When they were finished, the desire to be dressed and warm seemed to be all that was left.
He turned on the heater and the windshield wipers, the lake outside a fury of dark chop.
“I unfolded for a second again, I think.”
She was silent.
“You’re supposed to ask what I saw,” he said, but she didn’t ask. He buckled his belt while she fiddled with the radio dial, trying to find a signal strong enough to cut through the static, and he thought of Rake’s photograph in the vision, the look on his face, a look he recognized, he thought (though he couldn’t be sure), one Marine to another just before a snafu. Or maybe, he thought, kissing Wendy and reaching into the glove box to get a fresh joint — an apocalypse between each swipe of the wiper blades, fire waves rolling in toward shore, on the horizon bolts of lightning and small geysers rising, falling, devoured by immolation — maybe it was an orgasmic look. Blank and blissful. Tight, angry, happy. Filled to the brim but still wanting.
“It’s beyond weird out there,” Wendy was saying. “We’re living where water burns.”
“Where souls are enfolded,” he said.
“And then unfold,” she said, taking a deep hit.
“Unions are busted. Deals are made.”
“Deaths are avenged.”
“The good ones.”
“The ones that need to be,” she said, taking another hit.
STRANGE HOUSE
Meg woke in a strange room, splintery, beaverboard walls, an old side table with a jug of water, a straight-backed chair with an embroidered cushion, a lamp with a tattered shade. She lay in bed and tried to orient herself, trying to remember. The shooting on the highway. The shooting in Elk Rapids. The farmhouse on the edge of nowhere, another shooting, the noise of the car engine and the endless unwinding of the road all slightly blurry in a way that told her time wasn’t at a standstill, exactly. The press of a tree branch against her arches as she stood in a tree looking down at a window. The weirdly soft pop pop of gunfire through window glass. The snort-sniff of Rake clearing gunk from his throat before launching into another soliloquy about the nature of his own violent tendencies.
A man with a big moon face came into the bedroom, pulled the shade, and asked again and again if she was awake until she said she was awake. He had a beard and wore a leather vest over a bare chest, hair thick and curly. He went back to the window and made a comment about the big Gitchi Gumi and then came back to her and sat on the bed and asked if she was hungry.
She clutched the sheet against her chin and looked up at him. He looked kindly, somehow, but mean, too. She waited until he spoke again. He said she had nothing to fear and that he wasn’t there to hurt her or anything like that. He said he’d leave her to get dressed and suggested that she go to the window to take a look, that she’d be able to see a bit of the water through the trees at this time of the morning, with the light, and then he went out and closed the door gently and she got dressed and, smelling bacon and eggs, went down a narrow, steep stairway and found the kitchen.
An old lady in a calico apron was tending the stove, and the burly man was at the table eating. He asked her to join him, said it gently, and she did.
As he ate he explained that his father was probably out on a ship, most likely making passage from Duluth to Toledo, and she listened as he talked about the lake, about the men who worked the ships, and then he seemed to catch himself and without being asked, he said, I’m not like Rake, not at all, at least not now.
The lady brought her a plate of pancakes. While she ate, the man explained, speaking slowly, that he had enfolded himself with some black-market Tripizoid from Port Huron, after reading a few leaflets about the subject, and that the old lady, whom he called MomMom, had helped by tying him up. The treatment had worked and the trauma was gone, at least for now, he said. Then he said again that he was not like Rake, not anymore, although Rake didn’t know it, hadn’t caught wind of it. He was biding his time, unwilling to leave his mother behind, unwilling to kill again, not sure how to get out of the tangle, he said. Then he got up and went out the back door, leaving her alone with the woman named MomMom. She finished her food and felt quiet for the first time in a long time, for a few minutes at least, sitting at the table, warm and safe, and then he came back in with an arm full of wood and put a few pieces in the stove and poked it. He said she should go back up and rest if she wanted, and she did, going back up the stairs, lying down in the bed, pulling the covers up to her chin and listening for a while, afraid again suddenly but also extremely tired, and she fell back asleep.
* * *
That afternoon the man drove her down a narrow fire road, two ruts in the overgrowth, deep into boreal forest until the road ended in burned-out pines.
This here is most likely controlled burn, he said. Most likely the Department of Natural Resources flame took the whole fucking acreage as a firebreak line. Least I can do is teach you about the forest. That’s the least. See all those green shoots? That’s nature taking her course. Spring awakening and all that. No matter how bad it gets you’re gonna have green coming up.
As he led her on a hike he told her to keep an eye out for the big one, the queen tree. There were trees that had escaped felling during the previous logging boom.
There’s a rumor of a big pine around here. The way I like to work is to follow my nose, catching the pollen, he said.
The smell of the lake drifted in through the trees, wet stone and dead flies, with the hint of cold. She clutched the coat he had loaned her, leather with fringe, and followed him out of the woods and along a swell of grass and sand. At the top of the rise, the lake appeared, grand and glossy flat. He explained how just about every day he took a look — even when the waves came all the way up to the trees. He had to see it and tempt himself with the intensity of upheaval, its hugeness and brutal cold. His heart told him in no uncertain terms to keep sniffing for trees and listening to the lake as much as he could. So when I go out to look for trees I make a habit of stopping like this, he said. Smeary green copper deposits jutted into the water. A ship sat on the horizon, a supertanker from Duluth on a run to the locks at Sault Ste. Marie (he explained) and then from there out to the St. Lawrence and into the embrace of the wide ocean. His old man had worked his way up from deckhand, captained several ships and made countless runs without sinking. Maybe it’s enough to give you hope, he said. I like to think so.
On the beach he had her sit on a rock. He stood for a minute, blocking the sunlight, and then went down to the shore and, with his hands jammed in his pockets, watched the water. He came back and hunched down, plucked his beard, and looked at her with steady eyes.
I’m gonna do my best to help you. Rake’s out on a run. The lake is still cold, bitter cold. But the air is starting to warm up. That’s something, at least. It’s not all you could ask for. But it’s something.
That night, in bed, she went over memories. Everything beyond a certain point was a fuzzy abstract feeling in her head. The Causal Events Package, as the nurse had called it, started at an early memory point. She could remember being in her mother’s arms, the coolness of a glass of water held up to her little-girl lips, but after that things vanished into a perplexing blankness until she got to the Grid and Rake’s appearance — even that was fuzzy — and then her days on the road with him.