Erin shouted into the phone. “Dad? Dad?” She was incredulous and then she was sobbing, and he could hear Tennessee in the background, screaming in empathy, and then Erin calling out for someone, saying, “It’s my dad! On the phone! He’s okay!”
Her enthusiasm was nice but also highlighting of the enthusiasm he would have liked to hear from someone else.
“Erin, I’m fine. I’m fine, sweetheart”—and while he meant to say that he was coming home and that he loved her and that the whole time he was kept hostage he thought only of her and Tenn, of family and love, he popped out something different. He said, “But let me just ask you this: Who is that person you’re talking to in my house?” Because he suspected it wasn’t a woman, and if it was Erin’s asshole husband, Jim, he’d lose it.
“Dad,” she said. “Where are you? Are you okay? Oh, thank God,” and she started to cry anew.
He was afraid to squander battery life on her sobbing and was about to press on when closed captioning from the storefront began to ticker news of interest: The hostage Olgo Panjabi has a wife; this wife has joined the Helix.
He took a deep breath. The cold seemed to nip his lungs like frost starred to a windowpane. “Has your mother called?” he said.
Crying stopped. A long pause. Erin scouring her mind for the right way to put it. Olgo gawking at the TV.
“No,” she said. “I think she’s gone.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said.
“She’s with the Helix, Dad. Jim told me. She’s in Virginia.”
The last of the ticker onscreen: Living at whats thought to be a helix commune in richmon by the riber, sources close to teh case say, which wasn’t a case so much as Olgo’s hell spelled out in third grade.
“Dad, just tell me where you are. There’s nothing on the news saying the hostages were released, and Jim says no one knows anything, though I know he’s full of shit. Is it a secret?”
“Yes,” Olgo said, though it had not been a secret until now. He watched onscreen as one of Kay’s friends from yoga — she did yoga? — said how kind and vibrant Kay was, as though Kay were the tragedy here, the one taken. Though maybe — and here Olgo’s spirits rose like mercury in the thermometer — she really had been forcibly severed from her life by the brainwashing fury of the Helix, in which case she could be forced back.
He stomped at a snowbank and nearly fell in. He had not once been hysterical at the Helix House, not until the moment he realized he could get out. He clamped down on his voice with success.
“Listen. Don’t tell anyone you heard from me. Everything’s going to be fine, but I have to go.”
“Dad, you’re scaring me. Wait, oh my God, are you — is someone making you say these things? Are you, how do you put it, are you under duress? Just say I love you if I’m right.”
“Duress?” he said, sneering. “I thought you were a big fan of the Helix! You and your mother both. Their biggest fans ever!”
“Dad, I didn’t know they were armed or whatever. I didn’t know you were going out there. I didn’t know they were like that! I’m getting a divorce; I just wanted some friends. If you’re upset about what happened, that’s natural. But don’t take it out on me. What were you even doing in Cincinnati? All this time pretending to be a nobody when really you are CIA? At first I thought you went after Mom, but then when you were gone for so long without calling and then suddenly the news everywhere and the press and Jim feeding me ten different stories every ten minutes — I guess you are CIA. I know you can’t tell me, so all I’m saying is: I know.”
Olgo rapped the phone against his head and hunkered down. It was freezing. Kentucky in winter. No one around except a guy down the street smoking outside a garage, and in the driveway, a car with a For Sale sign in the window.
“I have never pretended to be a nobody,” he said, and then he lost his breath for the agony those words drowned him in.
“I didn’t mean it like that. When are you coming home? I’m just here with a girlfriend.”
“I need a few days.” In the meantime, he had started for the garage. The smoking guy was in coveralls and rolling a second cigarette before his first one was out.
“One good thing?” Erin said. “I think Jim has to leave town. Maybe even the country. So me and Tenn are home free.”
“Great,” he said. “Now listen: when your mother calls, tell her I’m fine.”
“Okay, but, Dad? She might not be coming back. Like, ever. His name is Jonathan. Just so you know.”
Olgo stopped midstride. He’d almost forgotten. So enamored had he become with the idea of his wife absorbed into a cult, he’d lost sight of the recruiting lothario at the start of it all. Jonathan? What could be more homogenous and totemic of the white man and his intolerance than a name like Jonathan?
“I have to go,” he said. “Give Tenn a kiss for me.” And before she could respond, he flipped his phone shut.
By now, he was within voice of the mechanic, who took one look at him and said, “You like this car? ’Cause I got a better one in the back. Cheaper, too. Want to see?” He flicked his cigarette into the gutter and plucked shreds of tobacco from his tongue.
Olgo nodded. Buy a car, hit the road. He struggled to keep pace with the mechanic. It wasn’t his way to move this fast, but it was refreshing so long as he could establish in their shared stride and silence the preconditions for talk. He needed to talk. More now than ever. If it’s true that stress makes you sick, there were polyps massed on the wall of his gut like barnacles. His bones were punchboard. He had coronary heart disease. Was getting a clot. Morbidity gorged on his despair.
He took three steps for the mechanic’s every one, but they were on pace. “So, how’s it going?” he said.
The mechanic glanced at him. “Car’s over there,” he said, and he gestured at a pea-green sedan. A Ford, maybe. He reached in his pocket for the keys. “You seem like a good guy, so let’s just call it an even three K.” He stopped several feet from the car, and when Olgo moved ahead, he called him back, saying, “Better yet, two K.”
“Fine,” Olgo said. “Just give me the keys so I can make sure it works.”
“I’m not out to get you,” the mechanic said. “But I do have to get back to work.” He held out his hand but still would not approach the car.
“The keys?” Olgo said. “I have to get to a bank anyway. It’s not like I’m carrying.” He was in a hurry, but he was not stupid. The car had New York plates. Probably the car was stolen, though he couldn’t imagine who’d want to steal a pea-green sedan.
“Done deal,” the mechanic said, and he tossed him the keys.
Olgo got inside and immediately felt something like oatmeal wet his pants. Then came the smell. Cloying and rancid. He flew out of the car, shut the door. His eyes watered. “What is that?” he said, and pressed his face to the window. The glass was hazy and the lighting dim, but still, he could see inside. An army of fungal spores was encamped in his new car.
“You can’t be serious,” he said, and turned around. But the mechanic was gone.