Mission to America (20 page)

Poor Lara was our first victim, our first sacrifice.

As Betsy and I climbed into the Suburban and settled in beside the knee-high party table cluttered with empty glasses, bowls of peanuts, and balled-up napkins soaked with spilled red wine, I vowed to myself that there would be no more—not by my hand, at least. Betsy leaned her head against me and I reached up to stroke it, but stopped myself. “Don't still be jealous and mean,” she said. “Be kind.” But I was being kind. And I was even kinder when I dropped her in her mother's driveway, declined her invitation to come inside, gave her my cheek to kiss instead of my lips, and told her I wouldn't be seeing her again. She took it badly, but she shouldn't have, and she asked if the problem was her “reputation.” I told her no, that it was mine.

Elder Stark drove to town
to
negotiate with the priest appointed by Lara's Episcopalian mother to conduct the funeral the next day. As proof of Lara's conversion to our faith and justification for his demands to speak during the service, approve the hymns, and perform a brief Aboriginal graveside ritual known as the Reinfolding of the Raptor, he carried with him three photographs I'd taken showing the two of them sitting in the coffee shop underlining verses in
Discourses
with red and yellow pencils. The pictures had been his idea, not hers, for an album he said he wanted to send his mother, and Lara had tried to worm out of them by claiming that a new face cream she'd applied that morning had inflamed her pores. My partner mocked her for being vain, and his bullying struck me as yet another symptom of the accelerating decline that soon, I expected, would place him at the mercy of the same Terrestrian medical doctors he blamed for savaging Eff Sr.'s bowels. When the pictures were printed, his skin looked worse than Lara's, which looked as bad as she'd predicted. She asked him to throw them away, but he refused, and he told me why as he left to meet the priest. “The Hobo wanted her picture. He badgered me. He wouldn't explain, he just said I'd understand.”

I confined myself to the guesthouse for the day, needing a respite from the strong emotions that had overrun the Rocking F following the discovery of Lara's body. Eff Sr., who'd been enjoying a surge of vigor as the result of my partner's ministrations, had lapsed into a volatile funk, relentlessly abusing the hired help and announcing at breakfast the day after the suicide that this year's “gathering” would include a “frontier safari” in which five guests, selected through a drawing, would be allowed to shoot one bison each using a priceless rifle from his collection of historic American firearms. The ranch foreman, Xavier, when he heard the plan described, refused to participate, reportedly, and Eff Sr. canceled the event, but not before turning his fury on a cook whose spaghetti sauce he blamed for giving him heartburn.

Two housekeepers walked away with the fired cook. Within a few hours the house deteriorated into a chaos of overflowing wastebaskets and empty toilet paper rolls. My partner volunteered to pitch in and recruited me to help him. As we were making up his bed, Eff Sr. stormed in and accused us of snooping in his closets. Maybe he feared we'd seen the plastic covers that presumably shielded his mattress from nighttime accidents.

Little Eff's state had decomposed more quietly. The morning after the suicide, having been taught by my father that hard labor purges dark thoughts, I'd gone out to the barn, where Xavier was stacking bales of barley hay grown as feed for the imperiled bison. Little Eff wandered in around lunchtime wearing slippers and a white bathrobe whose unbelted open front revealed a pair of silky baby-blue undershorts and a large crimson birthmark near his breastbone shaped like a tortoise with all four legs extended. Numbly, with a distracted, mechanized apathy, he lifted a bale by its twine and set it down far from the stack, in the corner of the barn. He sat on the bale with one foot across his knee, produced a small silvery object from his robe, and proceeded to clip and file and shape his toenails for most of the next hour. He hummed as he worked—and I recognized his last tune as the rousing Apostle standard “All Hath Ability.” My assumption that he'd learned it from my partner foundered when he began to sing out loud. “God Bless America,” he sang, “land that I love . . .” When Little Eff finally shuffled back out of the barn, the nail clippings piled on an outstretched hand as if he planned to show them off to someone, I asked Xavier if the lyrics were correct. His answer galled me. I killed the afternoon watching what Elder Stark and I called “squealing shows,” in which people whose lust for Comparison had caused them to grow discontented with their clothing and furniture were showered with new things they weren't yet sick of.

