by Tim Wirkus
“Do you think he’s going to be okay?” I asked Harriet.
It was a cold October afternoon, and Harriet was wrapped in several wool sweaters, a stocking cap pulled tightly over her head.
“It’s certainly a big disappointment,” she said.
I’d just interrupted another one of her lectures, this one on the semi-matriarchal social orders that had existed within polygamous families in pioneer-era Utah.
“I hope we find something,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, a bit absently.
She was staring at something to the east, and I followed her gaze to the rugged silhouette of the distant Tetons. I wondered what was on her mind.
“Can I tell you something in confidence?” she said, turning to look at me.
“Of course,” I said, eager to hear whatever secret from her personal life she was about to reveal.
Over the past few days, we hadn’t really discussed Craig D. Ahlgren—neither of us had mentioned him at all, actually—and my partial, inferred knowledge of what had happened between them cast an awkward pall over our interactions. I worried that she assumed that I had learned more from Ahlgren than I actually had, and that I was keeping mum about it out of disapproval, embarrassment, or shock. And in fact, I had begun to evaluate her through the foggy lens I’d been given by Ahlgren. She’d been mixed up in something unsavory, but what? And how careful did I need to be around her?
I wanted to clear the air, but whatever had happened between her and Craig was also none of my business, and since she hadn’t broached the subject with me, I figured she didn’t want to talk about it. So we talked around the whole thing, whatever the whole thing was, which kept us at a perpetual distance from each other. The end result was that even after spending several days together, I felt like I didn’t know Harriet any better than I had when we’d first met.
Now, though, it seemed that she was ready to break her silence on her haunted past.
“It’s about Salgado-MacKenzie,” she said.
Or not.
“Okay,” I said.
Harriet leaned her head toward mine and lowered her voice. She said that before Sérgio had initiated contact with her, she’d only read one Salgado-MacKenzie story, “All Quiet, All Dark,” the one she’d translated for Roger Ash’s jingoistic anthology. On Sérgio’s arrival to California, though, he’d presented her with a binder identical, I assumed, to the one he’d given me, jam-packed with the complete known works of Salgado-MacKenzie. Harriet had been working her way through the stories each night before bed, and although she enjoyed them more often than not, they’d failed to captivate her in the same way the elusive author’s letters had so many years earlier.
“They’re interesting enough, in their own way,” Harriet said about the stories. “For instance, there’s a modesty to them, even amid the grandiosity, that I appreciate. At the end of the day, though, I can’t discern in them the quality that Sérgio finds so compelling. He’s told me again and again, ‘It’s Sertôrian, it’s all Sertôrian—that’s what you have to focus on,’ but she ultimately seems like a pretty by-the-numbers, stock science-fiction character to me. Really, it’s a shame. So much of my scholarship focuses on bringing to light the lives and contributions of undersung Mormon women, and I would love nothing more than to read a canon of stories that features a potent new religion with a complex woman at its center, but like I said, for me Sertôrian just doesn’t jump off the page like that.” She glanced at Sérgio inside the diner and then back at me. “And I actually don’t know why I’m being so furtive about this—I usually feel quite comfortable expressing my opinions—but the current situation feels delicate enough that I’m opting to err on the side of discretion. What I’m curious about, I suppose,” she said, finally getting to the point, “is whether you’ve felt any mystical connection to Sertôrian, or if I’m the odd one out here.”
Just a few days earlier, I’d certainly thought I had. In my mind’s eye, Sertôrian had glimmered like a lodestar at the distant edge of my sorry horizons. Since my meeting with Craig D. Ahlgren, though, Salgado-MacKenzie’s inexhaustible protagonist had lost her guiding luster, and it was hard for me to think of those previous feelings as anything other than willful delusions, summoned to fill a host of gaping voids in my life. And now that those voids were filled, now that the CAC was out of my hair and I had a much better job waiting for me when I got back to Utah, now that I had the LSAT to study for and law schools to research, now that I had a bright future again for the first time in years, I didn’t need Salgado-MacKenzie or Irena Sertôrian or The Infinite Future to save me anymore.
