Mission to America

by Walter Kirn

  I undressed to my shorts and slid in under my blankets, clawing them up tight against my chin. Snowshoe cooled down fast at night; the valley just couldn't hold its heat. I lay awake and waited for my partner, but after an hour the nonsense thoughts began that ease the mind into deep sleep. A wolf running loose in the kitchen aisle of WorkMart, upending blenders with its swishing tail. The wedding of a doe and a bull moose with a lighted brass candelabra instead of antlers. Betsy in a wheelchair on a riverbank, coughing up little brown toads into a handkerchief while old Errol Effingham squatted in diapers beside her, the missing moose antlers sprouting from his gray head.

  Visions perpetual. Visions on top of visions. The Seeress believed that visions were natural objects, as common and ordinary as stones or sticks. Taken individually, she told us, few of them were worthy of much attention; it was the material that formed them, and which was released for reuse when they dissolved, that deserved our wonder and admiration. Because, finally, this was all our world was made of: decomposed visions. Not atoms—bits of dreams.

  My partner stayed away all night. I called him in the morning and got a message, longer than I thought a phone could hold, which jumped around in a way that frightened me and sounded at times like a child's letter home from some sort of camp or institution. “I'm heartbroken, and I realize you are, too, but we can't let our moods interrupt our mission. I'll try to be back by Friday, but until then please don't call this phone again. And don't drive up here, especially not with Lara. You might want to stay away from her, in fact. I know she's an Apostle now, but, well . . . The ranch is grand, a blessed place. Last night we watched two wolves from the back deck and I had the privilege of meeting Ronald Howard, a widely admired cinema artist. He's also a very funny, very kind, surprisingly philosophical gentleman. I gave him my pocket edition of Discourses to take back to California, so cross your fingers. He read a few lines after supper and seemed intrigued. Stay busy down there and don't brood about the Seeress. She's ninety-seven. It's time. Eff Sr. says ‘Howdy.' Today I'll get to see buffalo up close.”

  The ramblings seemed to end there, but just as I was hanging up I heard: “This is a secret, Mason. I hope you're there still. Lauer says he's heard succession rumors and that it might be my mother. She's disappeared. He's guessing she's up at Riverbright, secluded. I don't know what I think about this yet, and I wish I could call you and discuss it, but all the guests here have to check their phones with ranch security. Even Ronald Howard. You'd be interested in the chat I had with him, but I'm bending the rules by even recording this. The guard is here beside me, listening. Thank you, Luis. Luis is Roman Catholic. I told him I had solemn religious business, but he could be fired for this favor, so I'm stopping now. Luis can view twelve different cameras from his booth here, but he tells me there's one he can't see that watches him. I think I noticed the screen in Eff Sr.'s bedroom, but it was all dusty, so I think we're fine. I'm learning a lot about the world up here, and I think I may be helping, too. Little Eff says his father's color was much improved after I gave him the tincture of powdered lichen described in Little Red Elk's Prairie Pharmacy. I wish I could contact my mother. I miss her voice.”

  My partner sounded lonesome and not quite sane. Considering his strange surroundings and the momentous gossip he'd just heard, I found this understandable. I set down my phone on the metal sidewalk table where I'd been drinking my daily Americano and sent a little tapping prayer his way. Tapping prayers were brief and wordless, an inspired invention of Mother Lucy's meant to accommodate nine Hungarian immigrants who showed up in Bluff in the early 1890s as the result of a story about the Church that had appeared in a Budapest evening paper for reasons no one could explain. The Hungarians, who spoke no English, were taught to touch their left hands to their right temples and tap them, telegraph-style, for thirty seconds while smiling in the direction of the sun and imagining their loved ones' faces. The tapping sent magnetic ripples through the ether that were of benefit to both sender and receiver.

