She hired a contractor and grassroots organizers, then got distracted by the war with Iran. She was speaking at protests and having eggs thrown at her and writing op-eds and being called Iran Harridan by right-wing hacks. Credit Suisse fired her for damaging their image. Then the Save America Act was passed, and her assets were frozen because the State Department said she was bankrolling terrorism. That turned into a year of legal battles, in the course of which Sabine became a cause célèbre and a hate figure for the nativist right, and although she eventually won in court, she was sentenced to three months for contempt because, as she admitted, she was a cunt to the judge. She didn’t mind prison, though (or so she told Ben in a letter from the correctional facility), because she got a lot of reading done and easily bought the other prisoners’ friendship.
Meanwhile, in West Virginia, the contractors worked, and houses were demolished or fixed. The organizers settled in a nice Victorian (the town’s former haunted house) and got the fireplace working and planted a garden, but nothing else got done. No free clinic: doctors didn’t want to move there. No preschool: people wouldn’t send their kids. The sympathetic locals didn’t do anything but complain about the unsympathetic locals. Sabine started calling it “where money goes to die” and said it was a lesson to anyone who thought they could reinvent the wheel.
For Ben, the next phase began with a series of emails from Kate’s mother. Kate had been living in Ágota’s house for a year, but had now run away with an old family friend, a Hungarian writer of children’s books with a history of preying (Ágota said) on vulnerable young women. Kate had been acutely depressed ever since her infant son had died of SIDS, and was about to be admitted to the local hospital, since Ágota didn’t trust her not to walk into traffic while Ágota was at work.
Then Gabor (the family friend) came to visit, and he and Kate vanished in the middle of the night. Kate called Ágota from the road but wouldn’t say where she was going. All she wanted was for Ágota to wire her money. Ágota went to the police, who treated her like a demented old woman. They told her they couldn’t prevent her adult daughter from having sexual relationships. “It doesn’t matter that the daughter is perhaps a schizophrenic,” wrote Ágota. “It is I that must be crazy.”
At the time, Ben was in Louisiana, interviewing former Exxon employees—now refugees living in FEMA tents—and editing the interviews for use in press kits. The aim was to argue for more aggressive action to protect Exxon’s remaining installations in the Gulf.
The day he arrived, the Raza Verde had set fire to a string of oil platforms, and when the wind blew from the sea, the town was cast into a stinking, nebulous dusk. The tap water was contaminated, and bottled water was selling for twenty dollars a liter. Trees had begun to die, and no one had the money or energy to find out why. People had abandoned their homes, and apparently some had left their pets behind, since there were warnings posted everywhere about wild dogs. Ben’s skin was perpetually sticky. His teeth were sticky from sucking throat lozenges.
The other guests in Ben’s hotel were all reporters, FEMA workers, and military contractors, who congregated in the bar every night and drank until they passed out. To Ben, they all seemed like different species of vulture; they competed to tell the worst atrocity stories, made a game of drinking through their per diems, shared tips about local girls desperate enough to trade sex for bottled water. Only the refugees retained their humanity, and couldn’t help raging inconsolably to Ben, weeping and telling him their life stories—although he was patently just another vulture with no power to do anything there but feed. By the third day, Ben burned out and began to find it all unendurably boring. He couldn’t pay attention. Something had gone wrong with his mind.
In that context, the emails from Ágota felt ethereally harmless. Even the idea of Kate being ravished, which would have made him jealous the week before, now felt like a scene from a comic novel. Ben imagined Gabor and Kate as Humbert Humbert with an overgrown Lolita, fleeing across state lines to—as Ágota’s final email revealed—Sabine’s twice-abandoned West Virginian town.
There the emails stopped. He got home to New York and expected his depression to fade. It didn’t. His second week back, he broke up with Alicia from a feeling that he needed to change his life when he couldn’t really change his life. Another month went by. Every night he ordered takeout and drank a six-pack in front of the TV set. Three months in, he’d given up running. He’d stopped going out with friends. When six months had passed, he had headaches every day and chronic eczema on his hands. Often he threw up within a minute of waking; he kept a bucket beside the bed.
