Look At Me_ A Novel Part 28

"Meanwhile, he did come out here and pick up the kids," Abby said. "I wouldn't send them alone on the plane, they're just too small. And that was great. I mean, they need a dad." And here she looked away.

"How long have they been in L.A.?"

"Four days," she said. "They're in love-they don't want to come home." Again, that quivering brightness; tears, Michael thought, and hoped they wouldn't fall. "Colleen says on the phone, 'Mommy, it's warm every day here. You should come, too.' I guess he lives right by the ocean."

"Maybe you should," he said. "Go there, too."

"Never!" Abby said fiercely, and the pressure of her smile finally shoved the tears from her eyes, a single strand veering haplessly down each cheek. "The people out there have no souls. They're not really people-they've got plastic in their faces, their legs, their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Even the men, they put it in their calves to give their legs a better shape. I mean, these are not human beings in the traditional sense." She blotted her eyes with a napkin. "How could I live in a place like that?"

Michael crammed a last bit of fajita into his mouth and washed down the chicken and green peppers with margarita slush. The food made sweat p.r.i.c.k to the surface of his face. He was tired of Abby, of her anger. It felt tedious, like something not just he but all the world would soon be rid of.

"The good news," she said lightly, as if in apology, "is I'm finally getting some money out of the guy. I reupholstered the entire living room, even the rocking chair! Now I'm redoing the outside, putting flower beds in the front, and in back? That big concrete patio with the grill? I'm having them jackhammer that away, and I'm putting in gra.s.s."

Michael listened with approval. He remembered the area, and she was right, gra.s.s would be far, far better than concrete. He swilled the last of his drink and wiped a napkin over his hot, pounding face. Then he had an idea: "You ever thought of doing prairie?" he asked.

He walked Abby to her car under a black sky, a big spongy moon off to one side. He kissed her cheek and received in exchange a puzzled look, as if she were remembering before, and wondering why-or why not.

"Thanks," he said, "for keeping me company."

"Thank you for dinner. It was perfect timing-I've been a little lost without the kids."

How did she survive, Abby Reece, with her transparent face? How had the world not stamped her into pieces and ground her to a fine, glittering silt? Yet here she was, intact, tears in her eyes and a heart so tender that Michael imagined he overheard its gentle beating; she had survived, and showed every sign of continuing to do so. And there had been a time, he knew-perhaps just a moment-when exhaustion had tempted him to lay down his small bundle at the threshold of Abby's flat yellow house, to uncoil himself among the modest dimensions of her life. And then the girl had come along and startled him, distracted him. Yes, he had Charlotte to thank for the fact that now, as a plan ama.s.sed within him, he would not have to leave Abby Reece and her children behind, not stun them with his sudden, inexplicable departure.

"Howard told me you aren't coming back next year," she said, looking up at him in the darkness.

"No." A revolution is happening A revolution is happening.

"You're teaching somewhere else?"

"I'm not sure," he said. "I think ... probably not."

"What will you do?"

"I haven't decided. Something different. Something new." Everything is going to change Everything is going to change.

"That sounds exciting," she said.

Michael nodded, looking into her eyes. He was eager to be rid of her. At last she got in her car, and he waved to her as she pulled away.

Charlotte could hear the party, a ba.s.s line seeping up through the car, thumbing her insides. Laurel opened her s.h.i.+ny pale blue purse, whose hue exactly matched her fingernail polish. After some feral digging, she excavated a lipstick and applied a blossom of color to her lips. She offered the lipstick to Charlotte, who shook her head.

"Aw, live a little," Laurel said. And with breathtaking precision, considering that Roselyn was parking the car in which they sat, Laurel seized Charlotte's shoulder with one hand and used the other to push the soft nub across her mouth.

"Gimme," Sheila commanded from the front seat, clutching for the lipstick. "Hey," seeing Charlotte. "You've got lips."

Laurel was applying her blusher, a lunar, sepia glitter in the streetlight. "No," Charlotte groaned, recoiling as her friend came at her with the brush. It grazed her cheeks, soft as mink.

"Mascara next. Hush hush," Laurel said. "Or your face'll be totally de-balanced." It was hard not to flinch-Charlotte's eyes felt so exposed without her gla.s.ses. But there was a clean divide in her, one part simulating disgust so the other could accept the mascara with impunity.

"Nuh-uh," Laurel said, swiping Charlotte's gla.s.ses away when she tried to replace them. "That'll wreck it."

"You realize that I'm totally blind," Charlotte said.

