Mission to America (15 page)

Even before my brain was capable of forming and storing lasting memories, I must have seen her face a hundred times: the small pointed ears like tightly closed tulip blossoms, the fine but dense white hair swept back in waves, the pink upturned nose with the oddly snipped-off tip and the X-shaped wrinkle at the top, the round girlish mouth, and the knobby, prominent chin that looked almost manly when seen in profile. Strangely, her weakest feature was her eyes, which were tiny, close set, and dull in color—not quite green or blue but not gray, either. Though she didn't wear glasses, I wouldn't have been surprised if she needed them—the reason, perhaps, that when she spoke to people, she would always ask them to come closer, until they were near enough to feel her breath, which was teakettle hot and smelled faintly of black licorice from the anise seeds she liked to chew.

For years, I knew her only from a distance, as the short human figure between the towering floral arrangements at the far end of Celestial Hall. Before her arthritis forced her into her chair and confined her to the front porch of Riverbright, she delivered her talks standing upright, with her arms crossed, as though she suffered from a constant chill. Hearing her speak was like watching a magician draw an endless ribbon of yellow scarves out of his clenched fist—astonishing. She never used notes and rarely paused to think; her long singsong sentences sprang forth fully formed. Until I was tall enough to see her easily above the rows and rows of nodding heads, I liked to listen to her with my eyes closed while resting my head against my father's side between his rib cage and his belt. His organs gurgled and shifted with her words. “The All-in-One does not require our praise any more than the rivers and trees require our praise, nor does the All-in-One demand obedience, offerings, tokens, gifts, or sacrifices. The All-in-One seeks neither flattery nor increase but only the satisfaction of our companionship.”

I quoted these words for Betsy. “Sweet,” she said. Seeming to sense that I wanted more, she added: “And nice if it were true.”

When I was nine, in the heart of a cold winter that had kept my family inside the house for months, restless, bickering, and chronically sick as the result of my mother's rash decision to heed the warnings of a Terrestrian radio doctor and have us all injected with flu vaccine, the Seeress appeared at our front door one night while my parents were washing the supper dishes. I was lying on the sofa, trying to make myself vomit into a canning pot set on a towel beside me on the floor. After two days of nausea so acute that even seeing bright colors made me gag, vomiting would come as a relief.

I felt a draft from the kitchen, then heard her voice, pleasant, composed, and utterly unnerving. I flung off my wool blanket and sat up straight. I napkined my chin clean, but, without a mirror, I couldn't be sure I'd gotten all the saliva left there by my unproductive retching. I felt around with my finger, found a wet spot.

“Mason?” my mother called. “We have a guest.”

The Seeress insisted on drinking the tea we served her at the kitchen table, from everyday china. My mother offered her a slice of huckleberry tart, but she declined it, citing a “funny, belchy tummy.” This comment helped put us at our ease. My mother finally let herself sit down, my father stopped scratching his thumbnail on his belt buckle, and my own hands stopped shaking enough to lift a spoon and stir a little honey into my tea. The Seeress apologized for intruding, and then explained the reason for her visit.

“I was strolling home this morning from my hair appointment and I noticed a purple spot above your house. It was faint, you'll be happy to know, not fully developed, but any purple at all concerns me, naturally. I should have come by immediately—forgive me.”

My mother set down her full teacup on her saucer. It rattled and spilled. My father touched her arm. She took his hand and squeezed it and looked away. Over the Seeress's shoulder, through the window, I watched a magpie land on a slim tree branch that dipped and rose and dipped under its weight. A second bird landed and the branch stayed down.

“It was faint, as I said, so there's no reason to fret, dears. We caught it early, with time to spare, I'm sure.” The Seeress eyed us each in turn as she helped herself to a warm-up from the teapot. She picked up the creamer and dribbled in some milk, her hand a fragile-looking claw, but steady. Her gaze had come to rest on me. “Tell me, child. Describe it for me, please.”

