He came from the office with two colleagues. Flawless gray coat and burgundy tie, Brooks black slacks: overcompensating businessman, pretending Kearney was the next Denver. She turned to inspect the window of a locksmith shop, a carousel of key blanks. He saw her from two blocks away. She lifted an arm to her hair, then dropped it instantly. He gave his partners a vague meet-you-later wave. Then he was standing in front of her, not touching, but taking her in, consuming her all over again. A tourist back when travel was still hard.
“You,” he said. Voice a little deeper. “It’s you. I can’t believe it’s you.”
For the first time in months, she knew herself. The last half a year took its fingers from her throat. Her shoulders dropped. Her head lifted. “Believe,” she said, her voice like God’s own phone receptionist.
He winced, hands waving. “What did you do to yourself?” Her haircut: the one meant to trick Mark into thinking she was her. “Damn. You look amazing. Like a manufacturer-refurbished virgin. College all over again.”
She scowled, trying not to giggle. “You mean high school.”
“Right. Like I said. You’ve lost weight?” He’d called her a failed anorectic once.
She stood almost posing, savoring the payback. “How’re your kids?” She could almost do this. Capable, no-nonsense. “Your wife?”
He grinned, raking his fingers through his hair. “Good, good! Well…long story.”
Her heart, that stupid holdover, spun like a pigeon in a Skinner box. For this man, she’d once bought a book called How to Elope, even while browsing for wedding dresses. At least she’d confined herself to apricot and peach.
He kept looking at her, shaking his head in disbelief. “How’s…your brother?”
“Mark,” she said. She expected him to flinch apology. She’d been with Daniel that long.
“Right. I read about him in the Hub. Nightmare.”
In remarkably few words, they maneuvered to the bench in front of the war memorial. He sat next to her, in broad day, center of town. Caution to the wind. He kept asking if she wanted something—a sandwich, maybe something fancy. She kept shaking her head. “You eat,” she said. It would be a while before she ate again. He waved off the idea of food, insisting that this was even bigger than nutrition. He asked for details about Mark and sat still for a surprising amount of them, compared to the Robert Karsh of four years ago. He shook his head and said things like Twilight Zone or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Crude, crass, banal. But words like home.
As easy as breathing, she unloaded. She told him everything, making her collapse seem almost comical. “He’s been my entire life for the last six months. But he’s decided I’m never going to be me again. And after half a year? He’s right.”
“Oh, you’re still you, let me tell you. A few new wrinkles, maybe.” Robert’s motto: The asshole of truth. The more brutally truthful, the better. He had ten times the self-knowledge Daniel had. He’d always almost relished admitting all the women he lusted after. I’m a man, Rabbit. We’re programmed to look. Everything worth looking at. Brutal truth was why she was sitting with him now, in the center of town, in front of the war memorial, in plain view of everyone.
His voice chilled her—the sound of time starting up again. His hair had the slightest rime of frost now, over his ears. His shirt stretched over his belt, rather than bunching. Otherwise unchanged: a slightly squashed, forgotten Baldwin brother, just a little too wide-faced to make it into the movies, and so, suppressed by the rest of the clan. Something nagged at her, some small difference. Maybe just a matter of pacing. He’d grown just two clicks slower, more open, peaceful. A touch of the acid, neutralized. Less slick, less aggressive, less self-satisfied. Or maybe he was just on his best behavior. Anyone could be anything, for an hour.
He took her elbow, like she was blind and he was helping her cross the street. She didn’t pull away. “Why did you take so long?”
The catch in his voice shocked her. “What do you mean?”
“To look me up?”
“I didn’t look you up, Robert. I was walking downtown. You found me.”
He grinned, warmed by her transparent lie. “You called me last spring.”
“Me? I don’t think so.” Then she remembered the curse of caller ID.
“Well, it was your brother’s number. But he was still in the hospital.” The smirk, more teasing than sadistic. “Somehow, I just assumed it was you.”
