***
Olivia looked around the living room of the Santa Fe apartment she’d rented after the accident, thirty-five blessed miles from Los Alamos. It was the kind of place she’d never expected to live in: a stucco midrise allegedly attractive to singles, where each apartment had bland beige-and-white berber carpeting, a stylish but useless glassed-in gas fireplace, a stylish but useless balcony and a “clothing care center,” essentially a washer-dryer combo in a closet with an ironing-board hanging on the wall. Her ironing board hung crookedly, and while she’d often thought about fixing it, she never had. It was a place to live in after the break-up, with no memories of “the former.” She no longer thought of him by his name. In her few bitter moments, she even conceived that she had taken it from him. But she thought about him less and less now, though she still missed the house in which they’d spent so much time, so much of it happy.
She’d sold some of her furnishings and given away others. What was important to her, what she might someday have shipped to her in Russia, she had sent to her father in Pennsylvania. Her mother’s china and silver, her books, extra copies of reprints of her journal articles, a few mementos, some necessary documents, an antique chest of drawers, a Navajo rug. All her government awards and commendations she’d thought of burning in the fireplace. But the glass doors were fixed, so she’d simply torn up the certificates and mingled them with the other trash. No feeling attached to the act, or any other act intended to free her from the material part of her past.
The night before, she had stowed in the trunk of her car, a champagne-colored 1989 Mercedes 560 SL, the small steamer trunk she would take with her to Russia. A carry-on held some spare bras and panties, toiletries, some favorite perfumes, jewelry, and medications. Her laptop held nothing classified. In her mother’s black alligator handbag, she carried her current knitting project, a pair of socks for her father, her wallet, her birth certificate and passport, cell phone, lipstick. Nothing more.
Six AM. Santa Fe to Pittsburgh to see her father one last time. Then New York, Vienna, Moscow. Good to go, except for the pain and a hole in her spirit where regret should have been. That, and a question she’d asked herself but had not yet cared to answer.
Why the fuck, in my condition, am I driving halfway across the country when I could fly?
She looked around the apartment one last time. It was empty, except for the futon mattress she’d slept on and the polar fleece blanket she’d slept beneath. She wrapped her bellyband around her waist, then tucked in two spare magazines and her pistol. Not the elegant .45 her father had given her as a parting gift a decade before, when against his advice she’d gone to work for the Department of Defense. That pistol she’d surrendered to Getmanov. This was a plain and sturdy nine millimeter Beretta Cougar, purchased as backup some years ago at some forgotten shop. It held neither meaning nor value, save as a backup. It was that now.
Olivia hauled the futon and blanket outside into the cold morning and left them on the curb with a “Free” sign. She went back into her apartment, donned her black leather car coat, turned down the heat, locked the door behind her, and dropped the keys off in a box outside the manager’s office. She got into her car, the lovely extravagance she’d allowed herself after selling her house. She’d purchased the car for a fraction of its value from a rich divorcée who wanted nothing to remind her of her ex. Olivia understood that divorcée.
Why am I doing this?
She drove off.
At 7:00 AM sharp, still not quite functional, she stopped at a highway-exit McDonald’s for the facilities and breakfast. Then a sudden awfulness overwhelmed her. She looked at the sloppy, fat patrons. She’d never before really noticed the morbid obesity of so many Americans, but now she did. Recoiling from the ugliness, she ordered a large coffee and some sort of breakfast meal, including two hash browns, which she loved but which did not always love her back. In fact, she’d always considered herself addicted to those hash browns, at least whenever she had the chance. Hash browns to die for, she’d thought when she first accepted her craving, long ago. Or at least to get sick over. Hell, my stomach acts up, it’ll be a good excuse for taking more McDonald’s rest stops that I normally would. Then she ratified her rationalization, sat down on a plastic seat designed to become uncomfortable after fifteen minutes, and took a large bite of something. She thought of the weapon warm against her body. She had a concealed carry permit for New Mexico and wondered whether anyone in the restaurant would ever suspect that she was carrying. No, she decided. Their interests, their lives, did not seem to extend beyond their own expanding fat, expanding like mud slides of flesh.
She gathered up her breakfast, bought an additional order of hash browns, and left. She picked up US 285 South, bound for Clines Corners, hills of the barren yet vibrant desert she loved rising on either side of the road. It never ceased to fascinate her that a place so seemingly empty could sustain so much life—and how carefully and closely humans had to look to see it.
