After James (37 page)

He stopped chewing his french fry, stopped his hand midway to the plate. The coming end of the world was one thing, but the idea she might quit her job really alarmed him. She said she'd been thinking about it, indirectly, even unconsciously, not in a way she'd articulated to herself.

The moment ended, the chewing resumed.

“Why would you do that?”

She looked at him, this man who carried gods in his pockets. They were inside the floating particles of dozens of old conversations. Now and then over the years it seemed they'd switch positions, the wandering one and the one too bound to a sensible mind. She didn't know her position now. At least that was something.

“I've had a strange time.”

“Since the cave.”

“I don't know when it began. I just need it to end.” If she described it to him he'd say that a strangeness had been visited upon her, and she would have to decide if she should tell him about the lost pregnancy. She supposed that the memory lapses, her vivid moments of déjà vu in the gallery, her fanciful notions of being a ghost, these could be made sense of as the mind's casting around for understanding after the body had sized things up and declined to bring a new life into the world. At the time, the loss hadn't devastated her but it did contain meaning, and in not pursuing this meaning, she'd left herself open to further losses.

A wind kicked up a tall dust devil and held it before them briefly before dashing it against the window. When it was gone he kept looking out to where it had appeared.

“Some Apaches think that up in the Superstition Mountains there's a bottomless hole that connects to the lower world, and the winds that blow up into ours cause havoc and dust storms.”

“I hope you're not planning to crawl down it,” she said.

“It's what you're considering.”

“Like father, like daughter.”

“But I haven't quit my life. When I'm done at the lab I'm heading to Colorado to see old friends. There's an ancient dry lakebed up there with hundreds of extinct species perfectly preserved.”

Extinction was all the rage now, he said. Funds were streaming in. His academic friends would put him up for a few days in a grand hotel. The oldest bones by day, the newest cocktails at sundown.

“Will you tell your friends about China?”

“They'll all know soon enough.”

“What do they make of the new you? There can't be a lot of god seekers among them.”

He smiled. “I seem to make some of them nervous.”

“They must like that you still tickle the ivories now and then.”

He described the Colorado lakebed. The ivories to be tickled there belonged to mastodons.

“
Mammut americanum
,” she said.

“That's my girl. And giant ground sloths and
Castoroides
beavers the size of black bears.” He described the creatures drinking in the shallow water when an earthquake liquefied the sand. They dropped a few feet, struggled. The quake ended and they were trapped, some with their heads above water, some below. “Whole families lost where they stood. I'm still amazed at such a finding but the terribleness of it stays longer in the throat than it used to.”

The conversation was full of deathbeds. She wanted free of it but the time was theirs and they drew it along, outlasting the lunch crowd, through the end of Deena's shift, they kept talking, about lakes and monsters, ancient calendars and codices and number systems, and Celia realized, and knew her father realized, that they were each preparing the other for an ending. One would lose the other before long. How could they know such a thing? She saw the thought take hold in him. He looked away again, out the window.

“Here's an idea,” she said. “This time that I'm taking off, what if I took it with you? What if you promised to stop flying around and I came to live with you for a while?”

He'd reject the offer. He'd find the setup custodial.

“I'd love you to live with me. But I won't stop the flying around. I'm going after things, Lia.”

They'd reached an impasse. It was terrifying. When the dishes were cleared away, they finally fell silent, and Celia felt her state progressing toward the absurd. Had she already considered getting off the grid, or had learning of Koss's disappearance sparked the idea? There he was again, robbing her of something, a clean, sure gesture. All these disappearances promised some final perfection of irony.

“I have a car to return, a plane to catch. Thanks for the little god.”

She took her gift from the table and pocketed it.

“There are more of those handmade dolls now than there are mountain gorillas or finless porpoises.”

They couldn't help themselves. Nowhere a safe parting line.

