What I want, suddenly and fiercely, is to get my sister the hell out of this filthy squat, to extract her like one of those private detectives who pull kids from cults and reunite them with their parents. I want to tell her she has to leave this—this—this dorm, this hostel, this squalid storefront where she has decided to spend the last days of human history bedded down with this collection of lice-infested conspiracy theorists. I want her to give up whatever fantasies are driving her actions at this point and come stay where I can see her. I want to scream at her that for God’s sake she is all I have left, she’s the only person still living that I have a claim on, and her poor decision-making makes me depressed and furious in equal measure.
“Hen?” says Nico, dragging on her cigarette and blowing the smoke out her nose.
I don’t say any of those things. I smile.
“Nico,” I say. “I need your help.”
PART THREE
Signs and Shibboleths
1.
If I can find the woman, I’ll have the man.
Culverson’s right. When you look at it objectively, my plan is a long shot at best. It’s the plan of a rookie or a plum fooclass="underline" going to look for a person in the one place in New England where it’s probably the hardest to find anyone. A woman for whom I have no physical description, just an age and a stale address. And why? Because this woman may or may not have had a relationship two years ago with the man I’m looking for now.
And the thing is, McGully’s right, too—I’m not unmindful of that. There is an aspect of my character that tends to latch on to one difficult but potentially solvable problem, rather than grapple with the vast and unsolvable problem that would be all I could see, if I were to look up, figuratively speaking, from my small blue notebooks. There are a million things I might be doing other than putting in overtime to make right one Bucket List abandonment, to heal Martha Milano’s broken heart. But this is what I do. It’s what makes sense to me, what has long made sense. And surely some large proportion of the world’s current danger and decline is not inevitable but rather the result of people scrambling fearfully away from the things that have long made sense.
That’s what I like to tell myself anyway, and it’s what I’m telling myself now, as I take off for Durham, biking by night, east-southeast on Route 202 with my madman sister for a sidekick, buoyed forward on a cloud of instinct and guesswork. It’s only about forty miles from Concord to Durham, an easy bike ride with no vehicular traffic going either way, just mild summer weather and the trill of night birds. Sometimes Nico rides ahead and sometimes I ride ahead, and we shout jokes to each other, small observations, checking in:
“You doing okay?”
“Yeah, dude. You?”
“Yeah.”
One time the headlights of a bus appear in the darkness like lanternfish, get close, zoom past. A mercy bus, running on some sort of rotgut fuel, jammed with singing clapping passengers, luggage racks strapped precariously to the top: off to do some good works somewhere in Jesus’s name. We watch the taillights disappear into the westbound distance, the once-familiar sight of bus headlights on a highway at night as unfamiliar and eerie as if a tank had just rolled by.
I’ve haven’t been to UNH, not recently. I’ve been before, in the old days, but not since Maia, and not since the bloodless “revolution” in January, when a group of students exiled the faculty and staff, took over the campus and rechristened it the Free Republic of New Hampshire. Supposedly the plan was to quickly forge a utopian society in which willing participants can live out the rest of time in communal harmony with their brothers and sisters, everyone contributing, everyone respecting everyone else’s freedom to spend life’s remaining hours doing what they saw fit.
Nico, as I had suspected, has been down there numerous times. Apparently, her little clubhouse in Concord has something of a satellite office in the Free Republic. And, most important, she claims to know exactly how to get me in. “Oh, yeah,” Nico said, grinning, when I explained my dilemma, delighted to be in possession of something I need. “I know the place. I know it well. All the signs and shibboleths.” And when I explained who the client was, that the man I was looking for was married to Martha Milano, that only sweetened the deal—Nico was happy to pack a bag and come help me navigate the terrain.
There was just one condition—and she said that, of course, narrowed her eyes like a gangster-movie tough guy and said, “There’s just one condition…” After the trip, when I had what I needed, I had to promise that I would sit down with her so she could explain what she and her friends are up to.
“You bet,” I told her. We were sitting in Next Time Around on two filthy beanbag chairs, speaking in low whispers. “No problem.”
“I’m serious, Hen.”
“What?”
“You have a way of saying you’re going to listen to something, but then when the other person is talking you’re up in your head having some sort of complicated policeman dialog with yourself about something else.”
“That’s not true.”
“Just promise that when we sit down, and I lay it all out for you, you will listen with an open mind.”
“I promise, Nic,” is what I told her, extracting myself with difficulty from the beanbag chair. Then I even looked her in the eye, to make sure she knew I was listening to her and not to any voices in my head. “I promise.”
And so now we’re biking along 202, through the forested counties, past Northwood Center and Northwood Ridge, talking sometimes, singing sometimes, sometimes just gliding in silence, listening to the distant thud and whack of trees being cut down for firewood. It was harder for Nico than it was for me, everything that happened, the series of catastrophic events that marked our childhood. I was twelve and she was six when our mother was murdered in a Market Basket parking lot, and our father hung himself with a window cord, and we were sent to live with our stern and disinterested grandfather.
It would be difficult for me to disentangle these three sequential and overlapping traumas, tease them apart and judge which affected me the most. I can say with confidence, however, that as painful as all of it was for me, it swept over my sister like an advancing wall of water—pulled her under and never let her up. At six she was a small flickering gem of a child: agile minded, anxious, curious, quick witted, chameleonic. And here comes this great thundering wave and it knocked her over and dragged her around, filled her with pain like water in the lungs of a drowning man.
Somewhere east of Epsom, Nico begins to sing, something I immediately recognize as a Dylan song, except I can’t place it, which is odd to consider, that she might know one I don’t. But then Nico gets to the chorus, and I realize it’s “One Headlight,” the number by Dylan’s son.
“Love that song,” I say. “Are you singing that because of Martha?”
“What?”
I veer in close, pedal up alongside Nico. “You don’t remember? That spring, she listened to that song nonstop.”
“She did? Was she even around?”
“Are you kidding? All the time. She made dinner every night.”
Nico looks over, shrugs. Invariably we refer to that grim doom-heavy period of our mutual memory as that spring, rather than by the more cumbersome formulation that would be more accurate: “the five months after Mom’s terrible death but before Dad’s.”
“Do you seriously not remember that?”
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t.”
She gives herself a burst of speed, takes the lead again, and goes back to singing. “Me and Cinderella, we put it all together…” Houdini is in the wagon hitched to the bike, among the supplies, panting, joyful, his weird little pink tongue tasting the wind.