Was it possible the old woman was mistaken? Her sighting made no sense to me—how could a stomachache cause a hovering purple spot? I feared insulting her judgment, though. I began with my first symptom three days earlier: a pang of revulsion brought on by smelling an orange, usually my favorite fruit. The Seeress asked me if the offending whiff had come from the skin or the flesh. “The skin,” I said. This seemed to mean something to her—she pinched her lower lip, tugging it slightly between her thumb and forefinger in a way that exposed her crowded brown bottom teeth. I continued, point by point, mentioning my discomfort with vivid colors as well as a peppery taste behind my tonsils that intensified as sleep approached but vanished in the mornings.

“Peppery?” said the Seeress. “Not silvery? This is vital, child.”

I thought about it. “I don't know what silver tastes like.”

“Like this,” she said. She tilted her head, reached up with her right hand, and unscrewed an earring made from an old coin. She presented it to me balanced on an index finger. “On the back of the tongue, where it's rough. The very back.”

I turned away for modesty's sake, opened my mouth, and did as I'd been told. I tasted nothing at first, just noted the neutral hard coolness of the coin. After another second, it numbed my tongue. The numbness spread up the insides of my cheeks and through my gums and back to my esophagus, which was still sore and raw from all my coughing and hawking. At my back I could feel the warmth and pressure of everyone's concerned attention, and I wondered for how long the Seeress expected me to hold the earring in place. The test seemed pointless.

And then the cramps came, a rolling succession of whole-body seizures that caused me to rock backward in my chair and brought my pale, shocked father to his feet. He caught me from behind somehow, but the next contraction pitched me forward so violently that he lost his grip. My forehead sledgehammered the table and caused, I was later told, a stream of liquid to spout from the jostled teapot and splatter the Seeress, ruining the lace collar of a dress that had belonged to Mother Lucy herself once. I missed this disaster, though. All I saw was black.

The cleanup had begun when I came to. The Seeress and my father stood aside as my mother pushed a white bath towel across the table and what must have been two quarts of greenish sludge threaded with bright red blood sloshed off the edge into a galvanized bucket. Chalky shards of china littered the floor, and my mother, in slippers, was careful not to step on them as she carried the bucket to the bathroom and poured it loudly into the toilet. I heard distinct plops and isolated splashes—the stuff must have been quite chunky. I patted my belly. It was hot through my shirt and noticeably sunken. The nausea was gone, though.

The Seeress said, “Pancreatic, but caught in time. I'd like you to rest now and sip molasses water, as strong and sweet as you can stand it.” She extended one arm and opened a closed hand: the magic earring. The thing looked wet, besmirched, and her willingness to touch it made me love her. “We thought it was lost—you gulped it down,” she said. “But it came back to us, Mason, and so did you. No more deathly purple at the LaVerles'. All is lovely blue again.”

Betsy steered with one finger as the Explorer topped the ridge east of Snowshoe and nosed back down into its aspen-covered heart-shaped valley, speckled with the first house lights of early evening and softened by a fine magenta mist that looked like the vapor released by wealth itself. My tale of the time my life was saved had diverted her attention from the road. When a deer tiptoed out of the trees and crossed the center line, missing our hood by only a few yards, she not only didn't brake, she barely looked up.

“What exactly's wrong with her?” she asked.

“She said it didn't matter. She called the whole town together on her lawn for a lemonade social and just when it was ending she rang the bell that hangs on the side of her wheelchair and announced that she'll be gone by the next moon. People fainted. Not just women, men. Her nurses had to go around with smelling salts.”

“Interesting.”

“Sad,” I said.

“But picturesque. The bell, especially. I liked the bell.”

