“You can stay if you want,” Wylie went on, “but you’ll have to bring your own supplies. You can take Irina and Psyche back in the Caprice, and be back before the walls go up.”
“You’re welcome to stay,” Angus put in. “But we thought you should see the place before you made your decision.”
“What walls?” I said.
“We’re barricading the road,” Wylie said. “To make the refuge. Weren’t you listening to my position paper?”
I sat down on the ground next to Angus, who touched my knee gently, in a gesture of either encouragement or concern, I couldn’t tell which.
Berto reappeared, sloshing his plastic jug. “We’re going totally feral down here, man,” he said.
“Except for the beer,” I pointed out.
“Nobody ever said beer and ecology are incompatible,” Angus said cheerfully.
“How do you—” I said.
“The bottles are for pissing,” Wylie said, “obviously. There’s a funnel setup girls can use. Women, I mean. There’s plastic bags and toilet paper for the other business. It’s two weeks, Lynnie. Not the rest of your life.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him use my name. He was waiting for me to answer, and I wanted to prove to him — to all of them — that I could make it. That they could survive down here impressed me as much as the space itself. But the smell of dirt all around me turned from fresh to rancid, and I thought about worms in my hair and the stench of shit in plastic bags. I imagined the tunnels collapsing, and couldn’t breathe. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but there’s no way.”
My brother nodded, as if he’d known all along that this would be my response.
Angus stood up, and he didn’t look particularly surprised, either. “I’ll take you up,” he said.
Berto and Stan didn’t even wave.
It was two o’clock in the morning when I pulled into my mother’s driveway. I was about to unlock the front door when David Michaelson opened it.
“Well, if it isn’t the coal miner’s daughter,” he said, smiling broadly.
I didn’t smile back. “Excuse me,” I said, pushing past him.
My mother was sitting on the couch by the television in a light-blue bathrobe, a mug of what looked like warm milk cradled on her lap. “You’re back,” she said.
“What are you doing up?”
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” she said. Her tone was so extremely neutral as to make it even more laden with reproach. “We were watching a late movie.”
On the TV, Frank Sinatra was sweating horribly in black and white, and I thought of his sweet sounds playing in Wylie’s car, Angus beside me, singing along. But here, in The Manchurian Candidate, Frank was drunk. Raymond Shaw, the angular, government-programmed assassin, was also drunk, and waxing nostalgic. “I used to be lovable,” he was telling Sinatra. “You wouldn’t believe how lovable I used to be.”
“This is a good movie,” I said, and my mother nodded.
“The days were lovable, the nights were lovable, everybody was lovable,” Raymond Shaw said bitterly. He was recalling an innocent and happy summer of his youth, a time that was sunny and irretrievable, and I thought I knew how he felt.
My mother patted the couch beside her. David was still lingering somewhere behind me, waiting, I guessed, to see what I’d do. “Have a seat,” she said in the same weirdly neutral tone. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”
I shook my head, gesturing down at myself. There was no way I could sit down next to her, in her clean bathrobe, on that clean couch. “I’d better take a shower,” I said, “I’m filthy.”
“That you are!” David boomed. When I turned around, he was smiling widely at me. “You’re filthier than an alley cat in a rainstorm.”
“Is that a saying?” I said.
“It is now,” he said, patting my shoulder. “You go wash up, dear.”
I fled the room. In the shower I lathered, rinsed, and repeated, trying to get my hair clean. The smell of my mother’s strawberry shampoo was like candy. I felt like I couldn’t keep going back and forth between these two worlds — from tunnels to strawberry shampoo — without going crazy. I understood, now, why Wylie couldn’t answer my mother’s questions about what he was doing: because it was absurd to be feral in a condo; it was ludicrous; it was damning. Yet the condo itself was absurd, too, its cleanliness and decor almost wilfully oblivious to the real matters of the world. I rubbed conditioner that smelled like almonds into my scalp, and stood in the shower for a long, long time.
When I got out, my skin was loose and puckered, and my mother was standing in my room, going through the clothes on the floor, checking the pockets before dropping them into a laundry basket.
“What happened to the movie?”
“I know how it ends,” she said. “Angela Lansbury’s evil.”
“I’ve always thought so,” I said, and lay down on the bed. The Wilderness Kiss and The Ball and Chain stared at me from the dresser, their thick slabs of paint stark and shadowed in the light of the room, and I propped myself up on the pillows to look at them. The man in the first painting, I noticed, was thin and dark, Fleming-like. Why was I so convinced my father couldn’t have known Eva? How well had I really known him, after all? The longer I stared at the paintings, the more certain I felt that there was some reason I’d found them. I wasn’t given to wild imaginings or superstitious by nature, but it was as if they’d somehow demanded to be unpacked and examined.
My mother dropped what she’d found in my pockets on the dresser, then hoisted the laundry basket and left, turning the light off as she went. It seemed like only seconds later that she was back, shaking my arm, and thinking she had some question about the laundry — did I sort my whites from my colors, and how on earth had I gotten so dirty ? — I shook my head and told her to go away. Instead she opened the blinds, and sunlight rioted into the room. It was morning.
“You’ve got to come watch the news,” she said.
When I wandered into the living room, she and David were sitting on the couch in their bathrobes, now holding cups of coffee. It was like a perpetual pajama party around here. I wondered whether they watched this much television all the time. Standing in the doorway, yawning, I looked at the screen. A massive barricade made of tree trunks and barbed wire was stretched across the road to Sandia Crest, draped with posters: NO BARBECUES NO LITTER NO TRAIL EROSION and WHO WILL SPEAK FOR THE MOUNTAINS IF THE MOUNTAINS CANNOT SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES?
“As if mountains even wanted to speak,” David said.
“Shut up,” I told him.
“Sorry,” he said, to my surprise, as my mother sat watching with her hands curled tightly around her mug, ignoring both of us.
A reporter explained that the tram had been vandalized and the roads blocked by a group of “radical environmentalists” who had faxed a statement to all the news channels. I knew this must have been Irina, whom I’d dropped off at a Kinko’s near campus. The reporter read a few sentences from Wylie’s position paper; then the shot widened to include Panther, whom he described as a “local activist and author.” Clipboard in hand, she was wearing her hair in a high ponytail. “These actions may be misguided,” she said breathlessly, “but the issue of wilderness protection is crucial.” Then the camera cut away to a Forest Service ranger, who said only, “Steps are being taken to reopen this popular wilderness area to the public.”
My mother sighed once, heavily, as the reporter nodded and signed off—“Live, from the road to Sandia Crest.” Neither she nor David said much as they got ready for work. I assumed that my mother didn’t ask me how much I knew about it only because she didn’t want to know how much trouble Wylie was going to be in.