She got to her feet and he looked suddenly lost. He stood and they hugged. She turned and walked the length of the diner. Against a heaviness in her limbs she reduced all thought to pure motion. As she stepped through the door, a woman moved past her and a young man caught the door and held it for Celia, who nodded to him. They were eye to eye in a flash of recognition, though at the same time she knew they'd never met. She was in the parking lot, at her rented car, when she turned around and saw him looking in the reflection of the door, which he was holding at an angle to see her. Then he stepped inside and the next thing she knew she was on the highway.

In the distance the dust devils began to appear in numbers, four or five at a time. She drove past broken scrub, wire fences and cattle gates, short trees bent and swollen at the joints, an old silver car plugged dead in its ruts years ago. She tried to call Indrani for an update on Hartley but had entered a cold spot and the call wouldn't send. The highway ran on in cursive tarpatch. Cacti and creosote, an apron of burlap desert spread to the base of a low mountain.

Miles passed without a cell signal and in time the signs stopped rolling up. No distance to Santa Fe, no posted speed limits or highway number. Without the markers she crossed into the pure size and duration of the great west of things. A small dark cloud out ahead of a mass had assumed the shape of a black flint carving and then it stalled and seemed to penetrate the torso of the larger cloud. She'd seen it, a rudely tooled piece of rock, flat black stone, and could still sort of feel it in her thoughts, vivid, particular, and she wondered what the species had done to itself, what utility there was, in evolving the power to see likenesses. The persistent presence in mind of things that are not. She was coming around to the idea.

The road surface changed and a white noise set in. She drove into yellowing sky and the more distant mountains lost their shadows and then themselves were lost. She was either at the onset of something huge or already in its aftermath. What she felt wasn't fear but a whirling certainty. A high wall of approaching dust was drawing over all, a shuttering lid, closing the mountains, the plain. As she slowed and before the black road disappeared she saw or thought she saw the square cab of a pickup at some distance in the
mirror but then the mirror was shut too. On the signal arm she found the lights, the wipers fore and aft, but nothing helped. She needed to move to the shoulder but what if the truck lost its line and didn't see her in time, there was no seeing anything now. She tried to stay in motion but could not and drifted over, trying to feel the edge of the road through the tires. She stopped. A headwind blew the dark to other darks of different intensities.

She looked for the truck to loom up and move by her but it wouldn't appear. Imaginary things stay in the mirror but real things come to pass. What was real would come to pass, all things and their kinds come to pass.

From nowhere a deer buck shot out of the murk and slammed itself into her hood. It fell, struggled up and fell again, its antlers cantilevered as if hung too far forward, got up and bounded off with one front leg flopping uselessly as the hail began with two clean pops and then set in full force all at once in a crushing sound filled with trace frequencies. The stones shot off her windshield and danced before her and when it seemed they couldn't fall any harder the wind reversed and the windshield cleared for a few seconds as if to let her read the ice denting the hood in a storm of notational symbols. And then there it was, the truck, square behind her, sitting more or less on her tail. The caution lights flashed—she'd forgotten to put hers on—and up high sat a figure in the seat, motionless, waiting.

She kept checking her gauges, she didn't know why. The hammering sky drove out all thought. Then a shock of sharp webbings on the glass and they were coming down
like grapefruits and the whole windshield bent inward and separated and punched sheetform into the car. She felt the wind as she drew her legs up and threw herself over the seat onto the floor but the rear window was blooming constellations and now it shattered, the hail ricocheting off the back dash and bursting around her like cut-glass tumblers, and she couldn't find cover for her head. Beneath the passenger's seat a little plastic man, some kind of armoured superhero, lay lost and perfectly protected. A blue, articulated arm. Then the strike. A stone hit the back of her head and she almost passed out but the pain broke clean through and she was taking more direct hits when the door opened and someone had her by the ankles. She struggled and kicked but this creature was hugging her knees now and drew her out. At her feet she saw not a head but a spade head with arms and a voice shouted at her, a flat spade for a head covering and the handle fixed in place along the spine, shouted to get under the car. She hit the ground and rolled even as she was pushed under the chassis. The legs ran back to the truck and she dropped her face to the asphalt and said three times over what the fuck.

