The harder Hannah tries to follow the message, the more lost she becomes. So after a minute, she just lets it wash over her, like rough water. Usually, she can pick out the last word of each phrase, the word they put all their emphasis and accents on—protect, respect, reject, neglect, correct, suspect, detect, aspect, reflect, direct, deflect, insect …
She knows she needs to call in and request assistance from Lieutenant Miskewitz. She knows she needs to make a simple physical move, to grasp a phone and dial a number. To bring in air and emit sound and let common words fall off her tongue.
Instead, she reaches to her lap and pulls up the brown padded mailing envelope. She reaches inside and withdraws Lenore Thomas’s notebook, this bible of madness, transcribed by the strongest casualty Hannah will ever know.
She knows she shouldn’t read it. She knows the worst thing she can do is finish the letter, that her only hope is to burn the notebook in one more fire. But there’s a point in every common human life where the will runs dry and even the faintest vestige of strength has been depleted. We give that moment names of justification. But our naming will never stop us from hitting bottom and losing ourselves, losing the conception of hope, the imagined idea of what life could become.
I’m not myself anymore. But I’m not quite you either, Lenore. I’m left in between. Ready to fade.
She opens the notebook and picks up where she left off.
How does a woman go from being a detective with a methodology, a devotion to the clue and the motive and the conclusive solution …
… to being a mystic so deluged with undercurrent and chaotic input that paranoia evolves from neurosis to cosmology?
Be patient. Like me, you’ll start to lose that righteous grip on rationality, my young sister. My sweet Hannah. And you’ll start to dwell on that opaque, other realm— Mystery. (And by this I do not mean the occult.) I mean that dogma where the only pattern appears to be chaos. Where the only consistency appears to be randomness. Where everything is secret and where the connections come apart as soon as they are known.
I mean the place where I live now, Hannah.
Let’s guess what’s going through your head just now. You’re thinking I’ve hopped lanes, traded one rush for another, swapped my much-loved crank for antique acid. Sorry, that would be one more easy solution. And we both know, I pray, no, I trust, no, no, I guess, by now, we all know that life just won’t work that way. The fact is, my new addiction isn’t chemical at all. My new monkey is something so much stronger than meth or dust. Are you ready, Hannah? I’m mainlining Hidden Signs. Buried Signals. Coded Messages. I’m completely dominated by that whole subsurface reality that the brutal majority will not acknowledge, where every billboard is an endless bible of interpretations, where every lunch menu is a heinous political creed, where every boring phone conversation is a rape of multiple meanings, and always, always, malignant intent. There is a world beneath Quinsigamond, Hannah. And probably a world beneath that world. The year you’ve spent down Bangkok has to have changed you and hinted at this fact. I suspect you are beginning to think of yourself as a bar of iron. But even iron will melt at some ridiculously high temperature. Are your dreams starting to trouble you? Do you feel like there’s something radically wrong with your digestive process? Has your period been irregular for the past six months or so? You can ignore the symptoms if you choose, little sister. This virus will not go away. As an infected patient, I can attest to its persistence. And there’s worse to come. Your actions become uncontrolled — last summer I found myself mailing long letters, like this one, addressed only to:
General Delivery
The Andes Mountains
Argentina, South America
But so what? So my gospel sits in some dead-letter office, in some tiny valley village at the foot of a massive mountainside. There are some things we simply need to do. Movement for movement’s sake. It’s a way of advancing toward a resolution, a way of killing time until the Aliens show their faces. Already, I’m getting better.
But if you still choose to think I’ve lost touch, little sister, the loss, of course, is yours. Because, please, make no mistake in this one regard: things are falling apart at every possible seam. And into this breach of disorder and chaos, another putrid god is slouching for Q-town. But you have this promise, Hannah, when the beast comes, Lenore will be back to greet the little shit.
Hannah’s head begins to throb and she closes the notebook. And then someone is sliding a shot glass in front of her. It’s filled with a clear liquid. Hannah looks up to see Jerome LaCroix in his white silk shirt, opened to his navel, in his toreador pants with the gold brocade down the sides, up high on his two-inch heels, hands elegantly on his hips and a trace of a smile playing on his mouth.
“Girl, you just looked like you could use something,” he says.
Hannah picks up the shooter and holds it near her eye, looking through it as if it were some tool of science. She sniffs at it, but there’s no distinct odor, or rather there’s an abundance of odors, but none she can specify and put a name to.
She looks up at Jerome and manages to say, “I really shouldn’t. I might be pregnant.”
Jerome brings a flat hand up to his mouth to convey a mock sense of shock. Then he shakes his head and says, “Might do the child all sorts of good. It’s medicinal, you know. My own mother took it, in moderation of course, all the while she was carrying me.”
Hannah nods at him, not listening, then raises the glass slightly, clears her throat, brings the shooter to her lips, and says, “To my sister, who recently passed on.”
THREE WEEKS LATER
46
“What’s the sign say?” Ronnie yells from the car.
Flynn hunches over, cocks his head. “Says, ‘Open 8 A.M. to midnight.’ Want to wait?”
“It’s only five-thirty. We’ve got two and a half hours.”
“So you want to keep driving?”
Ronnie’s silent, thinking. Finally she says, “Let’s wait.”
She pushes open the car door, steps outside, and goes through a long run of stretching and bending that Flynn finds both amusing and lovable.
He starts to walk over to her. “Your back hurting?”
“Just a little stiff,” she says, and they hug and let both their bodies lean up against the side of the Jeep.
“We’ve got to take more breaks,” Flynn says. “Switch off more often.”
“Yeah, but you’re not much of a navigator. And you’re lousy with the radio.”
He holds onto her and digs a finger into her side and she squirms and laughs.
“The funny part is, that’s the truth,” Flynn says. “I’m no longer a big fan of irony.”
“It’s only partly your fault. That last two hundred miles it was illegal to play anything but Elvis.”
“The King always makes me hungry. You got anything left from the 7-Eleven?”
“We got licorice and nacho crumbs,” Ronnie says. “And the beef jerky.”
“Why did I buy that? I’ve got to be more careful with the money.”
“It’ll go a lot further down here.”
They stand and look out over the desert, quiet for a while. They’re fifty miles from the nearest collection of people and buildings called Sotela Village. They’re parked in front of a small, transplanted lunch car, a 1940s diner that sits like a deco mirage fifty feet off the side of this secondary road. The Gothic lettering on the front of the diner tells them they’ve reached the Duluoz Cafe. They almost rolled past it, thinking it was just an abandoned mistake, a long-closed-down gas stop left to bake and recede in the sand. But as they went by, Flynn recognized the architecture as native Quinsigamond and yelled for Ronnie to pull in. He jumped from the Jeep and looked in the window and wasn’t sure whether it was a good or bad omen. But it was a genuine, functional diner. And probably their best bet for breakfast if they stayed on this road.