Woke Up Lonely (3 page)

Two Helix came up on each side of her. They held her hands. They said: We know.

The woman blotted her eyes with the cuff of her sweatshirt. She would join, no doubt. She might as well. It cost only ten dollars a head to be here, but the reward was priceless. The idea, thus: Come in with your best friends, whose lives are as alien to you as yours is to them, come in steeped in the tide of loneliness and despair that grows out of precisely these moments when you’re
supposed
to feel a part of things, because, after all, you’re hanging out with your best friends. Come in a wreck, leave happy. How? Start from the beginning. Start over, start fresh. Tell me something real. At issue was not just isolation born of actual, literal solitude, but the solitude of consciousness. The very thing that lets you apprehend feelings for other people also tends to keep you severed from them.

There was a Pack for her not two hours away. As soon as membership cleared five thousand in any one area, a Pack was born. The Helix was seventeen Packs in seventeen states. Fifty-two million website hits a month. Bonds nationwide.

Thurlow drank from a water bottle. He said, “Now, I know what people say. They say that extreme detachment usually means mental illness, but that the pioneering spirit of individuality just means you’re
American.
Freethinking and unencumbered. But what we have today? When so many of us are destitute of intimacy with other people—intimacy of any kind—that’s American, too. And it’s not right. Now, believe me, because I know. I know firsthand. From my life and also from polling and statistical modeling procedures that corroborate a decline in frequency of every single form of social, civic, religious, and professional engagement since 1950. These stats are the God of tedium. But I’ve read them. The Roper Social and Political Trends survey, the General Social Survey, the DDB Needham Life Style studies, Gallup opinion polls, Mason-Dixon reports, and Zogby files. The bottom line? We are cocooned in all things, at all times, and it’s only getting worse. Today we debrief with our pets and bed down with Internet porn. So what can we do?” He paused here while the crowd said, “Tell me something real!”

“That’s right,” he said. “Tell me something real. Talk to each other. Get back to basics. And start feeling better.”

As he spoke, he managed to contact the audience with his eyes, to see people one by one, and in this way to blinker and laser his attention.

When he was done, he thanked everyone for coming. He said they’d made his day.

Cheers, applause, exeunt.

There was a new suit waiting for him at his hotel. Twenty-four roses and puffer vests in red, blue, green, purple, yellow. He had it all sent to his penthouse, then headed there himself. He pressed his head against the elevator door and nearly fell out when it opened to his room. He was so tired. The event had taken hours—they all took hours—so he had time enough only to shower and shave. Perk up. Esme was coming. She might even be on her way. He had forgotten, though, about Vicki, who was standing tall at the foot of his bed with legs apart. PVC boots zipped up her thighs. A latex corset and thong.

He tossed his coat on the duvet. “Get dressed,” he said, and he took off his shoes. “Not today.” He made for the window, peered out the blinds. The White House facade was soft-lit, soft yellow.

Vicki looked herself over and shed her leather gloves. Her arms were marbled with self-tanner. She slapped the floor with a crop. “Slave!” she yelled, but she gave it up fast. “Oh, come on, Thurlow. Even a hooker has feelings. I’ve been waiting here forever.”

He plopped on the bed, faceup. Two minutes of rest, and then he’d shower. “Traveling Companion,” he said. “Please.”

She folded her gloves. “Sorry,” she said. “But what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Just tired,” he said. “Not to worry. Now get dressed—you have to go.”

Instead, she lay down next to him. She’d just had her hair cut and dyed. It was brick red and shorn so close, he could see a birthmark the shape of Vermont traverse her skull. He reached for the side table and handed her a gift certificate to a cosmetics store. “Here,” he said. “Spend it however you want.”

“Wicked,” she said. “I love presents.”

He went back to the window. Vicki sat up on her knees and jutted her lower lip. Pushed her head into his ribs. She wore silver studs in both cheeks, which she’d gotten after a Helix rally in North Hampton to celebrate the start of her new life. She had been coming to Thurlow twice a week for two months and traveling with him as he went. Everywhere except North Korea, about which she was peeved but smart enough not to say so.

