You sure you don’t want a marzipan? asks Andi.
Dr. Pingpong would kill me. He’d torture me first, of course. Then he’d kill me. Watch the headlines. One of these days his name will be on the front page of every newspaper in the northwest.
Hey, collect lots of great sounds, you say, jobless.
You all hug.
Andi reaches up and strokes Nadie’s hair, though Nadie’s too engrossed in the palisade of cathode ray tubes to notice.
You pat her perfunctorily on the left knee.
Now you pull away and fall in with the other consumers revolving through the mall, passing a store that sells nothing but Christmas ornaments, a pet shop with a sign advertising medicinal leeches, a food bar that carries thirty-seven kinds of popcorn including coconut, lime, and cream soda.
Near the east exit, you pause and turn around.
You can barely make out Jared through the crowd.
He has slipped his large sea-creature earphones back in place and, Nadie palming his head like a basketball a wink before she goes for the set shot, he’s aiming his boom mike at the rows and rows of televisions, braced to receive the incoming noise of revelation.
The phone stutters awake in the kitchen.
You and Andi exchange glances that acknowledge you cannot avoid this decision any longer.
So you sit alone on the porch in a sunset lens flare and listen to Andi swap small talk with Grannam for nearly thirty minutes.
Andi describes how the summer heat wilts the lettuce leaves in the garden within a quarter of an hour of watering them.
How as you turned onto your driveway two nights ago you saw the furry reddish-black rump of a bear cub disappear into vegetation.
Saw or thought you saw.
Things happen so quickly.
Changing and not changing.
You enjoy closing your eyes and then opening them again, listening.
From the air, it occurs to you, logging roads cut through a forest look like termite drillings through wood.
Andi recites the story about how when you bought this place the former owner could not find the keys to the front and back doors because he had never used them.
You recall the bored stare of young single mothers on trains in Thailand who have played with their babies long enough.
How the sleeping puppy was not sleeping.
How if you look at something dead long enough it starts seeming alive.
Now you hear Andi say you will fly out with Gen to visit over Labor Day weekend.
You feel the last dangerous wavelengths whisper across your skin.
It strikes you that all photography can do is miss seizing existence in many interesting ways.
Existence being the one shot you will never be able to take.
You push back your redwood chair, lift yourself out of it, stroll into the house, past Andi who is still busy talking on the phone, into your office.
You click on the portable phone and immediately hear how Grannam sounds happier than she has sounded in months.
You squeeze your eyes shut, open them again, join in on the celebration.
It takes her quite a while to digest this new state.
She seems to delight in mishearing what her granddaughter is saying, then in hearing her granddaughter reiterate and reconfirm the news.
Standing in the shadowy room, listening to Grannam’s shaky voice explain how she will take Gen to Van Saun Park to see the geese, the cineplexes with stadium seating to see every film ever made, an elaborate trigonometry involving gratification, culpability, and tenderness arranges itself inside you.
The windows in your house are open wide as they will go.
As you listen to the conversation, the blinds begin clattering almost inaudibly behind you.
The first cool breeze of night breathing through the screens.
Outside, insects commence clicking like marbles in a bag.
Later, you try to nuzzle back into Andi in bed and discover she is gone.
You extend your arm into soft webby darkness, lower it, and pat pillow.
So you lie there, letting consciousness soak through you, stretching your toes, flexing your buttocks, until, slowly, you swing your feet out onto the floor, sit up, put your face in your hands, sidling awake.
You locate Andi in the kitchen, lights glaring.
She is studying that photograph on the fridge.
Sipping a cup of herbal tea and studying that photograph on the fridge.
Her profile puts you in mind of Mary Leakey when, one afternoon in 1978, she noticed something amazing on her return hike to camp after a day’s work on the Laetoli plain.
In the nearly four-million-year-old hardened volcanic ash beneath her, Mary made out the impression of a human heel.
She knelt and, using the dental pick and brush from her backpack, began scraping.
Three hours later, when she stood again, the study of anthropology had altered forever: she had begun unearthing an eighty-nine-foot-long south-north trail of crisp footprints that had lasted seven hundred times longer than recorded history.
They had been made by three hominids, two larger and one smaller, a family unit, who had crossed that stretch of the planet at the alpha of humankind.
About halfway along their forward progress, one of them, the smallest, paused and turned left briefly before continuing north.
He or she, you believe, was the first artist.
What are you looking at? you ask.
Oh, hi, Andi says. I hope I didn’t wake you or anything.
You put an arm around her and squeeze, vigilant not to disturb her tea.
Things have taken on a sort of inevitability, haven’t they, she says.
Each time I look up, the momentum seems to have increased a little.
How did this happen?
You both stand there, trying to remember.
You know what Kysha told me she did when she visited L.A.? asks Andi.
Was I aware Kysha visited L.A.?
It was a working vacation with Thom. She was terrified of earthquakes, so she slept in her jogging suit. For a fast getaway. That’s me all over.
You examine the photograph together.
The child, the chair, and the eyepatch are white ghosts.
What does it mean to be so white?
What does it mean to ask what does it mean to be so white?
You know what Thom told Kysha about Hanford? asks Andi.
We have to do something, you know, you say. That much is pretty obvious.
The ants there are radioactive.
We have to… what?
They burrowed or furrowed or whatever ants do into contaminated soil. Millions of them. It’s all very hush-hush.
You’re kidding.
Not simply your run-of-the-mill ants, either. The kind with wings. Winged ants, I think they’re called. That fly. Thom’s sense is they’re likely to make African killer bees look pretty much like harmless butterflies.
Andi lets her last point hang in this middle-of-the-night space.
You make a conscious effort to continue studying the photograph for clues, your mind running on, running on, following that trio of footprints all the way to the umber horizon.
Over your coffee break next morning, you phone Alaska Air and book two round-trip tickets from Spokane to Seattle.
Over lunch, you phone Delta and book two round-trip tickets from SEA-TAC to Newark.
Andi proposes that you wait until the weekend to give Grannam your flight information. That way, she says, you can pace the escalation of her excitement. You agree, and when you finally do call her you can hear her mood has ascended through happiness into elation.
She asks what Gen likes to eat.
You cite several brand names you remember from commercials between Saturday morning cartoons.
She started sniffling last night, Andi says on the other line. Her first cold. Cold or allergy. Either way, it’s the cutest thing. It makes you want to hold her twenty-four hours a day.