Woke Up Lonely A Novel

VII. In which: Four short stories after Kim Jong-il’s On the Art of Cinema. In which stories are not so much similar as empathic. A city under a city. Labia, gambling. The USS Pueblo. In which: Run, run, run for your lives.

VII. In which: Four short stories after Kim Jong-il’s On the Art of Cinema. In which stories are not so much similar as empathic. A city under a city. Labia, gambling. The USS Pueblo. In which: Run, run, run for your lives.





Anne-Janet, the set should reflect the times.

All things considered, this wasn’t so bad. A cot in the Helix House. A chance. An emotional context for events that might never transpire elsewhere, events called kissing and touch. Anne-Janet planning it out; Ned was her target. Anne-Janet taking the reins because she had survived cancer and incest and was not about to be cowed by a dark place in a dark time.

“You okay?” she whispered, and she put out her hand, which he couldn’t see or did not take.

Not cowed, but maybe a little discouraged. And unhelped by the warfare in her head. Half going: Kudos for exploiting alone time with a guy you like, AJ! Half going: Um, in the hours since being kidnapped, you have done nothing but augment an attraction that was already burlesque, and some ideas any sane person would dismiss. Among them: if you were kidnapped with a guy you liked, mutual duress was supposed to hasten the intimacy between you. Forget the barter of secrets and memories in the afterglow of sex, forget the dating and twaddle and rollback of your defensive line until you either had to love this person or kill yourself. Forget the prelude, just head straight for what your heart needed, which was a place to go when you were scared and lonely and, in this case, detained in a cult leader’s house in the suburbs of Cincinnati.

Right? Wrong. And Anne-Janet wasn’t stupid. She had not forgone self-doubt. She could never forgo self-doubt, since amid the miscellaneous fallout of being a victim was the constant suspicion that your feelings were nuts. If you’d fallen prey to the world’s incapacity to bring people together but were thinking only of how to get kissed by Ned Hammerstein, it was likely your priorities were askew. And if the task of releasing your lips from a burlap hood and clamping them around his hard-on was more pressing than escaping environs that might be your last, you were, arguably, a crackpot.

It was getting late. Three or four a.m. Their wrists were still cuffed behind their backs. They had each been assigned a bed, two on either side of an opaque screen that partitioned the room and was bolted to the walls. Presumably this was to guard against rebellion in numbers and to ensure the four could not see each other, though Anne-Janet thought the precaution redundant, since they’d already been given hoods. In any case, it didn’t work. On their first night they’d tried to band together. What the hell was happening to them? There were expletives and incredulity and sentences that fell off the ledge (But—What the—Why in God’s name—). They felt, in the main, duped by the arm of government known as the Department of the Interior and, worst of all, lacking the means to recompense themselves for the wrong done them. But that was as far as their shared feelings went. While the others groused, Anne-Janet had the sad thought that the kidnapping would not do for her what it would likely do for them, which was to make inconsequential, even silly, all the bewilderments and crises that had obsessed their lives to date. Quite the opposite. She had experienced such hardship that this check on her perspective only confirmed how dreadful it all had been. The others were panicked, she was calm, and in this calm managed to foreclose on just one more way to feel a part of the group.

Well, to hell with the group. She might have been paired with Olgo or Bruce, but the guards had chosen Ned and in this was a call to action. Even the layout of the cots was a call to action. That, or it was just having to sleep in a cot at all, but the arrangement invoked for her the bedtime dogma of summer camp and, in tow, feelings you tended to experience more acutely at camp, the bleating heart and onus to complete rites of passage before the summer was out. Anne-Janet was so behind on everything that the rites were as looming and fearsome as they were for girls half her age, and probably, for being so deferred, they were worse.

“Ned,” she said. “You awake?”

“Like anyone could sleep in this nightmare.”

“Want to talk?”

“What’s there to say? This isn’t happening.”

“I dunno. You could ask me about me. Pass the time. Chitchat.”

No sooner said than she rolled her eyes to China. Half her head going: Good one, AJ! The other yelling: Crackpot! She’d already told Ned about her mother and the hip, and, from what she could gather at work, everyone knew about her cancer because on her second day, a hospital renowned for strides in oncology but not discretion had called every extension on the floor looking for her.

The cancer had happened so fast. One second she was just bloated; the next she was having a colorectal neoplasm excised by a doctor who said she was lucky to get away without a colostomy, because there’s always that chance, and what young lady wanted her colon popped out her small intestine? She was irradiated. Poisoned. The skin of her hands and feet turned horse hoof. Her cancer was on the move, her cancer was in retreat. Move, retreat. Stage three. It was hard to imagine herself into next week, and for this shortsightedness she wanted the payoff. A reconfigured mental state. To live without fear. Go out on a limb. Do drugs whose effect you cannot predict, have sex with people you do not know. Surely this was someone’s idea of fun—why not hers? The months went by without a recurrence. And since she had done nothing to inch out on that limb, the rest was easy. Did she want to go to Cincinnati and share a hotel room with one Ned Hammerstein, on whom she had a crush? Absolutely. Because the refurbished mental state and drugs and edgy lifestyle were all fine and well, but what Anne-Janet really wanted before she left this life was intercourse. Intercourse with a man who liked her and might even look at her the way they did in the movies and who, if she had to say it, was not related to her in any way.

“Chitchat?” he said. “Nice weather we’re having”—and he began to laugh and then to snuffle.

“Visibility is excellent,” she said. “Not a cloud in sight.”

“Okay, wait,” he said. “I don’t like this game. The weather’s important to me—oh, forget it.” And the snuffling got worse. She told him to stop.

“I can’t. It’s probably three in the morning. I have a sister now. I need to get out of here.”

“You can,” she said. “Cry now, and what will you do tomorrow? Or the day after that? We could be here months.”

“Months? Don’t say that.”

“Well, it’s possible. So all I’m suggesting is: ration.”

“I don’t think you can run out of misery. We’ve been kidnapped; I can be miserable for as long as we’re here.”

“Wrong, wrong.” Sitting up. “You can dry out. Lose your ability to feel. One day you are sobbing for the beauty and horror of it all, and the next you are Stonehenge.”

“These f*cking hoods,” he said. “I can’t breathe.”

Only he was breathing fine. In and out—what more did he want? He was afraid of small spaces, hated the elevator, and had earlier complained that his face was aswelter. There was no way to doff the hoods, and breathing at a clip only made the sensation worse. Anne-Janet had suggested he visualize, and to the extent she had stopped hearing the suck and wheeze of his lungs, it had worked. You are sitting on the bottom of the ocean and observing the sky. After a while, he’d asked how she’d gotten so adept in the pursuit of calm and she said, MRI. Four every year. Spend enough time in the coffin space of an MRI and you become inured to its terrors. If Ned understood that she was, with this response, vanishing the difference between arming yourself against fear and not needing the armor at all, he did not say. He did not have to. Anne-Janet knew the difference; she wore armor on her teeth.

“You’re doing fine,” she said. “But if the ocean thing isn’t working, maybe try to think of yourself as one of those hawks who wears a hood to keep calm. And maybe, if it helps, that the falconer is your mom. Or a friend. I dunno.”

She could hear him shifting in his cot, turning on his side. Maybe he was fetal. Maybe he was thinking about how to flirt, too. Equally mindful of the bad timing of it all, the inappropriateness of it all, but willing to go out on that limb just the same.

“Remember our speed date?” he said. “How I told you I’m adopted? Just found out? Remember that part? Mom’s not so high on my list these days.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “Let’s just stick with the ocean. I’m on the floor, too. It’s sort of mushy.”

“Lot of fish, though.”

“Yeah? What kind?”

“I don’t know. But they’re tropical.”

“What are they saying?”

“Not much. I do all the talking.”

She smiled and laughed and then, for laughing, she blushed. Blushed in the dark, which bereaved the color of its biological purpose, which was to wile. So this was wiling the blind.

“Ned, do you think we’re actually in danger?” and she tried to sound in earnest, a little timid but ready to blossom at the first sign of hope. Because the fact was, she didn’t think they were in danger, but then she was not asking for his opinion so much as trying to undo the impression she had given him that she was bossy. After all, for the purpose of shooting up an ordeal with amorous content, wasn’t panic the grail? She should grope for his lapels. Weep into his collar. Fling her arms around his neck and heave with bosom cleaved to his chest.

“Definitely,” he said. “I think we’re going to die here. Unless—do you think we’re going to die?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and she meant it, because if the danger wasn’t mortal, it was spiritual, her spirit in free fall the longer this conversation failed to twin up their fears in lust.

Back and forth. She weighed her options.

At home: a sick mom and the burden of caring for this mom, which would fall to her alone. That, plus an emotional terrain that smoldered as though after a great fire but that could yield up nothing new, and in this the paradox of trauma: the past could live on in you with an energy you could never muster for the life that was happening to you now. And just think: tomorrow, she could be returned to all that. Unharmed, unchanged.

She rolled on her back and arched her spine to accommodate her wrists. She knit her shoulder blades until they hurt. As proportions went, her arms were orangutan vis-à-vis the rest of her body, so she was able to loop them under her ass and set them on her thighs. After that, the pick was easy. Thurlow’s men had frisked her but failed to consider the wire of her push-up bra, or what a girl with skill could do with it.

First thing, she took off her hood. A light shimmied under the door, dim and distant, and so the room was almost as dark when her eyes readjusted. She stood. And looked at Ned. He was on his side, legs drawn up. She tiptoed his way.

There were nice things about this man that seemed nicer for being unseen. His hair, parted down the middle, the kind you can rake through without snag—it had acquired a glow in her memory that struck out against the doom of where they were now. The same went for his hands and face—ruddy and bright, owing to joys wrought in the freeing of Anne-Janet from her darker self.

She sat cross-legged by the side of his cot. She could see the outline of his lips pressed into the burlap. His breath was warm on her face and came steadily, which meant he was asleep. She tilted her head as though they were lying next to each other and tried, just for a second, to imagine herself into the miracles she’d heard about. You wake up in the morning and someone else is there. Maybe this someone is already up and looking at you. And because you are loved, you do not think about the crust in your eyes or the eruptive skin events that have uglied your face overnight, just that this person is pressing his forehead to yours and saying hello and about to peck your lips, and because his own are so pledged in love for you, this contact seems to reprise the first kiss you ever had, because every first kiss, in its fumbling and tender way, promises the world, which means that this person who loves you has just woken you up in elegy and homage for the happiest you have ever been.

She leaned in closer. And thought: So what if he’s wearing a hood? Maybe this is better. Except just then he turned away and got on his back and arced his pelvis, which probably had to do with the cuffs and not because arousal is passed by osmosis. Either way, she did not think, just clamped her two hands over his mouth and straddled his lap.

He bucked, nearly threw her off, but she got in his ear and whispered fast, “Shhh, don’t wake the others,” and he did not buck again.

“What are you doing?” he said. “Get off me.”

“No.”

“You’re out of your handcuffs? Take off my hood.”

“No.”

“Are you crazy? What’s happening?” And when she started to rub up and down his groin, he said, “Okay, stop it. You’re scaring me.”

“What if I did it like this?” and she reached for him with her hand. “Is that better?”

“Please, stop. I don’t want to do this.”

But Anne-Janet was not listening. She unsnapped his coverall and tried to kiss her way down his stomach the way she’d seen. Ned rolled onto his side; she rolled with him. Finally, he got on his stomach and clenched his body so tight there was no way to get at him.

She backed away as though smacked. “Oh my God,” she said, and she started to cry.

“Can you take off my hood now?” he said. “It’s okay. We’re all freaking out.”

“Oh my God,” she said. “I have to get out of here.”

“Wait,” he said. Hissing almost. “Anne-Janet!” He got up and staggered in the direction of her voice.

“I am so sorry,” she said. “I’m a freak.”

“You are not. Just calm down.”

But she was already at the rebar grille, gripping the ribs until they gave, and out she went like the Incredible Hulk or one of those animals with the opposable thumbs escaping the zoo and running for its life.