“I need to shower,” he said. “If anyone knocks, take the back door out.”

The concierge rang to say he had a message, and could he send someone to deliver it? Vicki put on a robe and brought the envelope to Thurlow, who turned it over in his hand.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” she said.

“No.” He tossed it on the table.

“Can I?” When he didn’t answer, she opened it herself. “
Do sido in Pyongyang?
Think
.
That last part’s underlined,” she said. “What does it mean?”

He closed his eyes. “It means my ideas are stupid and my life is worthless.”

She came up next to him. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You are so not fine,” and she swiped a tear come down his face with her thumb.

He pointed at the roses boxed on the dresser. “You want those?”

“If they’re from you. So how did it go today? I bet you did great.”

He perked up a little. “Five thousand floes. I think we got them all.”

“Amazing,” she said. “All those people whose lives you’re improving.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“Don’t you?”

He nodded. He knew he was helping people but often lamented that, for his efforts, he hadn’t been more helped himself.

She put her hands on his chest, and when he did not push her away, she got on her knees and unzipped his pants.

He touched her cheek. Traced the flume at the base of her neck and rested the pad of his thumb there. It was always the same with his Traveling Companions, them trying and failing to rout the grief that tyrannized his inner life. And yet for Thurlow, this was the essence of a fetish—maybe, even, of all his doings: their incapacity to resolve a need alongside their aptitude for coming just close enough to sustain hope.

After a minute, she said, “Is it that you don’t want me anymore? Is that what’s happening?”

“Vicki,” and he tried to raise her to her feet, though she would not budge. “I want to say something to you. If what we have here ever comes to an end, if the Helix comes to an end, you should know that you have the right to a lawyer. And that you don’t have to say anything to anyone without one. Because it’s possible—the way things are headed—it’s possible this could all end badly. And soon. I’ve put us in danger.”

She laughed and burrowed deeper between his legs. She worked her lips and jaw and the studs gleamed and his heart cracked because whatever optimism he’d marshaled under the banner of finding his wife in D.C. had starved in the poverty of his chances.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I think you should go home. It’s not safe with me anymore.”

She paused—“Uh-huh”—and then carried on. After a minute more, “This isn’t working, is it?”

He helped her to her feet.

“Can I try again later?” she said.

He shook his head. “Go home, Vick.”

“I
am
home. Remember? You’re scaring me, Thurlow. Can’t I just sit here with you? Talk for a little, like you say all the time?”

It was dark outside, but he turned off the lights and led her to bed. She got on her side to face him. It was true, she
was
home. And in this he could take comfort. He could say his TCs had benefited from their association with him. Vicki, and before her Lois, Charlotte, Isolde, Ruth. A girl like Ruth would never have seen Santa Cruz or the Rockies if she hadn’t joined up. When he found her, she was anemic and homeless, trading blow jobs for blow under the BQE in New York. Had her life gotten worse? Or what about Isolde, whose name marked the extent to which she knew anything beyond the one-mile radius around her shack on the banks of the Cache River in Arkansas? He’d taken her to South Korea. He’d taken her to North Korea, where she’d doled out mints to children who’d spent the morning exercising outside the Study House of the People.

Vicki pressed her body up against his and said, “So, you know how my parents are sick and everything?”

“Yes, but tell me again. Tell me everything.”

And she did. She’d been a griddle chef at a diner off I-95 while also teaching adult literacy at the corrections facility in town. Working eighty hours a week to pay off interest on debts acquired from her parents, who had been in a house fire and lived in hospice because neither could breathe on his own.

“But you know what?” she said. “I couldn’t even bring myself to visit them. It was too hard. Isn’t that horrible? That’s my dark secret.”