Betsy's tone was shifting in a direction that suggested I'd overwhelmed her with thoughts and scenes only an Apostle could understand. She'd done her best, though. She'd sighed convincing sighs. I lifted a twist of hair from her white neck and let it fall back in a way I hoped felt pleasant. Inside, I grieved. Or so I thought. This would be my first death when it occurred, my first real death, and maybe the pain I felt was anger, panic, or deep self-pity, not grief at all. In Bluff, we didn't inspect and name our feelings the way they did here—they came and went, unclassified—and maybe this limited us somehow. Our books, our parents, and our leaders spoke with a single voice about the unity of every creature in its creator, but I'd begun to suspect the All-in-One existed differently in different zones, and our zone had little in common with the others.

Soon it would have no presiding spirit, either.

The camper looked empty when Betsy and I pulled in. I didn't invite her inside—the place was filthy. Ever since being accepted by the Effinghams, Elder Stark had lapsed into a state of haughty dishevelment, entranced by everything about himself, including his own filth. I wondered if he'd heard the news yet and decided he'd probably heard it first, since Lauer and he were in league now, as close as crooks. Had he wept? Had he broken down? I knew he'd say he had, of course, but I doubted I'd believe him.

Betsy parked. I sealed the dishonest mystery shopper report inside its pre-addressed brown envelope, gave it to her to mail, and opened my door. A cloud of the delicate black-and-olive mayflies that had been hatching on the river all week swarmed into the car, and Betsy grimaced. She didn't start swatting, though; she restrained herself, even when some of the bugs climbed into her vents. This girl who enjoyed it when others were mean to her—at least in certain situations—didn't practice meanness herself.

“You'll be okay tonight?”

“I will,” I said.

“I had a weird psychic flash a few miles back, but I didn't want to interrupt you. You should know that about me: I'm psychic, Mason.”

“I expect that in women. It's assumed.”

“You might not want to hear it, though. Do you or don't you?”

“I'll tell you afterward.” It was a peevish remark, but I was tired, eager to lie on my bunk, alone, in silence.

“All right, then,” Betsy said. “This seer lady?”

“Yes?”

“I said it wrong. I'm sorry. This Seeress?”

“Betsy, it's been a long day . . .”

“She'll be the last.”

I swung my right leg out the door and onto the ground. “I'll be in the coffee shop at eight or so. And remember to send that report. I need the money.” I spoke curtly, in clipped phrases. We traded feeble waves, I shut the door, and walked toward the van, aware with every step of Betsy's displeasure at my seeming dismissal of her vision. In truth, I'd grown weary of visions generally. Everyone had them, no one ever checked them, and even the few visions that proved true conferred no advantage on those who'd had or heard them. The Seeress was the lone exception. Though other Bluff sensitives were just as gifted, and some, including Elder Stark's own mother, were capable of feats she couldn't match, such as reading words from the dead in gnarled tree bark and finding lost pets by peering into their food bowls, the Seeress possessed a quality that vaulted her above all of them: judiciousness. She kept her beholdings close; she didn't scatter them. She intervened with hunches and predictions only when great outcomes were at stake: the fate of the Church, the survival of a marriage, the death of a child. Her visions mattered.

I undressed to my shorts and slid in under my blankets, clawing them up tight against my chin. Snowshoe cooled down fast at night; the valley just couldn't hold its heat. I lay awake and waited for my partner, but after an hour the nonsense thoughts began that ease the mind into deep sleep. A wolf running loose in the kitchen aisle of WorkMart, upending blenders with its swishing tail. The wedding of a doe and a bull moose with a lighted brass candelabra instead of antlers. Betsy in a wheelchair on a riverbank, coughing up little brown toads into a handkerchief while old Errol Effingham squatted in diapers beside her, the missing moose antlers sprouting from his gray head.

Visions perpetual. Visions on top of visions. The Seeress believed that visions were natural objects, as common and ordinary as stones or sticks. Taken individually, she told us, few of them were worthy of much attention; it was the material that formed them, and which was released for reuse when they dissolved, that deserved our wonder and admiration. Because, finally, this was all our world was made of: decomposed visions. Not atoms—bits of dreams.

