"Are you sure? Should we ask the police?" Suzette looked from him to me and back again.
"No, no police," said the driver. It was an order. He put the car in gear again and floored it. I looked out the window to see the people at the end of the procession waving goodbye.
Open country gave way to rainforest. Big green leaves slapped against the car windows. I sat forward, holding onto the back of the passenger seat and peered through the windshield. The "road" was a set of parallel wheel ruts. Very well-traveled wheel ruts-the Geo's off-road limit is an un-mowed lawn-so wherever they were taking us couldn't be too far from civilization.
Whose civilization, however, I wasn't sure of. After traveling to a place whose language and customs we didn't understand, Suzette and I had willingly gotten into a car with two strange men who were now driving us into a rainforest-jungle?-to a destination they hadn't even bothered to lie about because we hadn't bothered to ask them.
Was this the way your life began flashing before your eyes? Nothing remotely similar had happened when the plane had gone into a nosedive-
As if on cue, we were suddenly going down a steep hill into a tunnel. Suzette and I looked at each other; she had my arm in that Death Grip and I was returning the favor.
"Where-" Suzette started.
"Almost there," the man in the passenger seat said cheerfully. The driver put on the Geo's headlights but he didn't really have to: the tunnel lit the area immediately above us as well as a few yards ahead. The illuminated area traveled with us; I looked out the back window to see the lights going off behind us.
"What is this place?" I asked; I was thinking theme park.
The man in the passenger seat waved the question away. "Make sure you carry your documents and you can't get lost."
"I'm lost now," Suzette said. "Tell us where we're going right now or-" But of course, she didn't know how to finish that sentence and neither did I. This was Madagascar. Except right now it looked more like something out of a freaky movie.
The tunnel suddenly opened out into an enormous clear area paved with asphalt-outdoors. Waist-high barriers made of metal tubing held back the thick rainforest. I pressed my face against the window to look up at the sky, wondering if we really were outdoors again or if this were some sort of brilliant illusion.
Abruptly, we stopped in front of some ticket windows and turnstiles in front of what looked like an enormous sporting arena. The man got out of the car, then helped me and Suzette out of the backseat. He led us over to the counter, standing us in front of a specific window.
"Now I leave you." He made a little bow. "May each of you recognize what you seek in your famadihana." I was still trying to parse this when he got back in the car.
"What did that mean?" I asked Suzette as we stared after the car now disappearing into another tunnel entrance.
"Beats me," she said, "but I suspect it's not as good as he wants us to think it is."
"You must be able to recognize a good thing when you see it," said a voice behind us.
We turned to see a woman smiling at us with professional patience. She was in her late forties or early fifties, although her black hair had no strands of gray. She wore gorgeous blue and white printed material in intricate folds. I couldn't imagine where she had come from. Trapdoor? Transporter beam? At this point, either seemed likely.
"Documents, please."
Suzette slid her plastic envelope under the transparent divider. I started to do the same and she shook her head.
"One at a time, please." She opened the envelope and spread everything out on the counter. It was an odd assortment of things-cards of various sizes, some that looked an awful lot like old elementary school report cards, some that could have been I.D. cards or drivers' licenses or even library cards, a plastic thing that I knew was a hotel key-card but not one I recognized, and something that looked like a passbook for a savings account. All of them were marked with a barcode. I wondered what was in mine and decided to have a look.
"Don't do that," the woman said sharply, holding a barcode scanner in one hand and Suzette's high school photo in the other.
"I was just-"
"Don't. Do. That." She put down the photo and slid her hand under the barrier. "Here, we'll avoid temptation. Give it to me."
I hesitated. "Why can't I look?"
"It's not time." She frowned at Suzette, who took the envelope from me and passed it to her. She set it aside and went back to scanning barcodes. When she had finished, she did something under the counter and a flatscreen rose up from a slot that had been invisible thus far. I couldn't see what was on it from where I was standing; after checking for armed guards (none), I stood on tiptoe and tried to crane my neck. What little I could see didn't tell me anything-a few straight lines radiating from a point and a square the size of a postage stamp cycling through the color spectrum.
"There are many different routes from here but of course, not all of them are desirable-"
Suzette pressed the photo up against the barrier. "Is there one that goes here?"
The woman barely glanced at it. "No."
"Why not?"
"Because you're already here."
"Wait a minute." Suzette put the photo on the counter and pointed. "This is my mother. I'm trying to find her. And my Aunt Lillian-"
The woman motioned for her to pass it to her. "That narrows things down." She studied it for a moment and then concentrated on the screen, touching it occasionally, frowning at the result, touching it again, and frowning more deeply. After a few more touches, she stood back.
"I'm sorry, you can't get to her."
"What do you mean?" Suzette asked.
"There is no possible itinerary that will put you with her."
"You sound like you're booking flights," I said.
The woman nodded. "Yes, of course. What did you think you were doing here? However, I can give the both of you much better routes."
Suzette and I looked at each other. "What's that supposed to mean?" I asked.
She emptied my envelope and spread the contents out. It all looked like bus tickets, appointment cards, and the written portion of the driving test in Massachusetts. "I can give you both a route where you graduate from your respective universities magna cum laude and you meet for the first time during post-graduate study abroad." She touched the screen again. "It comes with single parenthood but you'll both be fairly well off."
"Magna cum laude in what?" I said. She was speaking English but nothing made sense.
The woman smiled. "That's up to you. Isn't that nice? You get the choice. Please pick something beneficial. You don't have to, of course, but if you did, it would make planning routes much easier in the future."
"My mother-"
"Your mother's itinerary does not intersect with yours. At least, not any more than it already has. Your flights in relation to her are unchanged."
Suzette shook her head, baffled.
"On your itinerary, she still dies when you're sixteen. But on her new itinerary, she never has children. I'm sorry, but there was no route with offspring that didn't include an early death. Once she understood this wouldn't affect your existence, she decided. I don't blame her."
"This," Suzette said, "isn't happening."
"Oh, it is. And it's not going to get any better, believe me." She put everything back into the envelopes and passed them back to us. "Through there," she said, pointing at the nearest turnstile.
We went through and down a passageway to a metal door. "This way to the egress," I said with a nervous laugh.