Then one morning he didn’t go to work. He lay in bed suffering until ten o’clock, then threw on some clothes and went to Sabine’s.
On the way, he had time to realize Sabine might not be there and to feel the anticipatory despair of being turned away by the doorman. But he found her at home, in a sea of boxes; she was being thrown out by her uncle, who was afraid the government would seize his assets. Two TaskRabbit kids were packing her belongings to be put into storage while Sabine, with brittle, ferocious cheerfulness, was listing the friends and family members who now wouldn’t answer her calls. The TaskRabbit kids were starstruck, laughing besottedly at everything she said. When Ben came in, they stared at him with the instinctive mistrust of sibling rivalry.
Sabine said to Ben, “Look, you want to take a road trip? I’m driving to West Virginia tonight.”
Ben’s mind said Kate. He felt tremulous and blank. He said without thinking, “Yes.”
There’d been a blizzard and Sabine drove recklessly at first, impatient with the slippery road. The car was a nondescript battered Hyundai; Sabine said when she used to drive a nice car, police would always stop her to shake her down. She’d once spent the night in a Maryland lockup while the cops tried to seize her Jag; they were trying to say she had cocaine in the car, when of course Sabine couldn’t do cocaine; she was a motherfucking cardiac patient. At last they let her make a phone call, and Sabine called the governor of Maryland—the mother of her best friend from Yale. “White privilege is kind of my cocaine.”
Then she talked about privilege, self-castigatingly, gloomily, and fell silent. Ben turned the radio on. They listened to a Christian station denouncing the Red Cross as Satanic. On the hills, billboards began to appear, which exhorted them to protect America and scolded them about the horrors of abortion. Meanwhile, the sun went down in fits and starts. Long after night appeared to have fallen, they would crest a hill and find another purple remnant of dusk backlighting the farther trees, while the people on the radio quoted Isaiah and assured each other that they, too, had at first found it hard to believe.
On the border of Virginia, they stopped at a service area. The area was going through a blackout, and inside it was pitch dark and achingly cold. The Cinnabon and Burger King staff (for whom this was apparently now routine) had set up LED hurricane lanterns and were otherwise acting as if nothing had happened. Customers carefully inched through the black expanse between the restaurants, admonishing their children to stay close and breaking now and then into nervous laughter. Sabine and Ben got the last cooked cinnabon and went back to share it in the car. There was a full moon and it was snowing again. Ben already felt happier.
Then driving again, and the mountains beginning, seeming to arise and help the car upward in reward for its long day of work. There was something tranquilizing about Sabine’s shadowed profile in the chilly, close darkness of the car; the gentle light from the gauges on the dashboard; the feeling of being borne through a vastness. Ben stared out at the massed close trees until they opened out suddenly into a valley. At that moment, the lights came back on in a roadside town, and it appeared as a fairy constellation on a hill. He’d been assuming he would call his boss in the morning, that he’d be back at Exxon the following Monday. At that moment, he decided he wouldn’t go back. He had some money in the bank. He could just keep moving. It didn’t have to be about Kate.
They turned into the ghost neighborhood, and Sabine slowed down and made Ben admire the new playground and the children’s library; she named the people living in the renovated houses and explained the affordable-rent scheme until Ben felt pleasantly quiescent and bored, like a child listening in on an adult conversation. At last, they pulled up to the organizers’ house, a steeply gabled Victorian whose paint was peeling so badly it had the appearance of a molting bird. The front yard had been churned by thousands of footsteps, which parted around a little island of snow with a sign saying: PEOPLE’S AID OF WEST VIRGINIA.
They got out of the car, and the silence was so intense it felt like blinding light. Walking to the porch, they repeatedly slipped on the terrain of frozen footprints. The front door had a lopsided wreath and a novelty welcome mat with the message: HI, I’M MAT! Sabine opened the door without knocking. They came through a hallway littered with dirty boots and cheap umbrellas and into a living room where half a dozen people were drinking wine around a fire. Everything here was in disrepair: the banister had been torn away from the stairs; so many chunks of parquet were missing from the floor that it looked like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle; one window was covered with blue plastic, which swelled and drained with the changing wind.