She closed her eyes. “I got your daughter. Ashley? I realized, the second I heard her…I’m sorry. Stupid. Wrong.” She recalled her mother’s words, the day before she died: Even mice don’t spring the same trap twice.
“Well,” he said. “I’ve seen worse crimes against humanity.” He pulled out a small black agenda from his coat pocket, flipping back to spring. He showed her the note, in his icy, clean handwriting: Rabbit, phone. Her brother’s pet name for her, from childhood. The name she never should have told Karsh. The name she thought she’d never hear herself called again. “I wish you’d stayed on the line. I might have helped.”
Not a sentiment the old Robert Karsh could even have faked. Their meeting might end here; she might never see him again and still feel vindicated, a thousand times better about herself than he’d last made her feel. “You’re helping now,” she said.
Robert returned the talk to Mark. The symptoms fascinated him, the prognosis depressed him, and the medical response outraged him. “Let me know when Dr. Author gets back. I’d like to run a few tests on him.”
She did not describe Barbara to Karsh. She didn’t want those two meeting, even in imagination. “Tell me about you,” she asked. “What have you been doing?”
He waved at the surrounding buildings. “All this! When were you through last? The town must look pretty different to you.”
The town looked like Brigadoon. The Land That Time Forgot. She tittered. “I was thinking that nothing has changed since Roosevelt. Teddy.”
He grimaced as if she’d kneed him. “You’re kidding, right?” He looked around, through three compass points, as if he himself might be hallucinating. “The fastest growing non-metro city in Nebraska. Maybe the eastern Plains!”
She swallowed her laughter into hiccups. “I’m sorry. Really…I have noticed a few new…things. Especially out near the interstate.”
“I can’t believe you. This place is undergoing a renaissance. Improvements under way everywhere.”
“Closing in on perfection, Bob-o.” The name slipped out of her. The one she’d sworn never to use again.
He looked ready to inflict full frontal assault, like the old days. Instead, he buffed his skull with his knuckles, a little hangdog. “You know, Rabbit? You were right about me. We built a lot of shit. Nothing substandard, but still. A lot of strip mall and cinder-block apartment complexes I have to atone for, come Judgment. Fortunately, most of it will blow away in the next high wind.” He hummed a high-pitched rendition of the tornado music from The Wizard of Oz. She laughed, despite herself. “But we’re different now. We’ve brought in two new partners, and we’re lots more ambitious.”
“Robert. Ambition was never your problem.”
“No, I mean good ambition. We were involved with the Arch!”
She hiccupped again. But he glowed with an Eagle Scout pride that stunned her. Inconceivable that she’d ever been afraid of this man. She’d simply mistaken him, never understood what he was really after.
“It took me a while to realize, but good conscience actually sells. You just have to teach people how to recognize their own best interests. We pushed through the paper recycling plant. Have you been out to see that? State of the art. I call it Mea Pulpa…”
She asked him about new projects. As soon as was safe, she fished. Something big and new, out near Farview? Bluntness was best with him. He didn’t try to hide; he never had. He stared at her question, his surprise threatening to become desire. “Where on earth did you hear that? You’re talking about a top-secret business deal th
ere, missy!”
“Small town.” Why she’d spent her adult life trying to leave it. Why she’d never be able to.
He wanted to know how much she knew. But he refused to ask. Instead, he just gazed, a look as intimate as an arm around her waist. “Wait a minute. You haven’t been talking to the Druid again? How is the world of sacred ecoterrorism these days?”
“Don’t be spiteful, Bob-o.”
He beamed. “You’re right. Anyway, he and I are practically in the same business now. Building a better future. From each according to his abilities.”
She looked up at him, disgusted, delighted. The four blocks of downtown that she could see did feel somehow revived. Maybe Kearney really was resurrecting, back to its glory days of a hundred years earlier, when buoyant Gilded Age residents actually lobbied to move the capital from Washington to their miracle city at the nation’s center. That bubble had burst so badly it took Kearney a century to recover. But to hear Karsh go on about broadband, the access grid, satellite streams, and digital radio: geography was dead, and imagination was once again the only limit to growth.