"There's nothing to see in there anyway."

They left the car and wandered toward the music among ranch-style houses and waxen golf course pines lit from below, past open garage doors exhaling smells of motor oil and cut gra.s.s and rindy walnuts still in boxes from last fall. They paused under a tree to relight Sheila's half-joint. The pot, in conjunction with Charlotte's uncorrected eyesight, made her feel like a stand-in for herself. Laurel brushed Charlotte's hair with a small neon-green plastic brush, and she felt it lift slightly from her head.

Michael stood alone in the parking lot, an asphalt version of the empty sky. A clear, cool night, a smear of light to the east, where Chicago was. The emptiness of this land and sky had ceased to trouble him; they no longer felt empty in the way they had. The plastic signs were everywhere-Mobil, Holiday Inn, Kentucky Fried Chicken-holding him like the fingers of a hand that would reach as far as he might wish to go. He pulled his car onto State Street, heading west, then took a right, then another right onto Squaw Prairie Road, still amazed at how quickly civilization yielded to countryside: fields, tractors in silhouette, long rows of freshly turned soil, other fields abandoned, still crowded with last year's dead stalks. Old barns like ghost s.h.i.+ps. He crossed over the interstate and soared beyond it, heading for a building site he'd visited once before. It glowed: a cloud of low, flickering light. A condominium village at an early stage of construction that was weirdly akin to devastation-the sort he'd once dreamed of causing himself.

Michael parked his car and went to look at the development. Nothing had changed since his last visit: four sample condominiums were poised among acres of dirt and curved, sparkling sidewalks. The houses were jaunty ersatz Victorians, each one distinct in size and shape but accented with identical festive trim, mailboxes saluting out front. A vast constellation of Victorian lampposts haunted the empty sidewalks, leaking a faint lunar glow from their flame-shaped bulbs.

Michael followed one of the sidewalks to its desultory end, then kept walking, trudging through loose, turned earth that worked its way inside his shoes, until eventually he reached three strands of barbed wire demarcating the outer limit of the development. Beyond these lay a planted field, rows of shoots just lifting their heads from the soil. From planted crops to condominiums: three strands of barbed wire abridging a gap of millennia. Wind cackled around him. Cross pollinization. Cross pollinization. No. Pollination. No. Pollination. Cross polliniz Cross polliniz-no! Globalization, pollination. This is the new Renaissance. Globalization, pollination. This is the new Renaissance.

All you need to know is how to tell a story.

Well, that he could certainly do. That he'd been doing all life.

The door to the party house was open. Inside flourished the sort of event made possible only by a blanket absence of parents, not an out-for-the-evening absence but an out-of-town absence. A primordial murk, a loamy, humid stench of beer and carpeting, a ravaged kitchen where four guys were playing soccer with a beleaguered cantaloupe. A stereo heaved up the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" at disorienting volume. Charlotte was astonished to find it all still here, undiminished by the pa.s.sage of months or her own lengthy absence. Head down, she avoided people's eyes at first, then discovered that she couldn't see them even when she looked. The world slurred, buckled, smashed pleasantly, the lashes of her eyes felt heavy, coated like sticky buds, and her lips and cheeks were hot. As she moved among the unrecognizable faces, her hesitation yielded to a marvelous detachment, a sense that she wasn't herself anymore, so none of it mattered. She carried her face like an object newly made, still wet, in danger of smearing or losing its shape as she followed her friends downstairs to a bas.e.m.e.nt rec room populated by boys in baggy attire who nodded their spa.r.s.ely bearded chins in accord with the rap music stomping from a boombox. And here was the keg, the party's faulty, intermittent heart, a guy squeezing out cup after cup of foam, complaining bitterly about the pump.

"Yo, Tupac!" someone bellowed.