He looked at the clock. He said that one time, when he was a kid, the Christmas tree had caught fire, and for the seconds he should have been calling for help or getting a bucket, he just watched the flames lash the wall and craze the windows—the bubbles were mesmerizing—but when the firemen showed, he pretended to have been asleep.

“Oh, I get that,” she said. “That’s a fear of responsibility. I fantasize about my parents dying at the same time because, as bad off as they are, it’ll be worse if they don’t have each other, and worse for me, too. Which is even more horrible. I mean, I love them, but still.”

And when he didn’t respond, she said, “Is this helping? Do you feel better? You always say that being always happens in a social context. Is this a social context?”

He took her hand in the dark and held it to his chest.

She kept talking until the winter dawn grayed up the walls and bedspread. And so, for Thurlow, another sleepless night. Alone, but not. Ever thus.

ESME
RUSHED
OUT
OF
THE
METRO. Or walked as fast as possible, given the rubber gams distending her legs, and her chest vest, which weighed a ton. A C-cup bosom that swung low, and a furl of belly fat that D-curved around her waist, not to mention the load of vulcanized ass piled on her rear. Christ, this fat suit. Christ, this life.

Times like these, she wished she and Jim had a more convenient rendezvous point. The Air and Space Museum was in the middle of nowhere. She spotted him at the entrance. She pinched his arm, and when he gave her a confused look, she laughed and said, “Hey, it’s me.”

“My God,” he said. “You are terrifying.”

“Nice to see you, too,” and she pecked him on the cheek.

“Totally unrecognizable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen your face all worked up.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” she said, and she glanced at her reflection in a window. Today’s prosthetic: a nose brinked on caricature that appeared to have been launched from the putty of her face like a dart. Today’s chin: prognathous. She wore a wig. Sawdust blond, washed out, limp. Bowl cut—a vase, really—that came in at her chin.

“Terrifying,” he said. “And what, like, fifty pounds heavier? You seem shorter, too.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is
matronly.
I call this look the Lynne Five-Oh. Effective, right?”

He took her arm as they made for the space hangar. Rocket boosters hung from the ceiling like Christmas ornaments. Jim said, “So how’s our boy?”

“Back in Cincinnati in a few days.”

“And you?”

“Fine.”

“Good, because after what happened in North Korea, you’re lucky to be getting another chance.”

“For what? Everything’s status quo, everything’s fine over there.”

He stopped walking. “Are we even talking about the same guy anymore? Do you need a leave of absence?”

“What? No. I’m just saying I don’t know why now is the time to try again. Nothing
happened
in North Korea. Thurlow never met anyone. He just drove around. I was on him the whole time. I was even in a
car
with him, face-to-face. Didn’t recognize me at all.”

“In this getup?”

“No. Something even better.”

“Wow.”

“So what more do you want? Should I have made something up?”

He gave her a nasty look and pinched his earlobe, which he did when stressed. He’d been working on this assignment nonstop—his file was huge—but the bureaucracy was worse. Under whose purview did a man like Thurlow Dan even fall? A domestic cult leader with foreign ties sounded like simple Joint Terrorism Task Force fare—the FBI doing its worst—but then the National Counterproliferation Center was not likely to hands-off a guy in chat with North Korea. Of course, it wasn’t like the center actually talked to the JTTF, which was probably for the best, since the JTTF took its lead from the NJTTF, which was just sixty guys stumped even by having to order lunch. Jim was at the Pentagon with Homeland Security—who knew how the job of dismantling the Helix had fallen to him. No one understood how business was run at that level.

What’s the latest, Jim? Don’t screw this up, Jim. You got
nothing
from North Korea, Jim? The pressure was intense. And he was losing patience. How could Esme have screwed up North Korea? And how many chances was she supposed to get? He’d been told she was the best. And when she did that Kegel thing, he
knew
she was the best. Also, to her credit, she did produce a lot of information. And she always knew where Thurlow was. So he would be patient. All they needed was a smoking gun.