Half an hour, and already she was thinking like him. She waved at a renovated bank across the street, big arm movements, like a magician’s assistant or an actress selling appliances on the Home Shopping Network. “Are you responsible for this one?”
“Maybe.” He rubbed his wide Baldwin face in his hand, amused by his own zeal. “But this new…development. It’s something different. This one’s a good thing, Karin.”
“And big,” she said, neutral.
“I don’t know what you’ve heard, but this is a beautiful project. I always wanted to do at least one thing in my life that would make you proud of me.”
She spun to face him. His words came out of nowhere, out of her own head, so wholly unearned that she teared up. She’d always dreamed that a few years of absence might make him like her more. She steadied herself with one arm, sucking air and pressing the other palm into an eye. Too much display: she had to stop. He placed his hand on her neck, and half a year of extinction lifted from her. Broad daylight. Not caring who saw. The old Robert Karsh could never have done that.
They sat still until her tears stopped and he removed his hand. “Miss you, Rabbit. Miss the side by side.” She didn’t reply. He mumbled something about maybe being able to get away for half an hour or something, next Tuesday night. She nodded, twitching like an awn of soft wheat on a windless day.
To make her proud of him. No one on the planet was who you thought he was. She got control of her face, staring down the street to the left. The town must look pretty different to you. She swung back toward him, a solid, sardonic look all prepared. But he was looking off at a clump of four office workers in their twenties, three of them women, heading back into the Municipal Building after their hour away.
“You probably have to get back to work,” she said.
He turned, grinned, and shook his boyish head. Her misguided mammal heart slammed again.
“Go,” she told him. The word sounded light, nonchalant. “Go ahead. You must be starving.”
“Maybe I will just…grab a little something?” She waved him away, dismissal, benediction. He needed something more. “Tuesday?”
She just looked at him, a minute tightening around her eyes: What do you think?
She said nothing to Daniel that evening. Not really deception; telling him—inviting the wrong conclusion—would have been deceptive. Even now, he was keen to prove that he could love her largest anxiety, remain as devoted to her as he was to the blameless birds. And she did love that core of his that didn’t know how to be tainted. Her brother—Mark before—had been right: Daniel was a tree. A decades-long trunk, tilting toward the sun. No victory or defeat, only constant bending. Every time she hurt him, he grew a little. That night, he seemed almost fully grown.
Over dinner—couscous with currants—the claustrophobia of recent days caught up with them. Daniel sat across from her at the old farmhouse table, his elbows on the oak, the steeple of his fingers pressed together against his lips. He threatened to disappear into reflection. He stood and stacked the dirty dishes. His quiet care as he took them to the sink betrayed the fact: she was defeating him. Breaking down his green ideals.
He placed the dishes in the basin and began to scrub them with a cup of lukewarm water. As always, when he did the dishes, he leaned his head on the cabinets protruding above the sink. Over years, the paint on the cabinet had worn away in a small oval, from the oils in his hair. She did love him.
“Daniel?” she asked. Almost like real small talk. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Yes? Tell me.” He still sounded ready to go anywhere. His old pagan Christianity: Do animals hold grudges? He was a good man, the kind of good man that only a truly insecure person could find contemptible.
“I’ve been a leech on you. A parasite, really.”
He spoke to the basin. “Not at all.”
“I have been. I’ve been so preoccupied with Mark. Out with him all the time. Afraid to get a job with real hours, in the event…in case…”
“Of course,” Daniel said.
“I need work. I’m making us both nuts.”
“Not at all.”
“I was thinking…that I could help,” she whispered. “If it were still available…the job that you talked about, at the Refuge?” She would die a fund raiser.
He set down the dish rag and faced her. His eyes bored into her, ready to shine. One offer of help and his wariness fell away. The worst no longer occurred to him, and the best seemed already half-confirmed. How badly he needed to believe in her. “If you just need money…”
“This wouldn’t be just money.” Not just water; not just air. Not, she told herself, just anything.
“Because we couldn’t pay much, right away. Tight times, at the moment.” He was so sure she would rise to what was best in her that she almost backed out. “But, man, do we need you right now.”