There was a round of names and handshakes. Most of the people were organizers—earnest, puppyish millennials—but Gabor was also there, a fiftyish man with a receding hairline and a long white nose, who wore gold-rimmed glasses and a rumpled old suit, as if he were in costume as an Eastern European intellectual fallen on hard times.
Gabor got up motherhennishly and brought Ben and Sabine plates of bright red stew. The organizers chattered at Sabine excitedly; Ben was suddenly too tired to take part and had to concentrate even to eat. All he got from the conversation was that Kate was out helping some elderly woman of the neighborhood put up Christmas lights. Then Sabine talked about her fair-weather uncle, gesturing with her fork, but suddenly trailed off mid-sentence, put her stew untouched on the floor, and announced she couldn’t think about anything now. She was wasted; she was going to bed.
Ben went to bed too (he was afraid to see Kate) and slept deeply in the thrilled, luxurious way he’d slept when he was a child who could easily fall asleep in airplanes, and he would sleep suspended above the world, and wake up believing something supernatural had happened to him in the sky. Then the long cold morning; Kate was still out. She’d slept at the Christmas-lights woman’s house because the woman was depressed because her dog had just died. Ben kept wanting to make a mean joke about it. It made him uncomfortably aware of being too selfish to do a thing like that. He also felt as if he ranked below the dog, since Kate now knew he was here; Sabine had called Kate’s cell phone and told her.
One by one, the activists went out. Sabine went out, and invited Ben to come along, but Ben was waiting for Kate, while pretending he was tired and didn’t feel like going out in the cold. Gabor was still in bed, and for a while, the only other person was an activist named Billy who looked about fourteen years old but had (as he told Ben) an MA in economics from Georgetown.
Then the doorbell started to ring, and the living room began to fill with locals. Three thirteen-year-old girls rang the doorbell and asked if they could build a fire; they huddled at the fireplace, whispering and giggling, pretending to be elves who were building a magical fire to summon a wizard. A strained-looking, bleached-blond woman came, who was angling to move into a renovated house; when Billy said she had to fill out an application, she stormed out, swearing about “red tape”. An obese man came, who walked with a cane and was accompanied by a limping, rotund dachshund, to ask when the veterinarian was coming to do the free clinic; then he and Billy stooped over the dachshund, which shut its eyes gratefully while they inspected its teeth. And more people came and asked favors, asked questions, and groused about the “Democraps” in Congress and belligerently asked Billy how anyone could defend that corruption. They gossiped and invariably asked after Kate. They left notes for Kate, and one woman left a casserole for Kate, and a girl left a scented candle wrapped in faded American-flag wrapping paper for Kate. At one point, Gabor (who’d come down at one thirty, frowsy and barefoot but in his same black suit) informed the company that Ben was Kate’s ex-boyfriend. Then everyone—the fireplace girls and the casserole woman and a man who was going through a box of donated shoes to see if he could find a pair that fit—looked at Ben with sudden fascination. The casserole woman asked if he was from New York, and the shoe man asked if he was Puerto Rican. When Ben said he was Indian, the fireplace girls said they’d seen a Bollywood film once and started to laugh uncontrollably, remembering the chase scene from the movie; they tried to describe it but couldn’t get anywhere because they were laughing too hard.
For a while then, everyone told Kate stories, mainly about Kate making friends with improbable people and acting in improbable ways. Clearly, Kate was a local celebrity, partly by virtue of being half Iranian but also by virtue of being Kate. She babysat kids for free and baked birthday cakes for lonely senior citizens and exuded an infectious happiness, but could also suddenly collapse and cry all day. After all, she’d lost her child.
Then Gabor talked about how he’d brought Kate here from her mother’s house, and Ben realized (or realized he’d already realized) that Gabor had never slept with Kate, and Ágota was crazy to assume he had. It was only three hours’ drive from Ohio, and Gabor had known Kate all her life. It was no big deal to drive her here. What was strange was that he’d stayed on afterward, which Gabor explained as “a fit of inertia.” The shoe man said, “Well, you found the right place for it. Nothing happened here since Noah invented the ark.” The casserole woman said she didn’t know why people had to have their inertia here; there were plenty other places to have their inertia in. The fireplace girls asked what inertia was, and the shoe man said when they got older, they would find out.
