“You’re kidding. So everybody’s a suspect now?”
One glance from the border officer indicates that if Stone speaks another word he will be strip-searched until his skin comes off. Only Thassa’s apologetic smile pacifies the official. He gives the American another chance. “You wouldn’t happen to be carrying a birth certificate?”
Stone has no option but to proceed to the holding area. He and Thassa get out of the car and review their choices. But choice is exactly what they don’t have. Thassa calls her aunt; no one in Montreal can drive the two hundred and fifty kilometers until tomorrow morning. She’s ready to sit in the border detention holding center until then.
She sits on a plastic scoop chair inside the grim concrete room, alongside a platoon of the equally lost, under the eyes of two watchful police. She starts to get the shakes. Her hands are like broom bristles, sweeping the air. “Russell, I’m so sorry. I’m making your life miserable.”
“You aren’t,” he says, confirming with lameness.
“I’m making millions of people miserable. Russell? I can’t seem to stop that.” She curls both arms across her narrow chest and cups her shoulder blades. “Kill the smiling Arab bitch. Dot com.”
He takes her by the elbow. “Come on. It’s nothing. We’ll turn around and find a place for the night. I’ll bring you back tomorrow. Your uncle can come down and take you home. Everything will be fine.”
“Fine?” she asks. “You think this is still possible?”
“I’m sure,” he says. And they walk back to the car.
The motels near the border are full. They find a place on a winding state highway about six miles off the interstate, nestled into the side of a wooded hill. It’s a motor lodge, one of those wormholes back into the sixties, a place right out of Stone’s parents’ Ektachrome slides, from when his folks were young and in love and still vacationing, before the kids came along and soured that show.
An elderly desk clerk with a growth the size of a honeydew melon coming out of his neck is using a magnifier to read an enormous volume of Boccaccio illustrated by Rockwell Kent. He’s surprised by customers and irritated by the interruption. He holds up the magnifying glass as if to fry them.
“Yes? Can I help you?”
Thassa pushes forward and slips off her sunglasses. “Do you have room for us tonight?”
The man glances down at an ancient ledger grid, the day’s blocks more or less empty. “Double?”
Stone freezes. He’s on the South Rim, unable to say just how many rooms they need.
“Yes, please,” Thassa says, pleading with Stone by clasping his wrist bone. Do not abandon me tonight.
The clerk looks up, scrutinizing them. Stone thinks he’s going to demand a marriage license. “Queen or two twins?”
Thassa stumbles on the idiom and Stone blurts out, “Two twins, thanks.”
They sign in and get a dense metal key. On their way out of the lobby to the room, the desk clerk calls after them, “Ahlan wa Sahlan.”
I look it up, two years later. It means, Welcome. You’re with kin.
Thassa stops, slapped by the words. She starts to tear up. “Yaïchek,” she calls back, shaky with gratitude. “ Shukran, shukran.”
The room spins and shakes as Stone lies on his bed. Pine trees still whip by in his peripheral vision. His blood sugar is all over the place, casualty of the long road fast followed by a fried-dinner binge. The dingy room, filled with a stale stink when they first checked in, now smells fine, either because they’ve opened the windows or because he’s habituated.
She’s in the bathroom, under the shower for close to thirty minutes. At dinner, she was listless. He wants to knock on the door to makes sure she’s all right. He’s thinking: Her beautiful essays for me were lies.
All right: not lies. Invention. What did that make them? Less beautiful? More suspect? Unfair, misleading, personal
Performance, in place of the real. Devices, in place of facts. The events she described were all fabricated from whole cloth. Not what happened: what could have happened. What might have.
Her father was shot, but maybe not by someone else.
Then, a thought that sits him up in bed. Those essays are not her only fiction. She has been authoring something else. How high is her real emotional set point, by nature? How happy is she, really? All of that testing, out in Boston, the psychological measurements so carefully correlated with the rigorous gene sequencing: nothing but self-reportage. Even science asked her to tell them a story.
Maybe she has faked a good half of her bliss.
And now, when he most needs time to think, to process the causal chains rippling through his head, she chooses that moment to come out of the bathroom at last. She’s in a loose, rose-colored shift that falls to her knees, a towel wrapped around her head. She tries to beam at him, as if she were the same content creature she ever was. Only now, the act exhausts her.
She sits on the end of her own bed, loosens the towel from her head, and squeezes clumps of hair in the roll of terry cloth. “You know, Mister Stone, if this were Algeria, my brother and uncle would have to come here tomorrow morning and kill us both.”
A forced laugh escapes her. She tilts her head and begins running a hairbrush through her now red tangles. Her hand moves slowly, as if combing oatmeal. He can see the outline of her tiny breasts through the billow of her shift and looks away.
He thinks of anything but her, listens to anything but that brush wicking through her ruined hair.
She stops dead still. “What is that beeping?”
“What beeping?” he echoes. He sits up, and his bed rustles.
“Shh. Listen. There. That.”
He titters, in case she’s joking. She isn’t. “That? That’s a bird, Thassa.”
Her words come out flushed and wild. “A bird? Oh my God, Russell, you’re right. It’s a bird. A bird, beeping.” Something small hits the floor with a soft thud. The hairbrush. And something larger falls back on the squeaking bed: Thassadit Amzwar. These sounds are followed by another one, even stranger. It starts as almost a whistle, then a low wail turning terrified. Weeks of bombardment, and she breaks.
She tries to turn the keening into words. “Something’s happening to me, Russell. I have to get out of this place.”
He does not move. He feels himself go weirdly calm. “Tomorrow,” he promises. “It will be okay. You’ll feel stronger. You should call your uncle now.”
“I can’t. I just can’t.” The words are clayey, distorted through a horrible mouth that can’t hold its shape.
“That’s fine,” he tells her. “We’ll do it in a little while.”
She’s hyperventilating. Long, muffled sobs rise up in her. “I’m sorry,” she keeps repeating. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” And then, would-be businesslike, “I dropped my hairbrush.”
She tries to move her arm, to sit up. He recognizes the complete debilitation-the outermost promontory of an outcrop he’s visited. If the hairbrush were God’s magic talisman for returning the world to Eden, she would not be able to sit up and take it. She’s defeated by the future, and a few shots of follicle stimulating hormone.
He raises himself upright but can’t move either. He, too, is paralyzed, by a realization all his own. Maybe she doesn’t have hyperthymia after all. Maybe it’s the other, wilder ride, there all along and undiagnosed, hidden by a mighty effort of will. Only: what is will but what the body allows? If she has been acting up until now, she’s an actress of unthinkable natural gifts.
The dread that grips him lasts only half a minute, wiped away by surprise relief. Their problem is over. Her haplotype has no bio-value whatsoever. She’s just another garden-variety mood-swinger. The world will finally leave the woman in peace. When this news gets out, it will delay genetic improvement by years. The race will be thrown back on inescapable, everyday, ordinary, glorious, redeeming moodiness.