Rafael seemed to be dozing. It was time for me to check on the venison. When I was at the door he suddenly said, “Do you ever hear from Glorita?” I shook my head. “Me neither,” he said. Why would he, anyway? He hardly knew her. Was this just gossipy intrusion, or vampirism? Some people live to suck the memories of others.
The fragrance of rosemary, thyme, and wild meat basted in red wine filled the kitchen. The venison was almost done. I stuck a fork in a tiny roasted potato. Still a little hard; they needed a few more minutes. The Pennsylvania butcher said you could keep them warm in the oven for a couple of hours after cooking without the venison drying out, or the potatoes getting mushy. Just make sure to baste the venison from time to time. Do not touch the potatoes! Set your oven at the lowest possible temperature. Some newer state-of-the-art ovens had a warming function, specially designed for that situation. I inspected Mrs. Wilkerson’s oven closely, oven manual in hand, but did not find that function. When the time came, I just set the oven slightly above zero, keeping my ear on its door until I heard the gas swoosh on.
Snowflakes swirled under the garden lamp. Soon they thickened into a light snowfall, enough to add a picturesque touch without disturbing traffic. The Celestial Designer was still on my side. McCabe was not being driven from the airport: she was driving herself. Why didn’t I think about this before? It’s always slower when you drive yourself instead of having a local driver who knows the roads. She had certainly rented a car at the airport. Add fifteen minutes for pickup, at least. Add another, say, half hour, to look at a map, hesitate while approaching an exit, even take the wrong one. What kind of a driver was McCabe? I had never seen her drive. One summer she drove a rust bucket from Bangor to British Columbia to work in a fish-canning factory, she told me. She was fifteen. That was about twenty-five years ago, at the tail end of the Great Hunger, but driving is an indestructible skill. McCabe’s wealth dated from a little over a decade ago, as far as I or anyone else knew. What had she done in the fifteen years between the fish-canning factory and SoHo? Where had she been? “It was brutal,” was all she would say. Driving cars likely figured in her years of wandering through the desert before arriving in Manhattan, where you did not need a car, and a great many people never learned to drive.
McCabe’s life had been harder than mine. I never worked in a factory. I managed to survive on my wits and America’s ebbing guilt toward my kind. McCabe had not gotten a break. She deserved every penny she had.
Rafael feared a marriage of convenience between the Aztlán fanatics and the Caliphate. “They’ve been secretly courting each other for a while,” he had said. Both abhorred the mixing of races and civilizations. The Caliphate would gain credibility and a new, multicultural fifth column, the Aztlanites, access to the Caliphate’s Swiss bank accounts, recruiting wizardry, and fat VIP rolodexes. When Rafael talked shop, his face would begin to blur before my eyes. The familiar traits would become unfamiliar: the nose too small or large to be his, the ears too high up or low, the Adam’s apple less visible than I remembered. I would no longer recognize this compact man with the large gestures. Then he would fall silent, and it was again him.
McCabe had no gurus. She would never fall for Aztlán and their ilk. She was serene in her non-identity. I worshipped her supreme blankness. Rafael must not see McCabe. He was not as perceptive as I was with the particular and the unique—a weakness of theoreticians—but McCabe’s glow was hard to miss. He might kidnap her, intellectually speaking, and use her in a new ideological stew. McCabe could be a powerful weapon in the hands of a philosopher-turned-advisor to the prince. I even had a name for it: supra-essentialism. An old idea stolen from Leibniz by each succeeding generation. Rafael could re-brand it. In an accidental world, McCabe was pure essence. It’s not an identity that you need, but an essence, he could tell the identity-deprived white masses that were imperiling the stability of the Republic. McCabe will give it to you. She will restore purity and glow to America. That’s how Rafael could snatch the white masses from the lusting Aztlán viper. A delirious scenario? Maybe, but no less so than Rafael’s NAR, or such archaisms as neoconservatism, Islamic fundamentalism, neo-nativism, Communism, and the homebred thicket of Christian heresies from the Reconstructionists to the rapturous, all of which became the truth du jour at some point, with the revolting consequences we all know.
I did not give a rat’s ass about America. There was no such place. It had been a postprandial dream of the Enlightenment, kept artificially alive by the feeding tubes of self-interest through the end of the twentieth century, until its fat throat was slit in the Jacobean gore of 2008. Mrs. Crandall was all that was left of America, the Accidental. She was the healthy limb, heavy with fruits. The tree was rotten. The limb would one day wither. In the meantime, it was the most sumptuous of meals. Poor Rafael, had he tasted Mrs. Crandall as I had (an impossibility), he would not be fretting now about the clueless white masses. They could always sing “Aracnida, the Beautiful.”
At the fish-canning factory, McCabe had started on the assembly line, and ended as a class “A” forklift operator. Those were the biggest forklifts, used to carry heavy loads to the waiting container ships. The factory had its own docks in the back. McCabe said it was hard not to run over the seagulls when you put the forklift in reverse to disengage from the load. Seagulls swarmed over the dock day and, she discovered, night. She had chosen the night shift thinking that there would be fewer of them. But there were just as many. “The floodlights were very bright. They thought it was sunlight,” she said. An ornithologist from a nearby college stopped by one night to take Polaroids of the seagulls on the dock. He told her that lack of sleep might render them infertile after a couple of generations. He was chased away by security before he could answer her question: Were seagulls throwing themselves in front of the forklifts on purpose? This was the only time when I felt a bodily impulse toward McCabe. I could have lifted her in the air, held her tight against my chest, and put her safely in my pocket, if any of that had been physically, or morally, possible. The sea was never far from McCabe in her early years. Saltwater, fish, and birds were in every story she told me about herself. They weren’t actually stories, but snippets, flashing images. The only full story she ever told me was the one of the Spanish sailors burning corpses in the Biloxi Marsh in the seventeenth century.
McCabe would come. Mrs. Crandall was in town. I considered going to see her after everything was over; she would not say no to me. Bebe existed somewhere, eternally, promising the rapture like a careless, provocative god. Only Glorita was truly absent. I fought the impulse to fall on my knees and beg for her to be alive. No matter how old, sick, or unlike Glorita she was. Please let her be alive. Lucky Petrona, who had my legs to grab, and my pants to smear with snot. I had only the venison, visible through the oven’s glass window. I am an egoist, I told the venison. I declared Glorita dead because time had gone by, yet I did not sign my own death certificate. If I am the same now as I was then, more or less, why wouldn’t Glorita still be my Glorita? The venison sneered. I lowered the oven temperature a bit more. Then I put on a pair of McCabe’s surgical gloves and went to inspect Rafael’s car.