Then the shoe man left, wearing new hiking boots and carrying his old sneakers. The casserole woman left and gave the fireplace girls a ride home. It went quiet. The door stopped opening and closing; the room began to finally warm. Gabor went to take a bath. Billy went into the kitchen and started to chop vegetables for dinner. Ben built up the fire and thought of it as summoning Kate. He was happy in a tranquilized way; it was the heat of the fire and the bathwater running, the too-intimate particular splashes Gabor made in the bath, the pans banging in the kitchen and the big snowy world outside.
Gabor came back out, wearing a bathrobe that Ben recognized with a shock of affection; it was one of the identical cashmere robes Sabine gave all her guests, because Sabine’s aunt once had a bathrobe company, and when it went out of business, Sabine got a hundred robes. Gabor sat in an armchair and stretched his bare feet toward the fire, then suddenly looked at the door. He pointed to it and said, “Kate,” as footsteps thumped on the porch and the door squeaked open. Kate walked in, already smiling with sentimental eyes and looking for Ben.
She was wearing a shapeless parka, corduroys, and pink snow boots of Kmart quality. But she was herself, with her old shining candor; the way she used to put on a rumpled old bag-like dress and wear herself like jewelry. Not beautiful exactly, but wonderful to look at, her black eyes charged with a particular emotion no other person felt. She looked (she had always looked to Ben) like a queen disguised as a commoner to walk among her people.
When she spotted him, she shook her head and grinned, then turned to shut the door behind her. In those few seconds, the room had grown crisp with cold. Ben got up from his chair but didn’t go to hug her. She turned back and didn’t come to him.
Gabor said, “This is a moment of tremendous excitement.”
Kate and Ben laughed without looking at
Gabor. Kate said, “Ben, you want to come out for a walk? I have to go to church and ask for hay.”
“Can’t you ask God for hay anywhere?” Ben said.
Kate laughed. “Silly.”
“I guess I should put on boots, then,” Ben said.
Gabor said, “It was as if they had never been apart.”
The sun was already setting; it was December and the days were short. They took a shortcut through the snowy woods. As they walked, Kate explained that she was asking the Baptist congregation for hay for a rescue cow; Kate’s friend Misty had adopted this cow but couldn’t afford the winter feed. The cow was from a nearby farm; she’d been about to be slaughtered because she couldn’t give milk, because she’d had to have a radical mastectomy. Ben burst out laughing, then apologized and said that of course it was no laughing matter.
Then they talked about Sabine and how she couldn’t stop trying to save the world, no matter how much the world hated her for it. They talked about the town as an example of Sabine’s compulsive efforts to save the world. They talked about Gabor and the popular children’s books he’d written in Hungary, which had all now gone out of print, and it was giving Gabor a crisis of identity. They talked about José and his job in Iran and how Kate had fallen out of touch with him entirely after the baby had died. Ben said he was sorry about the baby, and Kate cried a little, still walking, then said, “I can’t really talk about it. It was obviously just an awful thing.” At last, they talked about Kate’s psychosis and how the symptoms had all gone away. Even after she quit the medication, her time travel dreams had never come back. Kate said it didn’t feel important now. It felt like water under the bridge.
Ben said, “Are you still from a parallel universe?”
“Who knows?” Kate said. “It isn’t really a question that comes up.”
Then Ben wanted to pursue it, but stopped himself. They walked without speaking for a while, and the crunching of snow seemed amplified in the silent woods. The dusk had advanced; it was shadowy and frigid. It felt as if they were gradually being submerged in blue, even though there was no actual blue in the landscape. The only real color was the flashing pink of Kate’s boots. They came out onto a narrow road and passed a series of clapboard houses with Santas and nativity scenes in their yards. Kate pointed out the church, another clapboard house that only differed from the others in having a parking lot, which was full. There were extra cars parked along the road. As they came to the door of the church, the congregation was singing, abominably badly, while someone played a keyboard badly. Kate got the giggles, and they paused in the snow while she leaned against the side of the church, pressing a mittened hand to her mouth. Ben grinned at her foolishly. He wanted her to keep on laughing. He didn’t want to go inside.
The Heavens Page 21