She had not cried violently in years, but now the tears were coming so fast she could barely see where she was going. The house was much bigger than it had appeared from the outside—the multiple hallways and doors and rooms—and behind each, who knew, a guard in wait for the first hostage to escape. She wiped her face and ran.

The floors were tessellated and smooth underfoot, peel-back linoleum. The walls were bare and the lighting a spine of halogen bulbs recessed into the ceiling. So many ways to go, but when she heard footsteps and voices on her tail, she booked for the nearest door, which was locked. Same for each after that. Finally she just sprinted down the hall, thinking it had to go somewhere, which it did. A giant kitchen.

She made for the island, opened the sous-cabinet doors, and prayed there’d be room enough to hide among the pots, pans, colanders, lids, and dozen candy thermometers. She prayed in vain; the lights went on.

“What the hell?” said Vicki, reaching for the nearest blunt-force-trauma object, which was a steel spatula.

“Jesus crap,” said Charlotte. “You scared the Jesus crap out of me.” She was pressing her heart and fanning the air in front of her lips.

Anne-Janet was holding a Calphalon stockpot overhead. Her arms were trembling with the strain, so she bucked her head at Vicki’s spatula—an equine gesture, part nod, part rear—to propose détente. It worked. They laid down their arms.

Vicki sat up on the counter and brushed her feet against the drawers. She was wearing a rubber halter top latticed across the sides with chain mail that clipped up fishnet thigh-highs and matching thong. Charlotte went to a utility closet for a spool of duct tape. Anne-Janet backed into a corner and raised her fists. She’d seen enough martial arts on TV to know that if she chambered properly and kept her weight distributed, pulled back with one arm while releasing her jab, she was gonna get killed.

“What’s wrong with you?” Charlotte said. “I hardly think we’re the enemy.” She sat on the floor and began to wrap her boot, which was split at the toe like a duck’s bill.

“We’re just TCs,” Vicki said. “Ex-TCs.” She reached for a roll of paper towels and tossed it at Anne-Janet.

“Traveling Companions,” Charlotte said. “You’ll know soon enough. We keep Thurlow company while he makes company for everyone else.” And even though she was annoyed about the ransom tape, she said these words admiringly.

Anne-Janet scanned in her head the dossiers of everyone living here. She was still weeping, but the towels helped. “So you two are the prostitutes? Because I have a bunch of you on file, a Swede and some others, but nothing about you two.”

“Oh f*ck a duck,” Charlotte said. “You’re one of the spies? I thought you were the new TC.”

“No way,” Vicki said. “Like a TC would ever look like that.”

Despite all, Anne-Janet was hurt.

Vicki jumped off the counter. Her ass had left a steam print on the marble. “Oh fun,” she said, and pointed to her thong, which had lost purchase, so that Anne-Janet could see her mons, bald but for a cross of pubic hair. “It’s supposed to be a capital T,” Vicki said, and covered up. “But I get lazy. Funny, though, right? T for Thurlow, except it looks like Jesus on my cunt.”

Anne-Janet began to make for the door. “I think I’m going to go,” she said. “Except, should I be worried you guys saw me? Because I think we all know what I’m trying to do here.”

“Sweetie, look at you. You been through enough.” This from Charlotte, who was done with her boots and checking her watch.

“Plus,” said Vicki, “the whole house is under surveillance, so it’s pretty safe to assume someone besides me saw what just happened in your cell. So, you know, do what you feel.”

“Oh God,” Anne-Janet said, and slunk to the floor. She pressed her face into the roll of paper towels and began to wet through one sheet at a time. “Can you get me out of here? I can’t breathe in this place. I can’t deal.”

“Not exactly,” Vicki said. “But you can come with us. Charlotte’s got an appointment in the Sub.”

“A special procedure,” Charlotte said, and she beamed like summer sun. “I’ve been waiting for this for six months. Get my labia fixed. Snipped and tucked.”

Anne-Janet stared up at her but just could not summon the words.

“I’m happy for you,” Vicki said. “But just for the record, I think big lips are nice.”

Charlotte frowned. “They’re gross.” But then she laughed and said, “You know, at first, when I heard all the trouble outside, all I could think was that if the feds busted up the place before my vaginoplasty—! So I’ve been praying. And here we are.”

Vicki shrugged. “With your luck, I bet they storm the OR just when your p-ssy’s in a clamp.”

“Nice,” Charlotte said. And then, to Anne-Janet, “So you want to come?”

“Yes,” she said. “Only, to get this straight, it’s not in the house, right? We’ll have to leave?”

“Of course. This isn’t wire hangers in your poon or anything. It’s totally state-of-the-art. At the clinic.”

“The clinic.”

Charlotte and Vicki exchanged a look. Vicki said, “Now, wait just a minute. I thought you were an agent. Like with the government and all that. I know Thurlow is always saying you people are incompetent and don’t know anything, but come on. You’re messing with us, right? You can trust me, I’m in the know.”

Anne-Janet shrugged. Took a gamble. “There’s lots of clinics, I can’t keep track of everything the Helix does. But whatever,” she said, and she hugged the roll. “Lead the way. Just get me out of here.”

Charlotte said, “The Sub’s not Helix. No way. It’s just private enterprise down there.”

“Yee-haw capitalism,” Vicki said. “But I don’t have an extra set of gloves.” Charlotte didn’t either. “I bet there’s some by the hatch. If not, it’s no big deal. Just try not to hold the rope too tight.”

Anne-Janet followed them out of the kitchen, through a supply closet, to a mudroom staffed with hiking boots. Vicki traded her stilettos for Timberlands, and said, “Why is the black pair always out? I hate these camel ones. They don’t match at all.”

Anne-Janet looked her over. “I think maybe it’s just a clash of styles,” she ventured.

“Well, somebody’s been reading Glamour,” said Charlotte.

Vicki snorted. She harried the slack in her fishnets and revolved the hasp lock about her neck so that it faced front. “All set,” she said. “Let’s rock.”

Vicki and Charlotte got on either end of an oval floor mat and pushed it aside to expose a door. There was some talk about the code, and when was the last Thurlow changed it because if you entered the wrong code more than twice, it would lock you out for good. They looked to Anne-Janet, who said Vicki had it right, and since they really wanted to believe she knew things, they gave it a go, and presto, the door clicked free. It was a long way down, and immediately Anne-Janet understood the wisdom of gloves as she abraded her hands on the rope ladder.

So these were the tunnels. She’d read about them. A tunnel scheme fanned out beneath the streets of Cincinnati, the plan grown from a precept that said anything can be accomplished with money. Contractors hired by the city to oversee municipal planning, and in whose yawning regard for the work little got done—these people could be bought. And so they were. Nothing blasts through limestone better than graft.

She figured they’d walk through the tunnels and come up through some manhole in Kentucky. She figured they’d be there soon. Hoped, in any case. It smelled like dead squirrel. The linoleum of the house flooring had given way to a duff-like substance that squished underfoot. Crawling was out, stooping was in. If you stood upright, you’d graze your skull against the roof, which was slimed in moisture. The TCs wore caps. It all made sense.

They had fallen in line and said little. It seemed to Anne-Janet an hour had passed. Her hands were starting to feel like pulled pork. A blister on the gunwale of her big toe had just released fluid into her sock. These were not good developments. This was not a sterile environment. They came to a fork.

“Which way?” said Charlotte.

“Oh, f*ck me,” said Vicki, and again they turned to Anne-Janet.

“What?” she said. “Like I memorized the blueprints? How should I know?”

They went left. They should have gone right.

Eventually, they spotted light slewing beneath a door at the far end of the tunnel. They were accustomed to the dark, so already, from this distance, they had to blink and squint. It seemed possible, for all their left turns, that they were back where they started, in which case a more circumspect fugitive might have hewn to the wall and crept up on the door for the purpose of surveillance. But no. Anne-Janet was too tired to care. She trotted up to the door and gasped for the pain in her foot.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Vicki said. Anne-Janet pressed on.

The door was more vault than door, and locked from the inside. In fact, there was no handle or knob to let them in, just an intercom and button.

“What’s the big deal?” Anne-Janet said. “It looks like a bank.”

“But it’s not,” Charlotte said. “Could be many things, but not a bank. Let’s go, okay?”

“Why?”

“Because,” Vicki drawled, “if you don’t belong here, bad things happen. You need an appointment for every place in the Sub.” And when Anne-Janet pushed for more, they betrayed a brochure’s worth of info, highlights of the Subterrain: Below the Garfield Suites Hotel, a brothel full of Singapore girls, codified by an airline, fetishized by a nation. In the cellar of the Verdin Bell and Clock Museum, access to the operations center of a Deepnet marketplace for counterfeit money and contraband of the month. There was gambling. Ultimate fighting between inmates sprung from Queensgate jail for this purpose. A sweatshop for the sewing of official Major League baseballs, the work farmed out by Rawlings’s Costa Rica factory, where the oft-suspected juicing of the ball occurred. There were maps for sale online, though you had to know where to look, and the maps were not cheap. There were passwords to be bought. Security clearance. There were in the tunnels only people who belonged, attired according to venue, which is why three women in costume (two whores and an electrician) were able to tour the spread unremarked, the consensus of any observers being that they hailed from or were headed to Flaunt, in which you impersonated who you wanted to be and were applauded for it. The Sub was decades old. It had probably started with an underground speakeasy and proliferated from there.

Anne-Janet’s mouth opened, but only for a second. “Oh, come on,” she said, and when the others did not flinch, she said, “You’re saying that beneath the city of Cincinnati is some kind of second city? That’s insane.”

Vicki shrugged. “It’s not. There’s people doing all kinds of ugly shit in back alleys and basements all over the world.”

“This is just a little more organized,” Charlotte said. “A little more high-class.”

Anne-Janet didn’t have time for this nonsense, and so she pressed the button, which cued on the other side of the vault a wind chime followed by static on the intercom and a voice—May I help you?—which came as a relief, because, while Anne-Janet was playing it cool, it did occur to her that this door might in fact be the chthonic maw of snuff videography. Go in and you never came out.

“F*ck,” Vicki said. “I don’t know the entry script for this place.”

“No shit,” Charlotte said. Like anyone knew the script. The script was valued at ten thousand dollars street, assuming you could get it, which you could not.

Anne-Janet bent in close to the intercom and said, “Hi, can you let us in? We’ve been walking for a while and I need a bathroom.”

Charlotte was now cursing volubly. “My ’plasty is in twenty minutes! Let’s go!”

“You’re not gonna make it,” Vicki said.

Anne-Janet depressed the button again.

“Six months,” Charlotte was saying. “Free because of some new technique. Like I have health insurance. Like insurance was gonna pay, anyhow. Six months.” She slouched to the floor. “I think Thurlow got sick of me because of my labia, okay? It’s one thing to be tossed aside because your man thinks you’re working for the feds, but way worse if he thinks you’re gross. You got off easy.”

Vicki joined her on the floor.

“Hello,” Anne-Janet said. “My friend here is running late—can you just let us in already? Man, oh man, if you only knew who I was.”

“What was I thinking?” Charlotte said. “Why am I even here?” She had her face in her hands. “I’m not a Helix Head. I don’t even care that much if I stay alone. But Lo was just so sweet. Said we’d be like a family. All of us. I don’t know. I’m an idiot.”

Vicki began to rub her back. “You’re not an idiot,” she said. “You’re not.”

“Look,” Anne-Janet said, and she drilled her finger into the button. “I just had the most mortifying experience a person can have with another human being, and I have never felt more self-disgusted in all my life, I might go up in flames for how bad I feel, so please just let me in”—at which point the door began to open with ceremony, inch by inch, so that the light from within came upon them like a benediction.

They sprung to their feet. “Just get a map,” Charlotte said. “If you can. Then we’re out of here.”

There was an anteroom. Carpeting in hues graham cracker and shrimp. A row of plastic chairs bolted to the wall. It resembled a bus depot or processing foyer for the urban sanitarium of last resort. At the desk, behind a glass partition, the intercom lady, in a sports visor and white seersucker tennis dress with red and green piping down the middle and neckline. So perhaps this was a gymnasium. A super-fancy gym.