My partner stayed away all night.
I called him in the morning and got a message, longer than I thought a phone could hold, which jumped around in a way that frightened me and sounded at times like a child's letter home from some sort of camp or institution. “I'm heartbroken, and I realize you are, too, but we can't let our moods interrupt our mission. I'll try to be back by Friday, but until then please don't call this phone again. And don't drive up here, especially not with Lara. You might want to stay away from her, in fact. I know she's an Apostle now, but, well . . . The ranch is grand, a blessed place. Last night we watched two wolves from the back deck and I had the privilege of meeting Ronald Howard, a widely admired cinema artist. He's also a very funny, very kind, surprisingly philosophical gentleman. I gave him my pocket edition of
Discourses
to take back to California, so cross your fingers. He read a few lines after supper and seemed intrigued. Stay busy down there and don't brood about the Seeress. She's ninety-seven. It's time. Eff Sr. says ‘Howdy.' Today I'll get to see buffalo up close.”

The ramblings seemed to end there, but just as I was hanging up I heard: “This is a secret, Mason. I hope you're there still. Lauer says he's heard succession rumors and that it might be my mother. She's disappeared. He's guessing she's up at Riverbright, secluded. I don't know what I think about this yet, and I wish I could call you and discuss it, but all the guests here have to check their phones with ranch security. Even Ronald Howard. You'd be interested in the chat I had with him, but I'm bending the rules by even recording this. The guard is here beside me, listening. Thank you, Luis. Luis is Roman Catholic. I told him I had solemn religious business, but he could be fired for this favor, so I'm stopping now. Luis can view twelve different cameras from his booth here, but he tells me there's one he can't see that watches him. I think I noticed the screen in Eff Sr.'s bedroom, but it was all dusty, so I think we're fine. I'm learning a lot about the world up here, and I think I may be helping, too. Little Eff says his father's color was much improved after I gave him the tincture of powdered lichen described in Little Red Elk's
Prairie Pharmacy
. I wish I could contact my mother. I miss her voice.”

My partner sounded lonesome and not quite sane. Considering his strange surroundings and the momentous gossip he'd just heard, I found this understandable. I set down my phone on the metal sidewalk table where I'd been drinking my daily Americano and sent a little tapping prayer his way. Tapping prayers were brief and wordless, an inspired invention of Mother Lucy's meant to accommodate nine Hungarian immigrants who showed up in Bluff in the early 1890s as the result of a story about the Church that had appeared in a Budapest evening paper for reasons no one could explain. The Hungarians, who spoke no English, were taught to touch their left hands to their right temples and tap them, telegraph-style, for thirty seconds while smiling in the direction of the sun and imagining their loved ones' faces. The tapping sent magnetic ripples through the ether that were of benefit to both sender and receiver.

I stirred more honey into my bitter coffee and looked up and down the street for a white Jeep. I was waiting for the very person, Lara, whom I'd just been instructed to avoid and no longer wanted to see in any case, because suddenly there was just so much to think about. She'd come by the van at a quarter after midnight, awakened me by rattling the door, and kept me up for another forty minutes with stories of her mistreatment by Little Eff, whom she referred to in a single sentence as a “passive-aggressive emotional cripple” as well as “the only man I'll ever love.” Her charges against him were vehement but vague, expressed in a language I didn't understand. He'd “sexually invalidated” her. He'd “subverted” their “underlying romantic contract.” I asked her if he'd ever hit her. “In what sense?” she replied. I begged her to let me rest then. I promised to meet her as soon as I got up.

Now I was considering escape routes. I sealed a lid on my cup, unlocked my bike, and walked it toward an alley between the coffee shop and a bakery specializing in dog and cat treats where I'd once tried to buy a doughnut by mistake. A block away I spotted long-haired Lance craning his neck out the window of a pickup that he was trying to park between two sports cars. Though the space looked plenty large, Lance pulled out and reapproached it twice, possibly concerned for his truck's paint, a smoothly luminous obsidian finish that couldn't have been achieved with normal spray guns and might have involved dipping the whole vehicle in a massive tub or vat. I doubted he'd seen me, but I waved in case he had. Snowshoe Springs was shrinking by the day.