After my partner drove off to see the priest, I searched his bedroom for clues to his diminishment. If he'd wept over Lara's death, I hadn't seen it; all that pained him, it seemed, was her mother's disinclination to allow a traditional Apostle ceremony, for which he'd already reserved the services of a Grand Junction falconer. (Clutching in its talons a lock of hair cut from the crown of the dead person's head, a hawk or eagle circles the burial site while the mourners drop white feathers into the pit.) When the woman arrived at the airstrip on Little Eff's jet, which he'd sent all the way to the island off British Columbia where she'd been filming whales with her fourth husband, an Australian author and oceanographer, Elder Stark had presented her with the wreath of sage leaves worn by Lara at her First Avowal. She'd stuffed it into her cosmetics bag and damaged it when she zipped the zipper. He spat in her footprints as she walked away and told me that night that he wouldn't be surprised if she suffered a mishap at sea within six months.

Rolled up in a pair of socks inside his dresser I found three amber pill bottles whose labels cautioned against drinking alcohol or operating machinery. Eff Sr.'s name was on the labels, and one of the bottles was dated just four days ago, though it held only five of the thirty tablets prescribed. Since I doubted my partner would tell me what they did, I swallowed one dry and waited for a change I hoped would be shallow and short-lived. Terrestrian medications dazzled me. Their names buzzed and crackled with Zs and Vs and Xs and, unlike the powders and slurries I'd grown up with, they came in forms so denatured and compressed that their botanical origins, if any, were impossible to puzzle out. The tablet I took, pink and stop-sign shaped, scuffed my tender membranes as it went down and within twenty minutes brought on a placid listlessness I associated with the moments before death, when passions vanish and through thin gray mists the mind's eye discerns a hovering bird of prey. When it swoops, my grandmother once told me, wise folk bare their breasts to it in welcome, but when her own hawk swooped down late one night in the juniper sickroom adjoining our kitchen, she drew a wool blanket taut over her body and curled up under it like a porcupine, facedown, limbs tucked, exposing to the great beak only her vertebrae and quills.

Our newest Apostle had done much better, I'd heard, adjusting her car seat so it lay nearly flat, pulling up her short skirt, and tucking her Emmy tight between her legs. Elder Stark said the Snowshoe police had taken pictures that Little Eff had bribed someone to shred.

         

I was rolling the pill bottles back up in the sock when something thudded in another room. My sluggish drugged nerves didn't twitch. Another thud flickered the lightbulb in a ceiling fixture and shivered the floor joists. The sounds of smaller disturbances led me into my bedroom to a wall shared with the other apartment. The possibility that Edward, the writer, was being attacked voided my promise not to interrupt him. I rapped my fist against the paneling, got no response, then hurried downstairs and around to his back door. There was another crash as I shouldered it wide and burst through into his kitchen in a crouch like one I'd seen apprehensive soldiers use in a televised raid on a den of foreign evildoers.

Through an archway identical to one on our side, in Edward's identically furnished living room, I saw a floor adrift with torn brown envelopes, tables stacked with scrap-strewn dinner plates, a leather armchair draped in bath towels, and a desk with no drawers converted into a bar complete with a jar of olives, a moldy lemon, and a dozen or so liquor bottles, one of which had a burning candle stub jammed at a wax-dripping angle down its neck. The noises gave way to a depleted silence as I crept forward shouting Edward's name and gained a fuller view of his depravities, the strangest one being a uniform scattering of sunflower seeds across the soiled beige carpet, as though he'd been trying to plant an indoor lawn.

“I'm working. I'm turning the corner. Respect my process,” a croaky, disheveled voice called down the stairs.

Seeds crunched underfoot as I went up. In the hall I cleared a pathway through a barricade fashioned from a box spring, a wicker hamper, a carved oak headboard, numerous dresser drawers, and a mountain of bedding that smelled of spoiled milk. The first bedroom looked normal when I flipped on the light, but the next one struck me dumb. It was empty except for a pillow on the floor, but its walls were covered, every inch of them, in several hundred scribbled-on white note cards like those my mother used for recipes. Fastened by thumbtacks, the tiled rows of cards showed no gaps or cracks. Inconceivable precision. My father had raised me to honor a job well done, and I stood there in awe, ignoring the breathing sounds issuing from the closet to my left.