Charlotte and Vicki huddled against a wall. Outside the purlieus of the Helix House, they had grown shy. Anne-Janet asked for a map. The tennis pro qua receptionist laughed and said, “Just fill out this form and bring it back up to the desk when you’re done.”

“I don’t want a form, I want a map.”

“Most people don’t come through this way. Since you people did, you have to fill out the form. Several, actually.” She closed the glass. It was smudged with handprints (fingers splayed, palms flat) and the imprint of a forehead that together were like a pillory for clients to fit themselves into during a losing encounter with the tennis pro.

Anne-Janet perused the questionnaire. Her first thought: This is not a gym. Her second: Oh, man, this is so not a gym. They wanted to know her age, weight, and emergency contact info; okay. But they also wanted references, a waiver form, and a confidentiality agreement more draconian than your average mortgage contract, plus a brief sexual history (if applicable), an explanation of that history (if applicable), a profile of her sensitive spots and no-no’s (if not submitted in advance), a blood report, and a letter from the client’s referring therapist.

She thrust clipboards at Charlotte and Vicki. Vicki didn’t even look, but Charlotte skimmed it over and, when she was done, seemed even more distressed than before. “We have to get out of here,” she said. “I know what this place is, and we need to go.”

Vicki seemed less convinced. “Yeah, but maybe they can do a ’plasty here, too.”

“Earth to Vicki,” Charlotte said. “The people who come here don’t need vaginoplasty.”

“What do you mean? Some people are born with big lips. Not every busted lip is because you f*cked all the boys in Kansas.”

It was slow dawning for Anne-Janet, but then her ears went cherry at the tips. “So let me get this straight, people come here to, ah—”

“Customize their first time, you got it,” Charlotte said.

“Customize?” Anne-Janet said. “Whatever happened to flower petals and satin sheets and a real guy saying he loves you, and not just because he wants to ejaculate on your face?”

“No such thing,” said Vicki. “And from what I saw in your cell, I’m guessing you know that, too.”

Anne-Janet just shook her head.

Charlotte poked at her temple with her index. “And anyway, hello, since clearly neither me or Vick is new on the pony, we’re gonna get mistaken for cops or something, and then we’ll turn into you, all kidnapped and stuff, only we won’t get treated half as nice and probably we’ll get shot.”

“Also,” Vicki said, because Anne-Janet’s incredulity was annoying, “it’s no stranger than some john hiring me to do it. Only real diff is that sometimes in here you get daughters of sheiks or whatever who want a controlled experience.”

“A controlled experience,” Anne-Janet said, and the lady in her heart—her name was Pollyanna—plucked a rose and died.

The Pro took off her visor and spoke to Anne-Janet. “Okay, you’re all set. If you are amenable to the day’s arrangement, there’s been a cancellation. We can get you in now.”

Anne-Janet stammered. “Oh, no, there’s been a mistake. I didn’t come here for this.”

“What do you mean?” the Pro said, staring at Anne-Janet. If she had a racket in hand, she might well have served out a motivational speech about the game—You don’t choose it, it chooses you—though, in any case, what she did offer amounted to the same thing. She said, “I just read your questionnaire and bio. You know we do revisions, right? We can take you back, re-create the context, and change whatever you didn’t like. So, about your father, not to be rude, but you are so obviously in the right place.”

Anne-Janet’s mouth opened. She looked at the Pro, looked at the hookers.

“Sign here?” the Pro said. And then, to Vicki: “Maybe you both want revisions, too? There’s something here for everyone.”

Charlotte said, “Like virtual reality? Do we get to wear helmets?”

“Okay, this isn’t Blade Runner,” the Pro said. “You just describe everything for us, and we will re-create it down to the last detail.”

“Wow,” Vicki said. “My first time. Bradford King. I was fifteen.”

“You remember his name?” Charlotte said. “Mine could have been any one of five guys. Maybe six—who knows who went first that night.”

Anne-Janet continued to look from one face to another. A revision. How horrible. How New Age and barbaric and disclosing of her most awful moment to a set designer and stagehand.

“Yeah, I remember Bradford,” Vicki said. “We all wanted to call him Brad because Bradford was just so serious, but he wouldn’t have it. I remember trying to call him Brad during sex and him just not being able to cum at all and yelling at me for it.”

“Nerves?”

“Beats me. He was nine. Maybe it was too soon.”

Charlotte reached into her purse, as though looking for her wallet, as though in this wallet might be the 20 K it would take to get relaid by five drunken boys in plaid boxer shorts. “Can you charge this to the Helix House?” she said.

The Pro nodded. “One of our most active accounts.”

“I’m in,” Vicki said. “What the hell. I’ll call him Brad as much as I want.”

“Me too,” Charlotte said. “We’ll see who gets the roofies this time.”

They turned to Anne-Janet, who was just then feeling such a mess of grief balk in her throat, she could not talk. She’d heard it said that a girl whose father wrecks her becomes a woman no man can reach, and so far her experience had borne this out with depressing accuracy. Thing was, she wasn’t just unreachable; she didn’t know how to reach anyone else, either. What she’d just done at the Helix House? It underscored the bottom line: She was heartbroken. All the sentiment that attached itself to the condition was in play, with the caveat that the offending party was her dad and that instead of suffering acutely and with foreknowledge that she’d get over it, she hurt with moderation and diligence. A tide erodes the coast, the glaciers will melt; hers was just a slow assailing of the big things—the heart things—whose demise would change the world. Only not today. Tomorrow either. Who could go on like this? She was lonely beyond what she could endure.

She signed on the dotted line.

“So what do you need?” the Pro asked. “Just so I can get a sense of it.”

“A lock on the door,” Anne-Janet said. “A twin bed, a kid’s room, and a lock on the door.”

“Sure thing,” the Pro said, checking her computer screen. “Only it seems like some people are looking for you. You and three others.”

“That’s okay,” Anne-Janet said. “All I need is a lock. So that when your actor tries to get in, he can’t. After that, anyone who wants to find me won’t have any problem at all.”





Ned Hammerstein, begin on a small scale and end grandly.

Some people had wives and kids and the parents who’d given them life. Other people had a Lear jet forty-five-thousand feet up, a childhood plane, the Bernard, which they’d outfitted for cloud seeding and weather modification. Thus Ned, flying away or flying to, a hegira turned pilgrimage for a twin sister who more than likely would not give a shit to find out he was alive and might even fear the responsibility once she did.

“Cheer up,” his mother said, as if she could know; she had not looked at him in hours. Busy, busy. Touring the cargo bay, ransacking plastic bags for utensils and napkins and cold cuts and fruit. They were just over Colorado Springs, a couple of hours to go.

She held up two canteens, “Coke? OJ?” and looked hopeful. Feed the boy, curb his wrath.

He stretched his legs but didn’t get far. The bay was stuffed with kegs of acetone and silver iodide, dry ice, ammonium nitrate, urea, and some beat-up NEXRAD equipment. He’d painted the plane himself, attempting to render the original cover art of Cat’s Cradle—hands plus string loomed over a cityscape at night—but producing a slop of color that passed for abstraction in some circles but not in most. The wings were fitted with racks and flares that looked like the tines of a comb, and under each wing, giant cigar tubes of acetone–silver iodide—smoke generators—once the standard for seeding an updraft, provided you wanted rain.

Milanos on a paper plate, arranged in a crop circle. He took one to make her happy. For the fifth time, she asked about his health, and whether English Breakfast was okay, because she had Earl Grey in her fanny pack, so if he wanted Earl Grey, just say so. She dropped a spoon, then another while bending for the first, and throughout refused help, saying, apropos of nothing, “Your father’s doing well,” while pointing vaguely at the cockpit. He noticed her hands. The fingers were spindly, the skin thin but loose about the knuckles, and capped with nails corned-beef pink. He noticed the rest. Her cheeks were seasoned brown—liver spots and the bronzer she used to conceal them—and, where once showed the natural crimps of skin from nose to dimples, two ruts trafficked her tears so well, it was like city planning had landed on her face.

“Allergies,” she said, waving him off but accepting a tissue anyway.

“Nice outfit,” he said, and pointed at the TV on which was playing a tape of her giving a press conference the night before, urging the Helix to let her boy go. His mother in California cazh, tea rose ascot and blouse, and his father by her side in a double-breasted jacket. Amazing how their son might be shelving billy clubs in his ass, jailed and terrorized in the omphalos of dissent in America, and still they looked ready to yacht. Assuming they still traveled together, which seemed unlikely, given the spite in her voice every time she said we or us, as though the real resentment here was not so much Ned’s kidnapping as the assault of this crisis on their disunity.

She turned it off. “All I’m saying is: We were trying everything.”

“I believe you.”

“This was hardly your average kidnapping. You can’t buy off a man who asks for nothing; who knew what he wanted!”

“Mom, I know.”

“Oh, I was so worried,” she said.

Not that they had asked, but it was the old guy of the house who’d let him out. Shoved him down a rope ladder with instructions to keep going. And to call the police. Except Ned wasn’t going to do that. Forget the police, forget the feds; all he wanted was to wash the tunnel shit off his face and hightail it to Los Angeles. Because, for all those hours in the Helix House with nothing to listen to but his heart, after a while, he swore he’d heard a second heart. Not Anne-Janet’s, who was nuts and who’d disappeared; not Olgo’s or Bruce’s; but from inside, as though knowledge once cataleptic was now chanting what he wanted to hear most: Your twin is in L.A. That, and news from the PI, who had finally tracked her down.

Ned was ecstatic. He knew that one way to make life winnable despite the duress of physical and spiritual decay that was its chief characteristic was to experience intimacy with and through another human being. Progeny were good for this purpose, barring the financial commitment and moral obligation and opportunities to fail them, which were abundant. Marriage was good, barring its encumbrance and foreclosure on spontaneity. But a sibling, a twin—you could be a part of that for free. The trouble, really, was what came next. The unknown of other people’s feelings. How could you control those? Not even the Helix could make other people love you. Trust you? Maybe. But love you? No chance.

He drank down the last of his tea and stood. “It’s okay, Mom,” he said, and he bent down to kiss her on the cheek by habit before pulling up short. What a disaster. She looked at him, and in the glaze of those blues was a pleading that revolted whatever compassion he was trying to rally in her defense. They were not even related! He turned away, feeling pity and rage in equal measure but, in the main, resentment, because from now on he might always have to feel complicated about her and this was terrible and he was sad. He made for the cockpit. The plane had twin-engine jets, room for eight plus crew, with about three thousand miles before things got fumy.

He stared at the back of his father’s head. The hair—white, cropped thick and sea urchin—was his most resilient feature, so that even as his prostate, liver, and bones were crapping out on him, the hair said: I am virile! And also, apparently, I can fly. Ned had called his parents from Kentucky and told them to come get him, but he had not meant this literally. Six years since JFK Jr., eight since John Denver. Of all the crews to enlist, they chose themselves? Max had heart trouble. He kept nitrates in his breast pocket and some in Larissa’s purse. So, him at the controls—it wasn’t because he was young at heart but precisely because he wasn’t, the logic being that it was better to gesture against age and frailty by risking your life than to admit you were simply too old to pilot.

“Dad, you’re listing,” Ned said. He was standing in the doorway with one eye trained on the panel. “Stay the course.”

“Aye, aye, sonny,” Max said. “Chip schooling the old block,” and he listed worse.

“Honey!” Larissa said, alarmed and coming up behind Ned, because the plane had banked left for no reason.

“Helpful!” Max said. “It really helps when you do that!”

Ned looked from one to the other. He decided it was grim, having to save a marriage. Tedious, too. The emotional calculus—How far can I go, how much can I say, what is retaliatory and what constitutes a new offense?—was enough to fatigue every second of being alive to think on it.

“Mom,” Ned said. “Don’t you even want to know? What it was like or if I got hurt?”

“We can see you’re not hurt,” Max said. “It was barely three days.”

