He heard, from the audience, nodding, grunts, snuffles. Applause from a group cozied in the rafters. And a woman who began to cry. To wail with her head flung back, so that her arms seemed to lift of their own accord. She began to talk to her neighbors. She’d been married thirty-five years. Could you really be this alone after thirty-five years? Her husband worked for the Department of the Interior. He was about to turn sixty, was a good and kind man. And yet here she was. Someone passed her a microphone; she shared her story with the room. Sometimes, she said, she’d wake up in the night, stare at the stranger next to her, and say: Olgo, I like cheese sticks and corn in the can, and when no one’s looking I wet my finger and dip it in the rainbow sprinkles at the back of the cupboard, and you love these things about me, you know me, so why can’t I be reached? And then she cried some more.
Two Helix came up on each side of her. They held her hands. They said: We know.
The woman blotted her eyes with the cuff of her sweatshirt. She would join, no doubt. She might as well. It cost only ten dollars a head to be here, but the reward was priceless. The idea, thus: Come in with your best friends, whose lives are as alien to you as yours is to them, come in steeped in the tide of loneliness and despair that grows out of precisely these moments when you’re supposed to feel a part of things, because, after all, you’re hanging out with your best friends. Come in a wreck, leave happy. How? Start from the beginning. Start over, start fresh. Tell me something real. At issue was not just isolation born of actual, literal solitude, but the solitude of consciousness. The very thing that lets you apprehend feelings for other people also tends to keep you severed from them.
There was a Pack for her not two hours away. As soon as membership cleared five thousand in any one area, a Pack was born. The Helix was seventeen Packs in seventeen states. Fifty-two million website hits a month. Bonds nationwide.
Thurlow drank from a water bottle. He said, “Now, I know what people say. They say that extreme detachment usually means mental illness, but that the pioneering spirit of individuality just means you’re American. Freethinking and unencumbered. But what we have today? When so many of us are destitute of intimacy with other people — intimacy of any kind — that’s American, too. And it’s not right. Now, believe me, because I know. I know firsthand. From my life and also from polling and statistical modeling procedures that corroborate a decline in frequency of every single form of social, civic, religious, and professional engagement since 1950. These stats are the God of tedium. But I’ve read them. The Roper Social and Political Trends survey, the General Social Survey, the DDB Needham Life Style studies, Gallup opinion polls, Mason-Dixon reports, and Zogby files. The bottom line? We are cocooned in all things, at all times, and it’s only getting worse. Today we debrief with our pets and bed down with Internet porn. So what can we do?” He paused here while the crowd said, “Tell me something real!”
“That’s right,” he said. “Tell me something real. Talk to each other. Get back to basics. And start feeling better.”
As he spoke, he managed to contact the audience with his eyes, to see people one by one, and in this way to blinker and laser his attention.
When he was done, he thanked everyone for coming. He said they’d made his day.
Cheers, applause, exeunt.
There was a new suit waiting for him at his hotel. Twenty-four roses and puffer vests in red, blue, green, purple, yellow. He had it all sent to his penthouse, then headed there himself. He pressed his head against the elevator door and nearly fell out when it opened to his room. He was so tired. The event had taken hours — they all took hours — so he had time enough only to shower and shave. Perk up. Esme was coming. She might even be on her way. He had forgotten, though, about Vicki, who was standing tall at the foot of his bed with legs apart. PVC boots zipped up her thighs. A latex corset and thong.
He tossed his coat on the duvet. “Get dressed,” he said, and he took off his shoes. “Not today.” He made for the window, peered out the blinds. The White House facade was soft-lit, soft yellow.
Vicki looked herself over and shed her leather gloves. Her arms were marbled with self-tanner. She slapped the floor with a crop. “Slave!” she yelled, but she gave it up fast. “Oh, come on, Thurlow. Even a hooker has feelings. I’ve been waiting here forever.”
He plopped on the bed, faceup. Two minutes of rest, and then he’d shower. “Traveling Companion,” he said. “Please.”
She folded her gloves. “Sorry,” she said. “But what’s wrong? Are you okay?”
“Just tired,” he said. “Not to worry. Now get dressed — you have to go.”
Instead, she lay down next to him. She’d just had her hair cut and dyed. It was brick red and shorn so close, he could see a birthmark the shape of Vermont traverse her skull. He reached for the side table and handed her a gift certificate to a cosmetics store. “Here,” he said. “Spend it however you want.”
“Wicked,” she said. “I love presents.”
He went back to the window. Vicki sat up on her knees and jutted her lower lip. Pushed her head into his ribs. She wore silver studs in both cheeks, which she’d gotten after a Helix rally in North Hampton to celebrate the start of her new life. She had been coming to Thurlow twice a week for two months and traveling with him as he went. Everywhere except North Korea, about which she was peeved but smart enough not to say so.
“I need to shower,” he said. “If anyone knocks, take the back door out.”
The concierge rang to say he had a message, and could he send someone to deliver it? Vicki put on a robe and brought the envelope to Thurlow, who turned it over in his hand.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” she said.
“No.” He tossed it on the table.
“Can I?” When he didn’t answer, she opened it herself. “Do sido in Pyongyang? Think. That last part’s underlined,” she said. “What does it mean?”
He closed his eyes. “It means my ideas are stupid and my life is worthless.”
She came up next to him. “Oh, honey,” she said. “You are so not fine,” and she swiped a tear come down his face with her thumb.
He pointed at the roses boxed on the dresser. “You want those?”
“If they’re from you. So how did it go today? I bet you did great.”
He perked up a little. “Five thousand floes. I think we got them all.”
“Amazing,” she said. “All those people whose lives you’re improving.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“Don’t you?”
He nodded. He knew he was helping people but often lamented that, for his efforts, he hadn’t been more helped himself.
She put her hands on his chest, and when he did not push her away, she got on her knees and unzipped his pants.
He touched her cheek. Traced the flume at the base of her neck and rested the pad of his thumb there. It was always the same with his Traveling Companions, them trying and failing to rout the grief that tyrannized his inner life. And yet for Thurlow, this was the essence of a fetish — maybe, even, of all his doings: their incapacity to resolve a need alongside their aptitude for coming just close enough to sustain hope.
After a minute, she said, “Is it that you don’t want me anymore? Is that what’s happening?”
“Vicki,” and he tried to raise her to her feet, though she would not budge. “I want to say something to you. If what we have here ever comes to an end, if the Helix comes to an end, you should know that you have the right to a lawyer. And that you don’t have to say anything to anyone without one. Because it’s possible — the way things are headed — it’s possible this could all end badly. And soon. I’ve put us in danger.”