Look at me: (50 page)

Already he was relieved. Here was the link between his old self and his present-day self—the boy and the man—here was the place that gathered them together. He was whole, had everything he needed, and yet, even as Moose bathed in this sense of completion, he was assailed once again by the terrible contents of the vision itself: it was there before him in the howling trucks, the roar and hum they left in his ears, the terrible acceleration of human history, combustive, exterminating, violent and blind, blind—no one could see, no one could see what Moose had glimpsed then and saw today: a headlong forward motion that was inherently catastrophic. Moose hunched on the windy hill and felt the icy stream rise through his body in a giant, heavy sob that shook his exhausted frame. He felt in his pockets for his pills and jammed a few into his mouth. He took them every day, oh, yes, pills and pills, trying to calm his addled mind while he worked furiously to identify the cause, the mistake, the wrong stitch that had spun such devastation.

“It’s the end of the world!” he bellowed into the wind, using all of his voice. He hollered it again, down at the oblivious cars. And again, roaring with every last filament of energy he had left.
“It’s the end of the world
!”

No one cared; they had eyes only for the camera’s lens, these madmen who were no one, who were nothing but a series of impressions. Who were
information
, jumbled and soulless as the circuitry in which they mostly lived. And Moose was alone, bellowing into the wind. He would grapple with the harrowing task of trying to forestall a doom that only he and a few unstable others could see while the rest of the world beckoned it, a doom visible not just in the soaring temperatures and rampant extinctions, the dying coral and heaps of garbage lying in the deepest reaches of the sea, the mysterious expiration of frogs—these were things anyone could see—but a devastation that was a simple by-product of motion itself. Einstein had it wrong, or only half right, there was another equation that foretold the destruction, but Moose had forgotten it. Perhaps he’d touched on it earlier today, while driving.
Moving feels good.
It did—too good. They will move for the sake of it, he thought, they’ll move with an excitement they cannot know derives from their proximity to an end. And now Moose, too, was seized by a will to move into the end, his own end, to relinquish this burden of seeing and knowing, this terrible responsibility. To set it down.

“Please,” he sobbed aloud. “Please.”

The traffic below called lovingly to Moose, big wheels sucking over the rainy asphalt, the brute mechanical gnashing gallop of it all, and he moved toward it helplessly, a few paces down the embankment, feeding himself into the machine, a shivering anticipation in his mouth at the thought of collision, impact, then peace. “Yes,” he said. “Now. Please.”

But no. The answer was no—not now, not yet—because somewhere inside of Moose, stretched between his mind and his heart, was a tiny silver thread, a thread no bigger than a hair whose contents was plain strength, a will that endured within him and had survived all these years, albeit slenderly. And even now, Moose felt a protectiveness toward that silvery wisp, a need to shelter it from every other thing as if it were a last match untouched by the rain, and he lowered himself onto the mud and lay down, lay back in the wet earth to remove from his vision the motion that was provocation and temptation both, the problem and the solution, lay back to conserve his energy, what little he had left, his mind cupped around that single strand of strength. He closed his eyes and slept.

There was a crack of thunder, and then the sky opened and emptied its contents on top of us. “All right,
move,”
Thomas shouted from the road. “Everyone. Places. Get the Charlottes over to the fire. Are they there?”

My face was slathered with gore, my wet hair viscous; fake blood and peanut butter oozed into my eyes, half blinding me as we cut through the corn to the fire. It had just been lit, and six volunteers held a tarp above it to shelter the flames. They stared at me aghast. “It’s fake blood!” I told them, “It’s made of peanut butter, can’t you smell it?” But the storm inhaled my voice.

Little Charlotte held her umbrella over our heads as we waited to begin our long gallop between the cornstalks toward the camera. I’d begun to feel strange, slurry, drifty, as if everything were happening sideways. Lightning strobed the cornfield, making a daguerreotype from a hundred years ago. The girl watched me quietly, a pressure behind her stare like a touch.

“I know you,” she said finally. “You were in my house.”

“That’s right,” I said. “We met in your mother’s closet.” And I laughed, for the memory seemed to me hilarious—leaping from among her mother’s dresses, the smell of that Chanel. Recalling that day, I felt an odd twinge of happiness—not because of the meeting itself, which I hardly remembered, but what had happened since, something I recognized only now: I had freed myself from an onerous existence.

The girl didn’t laugh, or even smile. “How many years ago was that?” she asked.

“No years,” I said, grinning through my gore. “Not even one.”

“It feels like so long,” she said wistfully. Then added, “I never told my mother.”

“Not a problem,” I said. “Probably for the best.”

“You could come back.”

“Sure,” I said lightly, batting this away, but then I felt the idea dig into me. Ellen Metcalf. To see her again, to find out who she had become.

“Actually, she’s here. My mom,” the girl said.

“No kidding,” I said mildly. “Here here?”

“Somewhere.” She turned to look. “She came to watch. My dad, too. I told my mom it was you.”

“You told her,” I said, swallowing. “And what did she say?”

“She said, ‘Oh, my God.’”

This struck me as tremendously funny. “Oh, my God,” I said, and laughed.
Oh, my God.
I could hear her, exactly.

“When I saw you before,” the girl said, “your eyes were bright, bright red.”

“I’d just had an accident,” I told her. “The same one we’re starring in now, believe it or not.”

She was watching me with her strange clear gaze. “I met a man by the river,” she said. “Right before I met you. He had an accident, too.”

I said nothing.

“His arm was in a sling,” she went on, excitement lifting her voice. “He had a big cut on his face.”

“Did he,” I said.

“His name was
Michael West,”
she said, the words wresting free of her and opening like a flag, as if she’d never said them aloud and was relieved, at last, to do so. Through the rain I felt the quick heat of her breath.