She had planned her route so that her longest driving day, by about an hour, from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Wichita, Kansas, was the first, when she was freshest.
Six aching hours later, she had driven 376 miles. Another 220 miles, another four hours’ driving, and she would be in Wichita. She wondered if she would be able to tolerate the pain, but decided she did not have a choice. She stopped for gas, a snack of overripe fruit and a bottle of warm water. Mastering herself yet fading a little, she folded her body back into her car and stopped at the next McDonald’s. She started to get out, then wondered why and headed for the drive-through. She needed to stretch. But the thought of mingling with the other customers nauseated her. It took three attempts—the last one shouted—at the speakerphone for the girl to get her simple order right, and Olivia realized:
These awful, fat, ugly, stupid people. They’re what Americans are wanted to be. Them. Not me. It’s not just about my job anymore. It’s…everything.
And then, in one hideous moment, she accepted why she’d chosen this agony. It was to beg.
Give me a reason to stay, America. Any reason at all. I’m open. I’m looking. Give me a reason to stay.
The Mercedes drifted slowly past the girl who had taken her order, no more than eighteen, the life and intelligence in her eyes already faded. She paid another girl who had the same murdered eyes, then collected her meal from the final window and drove off. Just a Big Mac this time, no fries—the concept of deferred gratification occasionally motivated her; driving doesn’t burn a lot of calories—and a tall cup of iced water. Dessert turned out to be a pithy orange from a gas station/food mart she passed. A mid-afternoon snack was French fries—gratification must not be deferred forever—from the McDonald’s in Kingman, Kansas, along with an overripe banana, and more water. She couldn’t recall eating so much McDonald’s in a day, much less with so little exercise. Her stomach had the inevitable, sullen heaviness of, Why have I done this to myself?
It required a conscious act of will to get out of her car and slowly straighten up in the driveway of the Wichita Garden Inn Hilton. Her trunk, she left in her car. Her laptop, purse and carry-on went upstairs with her. A hot soak helped her regain her flexibility, as did the walk around Bradley Fair Lake and through the plaza to the restaurant the Hilton had recommended. She wasn’t really hungry, but there was nothing else she cared to do and maybe a decent restaurant would serve decent something-or-other.
Sitting outside, warm in her leather jacket in the fine spring evening, she could not help but overhear the other patrons talk about their stock options and initial public offerings. She consulted the menu, ordered an appetizer of tuna and beef Carpaccio, every bit as much for the salty capers, mellow black olives and peppery, bitter arugula as for the raw, rich meat and fish. She added a salad of spring greens, goat cheese, crisp bacon, and candied walnuts. After the day’s diet of manufactured mash, she craved taste. With a half bottle of a pleasant pinot noir and dessert, she could not but help notice
that her entire bill would probably come to a fraction of the cost of a single bottle of wine ordered by the men at the next table. Lawyers? No. Listening to their conversation, it seemed they had launched some sort of high-tech start-up and their IPO had netted them $98 a share. What it was they had started seemed unclear, even to them.
Olivia never knew what prompted her to lean towards their table and open her mouth, but lean over and open wide she did. “Excuse me, but I can’t help overhearing your conversation. What did you say you made?”
The two trim men, with their white teeth and impeccable grooming, in their business casual attire of expensive polo shirts and expensive pressed chinos, stared at Olivia for a few seconds. Then one of them smiled indulgently at her. “We don’t make anything. We work with Chinese manufacturers and American retailers to connect them. Textiles, mainly. Keep down inventory, be responsive to orders, outsource whenever possible for materials, labor, skip the environmental crap. The Chinese work for much less than Americans do, so that means our retailers can make more profit.”
“How do you expect Americans to be able to buy what you’re selling?”
There was a long pause. Then one man smiled, as though he were talking to an imbecile. “Not our problem. But since you asked—on credit.”
“Thank you for answering my questions.”
The men, finding her far less interesting than each other, turned back to their wine, now talking a bit more loudly. And the thought came to Olivia again. They are wanted here. Not me.
