Mission to America (19 page)

I helped myself to more wine as Little Eff opened the glass screen and asked the driver to watch out for elk and deer along the highway and to turn up the headlights until we got to Aspen, even if they blinded other drivers. Something told me the driver would ignore him the moment the screen slid shut and that Little Eff knew this but felt that giving orders, however they were received, was a duty required of him by Nature—a duty I had a feeling he resented. From what I saw, he was a timid man inside who mostly just wanted to enjoy good things. But there was the name, and the money, and the position, and whether he liked it or not, they made him boss.

Except around Hadley, it turned out. She didn't like our table at the restaurant because it stood in a cold spot by a window that Little Eff had tipped a man to seat us near.

He'd told me I'd love the view. I did. It sparkled. It reminded me of a train set that a neighbor had built in his attic for a son with kidney problems that the Seeress had deemed incurable. The father, a plumber, sold his truck and tools to pay for the lavish miniature wonderland, whose layout, he said, was inspired by a dream he'd had. Toothpick log cabins whose chimneys leaked cotton smoke clung to the sides of papier-mâché mountains topped by snowfields of glitter-sprinkled plaster. Rows of streetlamps with firefly-size bulbs illuminated storefronts with foil windows that faced on winding pebble-cobbled sidewalks thronged with people in bright enamel coats. I felt cheated when I saw this masterpiece. I was nine and I knew that no such village existed on earth, but I wished that one did, and I longed to dwell in it. The fact that I couldn't hope to angered me, and it also angered me that the Church had lied. Because if Bluff was perfect, as I'd been taught, then why had the sick boy's father not built its replica? Why had he envisioned this other, better place?

Now I knew. He'd been to Aspen, possibly; or somehow the All-in-One had shown him Aspen. Aspen existed—I could see it from my chair. The very same streetlamps and even the same people.

“I'm chilled,” said Hadley. “I'm shivering. Why can't we sit by the fire? Let's try. Let's ask.”

“I'll trade places with you. It's warmer here,” I said, reluctant to give up the view I'd waited so long for.

But Little Eff wasn't strong, or found no reason to be, and I ended up with my back to Aspen's nightscape, next to a massive stone chimney decorated with rotting horse collars and rusty rock picks. Colorado adored its olden days. It hung on to junk that we threw away in Bluff or salvaged for parts that might still have a use. The past hadn't died there and so it wasn't worth missing, nor were its worn-out scraps worth idolizing. For time to pass it would have to go somewhere, and where would that be? Time sits. We move, it sits. Sometimes it trembles slightly, but that's all.

The table switch had put me beside Hadley and Little Eff with Betsy. The noisy room made it hard for them to hear us or for us to hear them, but Hadley didn't mind, it seemed—her only interest, suddenly, was me. This interest felt almost genuine, unlike the rest of her.

“.         .         .         what I think you may not realize yet,” she said, following an extensive interrogation about my background and my people, “is that you carry it with you, in your
mien
. See Errol there, and then the man behind him, the one in the collarless white linen shirt—the one with the woman whose highlights need a touch-up? See how they guard themselves, sort of leaning back, all smiles and chuckles but actually not listening because they're always scanning their perimeters? You, though, don't do that. You lay yourself wide open. Your hands, for example—I've never seen you close them. You're totally frontal, totally exposed. I could pick up my knife here and hold your eyes with mine and reach around very slowly to the side and
sssttt
, before you know it, slit your throat.”

I poked my fork into a shred of quail meat glazed in a berry sauce rich with forest flavors. Softened by candlelight, Hadley's face looked natural now, broader, more liquid, less acutely organized. It soaked me up, but her words squeezed me back out.

“I think you misinterpreted my jest,” she said. “My point was you don't understand your own appeal, the source of your own charisma. Its unprotectedness. Feel flattered, Mason.”

“I'll try. I'm not so good at that.”

“Then flatter me back. I'm great at it,” she said. “I'm serious. Say something wonderful. But swallow first.”

I was chewing my quail meat and trying to make it last because there wasn't much of it. Hadley fingered the stem of her wineglass with her right hand and pressed the other one lightly against her neck as though she were checking her own pulse. Somehow the touch released a puff of perfume as dark and woodsy as my berry sauce. I still had no idea who she was, but her claims about having traveled as a youth seemed plausible now. She made such quick transitions. In the car she'd been pert and angular, at the window table sour and pushy, but here at the fireside table she swished, she flowed. Maybe she wasn't the daughter of a spy, but a spy herself.