“So now we’re quantifying trauma?” Larissa said. “Is that your latest?”

“Oh, right,” Ned said. “You’re going to blame each other for what happened to me but forget about me altogether.”

“Not really,” Max said. “We blame you entirely. Your mother warned you about the Helix, but you, being so smart and Ivy League, blew her off. Reap what you sow, kid.”

“Dad, I went to Kenyon. And enough with this blue-collar bullshit. You’re a millionaire.”

“I came from nothing. No one silver-spooned me all the chances you’ve had.”

“So it’s my fault I got kidnapped? My fault everyone in this country hates each other? Look at you two! Setting a great example.”

“Oh, stop it,” Larissa said. “We were worried sick.”

“Silver-spooned,” Ned said, and he looked about his plane with disgust. He hadn’t been silver-spooned so much as bribed. What sort of parents let their child do anything so long as it was expensive? Guilty parents.

“It’s just turbulence,” Max said as the plane capered through the sky. “Even the Red Baron had turbulence.” He laughed but clutched the yoke hard.

Ned had wanted to see his sister right away, only he had wanted to impress her, too. So he revised the plan. Study the weather in Cincinnati. Maybe seed the clouds overhead and flood the city. Hone his skills, then head out West. Some bullshit excuse, bereavement leave, whatever. Until then: briefings whose details he had missed.

When the time came, he had no idea who or what he was scouting.

If that little troll who’d vetted him at speed dating was chief of a camarilla deputized to bust the Helix, and if this troll had drafted him into the mix—he found this out only after being kidnapped.

ETA: twenty minutes. He closed his eyes and went over what to expect. The PI had not been forthcoming with data on his sister, mostly because he didn’t have any. Her name was Tracy. She lived way out in the Valley. Someplace rural—farmland, mountains—with a husband, Phil, and a toddler son, Willard. Anything else? Hang on. Ned had waited thirty-five minutes while the PI took another call, only to get shut down when he returned.

“No, that’s all I got.”

“But what does she look like?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t take photos.”

“What do you remember?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t paid to make out with her.”

“Hey, that’s my sister.”

“Are we done here?”

“No, wait, isn’t there anything else you can tell me? Is she tall?”

“She’s your height.”

“Really? What about her hair?”

“She’s got your hair.”

“Yeah? Wow. But wait, you never even met me.”

“Bingo, genius.” Click.

How many ways could he tell his mother the same thing? He plugged his ears, but she would not drop it. “How about if I call the police for you? I don’t mind. It’s the right thing; people need to know you got out.”

They’d been having this conversation all day. If he notified the police, they’d take him in. There’d be debriefings. Press conferences or, more likely, a quarantining by the feds, lest he broadcast their incompetence. Not that he could do much to tank the impression people already had of them, but he could spotlight the impression, at least until some other disaster laid claim to the country’s umbrage.

“Mom, I’ll call after Tracy.” He said her name and smiled.

“Don’t be so hard,” she said. “You make bad choices in life. You try your best.”

“Oh please.”

“Neddy, while you were at the Helix House, I prayed and swore if you got out, I’d make the best amends to you I could. So here we are. Flying you right to her door.”

He felt the anger coalesce in words that thronged his lips and teeth, so he was surprised to hear a different feeling assert itself out loud. “Mom, what if she doesn’t like me?”

This seemed to recoup for Larissa her equilibrium, because nothing better vanquishes your problems than your kid’s. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “What’s not to like? Now, buckle up, because who knows if your father can actually land this plane.” She laughed and frowned and laughed again.

ETA: now. The landing gear engaged. And down they went.

California was rilled with faults and counterpoised tectonic fronts likely to rip the state from the mainland. Where Tracy lived was notorious for fire and debris flows, and in that order. It had been the rainiest winter in 115 years. Nine inches in the last week. Almost nine feet at Opids Camp, up in the mountains, where Ned had always begged his parents to send him, which they never did. Probably because they knew his twin lived just a few miles away. They claimed not to know, but who was believing them now? It had rained more at Opids this year than in Bangkok. It was about to rain again; the clouds gathered in a scrum overhead.

They taxied to a hangar that was five sheets of aluminum and loud as bombs when the rain came. There was no one there, as though what few people who attended the strip had run home to open their doors and let the mud pass through. A nice idea. At the foot of the mountains, for fifty miles, were debris basins meant to catch whatever came down, but these overflowed, so that it was possible, at any moment, to drown in a gruel of mud twelve feet high, come slopping through your room.

“Well, this takes it,” Max said. The rain was coming off the roof in a wall and pooling by the hangar door. His shoes were wet through—suede loafers—not to mention his socks. He sat on a bench and struggled to meet his feet halfway.

“Let me help,” Larissa said, and before he could protest, she’d crammed her fingers down his heels like a shoehorn.

Ned made for the door and looked out. A road meandered from the hangar; there was a single car parked outside. “How are we going to get out of here?” he said. Because he had not exactly thought ahead. Well, no, he had thought ahead—that they’d land in Tracy’s yard and she’d come running to him with apple pie and lollipops.

“I rented a car,” Max said. “It’s the ugly one outside.”

“And go where?” Larissa said. “Because one place I’m not going is that woman’s. Not that anyone asked, but I am not going.”

“That’s the spirit,” Ned said. “I’m glad you’re open to this.”

“Your father and I talked about it. We’re at a point in our lives where we just want some peace and quiet. We’ve earned it. So, while we’re happy to get you to her, we’re not going.”

Ned looked at his father to see whether there was actual agreement there or whether she’d just bullied him down. But no, there was no bullying. If Tracy’s life was garbage, they simply did not want the guilt of knowing they could have done better for her.

“But she’s my sister,” he said, though it sounded pathetic even to him. He tried again. “If you’re interested in me, you’re supposed to be interested in her.”

“Let’s just get to the car,” Max said.

They drove around Sunland. A main drag with all the amenities, and to the north, the mountains, scalloped into the afternoon sky, which was a baby’s face swelled with the tantrum gathering force in her lungs.

“We need a map,” Ned said. “I just have the address.”

“We’re not going,” Larissa said. “I understand no one in this family listens to me, but all the same, we’re not going.”

“Fine, whatever, you can just wait in the car.”

“Oh, that’ll go over well.”

“We can drop you off,” Max said. “We’ll make sure she’s home and then come back for you later.”

Ned pummeled his knee with his fist. “You’re making this ridiculous,” he said. “It’s not like dropping me off for kindergarten. Why do you have to make this ridiculous? This means something to me.”

They pulled into a gas station. Larissa fussed with her purse, looking for her wallet. Ned shoved her a five. “A local map, okay?”

She turned around. He was lying down in the backseat. “Neddy, I’ve been thinking. Maybe you should call first? Because what if she really isn’t home? Or what if she doesn’t believe you? What if she doesn’t know she was adopted, either? Have you thought about any of that?”

He was blinking slowly, because on the lee side of his eyelids was the way this afternoon was supposed to go, and it gave him courage to check in with the footage every three seconds.

“I don’t think there’s another family in the universe that wouldn’t tell their adopted child she’s adopted,” he said. “Just FYI.”

“But is this really the best way?” Max said. “I’m not saying don’t find your sister, but what is the hurry? A little planning, a little foresight—these could save you some trouble down the road.”

He was getting a headache. “Just get the map,” he said. “Please.”

It was almost five. It was getting dark.

“It’s a ways up the canyon,” Larissa said when she got back into the car. “The man inside showed me.”

“Good, that settles it,” Max said. “We’ll do this tomorrow. If we hustle, we can still get to the lodge for a steak dinner. I’ve got friends that way.”

Ned reached for the map. “What do you mean? It’s just up the road!”

Larissa sneezed. “Your father will catch pneumonia out in this weather. You already saw his shoes.”

“Then I’ll walk,” he said, and he made to get out of the car, unsure whether he was bluffing or not.

“Neddy,” she said. “You haven’t lived out here for a while. Things are different. This area’s not safe.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Tell him,” Larissa said, looking at Max.

“Your mother’s right. There’s methamphetamine labs all over the place. Have you noticed how half the people running around have no teeth?” He put the car in gear.

“It’s true,” Larissa said. “Even the man behind the counter was missing a front tooth.”

“And that means he’s a meth head?” Ned said. “I need something from the store”—and he ran out. He needed air. Space. These people were unbearable, and thank God he was not biologically mandated to turn into them when he reached that age when you stop resisting your worst self. Course, it was possible his biological parents had been unbearable, too, but there was no point going down that road.

A bell rang as he walked into the convenience store. He kept his eyes on the floor and matted his hair against his forehead. The guy behind the desk was not a guy but a kid, and he was missing teeth because he was ten.

“Need something?” the kid said.

“Just looking.”

“Lemme get my dad for you.”

“No, no, I’m just leaving.”

But it was too late; the kid was hollering for his dad, who came lumbering in from a back room. “Didn’t I say not to bother me?” But then, seeing a customer, he said, “Well, well! Out in this weather? Brave man. What can I do you for?”

But Ned was backing out of the store, mumbling thanks and trying not to hear the radio, which was live from a Cincinnati hospital treating some of the people from around the Helix House. The place had gone up in flames, but the fallout was minor. Smoke inhalation. First-degree burns.

The guy whistled. “Sorriest thing I ever heard. You been following this mess? House blows up and all four of those hostages are gone. Even the Grand Poobah. Something’s not right.”

Ned looked up for the first time. “All four of them gone?”

“Maybe taken to a new place. What do I know. Radio’s telling me nothing.”

“Is anyone looking for them?”

“You just come out of a coma? Everyone is looking for them.”

Ned felt the blood recede from his skin, roll back through his veins, and log his heart, so that it grew tenfold. Everyone? He fled the store and, back in the car, told his dad to gun it.

What is tolerable in a person you love? Or want to love so much you will tolerate most anything? If his sister was a meth head running a lab, and if her husband, Phil, and son, Willard, partook of the results—one enjoying them and the other sustaining brain damage no one would notice for months—if they sold meth to local teenagers who marked it up and sold it to kids in Westwood, and if their franchise rivaled for quality what was coming in from Mexico, so that if they weren’t meth heads they might have been rich and put their son in a day care that served arrowroot animal crackers, if his sister’s face was all bone, and the skin was loose and pocked with gore, would he still see in her proof that his life had meaning? Would she still outfit his unconscious with the fabric of their bond so that he could go out and find someone to love romantically? And if she could do this for him, would he be able to prove he was worth it? The car splashed down the road, but the rain was on break.

“Do you at least have a plan for now?” Max said. “Do you know what you’re going to say?”

Ned was looking out the window for street signs. The closer to the mountains they got, the more sporadic the housing and signage, so that even though they were within a mile of her place, it took forty-five minutes to get there. Every time he thought they were close, it was as though a giant hand snaked down his throat, grabbed his lungs, and squeezed. Then when they were lost again, he tried to breathe double-quick. Get it in there, fill the sacs. He was not hyperventilating, but still he felt sick. One more U-turn and he’d lose every meal he’d ever had.

“Neddy, are you all right?” Larissa said. Amazing how well she could dial into his anxiety. A good mom. “How about we go up the road and park above the house so we can just see what’s what?” Giving him a face-saving way out. He said, “If you insist,” though he was relieved and grateful for this woman above all.

The road did not have a shoulder, so Max pulled onto the dirt. Fog was rolling in, dusk too, but they could still see Tracy’s house, which was actually a barn, and the yard, more like nature in a fence. There were tufts of buckwheat and sage and bitter brush laid out across the ground. Cockleburs up to your neck. Ned squinted but could make out nothing of relevance from this distance except a tricycle on its side and two cars in the driveway—a pickup and a town car much like the one whose engine Max was now gunning with impatience.

Larissa reached into her bag. “Here,” she said, and she thrust binoculars in Ned’s hand. “I got them at that philharmonic fund-raiser. They’re opera glasses, really.”

“You always carry around opera glasses?”

She blushed. Ned said, “Oh,” and then started to laugh and then to tear up.

