“Right on,” he says, dropping onto the cooler.
Watching from his high tech folding chair, Simon feels both real and unreal at the same time. This time yesterday he was in group therapy in a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-night facility, sleeping on Egyptian cotton sheets and eating sea bass. The city he’s from is made of glass and steel, town cars and NPR. People drink kombucha and do CrossFit. They summer places and go to white parties.
Duane reaches out and rubs the side of Norm and Glenda’s bus. There is a name stenciled on the lacquer, The Diplomat.
“That’s quite a ride,” he says.
“She’s a beaut, all right,” says Norm. “Gas mileage is a turd, but no price too steep for freedom. Am I right?”
The kids look at him. It’s the kind of thing grown-ups say, combining mundane in-jokes about household budgets with vague aphorisms inspired by go-for-broke hail Mary monologues in sentimental entertainment. Bumper sticker catchphrases filled with nostalgia for a world that never existed. A morality of symbols. Flags and flyovers. Mom and apple pie. The cemeteries of Normandy and WWJD? At that moment there is a shift in the elders. Mister and missus exchange a look. Norm puts down his beer koozie, leans forward.
“What,” he says, “do y’all know about Q?”
*
Later, Simon and Louise wander the periphery. They are dazed after two hours of Norm and Glenda proselytizing the insidious cabal of the Deep State and the stolen election. Witch hunts and secret socialists.
“Where we go one we go all,” they said, their mouths full of supermarket meat and relish.
Louise kicks an empty beer can. They are in a scrubby field, upwind of the porta-potties.
“So, the Wizard,” says Simon.
Louise stiffens. They walk for a while in silence. Then she takes Simon’s hand, holds it. “Are you my boyfriend?”
“I told you. I don’t—”
Louise sighs. “Whatever. It’s not about—sex. I don’t think I ever really want to have sex again, honestly. It’s what you said. Trust.”
He nods. “Trust,” he said.
She smiles, squeezes his hand. “People talk about evil,” she says, “but what does it mean? Dracula? The holocaust? I don’t know. I’m not good at what things mean. All I know is it’s cold and senseless. Evil. Like there’s no sense to it, if you think about what an animal should be, a human animal. The reason we exist. ’Cause, shit—I don’t know—what are we here to do? Feed ourselves, make babies? Warm things. Family, society. And that’s good, what we call good. You know, do unto others, et cetera. So, what’s evil?”
“Fucking children?” says Simon.
A long pause. Then Louise nods.
“It’s cold, right? Not love or hate, we’re not talking about passion or genocide, you know, but the planning for it, the science of it—so many gas chambers operating so many hours a day. So many teenage girls found where, for what price? How you hook them by saying ‘two hundred bucks for a massage’—a massage, like a brand name that’s been focus tested to sound harmless and clean, versus what it is, which is I want to rape underage girls. It’s all so—calculated. Fake smiles, fake tears. Cynical, you know. A lie pretending to be the truth, like, I don’t know—the big bad wolf dressed up as grandma. Meanwhile, good luck on your first day at school, kids!”
“LOL,” says Simon.
“Exactly. Fucking LOL—ha ha ha rape. Ha ha ha hate crimes. It’s such a boy thing, pretending nothing matters, everything’s a joke.”
Simon frowns. “I don’t do that.”
“You’re gay.”
“So?”
Louise shakes her head. They’re getting off track. They pass a clot of teenagers with mountain bikes doing tricks in a rocky grove. Simon feels her fingers tighten, remembers how Claire used to hold his hand so tight. She’d tell him that if an eagle were trying to steal him away, she’d kill that raptor dead.
Believe.
“So the Wizard is what, then?” asks Simon.
“He’s the wolf. And he’s in the shadows, watching and waiting. He sees the grown-ups getting so distracted they forget to watch the children, and he slips in and feeds, smiling his crooked smile—the better to eat you with, my dear. Then he boils us and skins us alive. Or I don’t know. Do I have to keep talking about this?”
Simon shakes his head. “The Pied Piper,” he says. She nods.
They reach a dirt road. On the other side they see rows of orange cones. Work trucks are parked in loose clots. Men in reflective vests erect large white tents, filling a sprawling field, sweating in the midday sun. Simon sees a woman with a clipboard watching the men work.
“What is this?” he asks her.
The woman turns. “That’s optometry. Those’ll be dentists. To the west is where you’ll find your internists and pediatricians, and this year we’ve actually got an orthopedic surgeon. Which is so helpful, ’cause too many people these days have a problem with their hips or knees.”
“I don’t understand,” says Louise.
“Medicine,” the woman says. “Since most of the rural hospitals closed, people drive a hundred, two hundred miles just to see a dentist, except who can afford a dentist? So we go around the country and set up these clinics, try to get people straightened out.”
“For money.”
“God no,” she says. “This is—we’re not for profit. Started in the nineties to help third world countries, you know. Sending doctors to Indonesia and the Amazon rain forest. But now—well, there’s just too much need here.”
“Is that why all the people?” asks Louise, looking back at the campground.
The woman shrugs. “It’s kinda the chicken and the egg. Used to be folks would drive to us and sleep in their cars, waiting in line. But now, well, the lines are home. So we come to them.”
Simon nods, watching the men work. They are building a hospital like you set up a circus. A tent for the elephants. A tent for the clowns.
The thought of clowns makes Simon shudder.
Most of Vietnam will be underwater by 2050, as well as parts of China and Thailand.
He grits his teeth, his neck muscles tensing.