She found us first. Apparently she’d noticed me earlier. She said hello and introduced her young companion.
“This is also Mike. Mike Reed, this is Mike Applegate. Mike has a date tonight.”
“Which Mike?”
“Both Mikes. I’m loaning Mike Applegate my car. And Mike Reed could give me a lift to my studio. I could cook you up a little soup.”
I told her I had a bag of groceries and a BMW, and she said that was perfect. All of this she repeated in mime and sign for the younger Mike. Remarkable how the expressions lit up her features and communicated the light to his. The evening’s prospects were brilliant in his face. He held out his palm and she pointed toward her car and said, “The keys are in it.” He understood.
We watched as the young blond Michael got into her hatchback with an angular ease, puffed out two short signals of exhaust, and took off fast.
“Well, this is slick,” she said as we got to my car. “Is it fast?”
“Not as fast as you want it to be.”
“Come on! These guys are built for the Autobahn.”
“I know, but I’m not. I drive under the limit. It handles well,” I said, feeling somehow required to offer a defense.
I took the Friesland Fellowship’s pamphlet from my breast pocket and laid it on the dash while I started the car. Flower picked it up and looked at it, but all she said was, “Do you know what it sounds like, Michael? Like a mechanical animal.”
And truly, the engine had a strongly mechanical yet somehow vocal sound when it accelerated. We entered the queue of vehicles heading onto the highway. The Frieslanders’ will to conform seemed to reach deep into their choice of cars: mini-vans, well-equipped pickups, very few sedans, all of them in darker colors, and all fairly new.
“Where did you say we’re going?”
“To my studio.”
“Back in town?”
“No. Here. About two miles from here.”
“Way out here in the country?”
“It’s in the Tyson School. I’m living there.”
Tyson was a town, or a village, I wasn’t sure what it was.
All of this while I felt lifted by a strange new medium, a strange element — I now tell you that I was newly buoyant in a brighter life. In the midst of a hymn, God had disappeared. It was like waking from a nightmare in which I’d been paralyzed. Like discovering that gravity itself had been only a bad dream.
And here beside me was Flower Cannon dressed like an Andromedan cadet in her black-and-white zoot suit. I said, “Flower, explain yourself. Are you a prospect? What were you doing there?”
“I was there,” and she hesitated…“for the music.”
“Where did you meet him? Mike.”
“Mike? The other Mike?”
“Mike Applegate.”
“In signing class.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Mike Applegate.”
“I mean—”
“I met him in signing class. He was the teacher.”
“I almost thought you said ‘singing class.’”
She paused…“I don’t guess he sings.”
In her voice I heard that timbre, that attractive and dangerous timbre — as if an outburst of laughter were caught in her throat and making a sort of chamber of hilarity there.
“It was a twelve-hour class, two hours a night for six nights. It went fast, and we learned fast because our teacher couldn’t talk out loud. And so I — and the others too, all of us who took the class — I sign differently from most hearing folks.”
“How so?”
“They talk when they sign. I’m mute.”
“I’m glad you’re talking now.”
She made great conversation, and entirely apart from its content. Her pauses were like pools. You wanted to draw closer until you were immersed. Some wealth of facial animation lingered from her previous discourse with the deaf Michael. I could hardly take my eyes away to look ahead, but it didn’t matter. The road was ruthless, never bending.
“Was he just there for the car?”
Pause.
“He was there for the music.”
We traveled slowly, washed along in an ocean of chlorophyll. Nothing existed out this way but tiny communities, widely spaced, each gathered around two or three monumental grain elevators. I didn’t know the name of any of these towns, not that I supposed it mattered, and we didn’t even reach the first, which must have been Tyson.
I told her, “I admire you.”
She took a breath to speak but seemed to change her mind. Then said, “Why?”
“Because you do crazy things without having to be crazy.”
“If you think I’m not crazy,” she said, “you’re out of your mind.”
“I remember a comment you made once — and I thought you were looking right at me when you said it, is why I remember it so clearly. You said, ‘Sane? Or tame?’ Okay, but that’s not the issue. The reason most of us seem so sane is we’re clinging by our fingernails. But not you.”
“And not you, either.”
“Most everybody, I’d say.”
“Not you. Not clinging. You’re tied. You’re tied to the mast, like Ulysses.”
“I sure was.”
“But not no more.”
“No.”
“Show me not no more, Michael Reed.”
“You. Are you a siren? A witch?”
With a certain frustration I knew I spoke too soon, too urgently. I wanted to get out of the way the things I knew to say, wanted to say, the things I’d been thinking, all in the hope of moving into the unforeseen. The wind thundered around the car.
She said, “I’m a girl.”
And now we arrived. I stopped the engine. The silence released our voices. But we had nothing further to say for the moment.
She’d directed us to a schoolhouse of orange brick in the midst of endless cultivated fields. The old building looked gigantic. Anything higher than a stalk of corn was visible for miles. A scraggly tree way off in the distance had the decisiveness of one clear fact.
We went up the steps. Flower used a key to the big front doors. How many times had I let myself into a silent public school after hours, to smell the lunches spoiling in lockers and the janitor’s pungent wax, in the buildings of concrete and metal, exactly like our public prisons? This one was actually smaller than most, only four classrooms and an office on the first floor, and perfumed within by citrus and oil paint. We took a short flight of steps into the basement and Flower put her key away again. For a purse she carried a small leather pouch that puckered with a string. She propped open the door at the far end of the hall, and the last of the day filled that region like a mist. The building felt irresistibly empty.
“Isn’t it quiet?”
“It makes me want to run around breaking stuff.”
“This is a public school building,” she said. “I guess you could bust the windows, but everything else is indestructible.”
In her basement studio, formerly a classroom, I sat on an institutional wooden chair, first putting down a handkerchief because the seat was daubed with paint. Everything was like that, every surface. I set down my plastic bag of produce on the floor next to her telephone, which was basically black but fingerprinted in a multitude of colors. Enough light came through ground-level windows — windows at the level of our heads. I watched her, not taking much in. Around the place I noticed three or four canvases on easels, all turned to the walls, the paintings hidden.
“Well! What do you think?”
“It’s messy and full of ghosts,” I said.
“The school’s gone.”
“I got that.”
“They all go to a consolidated over in Hereford now. You can apply for space here through the state Arts Council.”
“And are you allowed to live here?”
“No.” She hadn’t really entered, standing just inside the door. She turned on the overhead fluorescents. “It’s just a regulation,” she said. “Nobody checks.”