“I heard these guys from school?” Ricky told his sister, inclining his head at the mass of spectators. “They’re like, Charlotte Hauser’s in the movie? No way, how’d she get to be in it? They’re on me: Bro, how come your sister’s in this movie? I’m like, At ease, she has her ways. So now they’re in awe.”
Charlotte laughed. “That’ll be new,” she said.
I fought to keep my eyes open as Allison and Pammy rubbed the soft crayons over my face. It was a relief when Allison finally said, like every one of the hundreds of makeup artists before her, “Close your eyes.”
With my eyes shut, sounds seemed to magnify: rain tapping the corn, leaves sliding wetly, a distant grinding of thunder. “Donny, can you hold it higher?” I heard Thomas yelling to Speak No Evil as they tested the boom. “We’re getting static from the wind.” All of it broke, scattered the way children’s voices churn and shred in a playground, folding into the wet leaves, the sour, animal smell of the earth. My scalp tightened, prickling over my skull.
60
By the time we approached Chicago, we’d been driving more than twenty-four hours. My back hurt. My eyes stung. The car reeked with the smell of us.
I felt bad in a way I associated with coming down from drugs. A glittering apparatus, dismantled piece by piece.
Z stared into the darkness. I felt him looking for some reprieve, some escape. Of course there was nothing out there. Just plastic signs.
Allison was dripping fake blood onto my face, testing her various brands: “Dr. Spooks’ Blood Bath,” another called “Ghoul Gush” and a batch she’d made herself from a recipe in Seventeen that reeked of peanut butter. “Which is best?” she asked the group. “Or should we do like a combo?”
They gathered in around me, Ricky and my nieces, brows pursed at the import of their task. “Char, what do you think?” Ricky asked, deferring to his sister.
The girl leaned in, crouching a little, her eyes moving over my face with the intensity of hands smoothing every last wrinkle from a bedsheet. I felt something flare up in her—surprise, I thought—and was certain she had recognized me. But she gave no sign.
“The peanut butter one,” she told the others. “Definitely. Because it’s all clotty.”
“I saw your picture,” Z said. His first remark in hours. “A long time ago.”
“Not that long,” I hedged. “I mean, I’m only twenty-eight.”
“You were selling something,” he said. “Makeup, I think.”
“That’s possible.”
“I remembered you. When I saw you again, I remembered you from before.”
He was trying to tell me something. I listened very carefully. Scraped each word for the meaning underneath.
It was starting to rain.
“I thought you could help me,” he said.
“I will,” I said. And felt a tiny click of excitement. “I want to.”
Z shook his head. “You can’t. You have no idea what you’re doing.”
I was offended.
“You don’t know,” he said, with a kind of amazement. “None of you. It happens without planning, like the rain. Like the fire no one lights.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “What happens?” “The conspiracy.”
The word hung there. Coiled, sibilant. I felt another click. Hadn’t I known? Felt its presence around us from the beginning? A gold, shimmering net.
“Tell me about the conspiracy,” I said.
Z turned to look at me. In his eyes I saw something alive for the very first time. Pain.
“It’s a dream,” he said.
My face dripping with gore, I borrowed little Charlotte’s umbrella and crept among the cornstalks toward the blue Grand Am I’d seen wobbling up the road a half hour before. Halliday was there, leaning against the hood in faded jeans and a black T-shirt. He was taking in the scene with a look of some amusement.
He flinched at the sight of me: a broken, bloody figure emerging from the stalks. “Christ,” he said.
“Relax,” I said. “It’s mostly peanut butter.”
He ran a finger over my cheek and sniffed it. “I’m on my way to the airport,” he said. “Thought I’d stop by and see what you were up to.”
“How did you know we … ?” But I let it go. He was a detective.
I moved nearer to Halliday, holding the umbrella over both of us, snuffing subtly for booze. But the peanut butter smell was too strong.
“I’ve stabilized,” he said. “If that’s what you’re trying to figure out.”
I smiled. “I’m amazed you’re still here.”
“Had a setback or two,” he said. “As you saw. Some work to finish up.”
I glanced at him, curious. He seemed uncertain whether to continue. Finally he said, “He flew the coop, our missing friend. Again.”
“Your friend,” I corrected him.
“My friend,” he said, and laughed.
“Good riddance.”
There was a long silence. Halliday and I watched the commotion, swaths of movie light bleaching the cornstalks to white.
“Looks like you won’t need that detective job after all,” he said.
“Apparently not,” I said. “This face of mine is full of surprises.” After a moment I asked, “Was I in the running for it?”
“You were my top candidate.”
By now a few spectators had caught sight of me—a person in movie makeup—and begun moving eagerly in my direction. More cars teetered up the road from the interstate.
“I better get out of here,” Halliday said, “before your fans box me in.”
He slid into the driver’s seat. I stood by his open window, holding the umbrella, my other hand gripping his car. I couldn’t seem to move it.
Halliday lifted my hand in his own and kissed it. Twice. “You were an angel that night,” he said, with difficulty. “I’m grateful.”
“The pleasure was mine,” I assured him.