She was lying half on the shoulder with the heat of the pavement bisecting her body even as everything in her field of vision turned glassy. The sound alone would kill her. She looked out at the truck tires as the hailstones came slanting now in spears and white fists and ice sprayed into her eyes. One of the truck's headlights burst and the bulb sprung and dangled impossibly from a filament that seemed hardwired to her chances. Then the hail stood vertical again and an outer
sheet appeared surely defined in the air and moved off the vehicles and into the ditch and the desert ground until enough distance opened that the sound changed to muffled percussives and dull thuddings that returned Celia to herself and her differentiated pains.

Minutes later she was sitting next to a russet hound with welding goggles around its neck. There were bloody mappings on her palms, a knot on the back of her head. The torn fabric of her pant legs stuck to the cuts on her knees and shins. The driver's name was Catty or Hattie and she tried to retrieve Celia's things but the mangled car trunk wouldn't open. Now they were moving through a hard rain. Celia hadn't been able to say anything when asked for her name. Hattie said Celia was in shock but she needed to say how bad she was hurt.

“I'm Celia. Cut and bruised.”

At the sound of her voice the dog turned his head and looked at her.

“That's Corban. He only gets to ride up here when the weather goes sideways.”

The truck's windshield, more vertical than hers, was cracked but in place. Her rental was basically plastic. She couldn't remember the make and model, kingdom and domain, the very idea of kinds.

“Sideways.”

“That's the worst I've ever seen. Look back there.” She jabbed her thumb toward the truck bed. It was full of ice and orange sludge. A pitchfork and spade sat on top, the remnants of wicker baskets. “That used to be root vegetables, apples, and carrot tops. The horses'll miss their treats for a few days.”

“Where are we going?”

“We're going to the hospital in town and then calling your car people and getting you a new car. I'll come back later with a crowbar and get your stuff. Where were you headed?”

“It just came out of nowhere.”

“Everything does.”

Then Hattie was talking about horses. Celia looked at her now. She was thin and narrow-featured, maybe in her forties, a woman pretending not to be shaken. She wore a green rayon shirt, jeans, work boots. She drove with her hands at eight twenty. They were all, her clothes and hands, wet and mud-stained. On the dash was a roll of duct tape and a knife, and Celia saw that the back window slid open and she put it together, how Hattie must have pulled the spade and the dog into the cab, but how she could have taped the spade to her back while inside this small space would not easily resolve in her sense of things.

“I don't need a hospital. Nobody's ever saved my life before. How is it we aren't dead?”

“Maybe we are. I was hoping in the next world I'd be smarter or prettier. I'm the same except my truck's banged up and smells of wet dog.”

She kept talking. She ran a ranch for troubled girls. There was some kind of therapy involving the care of horses.

“The girls come from all over, mostly cities. They've only seen horses on TV. You know anything about horses?”

She'd read about equine immunostimulants from dendritic cells. Did that count?

“I think I'm scared of them.”

“They feel the same way about us, most of them, until you spend time to make friends. You have to kind of earn away the fear.”

The rain had let up but she only now noticed. She asked about the girls. Hattie said they were what you'd think. Abuse survivors, addicts, kids with kids they'd had to give away or would have to soon.

“One of them hadn't said a word for months when she came to me. Then I found her in the barn telling fibs to a mare.”

The road was white with crushed ice that moved under them in floes and now Celia couldn't recall where she was or how she'd gotten there. Through the side window the scrub gave way to a tufted grass plain. They passed cattle lying in a field, some of them writhing, some dead. A calf stood under a tree from which it was unlikely ever to move. A truck door opened and a man stepped out with a rifle. Hattie saw it too. Her face lost its set.