“Russell? Are they going to come after us?”
“No,” he tells her. Something lifts him up bodily, from the inside out. Happiness. “No one even knows we’re here.”
Her torso goes limp and drops back. She can’t have plunged often into this abyss. There’s too much shock in the fall.
He crosses to her and takes her hand. She reaches up and clamps his forearm like a tourniquet. She fixes her eyes on him. “Stone. Hajar . Am I something you might want? Would you like to just hold me for a little and see what happens?”
The sick thought comes to him before he can stop it: one little relentless sperm hitting home, and the $32,000 harvesting problem would be moot. But the problem is solved already. The minute the public learns just what her genes dispose her toward, the market for her eggs will burst as spectacularly as any speculative bubble.
He sits her up and puts his arm around her shoulder. She turns and grapples herself to his chest. He can feel through her shift the full, bony column of her. Desperate warmth, mistakable for anything. Holding her is like coming home. Returning to the soul’s first neighborhood.
“Thassa. You aren’t well. We have to take care of you. You’ll be back in Montreal tomorrow, and you can start to get better. We just need to ride out tonight. Nothing can hurt you; I’m here.”
One of a hundred things he’s learned from her. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. A little creativity with the facts. Lie, if it keeps you alive.
She grabs on to him like she’ll take him down with her. After a while, she breathes a little easier. Her head on his chest nods in agreement. “Yes,” she says. “You are right.” She pushes away and smooths her face with both palms. “I’ll be better soon. I’m a little better already, in fact.” She bends down and retrieves her hairbrush. She brings it back into the bathroom. She goes about the room straightening things, although there’s nothing to straighten.
The film speed gradually returns to normal. Her simple, wishful recovery floors him. It always takes him days to pick himself up again. Is that kind of force willable, or was she born with that as well?
A sound rises like the patience of the sea. He thinks he hears surf. He does, and only on the third breaking wave does he place it: her ringtone. She freezes, as if the device can’t hurt her if she doesn’t reveal her whereabouts.
“You should answer,” he says. “It could be Montreal.”
She goes to her bag and extracts the phone. She reads the ID and cries out. “It’s Candace.”
Russell cringes. His fingers ask for time, recalculating the need to answer.
Thassa monotones, “She wants to tell me to die in hell.”
He tries to object, but bungles it. The two of them sit and listen to the surf die out.
For a long time in the close room, he’s as crippled as she is. Then he masters himself, on nothing but silent words.
“Can I borrow that?” he asks. She nods, but hasn’t the strength to hand him the phone. He has to stand, take it from her lap, and step outside.
The world outside their rented casket floors him. Night is deep and crackling. The air smells of sap, as it must have smelled for millions of years before the first flicker of awareness. He walks down the deserted road, away from the motel’s throb, across a grassy slope and into something that might have been a pasture once. He climbs up along a fence under a stand of trees.
Life is beeping everywhere, past naming.
He walks until his pretense of courage feels almost believable. Then he opens the phone, looks at the lit dial, and calls back Candace’s number. Nothing happens until he presses a little green receiver icon, a silhouette of a species recently driven extinct by just this kind of device. At the press of that key, all his hopes and fears fly up into geosynchronous orbit and back down again, a lifetime and a few hundred miles to the west.
A woman he once knew picks up and says, “Hello?” Her voice peeks out over sandbags.
“Candace.”
“Russell,” she says, and the word splits through the middle.
“Listen,” he blurts. “This isn’t what you think.”
“Russell.” She’s not exactly crying. But the sounds can’t find traction in her throat. “It doesn’t matter what I think.” She talks fast, before he can embarrass himself further. “Where are you? What are you doing?”
He falters, but he tells her. There is trust, or there is nothing.
“Yes,” she says. “Okay. I figured you’d be together. You’re all over the news. The two of you. Your students are saying you’ve abducted her. She’s wanted for questioning. And you’re the most famous kidnapping suspect since the guy who stole the Lindbergh baby.”
He looks up into the bones of an enormous conifer. For a while, he wonders if he might not reply at all. “She called me,” he says. “She asked for my help.” He can’t even comprehend the public charges. He only needs to explain himself to his mate. “I’m trying to take her home.”
“Russell.” The name comes sharp and pointed, like a command. “Do you think I didn’t figure that?”
Light bobs over the hill to the west. A lone car slips down the road, some Jurassic creature. He draws closer to the fence and crouches in the dark.
“I told them as much,” Candace says. “I made a statement.”
He can’t follow her. “I don’t You mean you talked to reporters? About What about your job?”
At last the psychologist chuckles. “Job?”
The thing that clamps his throat must have some use. He just can’t imagine what. He sits down on the damp ground. All he can say is, “Thank you.”
“Any time,” she says. “What else is Welfare for? Besides: I’m getting as famous as the two of you. Up there every hour, on the hour. Not the most flattering clip of me, however. A little puffy-looking.”
“Fuck,” he whispers. Not a word either heredity or environment allows him. “Don’t people have anything real to concern themselves with?”
“Russell, the police are out looking for you. People are phoning in tips. A manhunt. Headline News is calling it ‘The Pursuit of Happiness.’ ”
“They’ll get us tomorrow,” he says. “When I take her back to the border. They’ll have our names in the database.” It would have happened today, if he’d given them a passport to process. The police will take them both into custody, until all the stories get ironed out. Thassa will be dragged back into the inferno. She’ll never get home.
“She’s in very bad shape,” he says. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I could come. I could be there by this time tomorrow. It might help.” When the two of them get arrested and held for questioning.
Russell leans against his fence post, underneath the trees and turning stars. This is the woman who once counseled him, in the dark: Close your eyes and write a sentence in the air. Use your left hand. Just one sentence. A simple one. They silent each other. The stars wheel in place above him. And at the center of the innermost circle, he imagines himself signing the air: You’re already here.
When he gets back to the room, the TV is blaring. A man wearing a paratrooper baseball cap is carrying on about a dog who took a bullet for him. Thassa is asleep, curled up on her bed. He cuts the volume slowly, then shuts the set off. He lies faceup on his own bed, reading palmistry in the ceiling cracks. He’ll tell her tomorrow, at breakfast, if the manhunt doesn’t beat him to it. There’s been a slight change in plans. No need to call Montreal anymore, he supposes. It would only trade one anxiety for another.