“I was just going to watch for a second,” she said. “Just to see if she looks like you.” She cupped his face. “My sweet boy.”

He swiped at the tears. He was afraid to look through the binoculars, but he looked all the same and instantly regretted it. He hurled them down the slope.

“What?” Larissa said. “What is it?”

He threw his hands in the air and again his mom said, “What?” She looked at the binoculars, some twenty feet below, and calculated the wisdom in retrieving them. She was wearing clogs and had probably not exerted herself in this regard in years.

He sat on the ground. It was wet and shrill with needle grass. “Goddamn it,” he said. “If you hadn’t taken so long at the gas station we could have beat them.”

“Beat who?”

“The cops. The feds. I don’t know. I saw a woman in the door, maybe it’s her, but I couldn’t get a good look because she was half-inside the house, talking to some jackass.”

Larissa stared down at the car in the driveway but could make nothing of it. “What makes you think it’s the police?”

“Mom, he was in a suit and tie. Look where we are. Everyone’s after me—of course they were going to check in on Tracy.”

“But—”

“Mom, they’re the government. They know everything. And now so does she. I can’t believe it.”

He felt so cheated, he almost could not move. Thanks to the feds, now he’d never know how she had felt in the instant she learned she wasn’t alone in this world, either. Not without blood family. Did the news come as a relief? Would it moor her to the universe and save her life? In receipt of major news for the first time, a face cannot lie.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” Larissa said, and she began to finesse her way down the hill.

Ned had his back to her. “Goddamn it,” he said. “This was idiotic. She’s probably a meth head. Maybe they were coming to arrest her. Let’s get out of here. I’ll call in to work tomorrow and that will be that.” He waited for his mom to hallelujah the plan but heard, instead, a small cry followed by the circus of a body tumbling downhill.

“Ah, Christ,” he said, and he plunged headlong after her, grabbing for balance what he could.

“I’m here,” she said, and she jutted her arm from a bed of sage that, in its congestion, had hidden her whole. “I think I twisted my ankle. Go get your father? He’s waiting.”

“Clearly,” Ned said. The car horn had been blaring through the night for three minutes. If the feds had any sense, they’d hear in the urgency of this horn a sennet for their catch.

“Mom, can you get up?” He took her by the forearms and was shocked at their girth. They were bamboo; she was so frail. She tried to put pressure on her foot but buckled at the knee. “I can’t walk,” she said. “How stupid.”

Ned looked up the hill. The night was livid now, but he could still see in the angle of the hill’s incline no way to get back up together. Unclear, even, if they could get down. He told her to stay put while he went for Max.

“Neddy,” she said, and she grabbed for the hem of his pants. “I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

He waved her off and began uphill. The sky crackled, and you could hear the dry ravel and a sound like horse hoofs on cobblestone, which was actually rocks and pebbles and earth caroming down the mountainside.

The only light for miles was a halogen nested in the gable of Tracy’s barn. It guided their way as they picked through the brush.

“We can act like we’re someone else,” Larissa said. She was pendant between the men in her life, and, though the throbbing in her ankle was getting worse, the pendant thing was nice.

“You could help us here,” Max said. “You do have one foot that still works.”

“Or maybe we could just be hikers who lost track of time,” she said.

“Some hikers,” Max said. “The one thing we had to make that story work, and sonny boy throws them down the hill.”

“I got them back,” Larissa said. And it was true; the binoculars were slung around her neck.

Ned kept his eyes on the halogen. What might his sister not like in all this? How about a creepy brother come to her door with the horrible parents who rejected her.

They made it to the outlays of the house, where management started: a gate, a path.

“What now?” Max said, though he got no answer.

There were bighorn in the mountains; they lowed and baaed, and the sound traveled for miles.

They neared the barn. Ned was the first to stop. He cocked his ear. They were twenty feet from a window open a crack. He was about to press on when a child’s voice sniped at the air and decked his parents. They were on their bellies fast. He just stood there.

“Ned,” Max whispered, and he reached for his son’s calf.

“Neddy,” Larissa said, and she reached for the other.

He looked down at them. Max had served in Korea and been awarded a silver star. Larissa had served as a nurse at the Eighty-Fifth Evacuation Hospital in Qui Nhon. They knew how to take cover. A man’s face in the window, and Ned got on his stomach, too. Listened hard. The voice, after all, was his nephew’s. His nephew, Willard. He tried to memorize its timbre. The high notes. The jazz. He’d been told the boy was just over two. He heard running through the house and a man saying, “I’m gonna get you!” and the child shrieking and laughing and yelling, “No no, Dada,” and collapsing on the floor while his mother nibbled his arms and neck, threatening to eat her boy for dinner because he was soooooo tasty.

Ned rolled on his back. So did Max. Larissa, too. They were soaked and filthy and staring at the nimbus overhead. For everything he’d been through, it was hard to imagine it was clouds up there and not a larder of tears.

He went back to listening. This family inside was a miracle. The boy romping through the house, saying: “Willard’s bear. Willard’s shoes.” The parents keeping an eye on him but retreating to the kitchen to talk it over. The man who’d come to see them before? He was a representative from L.A. County’s flood control division saying that if it rained big again, tonight or soon, probably there’d be a debris slide headed right for their barn. The fire season being what it was, the basin uphill was just not basin enough. Tracy saying, “You believe that? I don’t believe that,” and Phil saying, “Me neither,” but both of them watching their son and believing it wholeheartedly.

“He said if there’s rain, we’ll have just twenty minutes before the mountain comes down,” she said.

“I know.”

“He said in ’seventy-eight, there was such a bad flow, all the graves at Verdugo went loose and there were dead bodies upright in people’s living rooms when it was over.”

“I know.”

“Maybe let’s make an emergency bag if we have to leave in a hurry? Sort of like how when I was pregnant, we had that bag ready?”

“Okay, but what should we pack? There’s nothing important in this house but the memory of us in it.” He touched her cheek.

“I’ll grab the pictures of Mom and Dad in the living room,” she said.

“You’d better. Your parents will have a fit if they find out you didn’t save their pictures.”

“Oh, stop.”

They reconvened on the couch, him with the albums and her with a box of miscellany. Will’s first rattle. A corsage from their wedding.

They went through everything, and the hours went by. Finally, they put the pictures and mementos, title to the house, and some insurance papers in a duffel and put it by the front door. Only then did they turn on the radio. A severe storm alert was in effect. Rain imminent.

“I’m scared,” she said. “This house is all we have.”

“I know.”

“I love you?” she said.

“Check.”

Their son came waddling into the living room and mounted the couch. He sat between them.

“Willard’s book!” he yelled. “Oooooh, airplane! Flap, flap!”

“No way,” Tracy said. “Who could fly in this weather? Come on, baby, let’s get your boots. We’re going on a trip!” She picked up her son, who flapped in her arms.

“Flap, flap!” he said.

Tracy smiled. “Silly boy,” she said, though she was wrong. Because not two hours ago, a twin brother had talked his parents into reboarding his Lear jet and racing for the cloud decks off the California coast. The plan? Seed the clouds to make it rain well afield of a ranch on Alpine Way, so that when his sister was spared, Ned would know himself equal in love to whatever the universe could do for her. He set their course, he kissed the sky. And their lives were bound up for good.





Olgo Panjabi, a man sees, hears, feels, and absorbs

as much as he can understand.

Say you had this cult whose impetus to knit people together had turned terrorist—did that mean you forwent the instruments of community the second things got rough? That you divested your cult compound of a way to reach the outside world? If no, then what the hell, the Helix House was a nightmare; it had no cell-phone reception, no bars, which was colossal in the extent of its horror for Olgo Panjabi because if he could just get his voicemail, his life would start over. He had a rash, he was scared, but still, this kidnapping in its grandeur was like the Christ birth, a demarcation of time. Whatever had happened before belonged to a different epoch, and what tragedies it sustained were receded into it, among them adulteries committed by his wife. In this new era ushered in by High Event, his wife would come back, she was on her way, he just needed it confirmed by the message on his voicemail.

He had heard the others leave—Anne-Janet brawning her way out, Ned following suit—and he had wanted to go, too, only he was frantic and when frantic, paralyzed. If not for the expected message from his wife, he might not have left at all. As it was, he’d crawled his way across the floor and poked his head through the exit Anne-Janet had made for them. Looked left, right. The rash meant he’d been released from his hood ages ago; likewise the handcuffs, because he had to scratch, and so he was versatile with the actions required for this escape. He’d crawl all the way home if he had to.

Phone in his pocket. Checking for bars every few feet. Meeting no one. Meeting someone, a tree of a woman with an accent from the heartland telling him to make for a closet, find the hatch, something something tunnel, which did not appeal to the logic of finding high ground for best reception but which did mean a way out of this dead zone.

It was dark in the tunnel; he had no idea where he was going. He worried he’d deplete the battery for checking the phone every three seconds. Couldn’t remember the directions but kept walking. The plan?

Go home posthaste. Wait for his wife unless, oh-ho, she was waiting for him. Debrief in bed with kefir smoothies. The tunnel went on and on, but he could hear the rumble of cars overhead, and soon: a manhole. Ladder, life. A cover that could not be moved without a crowbar. Several such, and so he got filthier and angrier and more exhausted until, at last—a temp cover, resin grate, he could easily remove.

He ran to the sidewalk. Ran with no regard for the spectacle of himself sprouted from the nethers, waving his phone. Not that anyone cared and probably not that anyone even noticed. He waved his cell for the interminable seconds it took this device to realize it was aboveground. One bar, two. He called his number and listened to the outgoing, dialed his password, got it wrong, fingers like egg rolls, got it right, thank God. Many messages, jumping for joy. The first from Erin—Dad, where are you?—and another—Oh my God, Dad, are you okay?—and finally just her crying, saying everyone was so scared, she knew he wasn’t going to get this message, but she loved him, they all did. All? A call from the fraud department of his bank, because there’d been so much activity on his debit card—had it been stolen?—and then a reporter from ABC news, just in case.

Ah, choices. In every negotiation, there were plenty. Be the guy who reneges on what small powers of deduction separate man from ape, or the guy who accepts what’s what and acts accordingly and in everyone’s best interest. Trouble was, if you recognized these options as a choice, it wasn’t yours to make: You were the latter guy, the reasoning guy, the unhappy, paid-to-arbitrate guy whose wife had not called on purpose. He rang his daughter. Did so outside an electronics store with TVs in the window showing a photomontage of the Helix hostages: Anne-Janet before the cancer, in pastel tank top; Ned at some dress-up convention, brandishing an action figure statuette like an Oscar; Bruce with tripod braced over his shoulder. And Olgo? Olgo smiling hugely into the camera with Kay by his side, the red-eye spangles of the shot doing little to vandalize the joy coming off them in torrents. Didn’t the others have family? Couldn’t the news upturn a single candid of Olgo without Kay? Of course not. Not if they wanted to reproduce his likeness in good faith.

Erin shouted into the phone. “Dad? Dad?” She was incredulous and then she was sobbing, and he could hear Tennessee in the background, screaming in empathy, and then Erin calling out for someone, saying, “It’s my dad! On the phone! He’s okay!”

Her enthusiasm was nice but also highlighting of the enthusiasm he would have liked to hear from someone else.

“Erin, I’m fine. I’m fine, sweetheart”—and while he meant to say that he was coming home and that he loved her and that the whole time he was kept hostage he thought only of her and Tenn, of family and love, he popped out something different. He said, “But let me just ask you this: Who is that person you’re talking to in my house?” Because he suspected it wasn’t a woman, and if it was Erin’s a*shole husband, Jim, he’d lose it.

“Dad,” she said. “Where are you? Are you okay? Oh, thank God,” and she started to cry anew.

He was afraid to squander battery life on her sobbing and was about to press on when closed captioning from the storefront began to ticker news of interest: The hostage Olgo Panjabi has a wife; this wife has joined the Helix.

He took a deep breath. The cold seemed to nip his lungs like frost starred to a windowpane. “Has your mother called?” he said.