Stories? You want stories? I got a doozy, said the voice of a Hollywood producer as Michael envisioned him, a voice cribbed from movies and TV, a man who took meetings beside a pool with slices of fruit on his cheeks and chamomile teabags over his eyes. Listen Listen, he said, We've got a guy from one of those c.r.a.ppy parts of the world where people get shot up every other day-Lebanon, let's say, but h.e.l.l it could be anywhere, Sri Lanka, Nigeria. Sudan. Say Lebanon's southern coast-Tyre-cute little tourist town until everyone started gunning it to pieces. He's from a middle-cla.s.s family, s.h.i.+tes. No, you clown, shee shee-ite, two syllables. It's one of those Muslim sects. Now our guy, he's a prodigy. Math whiz, gobbles up numbers like most kids eat M&Ms. Goes to college in Beirut, honors in every cla.s.s, brilliant career ahead of him yadda yadda. Gets married, has a kid. Then bam. Chucks the whole thing. It's the early eighties, the Israelis're in South Lebanon trying to clear out the PLO, and our guy joins a bunch of s.h.i.+tes that's trying to get rid of the Israelis. Hezbollah, you've heard of them. Scary folks. Extremists in the extreme. But our guy wants wants that-see, he's mad. p.i.s.sed. Becomes a fundamentalist, starts baying at the moon or whatever the h.e.l.l they do. No booze, no girls in bathing suits. Then poof, he disappears. Wife, kid, folks, they all wait terrified. Never hear another word-finally they figure he must be dead. that-see, he's mad. p.i.s.sed. Becomes a fundamentalist, starts baying at the moon or whatever the h.e.l.l they do. No booze, no girls in bathing suits. Then poof, he disappears. Wife, kid, folks, they all wait terrified. Never hear another word-finally they figure he must be dead.

Is he really dead? No, he's in Iran. It's a s.h.i.+te majority over there so they like Hezbollah, send 'em money, ammo, whole bit. Our guy gets noticed by the higher-ups because he's got this knack for languages, picks 'em up like that, accents, jargon, dialects, the whole tamale, plus he hates-despises-America. Thinks we've got a plot to control the world with our "cultural exports," which you know what that means: how come our nice girls start whipping off their head scarves every time Brad shows up on the screen?

So these Iranians, they've got an extremist chameleon on their hands who hates America-but hates it. So whaddo they do? Set him up somewhere, Africa, let's say-Kenya-gets married all over again, new name, new history, starts a business doing import-export. But really, he's part of an intelligence network, people who let's just say our health and happiness aren't real big on their priority list. But our guy gets restless fast, he's got all this hate inside him and it's eating him up and he wants to do do something. Wants action! So when Hezbollah doesn't move fast enough, he disappears again. Poof, can't find him. Hooks up with some more splintery types, coupla rich guys in the deep background pulling strings. They want to send him to America, do some real damage. Horse's mouth, right? Whack the Holland Tunnel, whack the White House. Hey, don't kid yourself-this stuff goes on! He relocates to Libya, Afghanistan, wherever. Doesn't matter. New name, new wife. Then at a certain point the guys in the shadows say go. To America. Poof, he's out the door. Doesn't look back. Buncha phony doc.u.ments in his hand. And where does he wind up? One guess. New f.u.c.king Jersey-how about that? something. Wants action! So when Hezbollah doesn't move fast enough, he disappears again. Poof, can't find him. Hooks up with some more splintery types, coupla rich guys in the deep background pulling strings. They want to send him to America, do some real damage. Horse's mouth, right? Whack the Holland Tunnel, whack the White House. Hey, don't kid yourself-this stuff goes on! He relocates to Libya, Afghanistan, wherever. Doesn't matter. New name, new wife. Then at a certain point the guys in the shadows say go. To America. Poof, he's out the door. Doesn't look back. Buncha phony doc.u.ments in his hand. And where does he wind up? One guess. New f.u.c.king Jersey-how about that?

Charlotte followed Roz through sliding gla.s.s doors to the backyard, tonguing her cup of foam as she stepped into a familiar grind of wood against concrete, a sound like an electric saw in reverse. She made out a swimming pool girded by slouching, comma-shaped sentries, boys without jackets spurting one at a time up the sides of the empty pool and landing on its rim. Charlotte wondered if Ricky might be among them, her blurred eyes fumbling in search of her brother, but no, he'd lost his skateboard back in January and refused to buy another, even though Charlotte had offered to help pay for it.

Resting her screamers, Roz was uncharacteristically quiet.

"Whose house is this?" Charlotte asked her.

Okay, I know what you're thinking (said the voice), I'm reading your mind as we speak. What's this story about? You're thinking, G.o.d help us if it's terrorism, because Nightmare in Gaza Nightmare in Gaza tanked and tanked and Middle East Ma.s.sacre Middle East Ma.s.sacre barely broke even, including international. barely broke even, including international.

("Paul Lofgren's," Roz said.) You're thinking G.o.d forbid this is some kind of history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, I mean not even Spielberg's taken that one on, and he can make just about anything taste sweet. You're saying, How can we root for this guy? He's a jerk, a fanatic. A loony. What kind of guy walks out on family after family? It's not human, right? Okay, look. The movie's got nothing to do with history. Wigs, horses, s.e.x scenes where they have to paw through all that lace-this isn't like that. This is about self-discovery self-discovery. It's one man's personal history!

