CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The sun hammered the freeway, turning the air above it to jelly. Still we three pushed on—Rovil, Dr. Gloria, and I—Tint Shields on full, air-conditioning turned up to eleven. Rovil tried to chat, but I had become hazardous cargo, silent and toxic. Ollie had vanished. That morning I’d tried to call her pen, but she didn’t answer, and the desk clerk claimed to have no idea who I was talking about.
I felt like shit.
Rovil couldn’t believe we were leaving without her, but I told him to keep out of it, letting him think Ollie and I had split over some female relationship thing he’d never understand. “She’s just cooling off. She’ll be fine. Ollie’s, like, hypercompetent.”
He looked worriedly out at the motel parking lot and said, “I suppose.”
“You’re still my pal, right, Rovil? You’re still with me on this?”
Rovil breathed out. “Sometimes I think you don’t need a friend so much as chauffeur.”
“A chauffeur would quit.”
That got a smile out of him. “Look, I know I’m an asshole,” I said. “But we’re almost there, kid—a few hours from Emerald City. Just take me the rest of the way.”
He relented, and after a couple of hours on the road he’d dropped the worried pout. He listened to his music, a grating form of Indonesian pop, and when we crossed the border into New Mexico he set the car to auto and let go of the steering wheel, excited to finally be in a state that allowed autonomous cars—proof that there was as much joy in surrendering free will as exercising it.
Sometime after 2 p.m. we left the interstate, and Rovil took the wheel again. Los Lunas was a surprisingly green town on the Rio Grande, with lawns and trees living the high life off the river. The car’s GPS led us confidently out of town along Highway 6, west into the desert, through brown, rolling hills. Then we left the highway for a smaller road, then exited that one as well. Each turn seemed to lead us onto narrower, sketchier roads until finally a white cement drive appeared on our right. A black steel gate blocked it, and bleached stone fences curved away in both directions.
Rovil stopped the car. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Fine.” I was sweating in the cold air-conditioning, every pore open. I tried to think of something to say. “Hell of a driveway.”
The road ran for five miles and ended in a cul-de-sac. According to the satellite pictures there was a cluster of buildings at the end of the road, but their details were obscured in a cloud of fuzzy pixels; the rich could afford privacy agreements.
“He owns everything within ten miles of the compound,” Rovil said. He rolled up to the gate and the entry panel.
Dr. Gloria said to me, “Put your head down.”
“What?” I couldn’t concentrate.
“Cameras,” she said, and nodded toward the gates. “It’s what Ollie would have had you do.”
“Jesus, how could cameras make a difference? Edo knows we’re coming. He invited us.”
Rovil had rolled down the window. I started to tell him the gate code that had been in the text message, but he said “I remember” and typed it in.
The gates slid open. We rolled through, started to pick up speed, and I said, “Wait. Pull over. Now.”
He stopped the car and I jumped out. I marched across the pebbled ground toward a set of boulders, toward a clump of gnarled bushes, toward … fuck. Nowhere. Into the heat. Sweat poured from my face and dried almost instantly.
I stopped in front of a large juniper bush. Its limbs were gray as old bones. The plants around it were equally dead and strange, a cohort of parched alien bodies buried standing up. Humans didn’t belong out here.
Dr. Gloria descended from the sky and landed upon an Old Testament–quality boulder.
“You have absolutely no idea what’s going on in your own brain, do you?”
“Not now, Gloria.”
“Would you like me to explain?”
“I would like you to explain what the hell Edo’s doing out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“I like the desert,” she said.
“It’s the fucking waiting room of the apocalypse. In a hundred years half the planet’s going to look like this. So, what, he just had to get a preview?’
“You could have stayed with her,” Dr. Gloria said. “Called off this trip until she could come with you.”
“What do you do if you want to run out for milk?” I said. “How long do you have to wait for a fucking ambulance out here?”
“I’m concerned that you’re thinking of ambulances,” she said.
“I’m concerned that I have not punched you in the fucking throat.”
“You love her,” Dr. Gloria said. “Maybe you should admit that.”