Now it was raining, oh, yes, now it was finally coming down. Moose bypassed Rockford, heading farther west, rain punching his window, rendering useless his less-than-perfect windshield wipers. But the imperative of continued driving overshadowed all of that—the urgent need to return to the site of his first transformation, which alone had the power to dispel the terrible thought of some minutes back. The overpasses all looked alike, but Moose never had trouble finding the one in question—there it was; he recognized it even through this crush of rain, and felt a pull deep within him, a rising up. There were tears in his eyes as he eased the station wagon onto the narrow alley beside the interstate—dangerous, he knew, in a storm, so he left his headlights on, cautious Moose, then lumbered from his car and began climbing the steep embankment, rain hugging him, blinding him, mud pasty under his shoes. Moose slipped, he skidded—slopped, flopped, fell once and landed on his rear, but slowly, slowly he fought his way to the top of the hill. Rain heaved from the sky, soaking his head, the fabric of his shirt and pants, lightning scudding across the sky like skipped stones—this was no metaphor, Moose thought, with satisfaction, this was a bona fide summer storm!
Already he was relieved. Here was the link between his old self and his present-day self—the boy and the man—here was the place that gathered them together. He was whole, had everything he needed, and yet, even as Moose bathed in this sense of completion, he was assailed once again by the terrible contents of the vision itself: it was there before him in the howling trucks, the roar and hum they left in his ears, the terrible acceleration of human history, combustive, exterminating, violent and blind, blind—no one could see, no one could see what Moose had glimpsed then and saw today: a headlong forward motion that was inherently catastrophic. Moose hunched on the windy hill and felt the icy stream rise through his body in a giant, heavy sob that shook his exhausted frame. He felt in his pockets for his pills and jammed a few into his mouth. He took them every day, oh, yes, pills and pills, trying to calm his addled mind while he worked furiously to identif
y the cause, the mistake, the wrong stitch that had spun such devastation.
“It’s the end of the world!” he bellowed into the wind, using all of his voice. He hollered it again, down at the oblivious cars. And again, roaring with every last filament of energy he had left. “It’s the end of the world!”
No one cared; they had eyes only for the camera’s lens, these madmen who were no one, who were nothing but a series of impressions. Who were information, jumbled and soulless as the circuitry in which they mostly lived. And Moose was alone, bellowing into the wind. He would grapple with the harrowing task of trying to forestall a doom that only he and a few unstable others could see while the rest of the world beckoned it, a doom visible not just in the soaring temperatures and rampant extinctions, the dying coral and heaps of garbage lying in the deepest reaches of the sea, the mysterious expiration of frogs—these were things anyone could see—but a devastation that was a simple by-product of motion itself. Einstein had it wrong, or only half right, there was another equation that foretold the destruction, but Moose had forgotten it. Perhaps he’d touched on it earlier today, while driving. Moving feels good. It did—too good. They will move for the sake of it, he thought, they’ll move with an excitement they cannot know derives from their proximity to an end. And now Moose, too, was seized by a will to move into the end, his own end, to relinquish this burden of seeing and knowing, this terrible responsibility. To set it down.
“Please,” he sobbed aloud. “Please.”
The traffic below called lovingly to Moose, big wheels sucking over the rainy asphalt, the brute mechanical gnashing gallop of it all, and he moved toward it helplessly, a few paces down the embankment, feeding himself into the machine, a shivering anticipation in his mouth at the thought of collision, impact, then peace. “Yes,” he said. “Now. Please.”
But no. The answer was no—not now, not yet—because somewhere inside of Moose, stretched between his mind and his heart, was a tiny silver thread, a thread no bigger than a hair whose contents was plain strength, a will that endured within him and had survived all these years, albeit slenderly. And even now, Moose felt a protectiveness toward that silvery wisp, a need to shelter it from every other thing as if it were a last match untouched by the rain, and he lowered himself onto the mud and lay down, lay back in the wet earth to remove from his vision the motion that was provocation and temptation both, the problem and the solution, lay back to conserve his energy, what little he had left, his mind cupped around that single strand of strength. He closed his eyes and slept.
There was a crack of thunder, and then the sky opened and emptied its contents on top of us. “All right, move,” Thomas shouted from the road. “Everyone. Places. Get the Charlottes over to the fire. Are they there?”
My face was slathered with gore, my wet hair viscous; fake blood and peanut butter oozed into my eyes, half blinding me as we cut through the corn to the fire. It had just been lit, and six volunteers held a tarp above it to shelter the flames. They stared at me aghast. “It’s fake blood!” I told them, “It’s made of peanut butter, can’t you smell it?” But the storm inhaled my voice.
Little Charlotte held her umbrella over our heads as we waited to begin our long gallop between the cornstalks toward the camera. I’d begun to feel strange, slurry, drifty, as if everything were happening sideways. Lightning strobed the cornfield, making a daguerreotype from a hundred years ago. The girl watched me quietly, a pressure behind her stare like a touch.
