Mission to America

by Walter Kirn

  At almost ten at night a surprising number of places were still open, including a coffee shop whose ponytailed countergirl forgave me for being seventy-five cents short of the price of the triple Americano she'd made for me and sweetened with the same brand of hazelnut syrup I'd found in the guesthouse kitchen three days ago and grown so fond of that I sometimes sipped it plain. I'd left my wallet at home, I'd just remembered, because, with Little Eff around, why carry any money of your own? As I fished up loose change from my pockets, so embarrassed that the countergirl blushed on my behalf, I learned the answer: to pay for your escape.

  I walked the streets and found music along one of them—a string quartet in formal clothing playing a piece I'd heard in church once and thought had been composed by an Apostle. (I'd thought we'd invented the sewing machine, too, once.) I spotted a hat on the ground near the viola and, completely coinless, I backed away some, a few feet behind the paying listeners and next to an older man who looked bankrupt, too, but seemed to love the music more than anyone. His eyes were closed as he directed with his fingers. Some of his nails were black and others were missing, but his hands had lost no flexibility—his performance animated every knuckle. I wanted to speak with him when the playing stopped, to see if he needed help of any kind, but I felt bad about my coffee, whose purchase had left me with nothing to offer him except for a tract that was folded up in my back pocket. I'd spent my funds, my time, and my advice on all the wrong things and wrong people, I understood then, and in my shame I slunk off down a side street in search of a trash can for my paper cup.

  I knew they were in the Suburban looking for me, and I knew they'd find me eventually, but I wanted to delay the strained reunion until I'd rehearsed my part in it and pictured in more detail what theirs would be.

  From Hadley, sympathy and comfort, in any form or degree that I desired. Wherever Little Eff had found her and whatever his reason for flying her to Snowshoe, the two of them had no deep sentimental ties. People like them weren't capable of any. They skimmed and skipped and floated, they never landed, like birds in the time of Noah and the Flood. Hadley's work was no mystery to me now; it was simply the work she'd done this evening. She tried out interesting words, she showed her legs, she kept track of her hair under varied types of lighting, she created distractions, she chased the mood, she winked, she dissolved herself in the occasion. Maybe she was paid in money or maybe in the pleasure of being near it. Had Little Eff ever really thought of marrying her, though, or was she just someone to bring along to parties and occupy men whose women he had eyes for? I couldn't quite decide. They lived in a blurry world, those two, where clear, consistent intentions weren't required.

  And then there was Betsy. I expected she'd apologize, but not for misbehaving, merely for mismanaging her vitality. Too much wine, too much commotion, too much noise, too much eagerness to please her host. She'd reduce her offenses to small mistakes, reduce the mistakes to innocent missteps, and then ask forgiveness for having done nothing, really. And I would tell her I couldn't grant forgiveness, and neither could I withhold it—I didn't have it. Forgiveness already took place. It took place first, on the Morn of Emergence, which other faiths call Creation. Forgiveness and Creation were the same act.

  And Little Eff? I imagined he'd just shrug and then direct our driver to the nightclub by way of some shortcut the driver would likely not take. On the way Little Eff would tell us about the helicopter and the incident at dinner would be forgotten. I wondered now if there'd even been an incident. Apprehensions set loose by my conversation with Helen and fears left over from my hike with Lance might have conspired to reshape a scene of ordinary Friday-night high spirits into something sinister and sickening. I concluded as I walked farther that it was true: I'd worried this betrayal into existence.

  I happened upon another group of street musicians who sang in close harmony while snapping their fingers and spinning on their heels. I'd never seen a living black face before, and suddenly here were three of them, ecstatic, showing none of the anguish that I'd been taught was the ineradicable legacy of their people's forced exile in Terrestria. Indeed, their ongoing mistreatment was often cited by leading Apostles as one of the chief reasons for our policy of social withdrawal. We wanted no part in a hatred which the Seeress had characterized in the pages of Luminaria as “a loathsome reflux heaved up from sour bellies poisoned by the acids of Comparison.” It mystified some of us, including my grandmother, why the All-in-One had not thus far directed a single Negro to our safe harbor. She consoled herself with the notion that cruel Terrestrians had blocked the way of many who'd tried to join us but that one day the tide would be too mighty to frustrate. I asked her one time how she knew this. She answered, “Logic.”

  “It's nice to see them so happy, isn't it?” I said this to a young mother whose little boy had edged up close to the singers to mime their dance steps. She swiveled her eyes at me but not her head. She called her boy, who didn't turn, and then stepped briskly forward, grabbed his hand, and led him around behind the trio to listen from another spot. A man to my left who'd heard and watched, apparently, said, “She's too sensitive. Don't sweat it, kid. You bet it's nice. I'm glad they've got this outlet.” We spoke a bit and I learned the entertainers were part of an annual festival of the arts meant to bolster summer tourism. The news disappointed me. I'd come to think of Aspen as a place where people gathered spontaneously, out of sheer enthusiasm, to fill the crisp night air with pleasant sounds.

  “Here you are. I've been everywhere. My God . . .” Betsy clutched one of my elbows and tugged me backward, away from the crowd toward the window of a jewelry shop displaying rows of empty felt-lined boxes. The Suburban was nowhere to be seen, and the hairs that stuck to Betsy's damp forehead said she'd been running—facts my hopeful heart interpreted as evidence of a quarrel at the restaurant. Betsy, aware that I'd been schemed against, had declared her love for me and fled. The others had stayed behind and eaten dessert, hatching new mischief between bites of cheesecake.

  I opened my arms but Betsy rebuffed the hug. “Something terrible happened. Errol got a call. Somebody croaked. Some weird, depressed ex-girlfriend. He hired a helicopter to fly him home and left us the car. The driver's getting gas.”

  “Her name would be Lara. She's dead?” I asked. “She's dead.”

  “She killed herself up at his ranch, at the security gate. She overdosed in the front seat of her car.”

  I could see it, and the moments leading up to it. Varnished pink fingernails punching numbered buttons, desperate to work out the code that raised the gate, and Lara's numb face as she finally understood she'd been barred for all time from a life among the Effinghams and their invented private wilderness. Betsy dragged me across the street and through a parking lot, describing in more detail what she knew, but I hardly listened; my thoughts kept clustering around Lara's first attempt in the lukewarm bath, when she'd gazed at me with mascara-smeared raccoon eyes as I wrung out her gritty vomit from the washcloth and my partner held forth on lofty Apostle doctrine. She was already dead, but we were starved for followers and stupefied by the elixir of our own heroism, and so we pretended words could resurrect her. As she slipped into permanent slumber at the locked gate had the newest Apostle beseeched the All-in-One or had she, as I somehow knew she had, appealed to some white-bearded deity from childhood more easily envisioned and comprehended? We'd brought Lara nothing useful and come too late, I saw, and this would be the story of our whole mission, which sprung not from compassion, as we'd told ourselves, but from bitterness over our own approaching demise. We wanted to drown with strangers in our arms, to take outsiders down with us and feel them struggle. We were lonely in Bluff. We'd made ourselves so lonely. We'd waited for more than a century for company, persuaded by Mother Lucy's divinations that columns of pilgrims would show up any day, compelled by our irresistible magnetism to abandon all they knew. It wounded our pride when the seekers never appeared, and so we went out to abduct some before we vanished. />
  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 g
ave 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.