“You're a talented actress,” I said, “with flawless features.”

“‘Actress' meaning ‘insincere.' ‘Flawless' meaning ‘ever-so-slightly sterile.'”

“You said you take flattery well. I guess you don't.”

“Only when it's wholehearted.”

“It was,” I said.

“Naughty. Eek! But honest. I just love it. Now don't look down at your knee, here comes my hand.”

And then, as promised, there it was. But not on my knee. Above my knee. And rising. Sliding at first, but then walking like a spider.

“If they can do it, why can't we?” said Hadley.

I aimed my attention at Little Eff and Betsy for the first time since the appetizer course, and what I saw proved Hadley right: my jugular could be cut without my noticing. First, they had a private bottle of wine, its label older and fancier than the common bottle's and the level of fluid inside it lower. Second, they'd moved the candle and the flower vase next to their plates, which still held most of their food but also their silverware and napkins, meaning they'd finished eating a while ago. Third, no light showed between them, not a twinkle. They were optically one object. But at least their lips were moving. At least they'd refrained from progressing beyond the talking stage. If there was a fourth thing, the table blocked my view of it, but I assumed there was, and so I left, passing the dessert cart on my way and not even bothering to tell the waitress to cancel the lemon cheesecake I'd just ordered because I knew Betsy seldom ordered her own dessert but liked to eat a few bites of someone else's. At the oak double doors, which someone opened for me, I realized I was still holding my dinner fork, but I had a momentum by then and a direction: out, away, and into the great train set.

         

At almost ten at night a surprising number of places were still open, including a coffee shop whose ponytailed countergirl forgave me for being seventy-five cents short of the price of the triple Americano she'd made for me and sweetened with the same brand of hazelnut syrup I'd found in the guesthouse kitchen three days ago and grown so fond of that I sometimes sipped it plain. I'd left my wallet at home, I'd just remembered, because, with Little Eff around, why carry any money of your own? As I fished up loose change from my pockets, so embarrassed that the countergirl blushed on my behalf, I learned the answer: to pay for your escape.

I walked the streets and found music along one of them—a string quartet in formal clothing playing a piece I'd heard in church once and thought had been composed by an Apostle. (I'd thought we'd invented the sewing machine, too, once.) I spotted a hat on the ground near the viola and, completely coinless, I backed away some, a few feet behind the paying listeners and next to an older man who looked bankrupt, too, but seemed to love the music more than anyone. His eyes were closed as he directed with his fingers. Some of his nails were black and others were missing, but his hands had lost no flexibility—his performance animated every knuckle. I wanted to speak with him when the playing stopped, to see if he needed help of any kind, but I felt bad about my coffee, whose purchase had left me with nothing to offer him except for a tract that was folded up in my back pocket. I'd spent my funds, my time, and my advice on all the wrong things and wrong people, I understood then, and in my shame I slunk off down a side street in search of a trash can for my paper cup.

I knew they were in the Suburban looking for me, and I knew they'd find me eventually, but I wanted to delay the strained reunion until I'd rehearsed my part in it and pictured in more detail what theirs would be.

From Hadley, sympathy and comfort, in any form or degree that I desired. Wherever Little Eff had found her and whatever his reason for flying her to Snowshoe, the two of them had no deep sentimental ties. People like them weren't capable of any. They skimmed and skipped and floated, they never landed, like birds in the time of Noah and the Flood. Hadley's work was no mystery to me now; it was simply the work she'd done this evening. She tried out interesting words, she showed her legs, she kept track of her hair under varied types of lighting, she created distractions, she chased the mood, she winked, she dissolved herself in the occasion. Maybe she was paid in money or maybe in the pleasure of being near it. Had Little Eff ever really thought of marrying her, though, or was she just someone to bring along to parties and occupy men whose women he had eyes for? I couldn't quite decide. They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required.

And then there was Betsy. I expected she'd apologize, but not for misbehaving, merely for mismanaging her vitality. Too much wine, too much commotion, too much noise, too much eagerness to please her host. She'd reduce her offenses to small mistakes, reduce the mistakes to innocent missteps, and then ask forgiveness for having done nothing, really. And I would tell her I couldn't grant forgiveness, and neither could I withhold it—I didn't have it. Forgiveness already took place. It took place first, on the Morn of Emergence, which other faiths call Creation. Forgiveness and Creation were the same act.