I granted Edward the dignity of revealing himself when he felt ready. He wore gray slacks but nothing else, and his bare chest and forearms were marred by inky doodles and little blocks of minutely lettered text. He looked like a living truck-stop men's room wall, only hairier, with a sprinkling of pink moles. His navel was the smallest I'd ever seen, just a dimple in his starved pale belly. It served as the nose in a frowning round face he'd drawn under a crescent moon that also had features, including a nipple for an eye.

I pulled my sweater over my head and gave it to him. He put it on inside out and rolled the sleeves up.

“Tell him I'm making progress. He thinks I'm slacking. The manuscript's two hundred pages. You can see it. Tell him I've finished transcribing and started writing and ought to be done by Thanksgiving.
This
Thanksgiving. Tell him I won't take another dollar till then.”

Twenty minutes of hushed, persistent coaxing like a person might use to rescue a treed house cat succeeded in leading him to my kitchen table, where I refused his request for strong black coffee and offered a mug of sweetened hot milk instead. Over the next two hours, in jumbled blurts and headlong rants, it all came out: the tale of Edward's literary enslavement.

It was his phrase, not mine, and along with other deft turns—“brutal caprices worthy of Pharaoh,” “vivisectional vampire,” “esoteric whimsies,” “a positively Adamic grandiosity”—it convinced me that Edward's talent had survived the suffocating, humiliating labor of confining to orderly paragraphs and chapters the billowing idiocies of a rich man's dreamworld. What the project had devastated was Edward's sanity and a pride in himself that he told me filled him once, although I could see no evidence of it now.

The tale began five years ago, in New York, when Edward's book
Let Them Drink Coke
, about the rise of the global soft-drink industry, received a prize of one hundred thousand dollars sponsored by the Foundation for Moral Prosperity. Though Edward now viewed the foundation as “a tax shelter for Effingham monkey-blood money,” he used the windfall to finance a new apartment and new car. He overspent, he later realized, and committed himself to payments he couldn't keep up with, particularly after his next book,
Bombs Away
, about the international nuclear arms trade, provoked a lawsuit by a Swiss uranium dealer whose wife, Edward claimed, was carrying on a love affair with the chairman of the book's French-owned publisher. Facing huge debts, he sold his Saab convertible (no good ever came of those cars, I'd come to learn), rented out his apartment, left his boyfriend (Edward paused at this detail but I reassured him that in Bluff such couples, though uncommon, were cherished as proof that authentic Thonic bonds can form without reference to Matic expectations), and moved in with his mother in Denver to write a novel whose plot he described to me as “a combination of
Huckleberry Finn
,” a book my grandmother had read to me to help instill sympathy for Terrestrian Negros, “and
The Day of the Locust
,” which I resolved to read because its title sounded scriptural, like the product of one of Little Red Elk's vision quests.

“The only hitch in my noble plan,” said Edward, “was that, since boyhood, I've been a pitiful liar, and fictional narratives lie in every line. For example, when something is said to take place ‘suddenly.' In life, nothing ever happens suddenly, not even a drunken automobile wreck. The driver spends hours in a tavern first, and before that, of course, there's the painful adolescence that initially led him to imbibe. Which necessitates a description of the parents and their own flawed origins. It's endless.”

I thought this through, but wound up disagreeing. I explained to him how time sits or stands in place, and that one moment is as good as any other to begin a new journey or end an old one. Things did indeed happen “suddenly,” I said. There was no other way for them to happen. Life was suddenly after suddenly—so many suddenlys in such quick succession that people wrote made-up tales to stop their onslaught, to rest in the illusion of some smooth flow.

“You're either an upbeat nihilist,” said Edward, “or an opportunistic bullshit artist. Either way, you remind me of myself. Of what I remember that self to be, I mean. I leased it to someone. They haven't yet returned it.”