Crying stopped. A long pause. Erin scouring her mind for the right way to put it. Olgo gawking at the TV.

“No,” she said. “I think she’s gone.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said.

“She’s with the Helix, Dad. Jim told me. She’s in Virginia.”

The last of the ticker onscreen: Living at whats thought to be a helix commune in richmon by the riber, sources close to teh case say, which wasn’t a case so much as Olgo’s hell spelled out in third grade.

“Dad, just tell me where you are. There’s nothing on the news saying the hostages were released, and Jim says no one knows anything, though I know he’s full of shit. Is it a secret?”

“Yes,” Olgo said, though it had not been a secret until now. He watched onscreen as one of Kay’s friends from yoga—she did yoga?—said how kind and vibrant Kay was, as though Kay were the tragedy here, the one taken. Though maybe—and here Olgo’s spirits rose like mercury in the thermometer—she really had been forcibly severed from her life by the brainwashing fury of the Helix, in which case she could be forced back.

He stomped at a snowbank and nearly fell in. He had not once been hysterical at the Helix House, not until the moment he realized he could get out. He clamped down on his voice with success.

“Listen. Don’t tell anyone you heard from me. Everything’s going to be fine, but I have to go.”

“Dad, you’re scaring me. Wait, oh my God, are you—is someone making you say these things? Are you, how do you put it, are you under duress? Just say I love you if I’m right.”

“Duress?” he said, sneering. “I thought you were a big fan of the Helix! You and your mother both. Their biggest fans ever!”

“Dad, I didn’t know they were armed or whatever. I didn’t know you were going out there. I didn’t know they were like that! I’m getting a divorce; I just wanted some friends. If you’re upset about what happened, that’s natural. But don’t take it out on me. What were you even doing in Cincinnati? All this time pretending to be a nobody when really you are CIA? At first I thought you went after Mom, but then when you were gone for so long without calling and then suddenly the news everywhere and the press and Jim feeding me ten different stories every ten minutes—I guess you are CIA. I know you can’t tell me, so all I’m saying is: I know.”

Olgo rapped the phone against his head and hunkered down. It was freezing. Kentucky in winter. No one around except a guy down the street smoking outside a garage, and in the driveway, a car with a For Sale sign in the window.

“I have never pretended to be a nobody,” he said, and then he lost his breath for the agony those words drowned him in.

“I didn’t mean it like that. When are you coming home? I’m just here with a girlfriend.”

“I need a few days.” In the meantime, he had started for the garage. The smoking guy was in coveralls and rolling a second cigarette before his first one was out.

“One good thing?” Erin said. “I think Jim has to leave town. Maybe even the country. So me and Tenn are home free.”

“Great,” he said. “Now listen: when your mother calls, tell her I’m fine.”

“Okay, but, Dad? She might not be coming back. Like, ever. His name is Jonathan. Just so you know.”

Olgo stopped midstride. He’d almost forgotten. So enamored had he become with the idea of his wife absorbed into a cult, he’d lost sight of the recruiting lothario at the start of it all. Jonathan? What could be more homogenous and totemic of the white man and his intolerance than a name like Jonathan?

“I have to go,” he said. “Give Tenn a kiss for me.” And before she could respond, he flipped his phone shut.

By now, he was within voice of the mechanic, who took one look at him and said, “You like this car? ’Cause I got a better one in the back. Cheaper, too. Want to see?” He flicked his cigarette into the gutter and plucked shreds of tobacco from his tongue.

Olgo nodded. Buy a car, hit the road. He struggled to keep pace with the mechanic. It wasn’t his way to move this fast, but it was refreshing so long as he could establish in their shared stride and silence the preconditions for talk. He needed to talk. More now than ever. If it’s true that stress makes you sick, there were polyps massed on the wall of his gut like barnacles. His bones were punchboard. He had coronary heart disease. Was getting a clot. Morbidity gorged on his despair.

He took three steps for the mechanic’s every one, but they were on pace. “So, how’s it going?” he said.

The mechanic glanced at him. “Car’s over there,” he said, and he gestured at a pea-green sedan. A Ford, maybe. He reached in his pocket for the keys. “You seem like a good guy, so let’s just call it an even three K.” He stopped several feet from the car, and when Olgo moved ahead, he called him back, saying, “Better yet, two K.”

“Fine,” Olgo said. “Just give me the keys so I can make sure it works.”

“I’m not out to get you,” the mechanic said. “But I do have to get back to work.” He held out his hand but still would not approach the car.

“The keys?” Olgo said. “I have to get to a bank anyway. It’s not like I’m carrying.” He was in a hurry, but he was not stupid. The car had New York plates. Probably the car was stolen, though he couldn’t imagine who’d want to steal a pea-green sedan.

“Done deal,” the mechanic said, and he tossed him the keys.

Olgo got inside and immediately felt something like oatmeal wet his pants. Then came the smell. Cloying and rancid. He flew out of the car, shut the door. His eyes watered. “What is that?” he said, and pressed his face to the window. The glass was hazy and the lighting dim, but still, he could see inside. An army of fungal spores was encamped in his new car.

“You can’t be serious,” he said, and turned around. But the mechanic was gone.

Olgo circled the car and began to stack reasons for why this wasn’t so bad against a feeling that this was terrible. As if he could show up at Jonathan’s like the Swamp Thing.

He opened the trunk. Luckily: towels and aerosol. He was on the road shortly. The car smelled as though many drag queens had passed through it. Nine hours to go. He was headed to Helix Pack 7, Richmond, Virginia.

According to the radio—which worked, thank God—P7 convened at the Fulton Gas Works factory off Williamsburg Avenue. It was only two hours south of D.C., which meant Kay might have been commuting for months. Months! He could have hurled with the thought, though now, driving down the highway, windows up, then down—the cold was unbearable, but the smell was immortal—he thought he might hurl anyway. Olgo had never known himself to be an angry man or even a man with the stamina to anger for more than a few minutes, so the imprecations launched from his mouth at every car that passed and every one that didn’t; the slamming of his horn, plus coda, “Chingchong, CHING-CHONG!” because half these drivers were Asian and no Asian could drive; the tailgating of family vehicles signed Baby on Board—none of these behaviors, nor the presence of mind to deal with them, was part of his repertoire. It was not long, then, before he veered into the emergency lane and blew a tire. The asphalt was serrous, littered with glass.

He punched the ceiling. His knuckles came back wet. Good thing he could not call AAA. Good thing he’d insisted the expense was lavish when Kay pressed for it; good thing she’d called him a miser cheapskate and turned her back to him in bed that night and for a few nights thereafter. Good thing in the year since, he’d refused to go on vacation, buy a new fridge, pay for Kay’s landscape portraiture classes at Wash U, or even contribute to Tennessee’s college fund. He wasn’t a cheapskate, Kay’s shrieking opinion notwithstanding, but just planning for the long haul. Sixty was the new forty; he’d have to make their savings and income last for another half century of life together. Together! Even now, stalled and shivery and strewn with hives, he smiled. And warmed up from the inside. He would just have to hitchhike.

Five minutes passed before the anxiety of his circumstances returned. He hoisted his thumb, then jammed it in his pocket. There were some evil people on the road. People who might be the last you saw on earth if you got in their car. Oh, this was absurd. He thrust his thumb back in the air.

Success was immediate; a car pulled over. Olgo bent down to look inside. “East,” he said. “Virginia,” and he probed the man’s eyes for murderous intent. He was old. His face was like granite, and the lattice of declensions in his skin was chiselwork. The car was a station wagon. Mutts in the back—a Weimaraner and a medieval-looking dog with no hair—and in the front, where once was a radio and AC console, the dash had been gutted to accommodate a humidifier that plugged into the smoke socket. When Olgo opened the door, a plume of dew came at his face.

The man told him to hop in. “You’re in luck. I’m pointed exactly that way.”

His voice was phlegmy, as if the walls of his nose and throat were slopped in roux. He was missing fingers that mattered for making a good impression.

“The name’s Jerry. You?”

“Jonathan.” Olgo said it deliberately, testing the consonants for what pleasure they gave his tongue in bringing them to life.

“Well then. Hope you don’t mind the dogs. The bald one, you can put one of them pups on your arthritis and the skin is so hot it cures you. Folklore, but I done it. And I got arthritis in places no one but a pup’s gonna go without complaint.”

Olgo looked away. If he had wanted to talk, he also had standards. He thought about retreating to the backseat, claiming fatigue, only between it and the tailgate was a trellis for keeping the dogs put that did not seem so reliable. The bald one already had his snout wedged through.

Olgo said, “Is that okay? Your dog like that? I think he’s stuck.”

“Not really. But just see what happens you go find out.” Jerry laughed, like whatever mauling had befallen him in the past was good times. Olgo thought he even flourished his knuckle stumps, though maybe he was just swatting the air.

“I’m going to see my wife,” Olgo said. “She doesn’t know I’m coming, though.”

“Yeah? I had a wife once. But we don’t talk. When I came back from the services broke, she didn’t like it. Now my son and his family live near, but it still feels like I got nothing.”

“What do you do these days?”

“This and that.” He rolled up his sleeve and began to savage his bicep. When he was done, the patch of skin was candent and striking against the livid ink sealed into his arm.

“Oh Christ,” Olgo said, and he reached for the door handle.

Jerry grinned. “At eighty miles an hour, I’d say you’re not gonna make it.”

The tattoo was bigger than any Olgo had seen on file. It stretched from elbow to shoulder, and the rungs of the double helix were pearled—this version more science, less metaphor.

“Are you taking me back to them?” Olgo said. “How did you even know where I was?”

Jerry pointed at a CB radio bolted to the underside of the steering column. The radio was waterproofed in plastic. “Looks like it’d be in the way, but it doesn’t bother me none.”

Olgo said, “I don’t understand.”

“It’s like this. There’s an APB out for that car you were driving, for one. Ugly business with that car. Someone spotted your plates, said there was some jackass cursing all up and down the highway. Also, the feds put out the word. Found out maybe you wasn’t there when they came a-knockin’.”

“So everyone knows I’m out?”

“Everyone with a CB. Whole world is listening. All that fancy equipment, and some idiot is still using the CB.”

“Are you taking me to the Helix people or not? Because I’m pretty sure it’s not me they want, just anyone. To make a point. I do this for a living, conflict resolution, so, ah, talk to me. There’s no need to be confused about what we each stand to gain.”

“Sure there is. We’re all confused. Let’s call it the human experience.”

Olgo frowned. A preacher man.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Jerry said. “I’m seventy-nine next week. God willing.”

Olgo pressed his head to the glass—how was he even having this conversation?—and began to regret in earnest having left the Helix House. Why couldn’t he have waited for Hostage Rescue? Wherever Jerry was taking him, security would be tighter and the turncoats fewer.

“So let me get this right: You’re a bounty hunter for the Helix? At age seventy-nine?” Sixty might well be the new forty, but seventy-nine was eighty and eighty was nine hundred.

“Seventy-eight, thanks.”

“I have money. I could get money.”

“Oh, don’t talk stupit. I don’t like that kind of talk. I’m principled.”

“You’re above money?” Olgo cowered with the thought. In all his years negotiating, it was always the principled who stood their ground with the least remorse.

Jerry shook his head, said, “I’ll tell you all about it later,” and pushed Play on a cassette deck sized like a hardback novel.

And so it went: Show tunes. Oklahoma! and Cats and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Jerry singing in tandem but not in key. He had several five-gallon jugs of gas in the back, which meant they could go for hours without having to see anyone, which they did. Olgo was so clammy by the time they rolled into Blackstone, his skin was made of eel.

He did not know the area well, but he gathered they were close to Richmond, having drifted into Virginia a while ago and been headed east the whole time. Eventually, they pulled off the highway, and when they saw signs for Fort Pickett, Jerry said, “USS Pueblo, I was on that ship, you know.”

Olgo said nothing. So Jerry was a Helix-touting ex–navy man. Bad news. Also, the Pueblo? God knows what the North Koreans had done to the sailors off that boat; Manchurian candidate might be a step up. How’d Jerry lose his fingers, anyway?

