Conspiracy Theory(140)

I’m no longer making any sense at all, Annie thought. She stepped away from the non-booth whatever-it-was-called—they had to call these contraptions something. She ought to ask. She had AT&T stock. They would have to an-swer—and looked up and down the nearly empty street. It had to be close to noon. She could have checked her watch, but her head felt too heavy. Her eyelids felt like lead. She went back to the car she had parked on the curb and took a parking ticket off the windshield. That must have happened while her back was turned. She didn’t really care about the parking ticket. She’d always had more money than she knew what to do with. Now she not only had it, but couldn’t think of what she wanted it for. Her whole life felt upside down and sideways, all at once. Maybe she would give a lot of it to Patsy Lennon and the girls like her, the ones she knew personally, just to see what they would do with it. Maybe she would give it to the Freedom from Religion Foundation, since she knew exactly what they would do with it, and she was in something like a fighting mood. She wondered what it would be like to live like an ordinary person for real, instead of just playing pretend at it, what it would be like to have no money to spend rather than to refuse to spend it. That didn’t make much sense either, but it all went together on one level or another. It didn’t help that the money was in trusts, where she could not touch the principal.

She got in behind the steering wheel and popped open the glove compartment. She took her latest bumper sticker out of there and propped it up on the windshield. Religion Stops a Thinking Mind, it said. She never left it when the car was parked, because when she did people vandalized the car. She got out the street map of Philadelphia and laid it out across the wheel. Then she gave up. She couldn’t read maps without a magnifying glass anymore. Maybe she ought to spend her money on that new eye surgery that was supposed to restore your sight to what it had been before you’d reached middle age. She hated the thought of anybody or anything coming near her eyes.

The magnifying glass was in the pocket of her jacket. She never carried a pocketbook. In the neighborhoods she frequented, pocketbooks were an invitation to purse snatchers. Still, she thought, she’d trust herself with the pimps and the drug dealers and the teenaged whores with fewer reservations than she would trust herself with the kind of people she’d grown up with. Tony was the last of the good ones of them, and he was gone. She ran the magnifying glass over the map. She found the street. She checked it again. She took the tip of her finger-nail—not much; mostly bitten off—and tapped down along the broken lines until she thought she’d found the right block. Then, just to make sure, she got the copy of The Harridan Report she’d brought with her and looked at the bottom on the back, where the address was. Her back ached. Her head ached. She wanted to lie down right here on the seat and close her eyes and sleep for a week.

Instead, she got the key into the ignition and the car started. She looked carefully into her rearview mirror and saw that there was no traffic coming in her direction. There was no traffic coming in either direction. She knew where the map said she was, but she didn’t actually know where she was. She had never been in this part of the city before. It looked pleasant enough. There were a lot of narrow, tallish brick houses. There were trees. She put on her turn signal for the sake of the people who were not there to worry about what she would do next, and eased out onto the road.

Four blocks south, six blocks east, two blocks north—she had to be careful about the dead ends and the one-way streets. Why were there always so many dead-end streets in Philadelphia? She turned on the radio and caught NPR doing classical music. It was what she always listened to, but it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. Why did the announcers on classical radio programs always sound as if they were announcers at a funeral? Was it really necessary to whisper the news that you were about to play Beethoven’s Emperor’s Concerto? Beethoven would have known better. His music was triumphal, the rock and roll of its day. She punched buttons but didn’t come up with much she recognized. There was a lot of rap—hip-hop, they called it now. She’d never been able to get that straight. She punched more buttons and came to music she did recognize, but it didn’t make her feel any better. The Beach Boys were playing “Surfer Girl.” She wasn’t sure, but she thought most of the Beach Boys were dead. Two of the Beatles were.

She made the next turn and began to slow up. The neighborhood was a little shabbier here than it had been where she started. She was getting close to the fringes of the city, where the landscape was neither city nor suburb. The houses here were not brick, but frame. Most of them were double- or tripledeckers. All of them had porches. None of them had been painted recently enough. Every once in a while, there was a storefront: convenience groceries; newspapers and magazines; hardware. In another few blocks, the pawnshops would start. The tattoo parlors would come quickly afterward.