’re the driver, Scott.”

“I don’t think I can drive another fifteen feet.”

He got up and turned off another light.