Navid wasn’t there, but the rest of the guests were accounted for.
“It’s been four months since I retired,” said Big Linda.
It didn’t grow clear to me then where they’d heard their voices or how, only that the content of their perceptions varied. They’d heard different sounds, drawn different conclusions and had different responses. Linda had heard a voice at work, somehow, and told no one until much later; Burke had told Gabe about hearing a voice immediately, and Gabe had believed him schizophrenic . . . but in fact, that first day, I barely heard what was said. I drifted on the back of my Valium, lulled by the drone of voices.
And my fear of a cult, at least, was assuaged by the drabness of the plastic chair edge in front of me and the matter-of-fact trudge of Main Linda over to the snacks table. There was no grim power to be felt amid that mundane scene of guests selecting baked goods beneath the tube fluorescents. Main Linda piled sandwich cookies onto a paper plate printed with rainbows, then returned to her chair licking the powdered sugar off a finger.
Don didn’t address a single word to me at that initial meeting, just let me sit there behind the ranks, saying nothing.
Not for the first time I thought how groups of people had a habit of making even the exceptional banal. Was it a national characteristic or a trait of all humanity? Crowds could be grandiose, that was true, but small groups in small rooms . . . it took me back to my parents’ church, where I’d sat bored and staring around, looking high and low for any object of interest. More often than not I’d failed to find such an object and ended up gazing at the dirty Kleenex wadded into someone’s sleeve. I remembered the backs of my legs sweating on the smooth wood of the pew, heard wet coughs off to one side, saw dandruff on shoulders and, in sandal weather, hoary toenails.
Still: there’d been hymns, and some of them were dull but many were beautiful and sad. Although I hadn’t felt that sadness till after, long after we had left the church.
It was remembered music that was beautiful.
6
UNCLEAN SPIRITS ENTERED THE SWINE
THE INVESTIGATORS IMPRESSED ME WITH A SENSE OF COMPETENCE as I looked at their faces on the screen or scanned the neat pdf records of their efforts and expenditures, the rows of line items. I thought how easy I must be to fool—experience had shown this with sparkling transparence.
My questions were lame and I was often sedated. So I made Don and Will, and also the Lindas, ask questions for me. They huddled around and gazed into the laptop’s camera. The investigators’ clean, concerned faces stared back at us from a gray office only a couple hours’ drive away. Were they really present, I wondered, in an office building in Portland? Or were they a shallow illusion of service?
Absurd how all transactions had become talking heads, the whole culture a mass of flat images of heads with mouths moving: we barely needed our bodies. There were hardly even dialogues anymore, rather there were a million monologues a day, each head with its mouth, each mouth with its talk. Still I listened with obsessive attention as the investigators fielded the questions, tried to show us they were pursuing all possible avenues.
Whether or not they were skilled or diligent, they hadn’t found Lena by the next time Ned texted me.
He wanted to talk, he wrote.
Four days had gone by, the longest days I had lived.
WILL HAD TO DIAL the unfamiliar, prepaid number for me, my hands were shaking so hard, and when we finally got Ned on the line he wouldn’t talk long—maybe in case someone was trying to trace the call. I don’t know.
“I’munna need a photo op at the announcement, at least one TV show in Anchorage, down the road. Ads, maybe. Events availability. Magazine profiles, what have you. Like I said. And if I don’t get ’em, this is just what happens, honey. Kid’s just not with you anymore. She’s gone. There’s no cops out there gonna help you. It’s my call what happens. If you want to fix it, I need your full onboarding.”
Onboarding, I saw Will mouth silently, gazing down.
“Anything,” I said. I could barely breathe—I was taking shallow breaths, quickly, afraid I might hyperventilate. “Give her the phone. Please. Ned. Please.”
“She’s having a good time with her toys,” said Ned. His tone was indifferent.
“I need to hear her voice, Ned, and I need her back, please. I’ll do whatever. Today, Ned, please, I need her back today. You win. Completely, Ned, you won, you win. Please?”
There was a long silence. With my free hand I grabbed the fabric of my skirt and scrunched my fingernails into it, into the tops of my thighs.
“Some other time, darlin’,” said Ned. “I want you to recall exactly how this feels.”
“It’s killing me,” I said.
But he’d hung up.