Mercifully, Thomas’s voice reached toward us through the storm: “Fire,” he bawled.

At instructions from one of the mutineers, the tarp holders tossed handfuls of explosive pellets into the flames and then stepped away with military unison, unveiling the fire at precisely the moment that it reared back on its hind legs, snapping, grabbing at the sky, disgorging a bale-sized whorl of black smoke that rolled toward the clouds.

“Gorgeous!” Thomas hollered. “Ready, Charlottes?”

“Ready,” we called in unison from the narrow, spindly ditch, which was already half full of rainwater. The wet corn snapped above our heads. Charlotte held the umbrella over me to protect the small microphone affixed to the collar of my shirt, whose wire ran along my belly to a receiver in my pocket.

“Boom!” I heard Thomas cry, and I barely made out his shape under a tarp beside See No Evil, who was prostrate behind the camera.

“Boom!” called Hear No Evil, directly to our left.

“Charlotte Two, you lead! Charlotte One, you’re going to do what?”

“Scream,” I answered. We’d been over it a dozen times.

“Scream!” Thomas cried. “Scream like you’ve never screamed in your life. Scream like the naked girl running in that picture. Mouth wide open—wide, wide, got it? Three … two … one … Action!”

63

“Still,” Z was saying, “it can’t go on as it has
.”

We plunged into the night. His disappointment was so intense and embittered it felt like hate. The road was empty. Lined with tasseled crops
.

Rain spattered the windshield
.

I leaned on the accelerator, finding relief in the speed. It felt like tearing. Like breaking
.

“
It won’t be allowed to go on,” he said. He was watching the window. “The people will rise up and throw off these dreams you’ve used to imprison them
.”

I tried not to listen. I was an idiot. A lost and desperate idiot. But these facts seemed to melt away as I watched the speedometer climb
.

The car smashed through the rain
.

“It will end,” he said. “It will end with fire. And the artifice will burn away, and the truth will be left. Slow down,” he added.

But I couldn’t slow down. I listened, uncomprehending. Clenching my teeth.

“It will end without you, without me. An explosion of violence you can’t possibly imagine, sheltered and spoiled as you are.”

I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t hear. I could do one thing: push the accelerator toward the floor. Plucking strings on a giant harp one by one. No, the sound can’t possibly climb another note, I would think. But it could. It did. And each increase rippled through me with unbearable sweetness.

“Mountains will move and fall. Oceans will overflow, and you and the others will know how small this petty domination of yours really was. Please slow down,” he added.

“Let it,” I said. “Let it end.”

I wanted nothing but escape. From my wrong decisions. From the lost time. From the fact that I’d wasted my life. Thrown it away.

“Slow down,” he said again. Less politely
.

I pushed harder. The car could do one-sixty. I’d never gotten near it.

Cold metal kissed my temple.

“Take your foot off the gas,” he instructed. His hand trembled behind the gun. Trembled like the car, which felt on the brink of explosion.

Gently he said, “I’m counting to three. One …”

But it was too late. It felt too good. We were at one-thirty and climbing.

“Two …”

The gun nudged my skull. I didn’t care. It seemed perfect that we die together. A monument to the randomness and desperation that had united us.

“Three.”

I hit the brake and yanked up the emergency brake at the same time. A wind was blowing. In retrospect, that wind looks like Self Preservation. A squall of hope. Memory. An obstinate will to live that rushes in when we least expect, saving us. Drawing us back.

But in fact, it was the wind from his open door.

He had already jumped.

We crashed through the corn, little Charlotte and I, my useless eyes squeezed shut, my mouth a gigantic
O
that dredged up from within me a sound unlike any I had ever made before, or even heard. We slipped, the girl dragging me along the wet, soggy bowl of the ditch; my legs buckling, folding under me as I fell against the bars of cornstalk. The journey felt endless, blind, doomed, but the girl kept me going, strong despite her thinness, apparently used to hauling people along rain-filled troughs between rows of corn, or so it seemed; lifting me, dragging me, heaving me through the mud. We’ll never arrive, I thought each time I paused to yank in breath. It will never end.

And even when it had, when it was all over and people were around us, something still was wrong. I heard it in the panicky flicker of voices, in the fact that so many hands were touching me, soothing me. I felt heat coming from somewhere—the fire has leapt its moorings, I thought, there wasn’t enough sand, not enough rain, the fire has broken free and is raging somewhere, destroying the farmer’s fields.

I was lying down. I heard mention of a doctor, an ambulance, all from a great distance, all muffled by some other, unrelenting sound; something was wrong, I knew (despite Thomas in the background, muttering, “Beautiful, gorgeous …”), I knew from the scamper of running feet, the welter of voices—Irene’s, Allison’s, Pammy’s, little Charlotte’s—and then Grace, my sister, louder than everyone, coming closer, crying shrilly, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter with her? What’s going on?”

Someone answered from very nearby. A familiar voice. Yet strange, new. Old. A voice I hadn’t heard in many, many years surrounded me, now, familiar as my own. It was Ellen’s voice. Ellen Metcalf, my old friend.

My old friend.

She was holding my hand, I realized, and her voice sounded calm, calm and very near, so near that I wondered if I might be lying in her lap. I felt a warmth around me—yes, I thought, relieved, the Good Samaritan is here, the Good Samaritan has finally come.

“Charlotte can’t stop screaming,” Ellen said.

In near darkness, Moose lay in the mud and marveled at the silence. The thunder had faded, a bully moving on to other schoolyards, and the rain was a light patter now, a gentle dousing, warm and friendly. The whispering sounds of traffic might have been the sea.