“Why, exactly, did I want you to come back?” I turned back toward the car and was surprised to see that it was more than a football field away, American or Canadian rules. Rovil leaned against the fender, gazing out at the landscape, watching me but pretending not to. When I started walking back he casually got back inside the car.
Minutes later I dropped into the front passenger seat. “Sorry,” I said to him. “Mexican food.” He nodded as if he believed me and handed me a bottle of water. I drank half of it in two long swallows.
We zipped along the white road for several minutes. The air-conditioning triggered something in my body, and another tide of sweat swept out of me. I felt like I was being wrung out: cell walls rupturing, epidural levees crumbling, veins—
“Now you’re being melodramatic,” Dr. Gloria said.
A figure appeared ahead of the car, walking toward us in the middle of the road. It was a man, wearing shorts but naked from the waist up, tall and broad with a big gut. A floppy hat obscured his face.
Rovil slowed the car. We stopped when the man was perhaps thirty yards from us. He stopped walking and peered at the darkened windshield.
Rovil glanced at me.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s him.”
I got out of the car again. Dr. Gloria alighted by the side of the road.
“Edo,” I said.
Edo Anderssen Vik stood up straighter. “Lyda?” He took off his hat. “Lyda Rose!”
I walked toward him. Behind me, Rovil got out of the car.
“And Rovil?” Edo said. Again completely surprised. “This is amazing!” A bad thought occurred to me: Edo was not only God-drunk, he was afflicted with Alzheimer’s.
He stepped toward me, arms wide for a hug, and I stepped back. Edo dropped his arms, confused, the hat forgotten in his hand. His round gut looked permanently red; his chest was covered by a mat of white hair.
Rovil moved up and shook Edo’s free hand. “How are you doing, Mr. Vik?”
“Rovil, please, you’re not an intern anymore. Call me Edo.” He looked from Rovil to me, still grinning. “What are you doing here?”
“We got your text,” I said.
He frowned, not understanding. Then he glanced up. He listened for a moment, then nodded. Someone was speaking to him from the sky.
“Ah,” he said. “Of course.” He looked back the way he’d come, then said, “The house is just down the road. Lyda, will you walk with me? It’s less than a mile.”
I said to Rovil, “I promise to be good.”
“I’ll follow in the car,” he said.
“Closely,” Dr. Gloria told him, but of course he couldn’t hear her.
* * *
We walked for a while, Dr. Gloria trailing me like my maid of honor, the car creeping along behind her.
“You’re a hard man to find,” I said.
Edo laughed. “I suppose so.”
“We’ve been trying for weeks,” I said. “We even tried to see you in Chicago, but Eduard cut us off.”
“He did?” Edo looked upset. “But of course. I suppose he’d be very upset if he found out you were here.”
“So he’s not home.”
“Oh no. He and his wife left last night for Amsterdam.” He smiled. “Nick
of time, eh? Otherwise … whoosh. He’d run you off.”
“What’s he so afraid of?”
He thought for a moment and said, “A few years ago I was in my car, and I saw a man by the side of the road. It was very cold out. He was holding a cardboard sign that said HUNGRY. Just that one word.” He shook his head as if seeing it for the first time.
“I felt that hunger myself, Lyda. I felt like I was starving, that I was going to die. Is it like that for you? I could feel his weakness, how cold he was. I told the driver to stop. I gave the man my jacket. I took off my shoes. Then I gave him my wallet, and a smartcard that had access to my accounts. I even tried to give him the car!”
He chuckled. “My driver tried to stop me, but what could he do? I was his boss. In any case the man was too frightened by me to accept the car, or my clothing. He took my card, though.” He laughed again.
“My son heard what happened. The driver told him. Eduard took away my access—to my money first, then my company, then to anyone I used to work with. I kept trying to help people, give them what they needed. I couldn’t be trusted, he said. If I fought him, he would have me committed.” Edo shrugged. “Given my history, I knew this was no idle threat, eh? And I couldn’t afford to let that happen. So we moved out here. Oh, I travel when necessary. But Eduard only lets me see a few members of the board, and key customers who insist on meeting me, and I must follow the script. Because if I don’t—”
He stopped suddenly and put a hand to his face. He was overcome with some intense emotion: sadness, grief? I couldn’t tell. Something in the Numinous had made Edo into an empathic wreck. No wonder his son had isolated him.