  I stirred more honey into my bitter coffee and looked up and down the street for a white Jeep. I was waiting for the very person, Lara, whom I'd just been instructed to avoid and no longer wanted to see in any case, because suddenly there was just so much to think about. She'd come by the van at a quarter after midnight, awakened me by rattling the door, and kept me up for another forty minutes with stories of her mistreatment by Little Eff, whom she referred to in a single sentence as a “passive-aggressive emotional cripple” as well as “the only man I'll ever love.” Her charges against him were vehement but vague, expressed in a language I didn't understand. He'd “sexually invalidated” her. He'd “subverted” their “underlying romantic contract.” I asked her if he'd ever hit her. “In what sense?” she replied. I begged her to let me rest then. I promised to meet her as soon as I got up.

  Now I was considering escape routes. I sealed a lid on my cup, unlocked my bike, and walked it toward an alley between the coffee shop and a bakery specializing in dog and cat treats where I'd once tried to buy a doughnut by mistake. A block away I spotted long-haired Lance craning his neck out the window of a pickup that he was trying to park between two sports cars. Though the space looked plenty large, Lance pulled out and reapproached it twice, possibly concerned for his truck's paint, a smoothly luminous obsidian finish that couldn't have been achieved with normal spray guns and might have involved dipping the whole vehicle in a massive tub or vat. I doubted he'd seen me, but I waved in case he had. Snowshoe Springs was shrinking by the day.

  I mounted my bike at the entrance to the alley, then saw that its outlet was blocked by a delivery van. When I turned back around, they were both there: Lara and Lance. Their postures indicated they knew each other but said nothing about whether they liked each other. Through some odd coincidence they were dressed like twins in red zippered sweater jackets, loose black pants covered with odd-shaped pockets and enclosures, and those thick-treaded hiking boots that pick up mud and then leave it behind in W-shaped chunks.

  They said they were hungry and, to be agreeable, I said I was too, though I'd eaten a carrot muffin at the coffee shop. Through a series of tense suggestions and compromises that reminded me of the steak-dinner–wine debate, we ended up getting breakfast at a restaurant deep in the mazelike artificial village located at the bottom of the ski hill. The restaurant's decor seemed European—paintings of lakes and castles, cuckoo clocks—but the food was Mexican. Lance convinced me to let him order for me.

  “The huevos,” he said. “Guacamole on the side. Lara? Get something solid. It's on me.”

  “Sourdough toast, no butter,” she told the waitress. “Decaf double soy latte.”

  “You're not in Malibu. Bring her poached eggs and tomatillo salsa.”

  Lara wrinkled up her nose. Perhaps to mask her fatigue from staying up so late, she'd brushed out her hair into curtains that hid her cheeks and bangs that hung down almost to her eyebrows. The strip of face that remained looked spooky, furtive, like a feral cat peering out between two hay bales.

  As we talked and drank coffee and waited for our meals, my mind kept tugging me away to Bluff and thoughts of Pamela Stark, my partner's mother. Through what sort of alchemy could a neighbor lady be transformed into the Seeress? Or did the office consist of nothing more than a staff, a mansion, and a title? Maybe it was just another job. I felt the mystery draining from my world and resolved to resist the process.

  I turned to Lara, who'd been holding a glass shaker of ground cinnamon over her coffee cup for several seconds, apparently worried about adding calories. “You still haven't told me how you know each other. Through AlpenCross?”

  “Further back than that,” Lance said. He nodded at Lara as though asking for her permission to relate the whole story, part, or none. Her hair blocked my view of her reaction. It must have been a strong one, though; she flipped over the shaker, slapped its bottom, and let the cinnamon stream into her coffee until it formed a floating brown pyramid that, after vigorous
stirring with a spoon, flattened to a brown sand dune but wouldn't dissolve.

  “She'd rather we talked about something else,” said Lance.

  “Actually,” she said, “I couldn't care less.” She bundled together three sugar packets and tore them open as a unit.

  “Lara's my ex,” Lance said.

  “Correction. An ex.”

  “True. But by far my favorite.”

  “Whatever,” said Lara. She sipped her coffee, which she'd turned into sludge. It coated her lips and teeth. She sucked them clean.