Olivia slept until she woke without an alarm to jar her back to consciousness: her habit from all the years when getting up meant another full day of life, a habit that not even her time at Los Alamos had changed. She spent half an hour in the shower, systematically stretching, before she went down to a large breakfast of an omelet filled with meat, cheese and vegetables, hash browns—unfortunately, not nearly as good as McDonald’s—and plenty of fruit. Since lunch on the road was likely to be more fast food and whatever fruit she could scrounge, she asked the waiter to pack her a box of fruit and crackers to take with her, and then she checked out. She was on the road by eight, running north and east on Interstate 35, through Emporia, Ottawa, Gardner, through Overland Park to Kansas City, which she had learned from her eavesdropping the night before was becoming quite a Mecca of high-tech companies. As she passed through Liberty, just northeast of Kansas City, she found herself wondering how many of those high-tech companies made nothing, served only to import foreign goods and siphon off American money, and how many American paper millionaires they would make. As she filled up at a gas station in Cameron before turning east on US 36, she noticed that her own car was doing a pretty good job of siphoning cash.
I’m leaving. Probably forever. I’m going to Russia so I can use my brain. Russia. I’m leaving because my brain is not wanted here. I’m not wanted here. Wealthy corporations who turn the poor into obese eating machines are wanted here. High-tech millionaires who make nothing and sell us out to the Chinese are wanted here. Not me.
She laughed aloud in a wondering awe at the sheer absurdity of it all. Back on the road, she passed a Ford F-250 with “Sandy the Farrier” painted on its side and a stenciled-on drawing of a horse being shod by a semi-unbuttoned, decidedly buxom female. She waved at the driver, a rugged-looking, very pretty black woman her age, decidedly non-buxom, who waved back. Sandy the Farrier, thought Olivia, looked happy.
It was just after noon and the Missouri farmland was extremely open, the blue sky above her huge and high and hard. If the nights were crisp and the mornings cool, the afternoons were starting to get warm, foretelling a hot summer. Olivia hoped that when it came time to harvest the corn and soybeans and send the hogs and cattle to slaughter, the farmers would get a good price for their efforts. Farmers? No. Agribusiness. Large-scale corporate agriculture that was destroying the food, the people who ate it, maybe eventually the planet.
By the time she drove through Hannibal, she was in real pain, so she pulled off US 36 and onto what turned out to be 3rd Street. Driving slowly, she found Becky Thatcher’s Restaurant. Even though it was almost closing time at 3:00 PM—they would reopen for dinner—the waitress seated Olivia at a table beside the window and brought her coffee and a slice of pie, fragrant with peaches and cinnamon with some good vanilla ice cream, both made in the restaurant. Olivia ate standing up to stretch her legs and back, cleaning her plate carefully of every last crumb of pie and dollop of ice cream, draining her cup of coffee and part of a second as she stared out the window, down at the Mississippi.
My God, I’m sitting here in Mark Twain’s home town. What would he make of all this?
What would he think of me?
Unable to answer the first question, unwilling to consider the second, Olivia paid her bill and left a handsome tip for the waitress. The chance to stretch out her legs had done her good. Nevertheless, it was with grief that she crossed the wide, slow-moving river. Across the river, she was into Illinois, the Land of Lincoln.
In Springfield, she drove slowly up 6th Street to the red-brick President Abraham Lincoln Hotel. She parked and checked in; a long, hot soak and a lot of stretching greatly revived her. Afterwards, dry and dressed in fresh jeans and polo shirt, she went downstairs to the restaurant for dinner. She’d lunched on crackers and fruit, no longer willing to subject herself to the fast food clientele. Her late afternoon snack of pie and ice cream notwithstanding, she wanted a substantial dinner. A glass of red wine, a marbled steak cooked so that the fat was molten, salad and a baked potato with butter and blue cheese, so pungent it made the roof of her mouth itch—from Nauvoo, just north on the Mississippi, she learned—and turned the red wine shockingly, wonderfully sweet in her mouth. No, thank you, she did not want dessert, but she would like coffee. Regular, please, with just cream and sugar, nothing else, thank you.
A wise decision, when she saw the size of the desserts brought forth to other diners. They were absolutely huge, far beyond an amount that could actually be enjoyed. And then the unbidden thought.
Of course. Food calms us. Whatever else is wrong, we will not starve. Or so we tell ourselves.