“That should mean something to you,” Jerry said. “You’re almost my age, I bet. You lived through the war.”

Olgo’s mouth blew open. He flipped down the visor and evaluated what he could in the mirror. The skin about his lips was pinched. The whites of his eyes were not so white. He seemed to have grown lappets overnight. In general, the impression was of a man who’d lived in the sun and slept on sandpaper.

Jerry went on. “You and me have something in common now. Both kidnapped. I didn’t have to pick you up, you know.”

Olgo gathered his wits. Another way to hatch accord between parties was to get on record their differences and then to look for shared ground. He said, “Okay, I see you think you’re doing me a favor, whereas I think the opposite. Maybe we can come to terms. Because, frankly, taking me prisoner is not going to avenge whatever it is you want avenging. The Helix is finished. The place was surrounded when I left. The government is probably arresting Thurlow Dan as we speak”—though here he paused and smiled bitterly. Thurlow Dan, that wife-stealing shitf*ck.

“Prisoner!” Jerry laughed. “I’m not taking you prisoner. You already been through that, and besides, it’s unAmerican.”

“What?”

“Un-American,” Jerry said. And then, looking at Olgo with an appraiser’s eye, “Or aren’t you one of us? Whole country’s full of people who don’t look the part, so I never know who’s who anymore.”

“What?”

They pulled into a gravel driveway that ramped up to a single-car garage addition on a converted trailer home. Prongs of ice hung low from the gutters, and from sky to foot was a gray so ambient, it could blanch your heart in minutes. Olgo winced and waited and summoned the courage to run.

Jerry let the dogs out. He was gripping a carnation of fabric so that his sweatpants wouldn’t fall and wrestling with the rear door, which would not close. Hard to say which problem had him worse.

“Shit car,” Jerry said.

Olgo’s breath purled from his lips. A man across the street was shoveling snow, wearing orange camouflage gloves and a trapper hat. There was music in the air, guitar licks, and Olgo thought he saw a woman fat as a yak vacuuming inside. He surveilled their lawn and wished he hadn’t: hanging from a tree turned gibbet was a deer carcass with skin rolled down from the neck, over a brick that gave purchase to a rope, and at the end of this rope, two boys, seven or eight, heave-hoeing amid the steam still lifting from the animal’s flesh.

The man waved. “Eight o’clock,” he yelled, and Jerry nodded before plunging a key into the front door of his house.

Run, Olgo thought, and walked inside. The man was a twig. Did not seem to carry a firearm or have an incarcerating posse in the living room. Run, Olgo thought, and undid his scarf, noting that Jerry’s furniture was sealed in plastic. The place was overrun with cats and, in the bathroom, a litter of kittens not one week old.

“I rescue ’em,” Jerry said. “Else they just howl all winter long, and the sound is like people bawling for everything that’s unfixed.”

There were fifteen bags of cat food pushed up against the wall. Jerry toed a rubber ball that skidded across the floor. Four cats tore after it; the others couldn’t be bothered. Jerry said he’d be right back, and when he returned, he wore a terry-cloth bathrobe that exposed his skinny legs and gym socks tubed loosely around each calf. He popped a cube of gum in his mouth. “Hubba Bubba. Want one? I’m ’bout to shower.”

Olgo shook his head. He’d heard of abducted children who could escape at any time but never did. Whose minds had exiled the very idea of escape, so that when asked about it later, they regarded the concept the way a toddler might consider a new word—with wary enthusiasm because haven’t I heard this someplace before? Olgo had been here only five minutes and already he was stuck.

Jerry settled into an armchair. Olgo said, “So, do you want to tell me what’s going to happen to me now? That family across the street, are they Helix, too?”

“They was,” he said. “That’s how they met. My son never went to a dance in all his life, what’s it called, a RYLS, and next thing he’s married this woman—there wasn’t so much of her back then—and joined up.” He blew a bubble and went cross-eyed to watch it grow.

“That’s your son?” Olgo cursed under his breath. So Jerry did have people. Backup.

“And his wife. And them kids. I left the Helix easy enough, but for Buzzy, I got one of them exit counselors. Took us a year of planning. All nicey-nice, and for what? He’s all spaced out. Dissociation, they call it, from all them hours just telling on himself in a room.”

Olgo thought of Kay, her beautiful mind seized and plundered by these nuts. Why hadn’t he noticed the crossroads-of-life events that prep a person for cult induction? Had she been depressed? Menopausal?

Restless? Bored?

“You’re ex-Helix?” he said.

“Yep. An’ I still can barely make a decision on my own. We have this joke now: only thing scarier than Loch Ness is Together Ness, though maybe it’s not so funny.”

“Are we far from Richmond?” Olgo said. Though, really, what was he going to do? Pluck Kay from their midst? He couldn’t know how lost to them she was, but he’d heard stories. The power of group doctrine and how the person deputized to speak for the group was more worried about winning its approval than dealing with the enemy. Assuming he was the enemy—though how was this possible? His wife of thirty-five years would choose a cult over him, thanks to the five minutes she’d been among them?

Jerry produced a knife from his bathrobe pocket. He examined his hand and began to scrape at the dirt plastered to the underside of the thumbnail he had left. Kittens mewling. A car engine that would not catch.

“’Bout an hour,” he said. “Give or take. But not to worry. I know all the back roads.”

Olgo was about to ask what this meant when there was a knock at the door, then a pounding, and the sound of many people barreling into Jerry’s place.

Buzz had dundrearies like it was 1975. He was dragging a grill on wheels into the kitchen, except the wheels were missing and the legs grated the floor.

Olgo sat up as Sissy thrust a pail of charcoal briquettes at his chest, because him sitting around was not going to get this dinner on the table any faster. Her hair was buff, feathered to the chin. She was chopping sausage. Said, “You know, I was just sick at my stomach when I heard about you and the others. But when Dad said he was gonna help, well, we all gladdened up a little. He’s been on the road two days. Wouldn’t take a cooler, neither. You like a little blood in your meat? Barbecue’s almost heated up.”

Buzz had cracked the transom above the back door in the kitchen, but this did little to exhaust the room of smoke. Sissy said, “You know, my family was raised similar to the type of Amish with no electricity. But all of us girls has turned out to be terrific girls. We are six, except until the Helix caught hold, and now we’re two dead. So you see—” But then her boys tornadoed through the room and Sissy was up after them with a dishrag. The effort took her breath away, and she was back on the couch before long. “Buzz don’t know apples about rearing kids,” she said. “He ever had a thought in his head about them, it a-died of loneliness.” She peeled a potato. “He left me once. Right after we got out of the Helix. Then thought better of it.”

Olgo blinked at her slowly. He’d been confused and afraid and then confused all over again, but now he was something different. Bigger. His heart grew ten feet. He did not think it was an accident, him being shepherded from the Helix House and into the arms of—well, he didn’t know what these people were except that maybe they were God-gifted to tell him something.

“Anyway,” Sissy said, “my sisters took up with Thurlow, and one suicided for him not liking her enough, and the other got an abortion, which was afoul of God, so she died. We had such ideas, too. Just yearning to be a part of something. Stupid in backsight. But the thing is, you never knowed what you was signing up for. It all happened so subtle-like. Me, I’m not fancy-educated, okay, but half the people who talked me in were Harvard.”

“Amen to that,” Jerry said. He was sitting on the couch with two kittens in each hand. “So little,” he said. “Helpless.”

“Yep,” Sissy said, and she looked on her boys. They were slamming each other against the wall to see who could do it harder and to more lasting effect. George had a cut down the side of his neck but would not cede the game.

“They was born Helix,” she said. “We been out a year, but I still give ’em lots of rope. They’s still learning how to be just boys. Most horrible mistake of my life. They daddy could be anyone, though probably it’s Buzzy.”

Olgo sat forward. His voice came out low. Reverent. He was stuck eight thoughts back. “Thought better of it?” he said. “Left you and came back?”

“Yessiree. Wasn’t gone too long, neither. Sometimes, though, you can’t wait. So don’t you worry none.”

Olgo leaned way over the table like he might clutch the billows of skin come down her shoulders and said, “When he left, did you feel like he’d taken all the colors of your life with him? All the water, the light, the air? Like he’d left you for dead except being dead would have been better? Did that happen to you?”

She laughed. “That’s hokey talk. I grew up on a farm. I know how to fend for myself. Plus the Helix made me confused about Buzzy, like I weren’t married to him but just to the group.” And when Olgo did not return to the couch but just hung there as though waiting to be slapped, she said, “You oughtta see your face. You look like you left yer guts in the john.”

“Oh, leave him be,” Jerry said. “I’ve seen that face. I’ve worn that face. All hopeless and ruined. Eleven months in a shit-hole jail in North Korea, you bet I seen that face.”

“Umm-hmm,” Sissy said, and Olgo sat down. He got the feeling that though she’d heard this story a thousand times, today it was actually germane to something transpiring in their lives.

“Eleven months,” Jerry said. “You know the slits wouldn’t even let you sing in your room? I was never much for singing before, but just for being denied”—and he blew out another show tune that sent the cats tumbling from his chest.

“Terrible,” Sissy said. “Man’s just gone afoul of God.”

“Our captain near got beat to death. Others too. And whenever there was free time, which was pretty much never, but when there was: no football, ’cause the huddle meant plotting. Like we was plotting to escape. Stupid slits. I still have nightmares.”

“And they still got the Pueblo,” said Buzz.

“Correct,” said Jerry. “Like some trophy. Not that we tried too hard to get it back. Day we was released, a hospital in Seoul gave us each an ashtray souvenir. You believe it? Eleven months of turnip soup—and eyeball was a treat, mind you—and they give us ashtrays. I mean, this was in ’sixty-eight, so we was no one’s favorite army. But still. I hate this country, I really do.”

Olgo could not fathom where this was going, but he was decided to go along with it. Left and came back were the only words that mattered now. He glanced up at Sissy, waiting for more.

Jerry sank into his chair. “I know it’s an awful thing to say.”

Sissy patted his hand. “We all of us been disappointed.”

Jerry spat into a napkin. “Second I heard Thurlow was in with those same who took the Pueblo—man. What was I thinking? Sissy’d done lost her sisters and there I was still going to meetings and saying my heart’s broke ’cause of my wife and kin. Well, I had my eyes opened. And got my son out. But it didn’t feel like enough, so I been biding my time, jus’ hopin’ I’d get the chance to do more. And along comes you four. And along comes you.” He laughed and just as suddenly coughed up something with such force, it might have come from his colon. His face was twice its color, and his eyes were clear in tears. “It’s stupid, I know, but even at my age, I’m still looking for a hero. So maybe that hero is me.”

Olgo heard him—a hero, yes—though he kept his eyes on Sissy.

“Anyway,” Jerry said, recovering himself. “Here we are. You gotta figure everyone finds his own kind eventually. We’ll eat and then get a move on. We got a long night ahead of us. I best put my jeans on.”

Sissy lifted her paring knife and said, “It’s not like I’m okay with this, Dad goin’ back in and all. But he’s strong. He knows his up from down.”

Jerry smiled and looked at Olgo. “Plan is for you to show up like you been invited, like you’re interested. You’ll have ’em all over you, so while that’s doin’, I’ll swing round back. Best way is to isolate and ambush. Guy who used to do this in the seventies was called Black Lightning. I kinda like that. Even m’ jeans are black.”

Olgo nodded. He still had no idea what they were talking about.

“Try to look a little more excited,” Jerry said. “Who came for me in North Korea? Who came for you? You seen the news? Hostage Rescue blew up the place whether you was there or not. So fine. No one came for us. But you know what? We’re sure as hell gonna come for your wife.”

And like that, the energy that was clotted in Olgo’s body dispersed while something like old age moved in—fatigue, apathy, or maybe just a set of revised priorities. Suddenly, this all seemed very hard.