  Lance's story lasted until the check came. Lara didn't interrupt him once, just went on experimenting with her breakfast until the hot-sauce bottle, the salt and pepper shakers, and the dishes of sour cream and chopped tomatoes ringed her plate like the moons of Jupiter. The commotion and the mess she made confused me as to how much food she swallowed, which may have been her plan. Her life looked like torture. She treated its simplest tasks—not just eating, I suspected, but bathing, dressing, sleeping, and socializing—as awesome, monumental contests that could end in just two ways: absolute defeat or joyous victory. But should she flee or fight? She couldn't decide.

  Her marriage to Lance was brief, I learned: three months. They met on a weeklong wilderness rafting trip. He was guiding, she was paying. She'd brought along four TV friends from California, including a young musician she'd fallen in love with, but he gashed open one of his legs on a sharp rock and was helicoptered to Denver the first day out. Four days later, Lance and Lara were engaged. He quit his job, returned with her to Hollywood, and found work as an exercise coach—a “personal trainer.” He missed the rivers, though. He missed the mountains. Then Lara's soap opera was canceled. She sold her house at an enormous profit and moved with Lance to Snowshoe Springs, intending to rest, relax, lose weight, and resume her career in six months or a year. The wedding, solemnized by a Hopi holy man (“My fault,” said Lance. “I was full of New Age bullcrap”) took place on a cliff top that Lance said I could see by looking through a window across the restaurant. I squinted and strained. “It doesn't matter,” he said. “It's shaped like a dove; a miracle in granite. AlpenCross wants to buy it as a retreat but we'll need a big donor. Complicated deal. The family that owns it never sells land.”

  Lara glanced up at Lance from her latest project: ripping a soft tortilla into strips and wrapping them around chunks of avocado smeared with refried beans.

  “Fine, then. No secrets. The Effinghams,” Lance said.

  The name set his story on a different course. He folded the tale of his troubled marriage to Lara into a recent history of Snowshoe. The town had “sold its soul,” he said. Starting fifteen or twenty years ago, the old family ranches he'd grown up around had been nibbled away at by rich folks from the coasts interested in lots for winter ski homes. As real estate values doubled and quadrupled, the ranchers' heirs grew flush with cash, which, in imitation of the newcomers, they rapidly squandered on cars and trips and luxury goods, amassing debts that required further land sales and sometimes provoked disastrous family feuds that led to liquidations of whole homesteads. Then the romances began. At drunken parties that ran throughout the ski season and later, after the golf courses went in, throughout the other seasons as well, local men paired up with visiting women, local women ran off with visiting men, and divorces, breakdowns, and suicides ensued—so many of them that the town acquired a nickname among the opportunistic Denver feelings doctors who moved to town by the dozens: “Snowshoe Strange.”

  “I'm not shifting blame, because sin is real,” Lance said, “but Lara and I, we didn't have a chance here. Communal damnation—there's really such a thing.”

  Lara punctured an egg yolk with a fork and Lance cut his eyes at her. She didn't speak. She looked like she might speak later, but not now. She sprinkled the ruptured yolk with grated cheese.

  “I fathered a child with another woman,” Lance said. “A San Jose Internet executive. Lara'd like you to have the filthy facts, apparently.”

  She seemed to agree because she finally ate something. Ate, chewed, and swallowed it. A shred of lettuce.

  “Her own indiscretions we won't go into,” Lance said.

  Lara shrugged at him.

  “Okay, then. A certain then-married man whose wealthy father had just had several large colon polyps removed, thereby piquing widespread interest in the disposition of his estate, was soaking one evening in a natural hot springs when a certain restless married female happened along by sheer coincidence, shed her clothes, and climbed in next to him. Powdered narcotic stimulants appeared. Complaints of marital misery were traded. The following morning a private jet departed for either Las Vegas or Miami Beach—its destination still remains a mystery—and when it returned to Snowshoe five days later, two couples had been dissolved to form a third.” Lance pushed away his empty plate, streaked with sauce where he'd mopped it with tortillas. “You look uncomfortable, Mason.”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Because my favorite ex refuses to talk. It makes people tense, like they're waiting for an eruption. An old only-child attention-getting ploy.”