And sure enough, Charlotte made out Paul Lofgren inside the pool, grinding up against the edge. Roz's sort-of-boyfriend came outside and bit her cheek and she went away with him, leaving Charlotte among the bevy of skateboarding spectators, one of whom, the guy beside her, was starting to look familiar. Charlotte stared at him with the brazenness of the nearly blind until at last he looked back. "Hey," he said, and she recognized the voice. Scott Hess.

Charlotte turned back to the pool, mortified.

"h.e.l.l-o-o." Scott was waving an arm in front of her eyes. Except the arm was not an arm, but a white triangular shape. An arm in a sling. "We're twins," he said.

She'd forgotten about her Ace bandage. Now she lifted it, returning his goofy salute. And realized, then, that Scott Hess had no idea who she was.

"Happened to your arm?" he asked.

"I got caught in the middle of a fight."

"No way," he said, admiringly. "Mine's from sliding into second. It's not a break, just a really bad sprain. But I'm probably out for the season, 'cause swinging a bat is like totally out of the question."

"Mine's just bruised," Charlotte said, and smiled a little helplessly.

"Could be a sprain," Scott mused. "It's a fine line between a bruise and a sprain, I mean basically it just comes down to inflammation. You get much swelling?"

"Not really."

"Mine? The first day? It was like, three times the normal size at least. My girlfriend was like, don't come near me with that thing."

Charlotte laughed, but it sounded like someone else, as if her makeup were laughing.

"What's your name?" Scott asked, and she hesitated, still afraid this was all some multilayered joke at her expense. "Melanie," she finally said, and experienced a thrill that gave her gooseflesh.

"You don't go to Baxter."

"No," she said. "East."

Self-discovery! Hear me out. Who is our guy exactly? He hates Americans, that's all we really know. But see, where does he make sense? Where does he fit? Over in Europe, they're still yammering about who took out whose castle three hundred years ago, who's got the nicest accent. Who cares? We're heading into the twenty-first century. With us it's the opposite: Build your own castle, make up an accent if it rocks your boat. Start from scratch. And that's our guy to a T! That's what he's been doing from the beginning. Don't you get it? He's American! American! He's been American all his life, the whole time he was hating our guts! Which is what he finally figures out. The self-discovery. Which is what this movie's about! He's been American all his life, the whole time he was hating our guts! Which is what he finally figures out. The self-discovery. Which is what this movie's about!

"I'm Scott."

"h.e.l.lo, Scott."

And now he was shaking her hand, injured arm to injured arm, exchanging with Charlotte a secret intimate handshake of the fallen. She went along, laughing a little uncontrollably.

"How long you have to wear it?" he asked.

"I don't know. I haven't even gone to the doctor."

"Oh. Hey. Mel. Lemme give you some advice." Scott was serious now, with serious warnings to dispense. "I know how it is," he said, "no time and all that, you're like hey, everything's fine, whatever, but freshman year? I twisted my knee and I didn't go to the doc for like two weeks ... ?"

(Now the boisterous narrator went abruptly silent, blew away like dust, leaving Michael West alone beside the barbed-wire fence.) "... and no s.h.i.+t, they said if I waited one more day one more day, I could've had permanent damage in the cartilage."

"Wow," Charlotte said. "Permanent damage!" She was gulping laughter, inhaling it, popping it with her ears, blinking it back inside her head. She felt the old excitement of talking to strangers, except that Scott Hess was the opposite of a stranger: he was the boy who'd taken her virginity in under five minutes, then tossed her out of his car. But Charlotte wasn't that girl anymore. She'd cut ties with that humiliation, and was Melanie now. Who wore makeup. She She was the stranger. Scott Hess had nothing on her. was the stranger. Scott Hess had nothing on her.

"And as it is, the doc says I might end up with knee problems later on, you know, like when I'm older and stuff, from the injuries and also just the wear and-"

"Scott," she interrupted, "that's enough whining for one night."

He peered at her, startled, then laughed-a nervous, wheezy laugh. "Funny," he said. "Very funny, Melanie."

"Actually, I'm serious," she said, but she was laughing, too. She and Scott were laughing together. "I have to get out of here," she said.