I mounted my bike at the entrance to the alley, then saw that its outlet was blocked by a delivery van. When I turned back around, they were both there: Lara
and
Lance. Their postures indicated they knew each other but said nothing about whether they liked each other. Through some odd coincidence they were dressed like twins in red zippered sweater jackets, loose black pants covered with odd-shaped pockets and enclosures, and those thick-treaded hiking boots that pick up mud and then leave it behind in W-shaped chunks.

They said they were hungry and, to be agreeable, I said I was too, though I'd eaten a carrot muffin at the coffee shop. Through a series of tense suggestions and compromises that reminded me of the steak-dinner–wine debate, we ended up getting breakfast at a restaurant deep in the mazelike artificial village located at the bottom of the ski hill. The restaurant's decor seemed European—paintings of lakes and castles, cuckoo clocks—but the food was Mexican. Lance convinced me to let him order for me.

“The huevos,” he said. “Guacamole on the side. Lara? Get something solid. It's on me.”

“Sourdough toast, no butter,” she told the waitress. “Decaf double soy latte.”

“You're not in Malibu. Bring her poached eggs and tomatillo salsa.”

Lara wrinkled up her nose. Perhaps to mask her fatigue from staying up so late, she'd brushed out her hair into curtains that hid her cheeks and bangs that hung down almost to her eyebrows. The strip of face that remained looked spooky, furtive, like a feral cat peering out between two hay bales.

As we talked and drank coffee and waited for our meals, my mind kept tugging me away to Bluff and thoughts of Pamela Stark, my partner's mother. Through what sort of alchemy could a neighbor lady be transformed into the Seeress? Or did the office consist of nothing more than a staff, a mansion, and a title? Maybe it was just another job. I felt the mystery draining from my world and resolved to resist the process.

I turned to Lara, who'd been holding a glass shaker of ground cinnamon over her coffee cup for several seconds, apparently worried about adding calories. “You still haven't told me how you know each other. Through AlpenCross?”

“Further back than that,” Lance said. He nodded at Lara as though asking for her permission to relate the whole story, part, or none. Her hair blocked my view of her reaction. It must have been a strong one, though; she flipped over the shaker, slapped its bottom, and let the cinnamon stream into her coffee until it formed a floating brown pyramid that, after vigorous stirring with a spoon, flattened to a brown sand dune but wouldn't dissolve.

“She'd rather we talked about something else,” said Lance.

“Actually,” she said, “I couldn't care less.” She bundled together three sugar packets and tore them open as a unit.

“Lara's my ex,” Lance said.

“Correction.
An
ex.”

“True. But by far my favorite.”

“Whatever,” said Lara. She sipped her coffee, which she'd turned into sludge. It coated her lips and teeth. She sucked them clean.

Lance's story lasted until the check came. Lara didn't interrupt him once, just went on experimenting with her breakfast until the hot-sauce bottle, the salt and pepper shakers, and the dishes of sour cream and chopped tomatoes ringed her plate like the moons of Jupiter. The commotion and the mess she made confused me as to how much food she swallowed, which may have been her plan. Her life looked like torture. She treated its simplest tasks—not just eating, I suspected, but bathing, dressing, sleeping, and socializing—as awesome, monumental contests that could end in just two ways: absolute defeat or joyous victory. But should she flee or fight? She couldn't decide.

