The fire flared and smoke rose in a loose gray column toward the power lines as Psyche’s sad aria carried into the night. I wanted to see her in the oasis of a hospital waiting room, bathed in the antiseptic brilliance of fluorescent lights, doctors in white coats dispensing pills, giving injections, and placing the medals of the stethoscopes, round and reassuring, over her tiny heart.
Angus materialized beside us. “Just wait,” he said. “Soon the real fun starts.”
“What’s that?” I said, looking at him.
“Oh, this is just the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
“Angus,” I said, “I have to take the baby to the hospital. I’m taking the van.”
“No way. Just wait fifteen minutes until we’re done. We need the van.”
“Then I’ll take Gerald’s car. Get me the keys.”
“Yeah, right,” Angus said, and laughed. I felt like he would’ve laughed at anything I said. In the distant glow of the fire his smile looked wet.
“I mean it,” I said. Psyche sounded like she was gagging on her own vomit, then started crying again.
“She’s right,” Wylie said. I didn’t know where he’d come from.
“Gerald will never give her the keys.”
“He will if you ask him to,” Wylie said.
“I think you have a misguided sense of our dynamic,” Angus said.
“Oh, shut up,” Wylie said, walking right up to him and standing there, nose to nose.
I knew he wanted to punch him, and it seemed like a fine idea to me. There was a whispering sound behind me, buzzing in my ear like an unwelcome bug, and when I finally took a moment to listen it resolved into Irina’s voice. “Angus, she is right, we need to go now. Angus, Angus, Angus,” she kept saying, as if she’d forgotten most other English words. Then I smelled tobacco and cologne, and Gerald was standing beside me.
“Are you provoking all this noise,” he asked Angus, “or are you letting it happen?”
Angus didn’t answer.
“The baby’s really sick,” I said to Gerald. “We need your car.”
“No.”
“You’re not being reasonable,” I said, looking back and forth between him and Angus. “If you let us have the car, we’ll take the crying baby away and there’ll be less noise. It’s a win-win situation.”
“Win-win,” Angus repeated softly. “Gerald—”
“No.”
“Come on,” I said.
“Listen to her,” Wylie said urgently.
“You can’t have the car. But you do have to shut the baby up until this is done.”
“For God’s sake, why?” I said.
Gerald ignored me, looking at Angus. “You know we need the car.”
Wylie took a swing at Gerald. Somebody stepped on the dog’s tail, and he howled, along with the baby, and Irina started sobbing. Wylie and Gerald were truly fighting now, grappling and punching, grunting and heaving with breath. I’d never seen Wylie fight before and hadn’t known that he could. I sprinted back to the van and rummaged through the tools and trash until I found the crate I was looking for and pulled out the BB gun.
The thought of Angus firing it into the wall now seemed like years ago, and it aroused in me a strong, sexual sense of regret; then the wind delivered the sounds of Psyche crying, and I ran back to the tumult and pointed the BB gun at Gerald Lobachevski. “Give me the keys,” I said.
He ignored me completely. Wylie’d just hit him on the cheek, and Gerald had pushed him back, and they were sizing each other up in that strangely polite way men have when they’re trying to decide who’ll go on the attack next.
I could see Irina’s shadow and the shivering, sickly, wailing shadow that was her child. “Wylie,” I said, louder. “I’m going to shoot him. Stand back.”
“What?” Gerald said.
“Where’d you get that gun?” Wylie said.
“This is New Mexico,” I said. “Everybody has a gun.”
Angus’s eyes focused on me, and I knew he remembered the same day I did, the long afternoon in the motel, the soft sounds of television, our two selves slipping together on the sheets. “You better watch it, Gerald,” he said then. “That’s my gun.”
I was holding the gun out in front of me with my arms locked like they do in movies. My finger on the trigger was shaking. I thought this should feel like a dream, but it didn’t; it all felt gloriously real, each second defined, as it passed, in miniature splendor. “Pull the keys out of your pocket,” I said, “and hand them to Wylie.”
Gerald dropped his fists and looked at me with what I had to admit was considerable dignity for a man faced with a gun he didn’t know was loaded with BBs. “Don’t be stupid,” he said to me.
“Show me the keys,” I said.
He shrugged, and did.
Wylie stepped forward and grabbed them. “Let’s go,” he said.
Wylie drove. Psyche was quiet, a silence that now seemed ominous. Irina was quiet too, and when I asked how she was doing — she was sitting in the back — she didn’t answer. I asked her again.
“I am worrying,” she said tightly. Her shadowed face had an ugly red sheen; her breath was labored and her voice hoarse. She was sick, too.
“Wylie,” I said.
“I know,” he said. The car bounced and jostled on the dirt road, then turned velvet-smooth — it was an expensive sedan— as we sped onto the highway. After several minutes I could see the city’s loose beginnings ahead, farms and spread-out houses and the flow of gas stations. Beside the road the land sloped away to sheer nothing. Somewhere in that nothing, I knew, fire was catching in the desert grasses, a flower of spark blossoming into the air, the smoking particles fizzing and popping like a lightning storm. Ahead of the car the lights of the city stitched an uneven seam against the hem of the night sky. The world took on a funhouse cast, dense with terrible possibilities. We raced past a gas station, and inside the brilliantly lit interior of the Quick Mart a man stood behind the counter smoking and gazing out at the night.
Then, in front of us, the cluster of electricity and faint halo of neon around Albuquerque went dark, like a candle blown out in a single breath. The city vanished.
“Yes,” Irina said.
Never in my life had I seen so many stars.
Twenty-One
Irina was chattering behind me in some kind of dizzy, sick euphoria, and I snapped at her to shut up and Wylie told me to shut up and then we all did for a while. Darkness settled over everything, and the car’s headlights seemed barely able to penetrate it. It was like black fog, and Wylie kept braking suddenly at the shocking discovery of a stop sign, a cat prowling, another car. He kept off the main streets, wisely, steering us through neighborhoods where people stood in front of their dark houses talking to their neighbors or on their cell phones, whose tiny screens flared like lit matches as we passed.