The voice gone, its garish performance complete, Michael found himself alone at the edge of a condominium development surrounded by perfect silence. And here came the terror, raw, wild: a panic whose shadow he'd sensed flickering near him these past months was on him, now, at last. He scaled the barbed wire and began to run across the planted field, sprinting over acres of loose earth, running anywhere, away, the opposite direction of where he'd come from. They'd won, stamped out his anger and filled his head with this poison-listen to it! Listen to it. The scorpion sting had erased his real thoughts and replaced them with a plan to go to Los Angeles and The scorpion sting had erased his real thoughts and replaced them with a plan to go to Los Angeles and make movies make movies-exchange plots for plots! Spread the poison even further. They'd won! Running, he tripped, fell sprawling among short green stalks and lay there whole minutes, heart punching the soil. Then he turned his head to look at the moon, cooler now, white, the precious moon; "Listen to it," he whispered, beseeching the moon, "they're controlling my thoughts." But in English, always in English. He thought in English, dreamed in English. It was too late. The other languages were gone, his past was gone and so was his rage, it had vanished with the conspiracy. Because there was no conspiracy-no "them" in this nation of believers. Only us.

Charlotte left the swimming pool and pushed open a sliding gla.s.s door at the far end of the house. She slipped inside a white-curtained master bedroom, elongated shapes of skateboarders flung like shadow puppets over the walls. From the bedroom she reached a hallway and began opening doors, looking for-what? A place to laugh, except her laughter was gone, had burned away, leaving a little pile of ashes in her throat.

She opened doors: A girl's room, four people gurgling over a bong amidst hundreds of stuffed animals. A boy's room-Paul's? Paul's brother's? Did Paul Lofgren have a brother? It was empty. Charlotte went in and shut the door and sat on the bed, breathing the odor of teenage boy, sweat, cedar, mildew, Juicy Fruit. Something herbal-pot maybe. She lay back on the bed and shut her eyes.

[image]

Slowly, Michael rose to his feet. The panic had pa.s.sed through him and gone. He began walking slowly back through the planted field toward the nimbus of light that first had drawn him there.

Charlotte pulled her gla.s.ses from her purse and wiped them clean, restoring them to her face so the room crashed into focus, a dresser crammed with trophies, silver soccer b.a.l.l.s affixed to feet, gold hockey sticks soldered to hands, Blackhawks posters attached to walls along with several Baxter flags. The world remade itself, and she was Charlotte Hauser once again, from Rockford, Illinois. Who wore gla.s.ses. Scanning the reconst.i.tuted room in which she sat, she noticed a familiar shape beneath the dresser and knelt on the carpet to pull it out. A skateboard. A Tony Hawk, in fact. On its underside, in neat, felt-tipped capital letters, the name "RICKY HAUSER "RICKY HAUSER."

Charlotte hefted the board under her arm and departed Paul's room, shutting the door behind her. She left the house, navigating among boys who floated aside like inner tubes on a lake to let her pa.s.s.

Michael climbed back over the barbed-wire fence. Beyond it he saw the sample Victorian houses, the fake gas lamps with their flame-shaped bulbs. In the distance he made out his car, parked where he had left it.

Outside, Charlotte walked some distance from Paul's house before setting down the board and tentatively mounting it. She'd ridden Ricky's skateboard before, and it wasn't that far to her house. As Michael made his way toward the sparkling sidewalks, a calm began to rise in him. Yes, he thought. He wasn't lost. His car was right there, in the lamplight.

Charlotte pushed off, working her legs, feeling the wind along her arms, holding them out like the scarecrows you still saw, sometimes, in the fields of corn.

He wasn't lost. He was home.

Chapter Sixteen.

Excepting last August, during the accident, I had not been back to Rock-ford in seven years, following a visit I'd terminated prematurely after a shouted exchange of insults with my brother-in-law during Roast Beef Night at the country club. Yet the drive west on I-90 from Chicago to Rockford was intensely familiar: the rusted, jiggling trucks that looked hopelessly irreconcilable with the digital age, tarps fastened over their cargoes of dirt, of old tires; the freestanding mirrored office cubes that seemed not just postindustrial but posthuman; the overpa.s.ses with their old beige McDonald's built in the sixties, when fast food was still racy, cosmopolitan. Every few miles, a thirty-cent toll basket would materialize before me like a recurring dream, and I would toss thirty cents down its mechanical gullet and wait for the barrier to rise.

"How does it feel," Irene asked, "making this drive again?" She sat beside me, fiddling with the radio on the cherry-red Grand Am we'd rented at the airport. The Chicago stations were just beginning to fade.