Her marriage to Lance was brief, I learned: three months. They met on a weeklong wilderness rafting trip. He was guiding, she was paying. She'd brought along four TV friends from California, including a young musician she'd fallen in love with, but he gashed open one of his legs on a sharp rock and was helicoptered to Denver the first day out. Four days later, Lance and Lara were engaged. He quit his job, returned with her to Hollywood, and found work as an exercise coach—a “personal trainer.” He missed the rivers, though. He missed the mountains. Then Lara's soap opera was canceled. She sold her house at an enormous profit and moved with Lance to Snowshoe Springs, intending to rest, relax, lose weight, and resume her career in six months or a year. The wedding, solemnized by a Hopi holy man (“My fault,” said Lance. “I was full of New Age bullcrap”) took place on a cliff top that Lance said I could see by looking through a window across the restaurant. I squinted and strained. “It doesn't matter,” he said. “It's shaped like a dove; a miracle in granite. AlpenCross wants to buy it as a retreat but we'll need a big donor. Complicated deal. The family that owns it never sells land.”

Lara glanced up at Lance from her latest project: ripping a soft tortilla into strips and wrapping them around chunks of avocado smeared with refried beans.

“Fine, then. No secrets. The Effinghams,” Lance said.

The name set his story on a different course. He folded the tale of his troubled marriage to Lara into a recent history of Snowshoe. The town had “sold its soul,” he said. Starting fifteen or twenty years ago, the old family ranches he'd grown up around had been nibbled away at by rich folks from the coasts interested in lots for winter ski homes. As real estate values doubled and quadrupled, the ranchers' heirs grew flush with cash, which, in imitation of the newcomers, they rapidly squandered on cars and trips and luxury goods, amassing debts that required further land sales and sometimes provoked disastrous family feuds that led to liquidations of whole homesteads. Then the romances began. At drunken parties that ran throughout the ski season and later, after the golf courses went in, throughout the other seasons as well, local men paired up with visiting women, local women ran off with visiting men, and divorces, breakdowns, and suicides ensued—so many of them that the town acquired a nickname among the opportunistic Denver feelings doctors who moved to town by the dozens: “Snowshoe Strange.”

“I'm not shifting blame, because sin is real,” Lance said, “but Lara and I, we didn't have a chance here. Communal damnation—there's really such a thing.”

Lara punctured an egg yolk with a fork and Lance cut his eyes at her. She didn't speak. She looked like she might speak later, but not now. She sprinkled the ruptured yolk with grated cheese.

“I fathered a child with another woman,” Lance said. “A San Jose Internet executive. Lara'd like you to have the filthy facts, apparently.”

She seemed to agree because she finally ate something. Ate, chewed, and swallowed it. A shred of lettuce.

“Her own indiscretions we won't go into,” Lance said.

Lara shrugged at him.

“Okay, then. A certain then-married man whose wealthy father had just had several large colon polyps removed, thereby piquing widespread interest in the disposition of his estate, was soaking one evening in a natural hot springs when a certain restless married female happened along by sheer coincidence, shed her clothes, and climbed in next to him. Powdered narcotic stimulants appeared. Complaints of marital misery were traded. The following morning a private jet departed for either Las Vegas or Miami Beach—its destination still remains a mystery—and when it returned to Snowshoe five days later, two couples had been dissolved to form a third.” Lance pushed away his empty plate, streaked with sauce where he'd mopped it with tortillas. “You look uncomfortable, Mason.”

“I guess I am.”

“Because my favorite ex refuses to talk. It makes people tense, like they're waiting for an eruption. An old only-child attention-getting ploy.”

Lance had it wrong, though. The problem was my youth. At some point in the middle of his speech, I'd folded my hands on my lap and grown aware—keenly, overwhelmingly aware—of the defenseless softness of my skin and the tenderness of the underlying nerves. Time had battered Lance and Lara, encasing their spirits in crusty, windburned shells, but I'd developed no such coating. The world Lance described, so ravenous and faithless, so saturated with schemes and plots and traps, struck me as fatally inhospitable. Chances were I'd manage to survive, but how, exactly, and at what cost? I felt myself aging even as I wondered this. I felt the crackly dryness setting in.