“Oh, hey,” I say, sighing. “My name is Henry. Did I tell you that already?”
“You did. Yes. Henry Palace. My real name is Jean,” she says. “And I think—” She looks up at me, rubs her bloodshot eyes. “Actually, could I have—is there any water? Is that okay?”
“Of course, Jean,” I say. “Of course it’s okay.”
*
The jackhammer is the property of Atlee Miller. It was hidden in the fruit-and-vegetable stand, as it turns out, where the farm lines up against the highway. The piece of light machinery was stashed there along with a range of other specialty equipment, the existence of which would raise uncomfortable questions among his family: like sophisticated radio equipment, for example, like heavy artillery. These items were under the guard of a solemn young man named Bishal, with whom I had a quick, tense exchange before I said the password Atlee had provided me and produced my notebook with his signature on it.
The jackhammer is “an old dog,” Atlee warned, but he also assured me it worked with some coaxing. He did not say that the best coaxing involves shouting “fuck me sideways” when it stalls, but I trust Cortez knows what he’s doing, digging away in there. The two of us proceeding along parallel tracks in our investigation, our earlier altercation behind us. Both of us drilling down—he into the dense resistance of the stone and I into this poor kid’s damaged psyche.
Jean starts talking and talks for a while, sometimes in long jags but mostly in quick anxious bursts, frequently stopping and restarting, choking off sentences midway through, as if afraid of saying too much, saying something wrong. Bits and pieces. In her manner and appearance she is nothing like Nico—shy and hesitant where my sister was bold and direct—but sometimes, just the fact of her, her being a college-age kid who got sucked into this end-times looking-glass world, she reminds me so much of my sister that I have to stop talking for a second and hold onto my mouth or risk collapsing onto the ground.
“I was at Michigan,” Jean tells me, clutching the paper cup of warm water. “The university? That’s where I’m from. From Michigan. My parents are from Taiwan. My last name is Wong. They wanted me to come home. When the—when it started. Home to Michigan, I mean. Not Taiwan. They told me to leave school and come home and pray. We’re Catholic. I was born in Lansing.”
I’m not writing any of this down. My notebook is full, and anyway it’s better not to write, not to draw her attention any further to the fact that this is not just a regular conversation. I listen because I have to, to show empathy and build trust, but I do not care at all about her lineage, her faith and family. I am a question mark aimed at an answer.
“I didn’t want to, though, to just—just go home. Pray. I wanted to—” She shrugs, bites her lip. “I don’t know.”
In mid-January the University of Michigan wrapped up its existence with a final gathering of the community on the main quad to sing the fight song and raise a toast in Latin. But Jean Wong remained on campus through the early spring, hanging around, at loose ends. As little as she was interested in huddling in a church with her parents and reciting psalms in Mandarin, she was equally repulsed by the last-months options being explored by her former classmates: all the drum circles and “sexperimentation,” the semiorganized bus caravan heading south to the Gulf of Mexico, with pillowcases full of dope and breakfast cereal looted from the student center cafeteria. She was mainly angry, she says, and confused.
“I wanted to—I don’t know.”
I speak softly. “You wanted to do something about it.”
“Yes.” She looks up, and then repeats the phrase mockingly. “Do something about it. So stupid. Now, I mean. In retrospect.”
For a while, Jean wanders around Ann Arbor. She is briefly signed up for a mission to the Arctic, being touted by an energetic young entrepreneur who claims the world’s polarity can be shifted with the right combination of magnets. When that falls apart she moves in with strangers who are starting a cooperative “pickling and canning society,” to lay in huge quantities of preserved produce for the aftermath. But none of this feels quite real, nothing feels useful. Finally Jean finds herself at a house party slash political gathering in the basement of a Pattengill townhouse, drinking bathtub wine from a red plastic cup, listening to a man standing on a coffee table explain how the whole thing is a “con job” and a “frame-up” and how the government could “stop it like that if it wanted to.”