I said, “‘Give everything to the poor and you will have treasure in Heaven.’”
“I’m sorry?” Edo said. His cheeks were wet with tears.
“The Bible story,” I said. “Rich man, the eye of the needle…?”
He still didn’t know what I was talking about. What kind of know-nothing god possessed him? “The rich man goes away sad,” I said. “He loves money too much to get into Heaven.”
Edo nodded. “Sounds like my son.”
The sun beat down. I could barely breathe, but Edo seemed to soak it in. During the trial he’d described his god as a great pulsing ball of light and heat, a flame that surrounded him but did not burn him. He was his own burning bush.
We eventually reached the compound. There were three buildings: a sprawling, two-story Spanish-style house; a four-bay garage; and, farther back, another adobe-walled building that could have been a guest house or offices. Rovil parked the car in the circle drive.
Edo stepped up to the front door, then realized I wasn’t following.
“I should have told you,” he said. “I was afraid.”
“You were afraid? Of me?”
“I was afraid you’d take her away.”
He opened the door. After a moment I followed him in. The foyer felt like an icebox. A dark-haired woman appeared from a far doorway and stopped, startled to see someone with Edo. She was even more surprised when Rovil stepped into the doorway. “Mr. Vik, how did—?”
“These are friends of mine,” Edo said. “Esperanza, this is Lyda Rose and Rovil Gupta.” Somewhere in the distance was a bass beat of music, and I was ninety percent sure that I wasn’t imagining it.
Esperanza nodded at us, then handed Edo a white towel and a sport shirt. “Sasha’s still in her room?” Edo asked her.
Dr. Gloria put a hand on my elbow. I became aware of the tightness in my chest, my tripping heartbeat.
Edo tugged the shirt down over his gut. “This way.” He led us into a vast, airy room. The ceiling slanted up to a peak thirty feet above us. A huge stone fireplace filled one wall, and a staircase led up to a railed balcony and the second-floor rooms. The sturdy furniture, I was pretty sure, had been constructed from the hulls of eighteenth-century battleships, then upholstered in buttery, deep-brown leather that could only be obtained from cows fattened on foie gras.
“Tell Rovil,” Dr. Gloria said. “This is how you decorate a house.”
Edo led us through an archway to a long corridor. The door at the end of the hall was ajar. The music blared from there, a heavy funk beat under a massive horn section. It sounded like a New Orleans marching band that had added a rank of synthesizers.
“Ten years old, and already a teenager,” Edo said, grinning. I could barely hear him. My eyes were fixed on the wedge of sunlight spilling from that door. A shadow flickered there, and I sucked in my breath.
Edo reached the door and pushed it open. The room was large and bright with windows on two sides, the desert sunlight blasting in. A skinny girl with a wild nimbus of red-brown hair danced in the corner of the room where the windows met, her back to us. She wore a lime-green T-shirt, multicolored tights, and a Hawaiian grass skirt. In front of her stood a large easel with a rectangle of white paper bigger than she was, three feet wide and four tall. The easel’s tray was full of liquid paints in shallow plastic cups. She held a paintbrush in each hand like drumsticks, dancing and painting at the same time, her little booty shaking that skirt, hands swiping and stabbing at the paper, throwing down colors.
She spun around, skirt fanning, droplets of paint flying—and stopped cold. She was a cartoon of shock: mouth agape, eyes wide, arms outstretched. No one moved for a long second.
Then something broke inside me. A bark escaped my body, a wild laugh, and then the laughter kept coming, tumbling out of me. My knees weakened and I nearly lost my balance. The dancing, the grass skirt, those paintbrushes!
I couldn’t stop laughing. Tears filled my eyes. The girl looked stricken, which only made the moment more hilarious. I didn’t know what was happening to me. My stomach began to cramp.
