Mission to America (27 page)

“She'd like to see you. Both of you,” said Lauer. “You and the girl. Tonight. At moonrise.”

“Where?”

“Riverbright. The Isis Room. Top floor.”

“Why?”

“I don't know, but I trust you'll tell me afterward. Teamwork. Brotherhood. Cooperation. Those are the keys. The lamps along our path. I've created a job in my office: Clerk Superior. Consider it, Mason. In Unity, Immensity.”

“You made that one up.”

“It's all made up,” said Lauer. “You'll see that someday. And it will give you strength.”

         

“Closer, darlings. Up here, beside the pillows. I like the warmth. I don't put out much heat now.”

I stood behind Betsy. It wasn't just good manners. The woman on the bed was hard to look at. The shrinkage. The curling in. The crackliness. She'd been scoured away, just a thinness with a voice. Her eyes were the fattest things about her now, not sunken at all, but driven to the surface. They floated there, enormous, round, popped out. All of her other parts were curveless, flat.

“Your hand, honey. Let me hold it. There. Such pressure. So much wonderful leverage from such small bones. I miss that the most—that ability to squeeze things. It's a pleasure I wasn't aware of until it passed. It may be the greatest pleasure of all, in fact. Along with sucking, it's certainly the earliest. But sucking is really a form of squeezing, isn't it?”

Did this call for an answer? I gave one to be safe. “They're the same. You're absolutely right.”

“Am I? Don't just kowtow. Think,” she said.

I tried but I couldn't. I wished I'd never seen this. I envied Betsy for knowing nothing different.

“Sweetie, you're lovely. Do you know that?”

“Yes.”

“Much lovelier than he is handsome.”

Laughter.

“For a period,” said the Seeress. “For now. Women slump, men stiffen. It all reverses. The squeeze and suck, the squeeze and suck of things.”

The sound that's left behind when laughter stops and any further laughter seems impossible.

“If I could just bring more spit into my mouth I feel like you two young dears could hear me better. Words are wet things. Language is mostly moisture. I'm afraid I'll run out soon; I need to say this quickly. I'd ask for a glass of water, but it's useless. I can't seem to absorb it like I used to.”

The Seeress reached for Betsy's other hand and it struck me that in the spaces between her words another conversation had taken place that included just the two of them and had already moved toward an agreement whose terms would never wholly be disclosed to me although they might determine my life to come. I was here as a witness, not a full participant. I was here to make the meeting legal, to attest to the fact that it had happened, not guide its outcome. When the women dropped their voices to a whisper, I stepped back from the bed and let them plot. Men can only stand guard over the mysteries. They don't belong to us. They never have.

The Seeress kissed Betsy's forehead and it was done. The kiss she gave me was a mere formality. It conveyed her affection but transferred no authority. That resided elsewhere now, passed safely along at the last possible moment through codes and signs I couldn't comprehend.

We didn't need fortifications after all. We had tunnels. We had tunnels out. One, the very deepest, was so narrow that only two people could pass through it, but two was enough, the Seeress assured us. Two was the All-in-One's own secret number.

“Take my big old Lincoln,” she instructed us. “The keys are in the nightstand, in the drawer. There's an envelope under the driver's seat with money. It's finished here. It's complete. It's had its day. We've known it was coming since Mother Lucy. All of us. I'd tell you more, but I'm out of spit, my darlings. Now run along. Go. Go reinfold yourselves.”

And so we set forth, that same night, into the world, and nothing was lost, because where would it have gone?

About the Author

Walter Kirn is a novelist, journalist, and critic who lives in Livingston, Montana. He is the author of four previous works of fiction:
My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, Thumbsucker,
and
Up in the Air.

ALSO BY WALTER KIRN

My Hard Bargain: Stories

She Needed Me

Thumbsucker

Up in the Air

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kirn, Walter, 1962–
Mission to America : a novel / Walter Kirn.—1st ed.
p.                  cm.
1.         Missionaries—Fiction.         2.         Rich people—Fiction.         3.         Ski resorts—Fiction.         4.         Matriarchy—Fiction.         5.         Young men—Fiction.         
6.         Colorado—Fiction.         7.         Cults—Fiction.         I.         Title.
PS3561.I746M57 2005
813'.54—dc22
2005045477

Copyright © 2005 by Walter Kirn

All Rights Reserved

eISBN: 978-0-307-27855-5

v3.0