And Little Eff? I imagined he'd just shrug and then direct our driver to the nightclub by way of some shortcut the driver would likely not take. On the way Little Eff would tell us about the helicopter and the incident at dinner would be forgotten. I wondered now if there'd even been an incident. Apprehensions set loose by my conversation with Helen and fears left over from my hike with Lance might have conspired to reshape a scene of ordinary Friday-night high spirits into something sinister and sickening. I concluded as I walked farther that it was true: I'd worried this betrayal into existence.

I happened upon another group of street musicians who sang in close harmony while snapping their fingers and spinning on their heels. I'd never seen a living black face before, and suddenly here were three of them, ecstatic, showing none of the anguish that I'd been taught was the ineradicable legacy of their people's forced exile in Terrestria. Indeed, their ongoing mistreatment was often cited by leading Apostles as one of the chief reasons for our policy of social withdrawal. We wanted no part in a hatred which the Seeress had characterized in the pages of
Luminaria
as “a loathsome reflux heaved up from sour bellies poisoned by the acids of Comparison.” It mystified some of us, including my grandmother, why the All-in-One had not thus far directed a single Negro to our safe harbor. She consoled herself with the notion that cruel Terrestrians had blocked the way of many who'd tried to join us but that one day the tide would be too mighty to frustrate. I asked her one time how she knew this. She answered, “Logic.”

“It's nice to see them so happy, isn't it?” I said this to a young mother whose little boy had edged up close to the singers to mime their dance steps. She swiveled her eyes at me but not her head. She called her boy, who didn't turn, and then stepped briskly forward, grabbed his hand, and led him around behind the trio to listen from another spot. A man to my left who'd heard and watched, apparently, said, “She's too sensitive. Don't sweat it, kid. You bet it's nice. I'm glad they've got this outlet.” We spoke a bit and I learned the entertainers were part of an annual festival of the arts meant to bolster summer tourism. The news disappointed me. I'd come to think of Aspen as a place where people gathered spontaneously, out of sheer enthusiasm, to fill the crisp night air with pleasant sounds.

“Here you are. I've been everywhere. My God . . .” Betsy clutched one of my elbows and tugged me backward, away from the crowd toward the window of a jewelry shop displaying rows of empty felt-lined boxes. The Suburban was nowhere to be seen, and the hairs that stuck to Betsy's damp forehead said she'd been running—facts my hopeful heart interpreted as evidence of a quarrel at the restaurant. Betsy, aware that I'd been schemed against, had declared her love for me and fled. The others had stayed behind and eaten dessert, hatching new mischief between bites of cheesecake.

I opened my arms but Betsy rebuffed the hug. “Something terrible happened. Errol got a call. Somebody croaked. Some weird, depressed ex-girlfriend. He hired a helicopter to fly him home and left us the car. The driver's getting gas.”

“Her name would be Lara. She's dead?” I asked. “She's dead.”

“She killed herself up at his ranch, at the security gate. She overdosed in the front seat of her car.”

I could see it, and the moments leading up to it. Varnished pink fingernails punching numbered buttons, desperate to work out the code that raised the gate, and Lara's numb face as she finally understood she'd been barred for all time from a life among the Effinghams and their invented private wilderness. Betsy dragged me across the street and through a parking lot, describing in more detail what she knew, but I hardly listened; my thoughts kept clustering around Lara's first attempt in the lukewarm bath, when she'd gazed at me with mascara-smeared raccoon eyes as I wrung out her gritty vomit from the washcloth and my partner held forth on lofty Apostle doctrine. She was already dead, but we were starved for followers and stupefied by the elixir of our own heroism, and so we pretended words could resurrect her. As she slipped into permanent slumber at the locked gate had the newest Apostle beseeched the All-in-One or had she, as I somehow knew she had, appealed to some white-bearded deity from childhood more easily envisioned and comprehended? We'd brought Lara nothing useful and come too late, I saw, and this would be the story of our whole mission, which sprung not from compassion, as we'd told ourselves, but from bitterness over our own approaching demise. We wanted to drown with strangers in our arms, to take outsiders down with us and feel them struggle. We were lonely in Bluff. We'd made ourselves so lonely. We'd waited for more than a century for company, persuaded by Mother Lucy's divinations that columns of pilgrims would show up any day, compelled by our irresistible magnetism to abandon all they knew. It wounded our pride when the seekers never appeared, and so we went out to abduct some before we vanished.