“I know you,” she said finally. “You were in my house.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We met in your mother’s closet.” And I laughed, for the memory seemed to me hilarious—leaping from among her mother’s dresses, the smell of that Chanel. Recalling that day, I felt an odd twinge of happiness—not because of the meeting itself, which I hardly remembered, but what had happened since, something I recognized only now: I had freed myself from an onerous existence.
The girl didn’t laugh, or even smile. “How many years ago was that?” she asked.
“No years,” I said, grinning through my gore. “Not even one.”
“It feels like so long,” she said wistfully. Then added, “I never told my mother.”
“Not a problem,” I said. “Probably for the best.”
“You could come back.”
“Sure,” I said lightly, batting this away, but then I felt the idea dig into me. Ellen Metcalf. To see her again, to find out who she had become.
“Actually, she’s here. My mom,” the girl said.
“No kidding,” I said mildly. “Here here?”
“Somewhere.” She turned to look. “She came to watch. My dad, too. I told my mom it was you.”
“You told her,” I said, swallowing. “And what did she say?”
“She said, ‘Oh, my God.’”
This struck me as tremendously funny. “Oh, my God,” I said, and laughed. Oh, my God. I could hear her, exactly.
“When I saw you before,” the girl said, “your eyes were bright, bright red.”
“I’d just had an accident,” I told her. “The same one we’re starring in now, believe it or not.”
She was watching me with her strange clear gaze. “I met a man by the river,” she said. “Right before I met you. He had an accident, too.”
I said nothing.
“His arm was in a sling,” she went on, excitement lifting her voice. “He had a big cut on his face.”
“Did he,” I said.
“His name was Michael West,” she said, the words wresting free of her and opening like a flag, as if she’d never said them aloud and was relieved, at last, to do so. Through the rain I felt the quick heat of her breath.
Mercifully, Thomas’s voice reached toward us through the storm: “Fire,” he bawled.
At instructions from one of the mutineers, the tarp holders tossed handfuls of explosive pellets into the flames and then stepped away with military unison, unveiling the fire at precisely the moment that it reared back on its hind legs, snapping, grabbing at the sky, disgorging a bale-sized whorl of black smoke that rolled toward the clouds.
“Gorgeous!” Thomas hollered. “Ready, Charlottes?”
“Ready,” we called in unison from the narrow, spindly ditch, which was already half full of rainwater. The wet corn snapped above our heads. Charlotte held the umbrella over me to protect the small microphone affixed to the collar of my shirt, whose wire ran along my belly to a receiver in my pocket.
“Boom!” I heard Thomas cry, and I barely made out his shape under a tarp beside See No Evil, who was prostrate behind the camera.
“Boom!” called Hear No Evil, directly to our left.
“Charlotte Two, you lead! Charlotte One, you’re going to do what?”
“Scream,” I answered. We’d been over it a dozen times.
“Scream!” Thomas cried. “Scream like you’ve never screamed in your life. Scream like the naked girl running in that picture. Mouth wide open—wide, wide, got it? Three … two … one … Action!”
63
“Still,” Z was saying, “it can’t go on as it has.”
We plunged into the night. His disappointment was so intense and embittered it felt like hate. The road was empty. Lined with tasseled crops.
Rain spattered the windshield.
I leaned on the accelerator, finding relief in the speed. It felt like tearing. Like breaking.
“It won’t be allowed to go on,” he said. He was watching the window. “The people will rise up and throw off these dreams you’ve used to imprison them.”
I tried not to listen. I was an idiot. A lost and desperate idiot. But these facts seemed to melt away as I watched the speedometer climb.
The car smashed through the rain.
“It will end,” he said. “It will end with fire. And the artifice will burn away, and the truth will be left. Slow down,” he added.
But I couldn’t slow down. I listened, uncomprehending. Clenching my teeth.
&
nbsp; “It will end without you, without me. An explosion of violence you can’t possibly imagine, sheltered and spoiled as you are.”
I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t hear. I could do one thing: push the accelerator toward the floor. Plucking strings on a giant harp one by one. No, the sound can’t possibly climb another note, I would think. But it could. It did. And each increase rippled through me with unbearable sweetness.
“Mountains will move and fall. Oceans will overflow, and you and the others will know how small this petty domination of yours really was. Please slow down,” he added.
“Let it,” I said. “Let it end.”
I wanted nothing but escape. From my wrong decisions. From the lost time. From the fact that I’d wasted my life. Thrown it away.
“Slow down,” he said again. Less politely.
I pushed harder. The car could do one-sixty. I’d never gotten near it.
Cold metal kissed my temple.
“Take your foot off the gas,” he instructed. His hand trembled behind the gun. Trembled like the car, which felt on the brink of explosion.
Gently he said, “I’m counting to three. One …”
But it was too late. It felt too good. We were at one-thirty and climbing.
“Two …”
The gun nudged my skull. I didn’t care. It seemed perfect that we die together. A monument to the randomness and desperation that had united us.
“Three.”
I hit the brake and yanked up the emergency brake at the same time. A wind was blowing. In retrospect, that wind looks like Self Preservation. A squall of hope. Memory. An obstinate will to live that rushes in when we least expect, saving us. Drawing us back.
But in fact, it was the wind from his open door.
He had already jumped.