And shouldn’t need be enough? Something needed her more than Mark ever would. She studied Daniel for hints of unaffordable charity. Would he cook books, risk his professional standing, just to keep her straight? Could anyone trust anyone who trusted anyone so much? She held his eyes; he didn’t look away. He needed her absolutely, but not for herself. For something larger. Once, that had been all she’d ever wanted. She rose and crossed to where he stood. She kissed him. Sealed, then. What Mark wouldn’t take from her, she would give elsewhere. The Refuge would be amazed at her energies.
The following Tuesday, she met Robert Karsh again.
Four months on, and the place was another country. The shin-high fields of green he’d driven through last June now waved gold and brown. Identical route from the Lincoln airport westward, in an interchangeable rental, yet everything around him had altered. Not just the simple turn of a season: more roll now, more tangled range, drumlins and pitches, rifts and concealed copses disturbing the perfect expanse of agribiz, surprise features where Weber had seen only the peak of emptiness. He’d missed everything, the first time through.
So why, in the final twenty miles before Kearney, did it feel so familiar? Like returning to the sealed summer house to retrieve some article of clothing mistakenly left behind. He needed no map, just drove from the exit ramp to the MotoRest on inner compass. The marquee out front still read “Welcome Crane Peepers,” already ready for next spring’s migration, now only four and a half months away.
He felt he was on a spiritual retreat, recharging his cells, wiping the slate clean. Signs in his room still asked him to spare a towel and save the earth. He did, and went to bed oddly tranquil. He woke refreshed. At the breakfast buffet—healthy midwestern spread, with three kinds of sausage—it struck him that his writing should never have become anything more than private meditation, a daily devotion for himself and a few friends. He could start again, with the extraordinary Mark Schluter. He had come back not so much to document Mark as to help his story forward into the tot
al unknown. Neuroscience might finally be powerless to settle this desperately improvising mind. But he might help Mark improvise.
He followed Karin’s directions out to Farview, River Run Estates, on numbered roads as right-angled as rationality pretended to be. He found the house, in a subdivision cowering in the middle of an enormous harvested field, bounded on one side by the snaking line of cottonwoods and willows that declared the hidden river. He sat in his rental for a moment, gazing at the house: mail-order, springform, something that hadn’t been there yesterday and certainly wouldn’t be there tomorrow. Walking up to the wood-laminated door, he had the passing feeling, not of déjà vu, but of déjà ecrit, of a passage he’d written long before that was only now coming true.
The man who opened the door to Weber was some foreigner. All Mark’s scars had healed and his hair had grown out. He stood like a fledgling god, somewhere between Loki and Bacchus. He seemed only mildly surprised to see Weber.
“Shrinky! Am I glad it’s you. Where the hell have you been? You won’t believe what’s been going on around here.” He scouted the yard behind Weber before ushering him in. He shut the door and leaned against it, excited. “Before I say anything: What have you heard?”
All clinical interviews should take place in the subject’s home. Weber learned more about Mark in five minutes in his living room than in all their previous encounters. Mark sat him in the overstuffed chair and brought him a bottle of Mexican beer with some honey-roasted peanuts. He shushed Weber and went to root around in the bedroom. He returned with a pad of paper and a pen. He gestured to Weber to start his recorder, the two of them old collaborators. “Okay, let’s tackle this thing, once and for all.”
Mark was remarkably animated, spinning a story that smoothed out all the breaks. He raced through the answers before Weber even asked the questions. He traced a single, clean line of thought: all his friends were conspiring to hide what had happened that night. Cain and Rupp knew; they’d been talking to him on the walkie-talkie just as he flipped over. But they’d lied to him about it. His sister knew, so she’d been replaced, to keep her from telling. Like the guardian note-writer, she was probably locked up somewhere. Daniel Riegel was somehow trailing him, for reasons unknown. “Like I’m some creature or something. He’s a big tracker, you know. He can find wild things invisible to the naked eye. Things you and I don’t even know are there.”