“I don’t know,” I said to Harriet. “Not really, I guess.”
She looked at me intently for a moment.
“Nothing?” she said.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Hmm,” said Harriet.
I opened my mouth to elaborate on what I’d just said, but then I opted for silence, pulling my coat more tightly around me.
Gazing again at the distant mountains, Harriet said, “And I do have to acknowledge—we both do, really, you and I—that we could be missing something. His letters, after all, had a zip to them—a real zip, you know? They were much funnier than the stories, for one thing, and more audacious. And those qualities, I just don’t see them in the stories. Or if so, only a glimmer.” She shook her head. “That book proposal, on the other hand—The Infinite Future?—there’s audacity for you. There’s something I’d really like to read.”
“If it even exists,” I said.
As if summoned by this blasphemy, Sérgio stepped through the door of the diner and glared darkly at me.
“The waitress,” he said, “told me we might try Stockton Funeral Home. The owner knows everyone in town, apparently.”
And with that, he swung the loose end of his plaid scarf over his shoulder and started walking up Main Street, apparently uninterested in whether or not Harriet and I would follow.
Though Sérgio’s stride was purposeful, I could see as I caught up with him that his face had been overtaken by an expression that was equal parts mourning and confusion. Feeling guilty that I didn’t need The Infinite Future to fix my life anymore, while the book continued to matter so deeply to Sérgio, I thought I might try my hand at cheering him up.
“Maybe,” I said helpfully as I walked alongside him, “this is one of those situations where the real treasure is in the searching for it, you know? Joy in the journey kind of thing.”
We were making good time up the sidewalk as I said this, autumn leaves blowing around our feet. As soon as the words left my mouth, though, Sérgio stopped walking and grabbed me by the shoulder. He turned me so we faced each other.
“Let me make one thing clear to you, Daniel,” he said. A few strands of hair had come loose from his ponytail and blew wildly around his face. “Although I might have implied otherwise in the recent past, if we don’t find what we’re looking for here, I will be very, very disappointed.”
“Sure,” I said, pulling free from his grip. “I get it.”
“Do you?” said Sérgio, wrapping his scarf more tightly around his neck. He turned away.
“Come on,” said Harriet, a few paces ahead of us. “We’re wasting time.”
It was hard for me to reconcile this surly, taciturn figure who moped his way up and down Main Street with the bold enthusiast I’d met just a few months earlier. Where, in the past, he might have fought back when the multifarious tentacles of disenchantment threatened to drag him underwater, now he seemed content to be embraced by their iron grip and conveyed without struggle to the beast’s ravenous, clacking maw.
And unfortunately, our visit with Patricia Stockton did nothing to improve Sérgio’s outlook. In the funeral home’s muted, tastefully forgettable front lobby, Patricia—a woman whose demeanor was as far from funereal as could be imagined—told us she didn�
��t know any Brazilians or any space-fiction writers who lived in Fremont Creek, but had we talked to Jack Phillips yet? We said we hadn’t, and Patricia said that if anyone knew our writer friend, it would be Jack Phillips; he’d taught English for thirty years over at the high school and may have done a little writing himself. It seemed like an unpromising lead, but we thanked her warmly for her time and saw ourselves out.
“Should we give this Jack Phillips a call?” said Harriet as the three of us stood on the sidewalk outside the funeral home.
“I don’t see why not,” I said, although I had a pretty good hunch it would be a waste of our time.
Sérgio looked up and down the street. We’d been inside every shop, restaurant, and municipal building by now, which, given the size of the town, actually wasn’t that impressive a feat.
“You two go,” said Sérgio. “I’ll head back to the motel.”
