CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The sun hammered the freeway, turning the air above it to jelly. Still we three pushed on—Rovil, Dr. Gloria, and I—Tint Shields on full, air-conditioning turned up to eleven. Rovil tried to chat, but I had become hazardous cargo, silent and toxic. Ollie had vanished. That morning I’d tried to call her pen, but she didn’t answer, and the desk clerk claimed to have no idea who I was talking about.

I felt like shit.

Rovil couldn’t believe we were leaving without her, but I told him to keep out of it, letting him think Ollie and I had split over some female relationship thing he’d never understand. “She’s just cooling off. She’ll be fine. Ollie’s, like, hypercompetent.”

He looked worriedly out at the motel parking lot and said, “I suppose.”

“You’re still my pal, right, Rovil? You’re still with me on this?”

Rovil breathed out. “Sometimes I think you don’t need a friend so much as chauffeur.”

“A chauffeur would quit.”

That got a smile out of him. “Look, I know I’m an asshole,” I said. “But we’re almost there, kid—a few hours from Emerald City. Just take me the rest of the way.”

He relented, and after a couple of hours on the road he’d dropped the worried pout. He listened to his music, a grating form of Indonesian pop, and when we crossed the border into New Mexico he set the car to auto and let go of the steering wheel, excited to finally be in a state that allowed autonomous cars—proof that there was as much joy in surrendering free will as exercising it.

Sometime after 2 p.m. we left the interstate, and Rovil took the wheel again. Los Lunas was a surprisingly green town on the Rio Grande, with lawns and trees living the high life off the river. The car’s GPS led us confidently out of town along Highway 6, west into the desert, through brown, rolling hills. Then we left the highway for a smaller road, then exited that one as well. Each turn seemed to lead us onto narrower, sketchier roads until finally a white cement drive appeared on our right. A black steel gate blocked it, and bleached stone fences curved away in both directions.

Rovil stopped the car. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Fine.” I was sweating in the cold air-conditioning, every pore open. I tried to think of something to say. “Hell of a driveway.”

The road ran for five miles and ended in a cul-de-sac. According to the satellite pictures there was a cluster of buildings at the end of the road, but their details were obscured in a cloud of fuzzy pixels; the rich could afford privacy agreements.

“He owns everything within ten miles of the compound,” Rovil said. He rolled up to the gate and the entry panel.

Dr. Gloria said to me, “Put your head down.”

“What?” I couldn’t concentrate.

“Cameras,” she said, and nodded toward the gates. “It’s what Ollie would have had you do.”

“Jesus, how could cameras make a difference? Edo knows we’re coming. He invited us.”

Rovil had rolled down the window. I started to tell him the gate code that had been in the text message, but he said “I remember” and typed it in.

The gates slid open. We rolled through, started to pick up speed, and I said, “Wait. Pull over. Now.”

He stopped the car and I jumped out. I marched across the pebbled ground toward a set of boulders, toward a clump of gnarled bushes, toward … fuck. Nowhere. Into the heat. Sweat poured from my face and dried almost instantly.

I stopped in front of a large juniper bush. Its limbs were gray as old bones. The plants around it were equally dead and strange, a cohort of parched alien bodies buried standing up. Humans didn’t belong out here.

Dr. Gloria descended from the sky and landed upon an Old Testament–quality boulder.

“You have absolutely no idea what’s going on in your own brain, do you?”

“Not now, Gloria.”

“Would you like me to explain?”

“I would like you to explain what the hell Edo’s doing out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“I like the desert,” she said.

“It’s the fucking waiting room of the apocalypse. In a hundred years half the planet’s going to look like this. So, what, he just had to get a preview?’

“You could have stayed with her,” Dr. Gloria said. “Called off this trip until she could come with you.”

“What do you do if you want to run out for milk?” I said. “How long do you have to wait for a fucking ambulance out here?”

“I’m concerned that you’re thinking of ambulances,” she said.

“I’m concerned that I have not punched you in the fucking throat.”

“You love her,” Dr. Gloria said. “Maybe you should admit that.”

“Why, exactly, did I want you to come back?” I turned back toward the car and was surprised to see that it was more than a football field away, American or Canadian rules. Rovil leaned against the fender, gazing out at the landscape, watching me but pretending not to. When I started walking back he casually got back inside the car.

Minutes later I dropped into the front passenger seat. “Sorry,” I said to him. “Mexican food.” He nodded as if he believed me and handed me a bottle of water. I drank half of it in two long swallows.

We zipped along the white road for several minutes. The air-conditioning triggered something in my body, and another tide of sweat swept out of me. I felt like I was being wrung out: cell walls rupturing, epidural levees crumbling, veins—

“Now you’re being melodramatic,” Dr. Gloria said.

A figure appeared ahead of the car, walking toward us in the middle of the road. It was a man, wearing shorts but naked from the waist up, tall and broad with a big gut. A floppy hat obscured his face.

Rovil slowed the car. We stopped when the man was perhaps thirty yards from us. He stopped walking and peered at the darkened windshield.

Rovil glanced at me.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s him.”

I got out of the car again. Dr. Gloria alighted by the side of the road.

“Edo,” I said.

Edo Anderssen Vik stood up straighter. “Lyda?” He took off his hat. “Lyda Rose!”

I walked toward him. Behind me, Rovil got out of the car.

“And Rovil?” Edo said. Again completely surprised. “This is amazing!” A bad thought occurred to me: Edo was not only God-drunk, he was afflicted with Alzheimer’s.

He stepped toward me, arms wide for a hug, and I stepped back. Edo dropped his arms, confused, the hat forgotten in his hand. His round gut looked permanently red; his chest was covered by a mat of white hair.

Rovil moved up and shook Edo’s free hand. “How are you doing, Mr. Vik?”

“Rovil, please, you’re not an intern anymore. Call me Edo.” He looked from Rovil to me, still grinning. “What are you doing here?”

“We got your text,” I said.

He frowned, not understanding. Then he glanced up. He listened for a moment, then nodded. Someone was speaking to him from the sky.

“Ah,” he said. “Of course.” He looked back the way he’d come, then said, “The house is just down the road. Lyda, will you walk with me? It’s less than a mile.”

I said to Rovil, “I promise to be good.”

“I’ll follow in the car,” he said.

“Closely,” Dr. Gloria told him, but of course he couldn’t hear her.

*   *   *

We walked for a while, Dr. Gloria trailing me like my maid of honor, the car creeping along behind her.

“You’re a hard man to find,” I said.

Edo laughed. “I suppose so.”

“We’ve been trying for weeks,” I said. “We even tried to see you in Chicago, but Eduard cut us off.”

“He did?” Edo looked upset. “But of course. I suppose he’d be very upset if he found out you were here.”

“So he’s not home.”

“Oh no. He and his wife left last night for Amsterdam.” He smiled. “Nick of time, eh? Otherwise … whoosh. He’d run you off.”

“What’s he so afraid of?”

He thought for a moment and said, “A few years ago I was in my car, and I saw a man by the side of the road. It was very cold out. He was holding a cardboard sign that said HUNGRY. Just that one word.” He shook his head as if seeing it for the first time.