  Lance had it wrong, though. The problem was my youth. At some point in the middle of his speech, I'd folded my hands on my lap and grown aware—keenly, overwhelmingly aware—of the defenseless softness of my skin and the tenderness of the underlying nerves. Time had battered Lance and Lara, encasing their spirits in crusty, windburned shells, but I'd developed no such coating. The world Lance described, so ravenous and faithless, so saturated with schemes and plots and traps, struck me as fatally inhospitable. Chances were I'd manage to survive, but how, exactly, and at what cost? I felt myself aging even as I wondered this. I felt the crackly dryness setting in.

  “That it hasn't worked out must hurt like holy hell,” Lance said, reaching for the breakfast bill. He brought out a checkbook, much to my relief, and signed his name, though the checkbook's cover read “AlpenCross.” When he entered the figure in the ledger, I saw that the account held quite a sum: seventeen thousand five hundred and fifty dollars.

  “Who's up for a hike?” Lance asked. “Buckhorn Falls, four miles. A little light cardio to start the day. Sunblock, fresh water, and trail mix in my daypack. Maybe we'll come across a calving elk.”

  At last Lara spoke: “I still believe in love. I always will. It's my blessing and my burden.”

  Our waitress, who'd come up beside her, said, “Ditto, hon.” They shared a long look, then the waitress took Lance's check. Lara watched her walk off with moist pink eyes.

  “You need to get right with the Lord,” Lance said.

  “Get fucked.”

  “There. The first step. The eruption.”

  “So hard you hemorrhage.”

  “Anally, presumably,” Lance said.

  Lara nodded. Then we all went hiking.

  The boots Lance gave me to replace my dress shoes were tight in the toes but loose around the heels. After walking in them for an hour, up a switchbacking path of mud and jagged stones that was blocked every few hundred yards by fallen pines that the Forest Service had flagged but not yet cut, I could feel my heartbeat in my feet as well as the warm, oily ooze of broken blisters. Instead of pushing the pain aside, I did as my father had taught my buddies and me during a freezing fifth-grade camping trip and forced myself to dwell inside the agony until it started to feel normal.

  Lara fell back about two miles up, telling us she wanted to gather wildflowers but looking like she intended to take a nap, and Lance and I picked up our pace, passing the water bottle back and forth until we were gulping each other's blended saliva. I hoped he lived as cleanly as he pretended to. I walked two steps behind him to watch his calves flex, a rhythmic display of focused power that seemed to reveal some obscure, essential lesson about the nature of motion itself. Spirit, according to Discourses, was a by-product of activity, like the reflection from a spinning fan blade, and our souls in the end did not reside within us but flowed outward from our moveme
nts. This conflicted with certain other doctrines, but such conflicts just gave us topics for debate.

  I softened on Lance as we climbed through aspen groves whose mottled profusions of trembling leaf-shaped shadows and rich, humid layers of moss and mushroom smells brought on a feeling of storybook enchantment. His voice sounded more sincere in these surroundings, less distorted by pride and pain. He named the plants we passed, the types of rock. When a ladybug landed on the back of his right hand, he showed it to me, then held it near his whitish, wind-chapped lips and carefully puffed it back into the air.

  “How well do you know Betsy?” I wanted to trust him.

  “You've seen her since that night?”

  “A time or two.”

  “She's everything I wanted when I was young and everything I distrust now that I'm not. I guess you can tell that I've answered this question before.”

  “Who asked it?”

  “Lots of people. The girl provokes that. Why she stays down in the minors I don't know—she could be out there playing the big stadiums. She has the right build and all the moves.” Lance snugged down a shoulder strap on his orange pack by tugging the end of a hanging black nylon tab. “I'd say steer clear, except you probably won't, and if you do, she'll come back so hard and strong . . . can you reach behind me there, the bottom zipper, and maybe you'll notice a medication organizer, see-through plastic, with little flip-up lids?”

  He took his pills without water, five or six of them, his chin tilted up and his throat stretched long and tight like a pelican swallowing a minnow. He seemed to be able to track the pills' descent; he didn't look down until they'd reached his stomach, at which point he shut his eyes and mumbled something that might have been a brief, memorized prayer. The man had his layers, his levels; I could see that. AlpenCross was just a wrapping for them.