I tried to consider the question. How did it feel? feel? But almost immediately, the breathless narrator who had taken up a pampered existence in one lobe of my brain (red curtains, ostrich feather slippers) began piping in her own treacly reply: But almost immediately, the breathless narrator who had taken up a pampered existence in one lobe of my brain (red curtains, ostrich feather slippers) began piping in her own treacly reply: It had been nearly a year since the devastating event, and oh, the pain Charlotte felt on returning to the scene, the anguish of seeing those same fields scarred by terrible memories It had been nearly a year since the devastating event, and oh, the pain Charlotte felt on returning to the scene, the anguish of seeing those same fields scarred by terrible memories ... and as she spewed this dreck, tilting her face for the overhead camera, I felt not just unable to speak, but unable to feel. "Like nothing," I said. "I could be absolutely anywhere." ... and as she spewed this dreck, tilting her face for the overhead camera, I felt not just unable to speak, but unable to feel. "Like nothing," I said. "I could be absolutely anywhere."

Irene didn't write, which disappointed me. When many minutes pa.s.sed without the scratch of her pen, I felt a mounting sense of urgency.

We were visiting Rockford this afternoon in early June at the behest of Thomas Keene, "gathering visuals," as he put it. An all-expenses-paid trip to the middle of nowhere, so Irene could photograph and videotape the house where I grew up, the cemetery where Ellen Metcalf and I used to smoke, my grade school, high school, country club; Dr. Fabermann in his surgical scrubs, Mary Cunningham and her moss-crammed fishpond, and most vitally, the stretch of interstate where the accident had happened-the field where I'd landed in my burning car.

Last week, Thomas had sent a professional photographer to my apartment: Randall Knapp, a solemn, beturtlenecked fellow with a single earnest crease running straight up the middle of his face, beginning at his cleft chin, advancing along the points of his lips and concluding in two deep grooves between his beseeching eyebrows. "Let's try it without the smile," he'd importuned woefully as I sat smoking on my sectional couch. "Remember, you've lost everything. You don't know how you're going to earn a living. There. Good. Hang your head," all in a gentle murmur that seemed calibrated to coax a reluctant partner through a sequence of daunting s.e.xual positions. "Lose the pose," he crooned in the bathroom, shooting close-ups of my face as I parted my hair to rub vitamin E oil onto my surgical scars, when in fact I'd stopped doing this months ago. "There's no glamour here," he chided me softly, "this is sad, this is a sad, private moment. Yes. There. Looking in the mirror like, Who am I?"

I was so disheartened by the time we adjourned to my balcony that I shuffled to the railing and stood motionless, staring at the river below. A berserk cry jackknifed me into a cringe, nearly pitching me over the edge. Shaken, clutching the railing, panting fearfully, I turned to find Randall Knapp in extremis behind his camera. "Yes! Great!" he yelled, shooting madly through his ululations, "Like that! Frownier. Bunch up your hands on the rail. Awkward, frightened-like that! Beautiful! Yes! Despair!

G.o.d! Yes! Yes! Yes!"

I endured these indignities for a reason that was infinitely complex yet capable of being named in a single word: money. Staggering quant.i.ties of money were shortly to come my way, according to Thomas; the media potentates before whom he'd dangled my story were responding to my "character," and phrases like "bidding war," "TV series" and "publis.h.i.+ng tie-in" (which apparently meant a book) had been uttered in conjunction with my name. As the sphincter of other people's excitement tightened around me for the second time in my life, I spoke to Thomas as often as I once had spoken to Oscar. The sensation was familiar, of course, from my earlier brush with fame, but with a difference: then, I had existed in a state of pure giddy antic.i.p.ation, but now I felt a constant twitch of anxiety, as if something ominous were stirring in my peripheral vision. When I tried to stare it down, it vanished, but no sooner had I glanced away than it was back, skittering in one corner of my eye.

After Elgin, the mirrored buildings melted away into fields-bright, iridescent green corn, burnt-orange soybeans. Each one appeared haphazard, disorderly until you hit that angle from which the secret of its perfect geometry was revealed-a dimly remembered pleasure from my childhood-long clean lines like spokes of a wheel extending outward from my eye.

"We're getting close," I told Irene. "Close to where it happened."

"I was thinking we'd save the accident until later," she said. "Unless you want to stop."

"We can save it forever," I said, applying this toward the quota of ironic, curmudgeonly remarks that I now understood were typical of me. Sure enough, Irene took a note.