The girl looked up at Edo, then back to me. I kept thinking, She dances. My daughter dances!
I was past hilarity now and deep into some unlabeled emotional state, something roaring and chaotic. How does a wave feel when it crashes into the beach?
The girl (my daughter, my daughter who dances) stared up at me. She smiled tentatively, set the wet brushes on the floor, and touched my elbow. Dr. Gloria stood behind her, hands on her hips, waiting patiently for me to recover. Edo walked to the wall and did something that silenced the music.
I wiped at my eyes. “Whoa,” I said. I smiled to reassure the girl.
Rovil stared at me. “Are you okay?”
I had no idea what I was. Edo, though, seemed unperturbed. “Sasha,” he said, “this is Lyda Rose.”
She held out her hand. So polite. I took a stuttering breath, then took her hand in both of mine. I pumped officiously. “Pleased to meet you, Sasha.”
She nodded, equally mock-formal, in on the joke.
Edo said to Sasha, “Do you know who this is?”
She was staring at my hand. My left hand. Then she pirouetted away from me. The room was huge, much larger than the bedroom I’d grown up in. The queen-size bed was unmade, the bedclothes a riot of pinks and greens. Every wall that wasn’t a window was covered with her paintings and drawings. There were charcoal pieces like the one Eduard Jr. had shown me in Chicago, and pieces done in marker, but most were paintings on pages the size of the one on the easel, singing with color. The paintings looked like random swirls and stripes, but I began to see figures in them: an alligator in a red-checked suit; a fat woman holding a pink parasol; a parrot wearing a top hat, hiding in a tree. The pirate bear was a frequent subject—and there was the toy itself, a stuffed bear half buried in the sheets and blankets.
Sasha crouched and reached under the bed. She brought out a rolled-up page, then looked over her shoulder at me. I went to her and helped her unroll it.
In the center were two figures, holding hands. One woman was tall and thin with an imperious afro; the other shorter but with wild red hair that spiked in all directions like flames. Their outside hands were waving at us. The paint was bright, the paper unwrinkled. I thought it must be a recent piece.
; Sasha reached for my left hand. She lifted it up so she could touch the ring there. Then she reached inside the neck of her shirt and drew out a necklace. Dangling from the end of it was a benzene ring—Mikala’s ring.
“I think she knows,” Dr. Gloria said.
* * *
Sasha took us on a tour first of her room, showing us her artwork and toys, then of the entire house, then outside to the pool and the rock garden and the sprawling vegetable garden, where three Hispanic men in long-sleeved shirts were assembling aluminum sprinkler frames. They greeted her in Spanish, and she made Edo introduce me and Rovil. Then it was into the huge garage, where Sasha demonstrated her skill with a device that looked like a cross between a skateboard and a teeter-totter. I could not even stand up on the thing. Sasha kept trying to coach me, putting her hands on my shins and ankles, but I was hopeless. Finally she flicked open a digital fan and shook it at me until I understood that she wanted me to take out my pen.
I produced mine and she tapped it, not with her fan, but with her finger. A message appeared: Stand on the dots!
Ah: the two orange circles on the toy’s deck. I put one foot on one dot, stepped up—and the device shot out from under me. Edo caught me before I hit the ground. Sasha shook her head in mock disappointment.
My pen kept filling with messages from her. I couldn’t see how she was typing—the fan wasn’t even in her hand anymore. It was the closest thing to telepathy I’d ever seen. The fake mind readers in the NAT ward would have been so jealous.
We walked back to the house down a path made of pink gravel. Sasha was at my side, chattering away electronically. Rovil and Edo were up ahead, talking pharmaceutical biz.
“You sent that message to me, right?” I asked Sasha quietly. “The one telling me to come here?”
My pen flickered with a new message: Are you mad?
“No, I’m not mad,” I said.
“Not in the way she meant, anyway,” Dr. Gloria said. She was walking a few feet behind us, her hands clasped behind her back. She’d stayed within a dozen feet of me since we’d come through the gate, ready to swoop in as soon as I fell apart.
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