An hour later: Olgo and Jerry were in the station wagon en route to an abandoned factory, a box on stilts at the mouth of a floodplain that burbled with sewage now and then, where Olgo’s wife would sooner spend her time than with him.

“And the RYLS?” Olgo said.

“A front group. Dating Service snatches you in, you think it’s gonna be something nice, and next thing you’re saying your life before was shit, you were so lonely you wanted to die, but this, this talking and sharing and crying, is a whole lot better.”

“How do they get you to do it?”

“Dunno, really, but the exit counselor said it was thought control and just wanting to fit in, and maybe just ’cause the most of us is kinda sad and lonely anyway, they was workin’ that for gain.”

Olgo shook his head. “My wife isn’t lonely. She hasn’t been lonely since the day we met.”

Jerry laughed. Said, “Ooowee,” and mopped the windshield with his palm.

“What?”

“Nuthin’.”

“What?”

“Well, I weren’t sitting on yer bedpost, but with your attitude like that, I’m not surprised she left.”

“My attitude? I thought you were ex-Helix.”

“I am. But I ain’t stupid about life, neither.”

Olgo pressed his eyes closed with his fingertips.

Jerry nudged him in the arm. “Don’t let the bear getcha. It’s gonna be all right.”

They pulled into the grounds, and when Olgo stepped from the car, the condemnation of landscape into which he’d been cast was staggering. The trees were bald and black and immobile despite the wind galloping down the riverbank. The snow was two feet deep. In the distance: a trestle for the freight that rolled through every day and the skeletal remains of a holding tank that looked, for its imposition on the sky, like a gallows befitting the evil of mankind. He breathed in deep, coughed it out. The snow was colored urine and coal, smelled it, too, and everywhere you looked: garbage, like someone had leaked the bag from one end of the grounds to the other.

The only building alive was the boiler room. It was up on cement risers, maybe fifteen feet above the ground where Olgo and Jerry hid. Light blazed through the windows, which were two banners of glass come down the facade. It was behemoth, imposing. Olgo did not want to go in there at all.

Jerry said, “You go up the front; I’ll circle round back. I seen your wife on TV. I’ll try to separate her from the others.”

“Why can’t I talk to her and you distract?”

“’Cause you’re a threat now. A floe.”

“A what?”

“An outsider. Now come on.”

“So you’re just going to talk to her? How are you going to talk her out of there in two minutes if it’s really as bad as you say?”

“Can’t. I’ll need about three days.”

“We don’t have three days.”

But then even in the dark, Olgo could see the denture whites of this man’s smile and something of the Black Lightning sobriquet flash in it. “Leave that to me. You just keep the others busy, act like you ready to join.”

“How?”

“Just tell ’em your story. You don’t even have to lie—it’s Prereq enough. That’s what they in there call a past you want to leave behind. Good Prereq.”

Jerry tiptoed off, under the building, into the dark. Olgo looked at the twenty steps he’d have to mount to get to the entrance and sat on the bottom one. He might not be able to endure the experience of Jerry talking to Kay, reasoning, and exposing the manipulation to which she’d been subject. If reason could turn his wife, love had no role to play in her decision. And if love had no role to play, maybe she had never loved him at all.

Olgo took the stairs like an old man. His knees cracked. The space between his toes was crammed with ice. But for feeling this dreary, would being eighteen again make any difference? He reached the front door, and because he was exhausted and cold and defeated even by the prospect of having to steal his wife back, he forgot to knock, just walked in.

“Hello?” Because while there were fluorescent work lights clamped to the lintels overhead, there was no one around to make use of them. “Hello?”

He looked around. Brick walls, peeling paint. The floors inches thick in debris, which crackled and skittered underfoot. A toilet moored in junk; machinery whose purpose he’d never know, rusty, limed, a tetanus party. It was like the industrial revolution had come to this place to blossom and die. He slipped, fell, and the plaster dust came over the sides of his legs like waves into a boat.

Laughter from the other end of the floor. He picked his way across. A wall, half-crumbled, hid his approach. He scanned for a breach, eye to the hole. And, wow, what a difference a wall makes. On his side was the collapse of industriousness in America; on the other was an IKEA showroom. Navy-blue couches with white trim, Chinese lanterns chandeliered from the pipes overhead, twenty people arranged around a table, cast in haloes of light, sipping tea. The floor, overspread with quilts; and in a corner, a wood-burning stove going full blast. Everyone shoeless, in bright wool socks that bunched at the toe, symbol of Christmas comfort the world round. Olgo could smell the tea, an herbal blend, sleepy and sweet, and felt his tongue unstick from his palate. He scoped the room for his wife and, not finding her, began to pay attention to the scene, which was the group listening to a speech by Thurlow Dan. Listening rapt, listening whole. Faces angled at the CD player as though it were the man himself.

Olgo tuned in. “It’s like this,” Dan said—assured but tender—“every person on earth is always, every second of his life, and in one way or another despite his good deeds, shackled to himself and suffering for it. We default to egotism and isolation. We default to the loneliest place a heart can go. But you know what else? Every one of us, consciously or not, also lives the lives of his generation and his peers—friends and family, the people we love—and so the task here is simple but huge: to rise above ourselves and see each other.”

The track ended there. No one said a word, but all eyes shifted at what seemed to Olgo to be Olgo. Stares funneled and condensed in his peephole. He had not known he would show himself until this moment, when he was to be their star. His feet were asleep. Threads of wool cleaved to his neck as sweat watered his armpits and inner thighs, and it seemed from one second to the next that the blood was either draining from his limbs or storming through them. He was about to stand when a voice belonging to a man pressed against the other side of the wall began to address the group.

Oh, how stupid, these people weren’t seeing him at all. His heart lunged at the speaker through the brick. It was Jonathan, of course, which meant that when Olgo rounded the wall, he seemed to be looking at not just Jonathan, but at Jonathan with Olgo’s heart flopping around his feet like the day’s catch.

No one was startled to see him. Jonathan put out his hand and said, “Ah, great, you’re a little early, we weren’t expecting the pledges for another hour, but welcome! We’re so glad you came.”

Olgo, who had sunk his fists into his coat pockets, removed one for a quick shake hello. He didn’t want to blow his cover, though it was hard. Jonathan was depressing. Not especially young or handsome—he wore jeans and a hooded sweatshirt; his hair was thin and straight and piebald; no feature stood out for its beauty or size—which meant he had less tenable and thus more winning qualities to offer Kay Panjabi.

Jonathan said, “Come meet the others,” and introduced them one by one. A mixed group of men and women, midthirties, forties, fifties, with nothing shared in their lives but the joy of their comportment. One gave him her seat on the couch. Her name was Teru. Used to be an accountant. Came into the Helix three years ago. Was thirty-five but looked eighteen. “Here,” she said, and she passed him a mug of tea. “You look exhausted. Let me take your coat—my God, it’s freezing!” He did as told—the coat really was cold and wet—and when she gestured at his boots and then at a corner where everyone else’s were gathered, he let her have them, too.

“Fresh socks,” she said, and she held up a pair—thick, woolly, ecru with blue heel and toe. He said thanks. The socks had been beached on the stove; they were warm to the touch. Teru vanished with his old pair like a nurse with the offending bullet.

A woman bearing a tray of peanut butter cups and caramel popcorn drizzled in chocolate and coconut shavings walked by. Olgo noticed a dish of oatmeal cookies on the table. This new woman, whose name was Myla, sat next to him. Tucked one foot under her thigh, put the dish between them, and said, “Whatever it is, don’t worry. You’re in the right place.”

Her eyes were gray and swimmy, as if filmed in a clear lubricant that gave them the appearance of water. “Cookie?” she said, and she broke one in half.

He shook his head. He was getting tired. He flexed his toes, sipped his tea. Noted an aroma float into the room and waft around his face like a turban.

“Pie,” she said. “Mixed berry. Fresh cream, too. I made the crust myself”—and here she smiled. “Pie makes pretty much everyone feel better. And if you’re here, chances are it’s ’cause you want to feel better.”

Olgo looked past her. He said, “Is this it? Is this all of you?” He’d lost all hope that his wife was elsewhere, but then where was she if not here?

“There’s more in the back. One’s making tandoori chicken. Her specialty, apparently. Oh, no,” she said, seeing his face, “how rude of me. I mean, there’s vegetarian options, too.”

“It’s not that,” Olgo said, and he upturned his nose, trying to detect something of his wife’s favorite dish in the smell of mixed-berry pie. But it was no use—the pie overwhelmed. There’s no fighting pie; there never was.

“You want to talk about it?” she said. “I’m all ears. When I came in, my husband had just died, and even though my friends and kids came by and took me out, it just wasn’t any good. But I get what I need here. You will, too.”

The irony was not lost on Olgo, who’d been trying to talk to pretty much anyone for three weeks, and here was this woman offering him the gold standard. Well, what harm in talking? Retain your pretense, betray no facts, but still: get it off your chest. But when he opened his mouth, he wasn’t so sure or in control.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s hard.”

“That’s okay,” and she squeezed his arm. “There’s no other world besides this one. No TV or radio, no clue what horrible things are happening out there. So just talk if you want. Otherwise we can sit and drink our tea, and that’s not so bad, either.”

“It’s just—” But then he felt the hurt rush his mouth as though to secure a home there and never move out.

“For me,” she said, “I didn’t even know what I felt or why, just that I felt awful. And scared. Like maybe things were just never going to be right again. But look at me now.” And Olgo looked; she looked calm and together and happy to be alive, which was the exact opposite of how he looked, he knew it.

The room was filling up with people from the outside, but still no Kay. Jonathan made the rounds, extended his largesse without caveat, greeted everyone with the same smile and warmth and appeared to mean it equally. The discrepancy between the pledges and the members was overt and telling of the same story fifty times over. The pledges gathered in a circle: Jin, who oversaw cleanup at a Korean spa in D.C.; Mark, in town for his youngest daughter’s wedding; Ruby, with newborn strapped to her chest, the child knocked out—but just wait.

Olgo, when asked to speak of his life, took a pass and blushed and felt a hand take his—it was Myla—and another take his right, Mark with the daughter-bride. Once around the circle, then twice. The more you told, the more the group applauded your candor, Jin winning kudos for confessing to a hand job or two at the spa—she needed the extra cash but also the gratitude; no one ever looked on her with that kind of gratitude at home—and Ruby for sharing the isolation of motherhood, the late nights and death-row thinking.

There were canapés on the table—goat cheese, wasabi crackers—more tea, and when the circle broke for dinner and Kay still had not appeared, with or without Jerry, Olgo returned to the couch and stared at the wall.

The pledges who’d spoken were thronged, he was alone, and it seemed like the Chinese lanterns had recast their glow from where he sat to where the confessants were. A member walked by; Olgo caught her sleeve and said, “So how does this work?”

She smiled. Sat opposite him on a canvas ottoman. Leaned forward with her hands clasped between her legs. “You share and belong and find what you need.”

He winced and quivered at the lip. “But does it help?” he said.

“You tell me.”

He took a deep breath, so deep that maybe it solicited his wife from the dark, because all of a sudden, there she was. Across the room. Seeing him but making no move in his direction.

“We are all kinds,” the woman said. And Olgo smiled, but grimly. We. One of his favorite words. Who knew that it could turn on him, that something as steadfast as we—even the letters were bonded tight—could cede its joys to context.

Kay’s hair was in a ponytail. Her sweater was pastel green. Behind her stood Jerry, who just shook his head and held the side of his face like he’d been slapped.

“I feel broken,” Olgo said. “Totally confused. Like I don’t understand anything.”

And he took the long view. As a professional, he’d been reared in the ways of empathy and the seminal texts that gave it name. He knew all about having to activate something in yourself so that you could apprehend the thing or person before you. But he also knew about the urge to apprehend nothing, at least nothing coherent, and to be redeemed from the anguish of trying. What did he really know of other people? How had he spent his life divining intent and motive and need without having the vaguest idea of what went on in anyone’s life but his own? And not even his own, for which failing he now had ample evidence? He took the long view and floated right up and out of his body. This woman had offered him help. His wife was on her way.