We were staying at the Teton Motor Lodge, Fremont Creek’s only motel. Located at the end of Main Street, just before the road became State Highway 49, the establishment consisted of twelve cozy log cabins that had been superficially renovated—a new coat of varnish on the logs, fresh paint slapped on the interior walls—by the current proprietor, an enterprising native son named Kenny who exhorted us, each time we saw him, to try out the new hot tub he’d just installed behind the main office building. If we hadn’t brought our own bathing suits, he told us, we could rent them at the front desk. We’d noticed the hot tub, a secondhand affair that had seen better days, sheltered within a white vinyl gazebo, but so far, to Kenny’s obvious disappointment, none of us had taken a dip.
“Come on,” Harriet said as Sérgio started walking motel-ward.
“We could wait to talk to Jack Phillips,” I said, “if you’re needing a break.”
A cold wind blew, cutting through my wool coat and sending an abandoned Styrofoam cup skittering down the sidewalk.
“I’ve finished for the day,” said Sérgio. “Go ahead without me.”
We watched him trudge up the street, head down, feet dragging.
Sans Sérgio, then, Harriet and I headed out in her old Toyota to meet Jack Phillips.
We drove toward the Tetons, their rugged outline still visible against the dim, early evening sky. On either side of us, empty potato fields stretched to the horizon. Inside the car, the heater blasted, not quietly. Neither of us spoke. Not knowing, though, when I’d have another chance to speak privately with Harriet, I decided that this was as good a time as any to clear the air.
“So how do you know Craig Ahlgren?” I said.
If the question bothered Harriet, she didn’t let on.
Eyes fixed on the long straight road ahead of us, she said, “He was my bishop when I lived in Salt Lake.”
I adjusted the shoulder strap of my seat belt.
“Did you know him well?” I said.
“Well enough,” she said. “Why? What did he tell you?”
There was just enough of an edge to her question that I lost my nerve. If there were things she wanted to leave buried, they could stay buried.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just that he hopes you’re doing well.”
“Hmm,” she said, and that was the end of our conversation.
Jack Phillips turned out to be an even flimsier lead than Patricia Stockton had made him out to be. A short, broad-shouldered old man with a bushy white beard, he lived by himself in a small house on a lonely couple of acres he’d bought from a dissolute farmer decades earlier.
As we sipped hot cocoa around his Formica-topped kitchen table, Mr. Phillips recited for us a heroic catalog of grievances he had with Fremont Creek High School students, past and present. And every time Harriet or I tried to bring up Salgado-MacKenzie, Mr. Phillips would set off on a new rant about the sorry state of educational affairs in Fremont Creek—school-board politics, funding issues, etc. I think Harriet and I were both sympathetic to Mr. Phillips’s plight, at least broadly, but it became clear pretty quickly that he had no information that directly pertained to our search. Each time we tried to politely extricate ourselves, though, a new rant kicked into gear. It took us well over an hour to convince him that, as much as we were enjoying his company, we really needed to go.
When we finally walked out of Jack Phillips’s house, leaving him brooding in the kitchen, it was dark outside and fifteen degrees cooler than when we’d arrived. Amid flurries of snow—October storms were not uncommon in Fremont Creek—we drove back to the motel.
XIV
In a disconcerting development, we found Sérgio sitting in the Teton Motor Lodge’s aboveground hot tub, his slouching torso wreathed in fluorescent-lit steam. As we drew closer, I could see through the illuminated water that he wore a pair of turquoise swim trunks with the words PROPERTY OF TETON MOTOR LODGE stenciled across the front.
“Hey,” I said. “Everything okay?”
He drew a hand over his dripping beard.
“I’m drinking a milkshake in a hot tub,” he said, lifting a paper milkshake cup for us to see. “Kenny’s idea. He said it might be fun, the cold in the hot.”
“The cold in the hot in the cold,” said Harriet, gesturing at the snow falling around us.
“As you say,” said Sérgio, closing his eyes and leaning back against the wall of the tub.
“I bet Kenny’s thrilled,” said Harriet.
“On cloud nine,” said Sérgio.
Harriet seemed to be taking things in stride, but I was still trying to get a handle on the situation.
“So, Kenny suggested you drink a milkshake in the hot tub?” I said.