By the time she finished, the day was slowly turning to cool dusk, so she went up to her room for her car coat. It required no thought at all to wrap the bellyband around her waist, slip her pistol into it, and cover everything with her polo shirt, concealed so long as she kept her coat closed. Then she began the long walk up Sixth Street to Oak Ridge Cemetery, the grass green, the sky a tender blue. She’d come, for no other reason than an inarticulate, almost involuntary urge, to pay her final respects to Abraham Lincoln.
The cemetery was not quiet, but alive with teenagers playing their boom boxes. It was the standard corporate garbage, gorged on by boys wearing the baggy jeans that had been cribbed from prison culture, their underwear showing, their caps on backwards. The girls seemed heavy enough to be pregnant, although the softness of their bodies proclaimed bulk fat, not new life, in their tight jeans and tighter sweaters that exposed bellies that simply shouldn’t have been visible, or there at all.
Olivia walked up the drive, then found herself wandering through the graves of the famous and the anonymous alike. Senators and governors and consuls, with their marble and granite monuments, sometimes with ornate bronze accoutrements. Bishop and Mrs. Rayburn’s grave, their obelisk crowned with her figure. Monuments to the dead of World War Two, Korea, in particular the brutal fight for Chosin Reservoir, and Vietnam. Everywhere, graves from the Civil War, indicating its terrible toll, the names on many of them worn by time, the shallow carving indicating the modest means of their survivors.
Finally, she let herself approach Lincoln’s tomb. The burial chamber was closed to the public for the night. That was all right. At the entrance, despite a nose rubbed shiny by all who had touched it for luck, the massive bust of Lincoln’s face that greeted her showed a man worn by sorrow. His face reflected the stark losses of the war, memorialized by the cavalry, artille
ry, infantry, and naval sculpture groups cast from old bronze cannon. She climbed the stairs on the exterior of the tomb, carved from Massachusetts granite, lit up against the encroaching night. In front of the tall obelisk, beneath the standing statue of a solitary Lincoln, she found a small, irregular stone. The inscription was in Latin; below it, a carved translation that read, To Abraham Lincoln, President for the second time of the American Republic, citizens of Rome present this stone from the wall of Servius Tullius by which the memory of each of those brave advocates of liberty may be associated. She knew from her long-ago child’s illustrated history of Rome, a present from her father who’d tried, not always successfully, to impart to her his love of the classics, that Servius Tullius had been born a slave. He had been manumitted and became a king who gave Roman plebeians the rights of citizens, and treated Rome’s conquered enemies with mercy. He paid with his life for his policies. She marveled a bit at her own mind, that it could still carry such memories and include such items.
She was so lost in her own thoughts that she didn’t notice the cop walking up behind her. “Ma’am?”
The very blue eyes she turned on him were not what he expected from a woman, alone at night—calm and precise. “May I help you, officer?” Her voice was level, utterly self-possessed.
“Ma’am, the park closes at dark.” She thought to reply, then thought again. Carrying a loaded weapon with a concealed carry permit in a state like New Mexico was one thing. Carrying it concealed without a permit was another matter almost anywhere, and Illinois was notoriously stringent. “It’s almost dark and it’s for your own protection. Bad people come out at night.”
And so you think citizens should yield the night to them. Awkwardly, she turned bodily to face him, giving the officer two overwhelming impressions: one of damage, the other of strength. “And you worry about women out alone at night.”
“I do. Especially if you can tell they’ve been hurt. Makes them more vulnerable. Don’t you think?”
Bemused, she thought about where she was likely to end up and what could happen to her where she was going. But why take unnecessary risks? She wasn’t worried about who else would want to visit the floodlit tomb—no matter what kind of prey they were seeking, the cemetery was still too public, too visible. But she didn’t need a police body search that would find her pistol. “All right, son. And I promise to walk straight back to my hotel.”
The policeman winced at the familiarity from a woman clearly not old enough to be his mother. “You won’t let me drive you, would you, ma’am? Or call you a taxi?”
So earnest. “No, thank you, officer.” Her tone was gentle. “I really can take care of myself.”
After she returned to the hotel she stayed up a while, working on her father’s socks. Knitting had been a way out of the maze of drugs and pain in the immediate aftermath of the crash. Knitting was all about math, and it had to be done right, one stitch at a time, stitch after stitch, for thousands of stitches. She knitted. But her mind was elsewhere.
My poor country. She’s not going to ask me to stay.