“No, he insisted I drink a milkshake,” said Sérgio. “He went and bought it for me himself.”
Sérgio appeared to feel nothing—not amusement, not pleasure, not embarrassment, or chagrin—about his current state, which worried me even more than his sulking had.
“That’s a very specific request, with the milkshake,” I said and then lowered my voice. “Do you think Kenny has, like, a webcam set up or something?”
“A webcam?” said Harriet. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, this has to be a thing, right? People who get off on watching people drink milkshakes in hot tubs?”
Harriet rolled her eyes. Sérgio shrugged.
“If he’s filming then he’s filming,” he said.
The hot tub’s heater hummed to life. Sérgio leaned back, eyes closed. Harriet zipped her coat up all the way to her chin and huddled down into it. I checked my watch.
“Listen,” I said, hoping to snap Sérgio out of this funk. “It’s Friday night. We should stop by the bar and the Spud again—catch the weekend crowd, talk to someone new.”
“You can do what you want,” said Sérgio, eyes still closed.
Snow had started to build up on my hair and shoulders. I stepped closer to the steam.
“Is the motel office still open?” said Harriet, blowing into her gloved hands.
“I believe so,” said Sérgio.
“Then I think I’ll join you in the hot tub,” she said.
I looked at her through the steam. The evening had just taken another unexpected turn. Sérgio only nodded, though, as if everything was unfolding exactly as he’d imagined it might.
I took a step back from the tub, and Harriet turned to me.
“Daniel?” she said. “What about you?”
There was no question that the hot tub grossed me out. I’m no germophobe, but I’d once spent a queasy afternoon following links from a local newspaper article to CDC reports of fecal contamination in public swimming pools and hot tubs. Still, I had no interest in hunting for Salgado-MacKenzie by myself, and what else was there to do in Fremont Creek on a Friday night?
“Okay,” I said.
So we each borrowed a swimsuit from the box Kenny kept under the office counter, and fifteen
minutes later all three of us—Sérgio, Harriet, and I—were sitting in the hot tub, the bubble and whir of the jets precluding any conversation. The awkward intimacy of being so nearly naked at such close quarters with two people I barely knew set me on edge. My two companions, however, seemed completely at ease, Sérgio allowing his generous, hair-covered belly to bob first above and then below the surface of the water as he reclined his body, and Harriet stretching her arms behind her, their nearly translucent skin loose along the underside.
I turned and watched the snow falling on the empty parking lot, the outside temperature having dropped low enough for the flakes to stick—little white dots on the black asphalt, then small clumps, then soon enough, a blank sheet of white. Occasionally a car or truck drove past on Main Street. Mostly, though, the night was still. The hot tub jets finished their cycle and shut off.
Sérgio lifted his body from the water to sit on the edge of the tub.
“So warm,” he said. “And all this snow.”
“It’s the best time to hot-tub,” said Harriet.
Sérgio looked up at the white vinyl roof of the gazebo.
“The steam,” he said, pointing up. “It’s collecting. Condensating? Condensing?”
“Condensing,” said Harriet.
“It’s going to start dripping soon,” I said.
“A design oversight,” said Harriet, hunching her bony shoulders in anticipation.
We all looked up and then, almost in unison, back down at the steamy surface of the water.
“I feel so foolish,” said Sérgio.
For a second I thought he was talking about the hot tub and the gazebo, but then he went on.
“I understood going into this that we might not find the book,” he said. “I understood that. I did.” He took a long drag on the straw of his milkshake, loudly slurping up the melted dregs. “But still.” He shook his head. “It’s the cruelty of hope.” He paused. “My life, or if not my life, then life more generally—I’d like it to mean something, although I have no idea what.” Sérgio scratched his beard. “You see, I’ve tried philosophy, but philosophy feels far too cautious, too bound by human logic. And then there’s religion—God, angels, sin—but none of that has ever appealed to me. Fiction masquerading as cosmology is what it feels like to me, and all too self-important, too self-serious.”
