Lucinda looked up as Anne came in, her enormous black helmet of hair bobbing vigorously above her thick neck. She had a Holy Bible on the table in front of her, unopened. Lucinda took a Holy Bible everywhere she went, but Anne hadn’t seen her open it yet.
“So what’s it you’re doing?” Lucinda said. “Trying out for a part in The Matrix?”
“Which one is The Matrix?”
“It’s the one with the red pill and the blue pill. Never mind. It’s a movie. We ran it here about a month ago. You came.”
“I get distracted.”
“Don’t I know it. Seriously, though, you ought to wear some kind of reflective clothing. You’re going to get killed out there one of these days.”
“Maybe,” Anne said, “but not in a car accident. Isn’t there something called vehicular homicide?” She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. There was a bucket of fried chicken. It was probably a good three weeks old. There was a package of celery, half-used. She closed the refrigerator door. Lucinda had a big piece of Swiss cheese on the table, with knife and crackers. Anne sat down and started on those. “I take it there’s no sign of our visitor,” she said.
“He’s not due for half an hour, Annie, relax. There’s not going to be anybody out there cruising yet.”
“They cruise all day.”
“Not most of them, they don’t. They like the dark. You ever notice that? That’s what you should do, instead of taking pictures of their license plates. You should buy a whole bunch of big spotlights and set them up down there. That’d drive them off faster than anything.”
“They’d only move to another street. The city’s already tried that.”
“The city got bought off.”
“Probably. What are you watching?”
“Mother Angelica Live. I know she’s a Catholic, but she’s a good woman. Had a stroke, kept right on going. Reminds me of my grandmother.”
“The queen of England reminds you of your grandmother.”
“Well, you know how those things went, back in the colonies. Maybe we’re related.”
Anne tried the cheese. It was hard as a rock. One of the things she would never be able to understand was why, now that she lived in a place where the food was both erratic and awful, she weighed so much more than she had when she’d been able to get the best food on the planet, simply for the asking. At least she’d rid herself of that prejudice about the lack of discipline and self-respect that so often made poor people so fat. Obviously, it just happened, even when you didn’t eat much of anything.
She cut herself another piece of cheese and wrinkled her nose at it. She put the cheese on a Saltine cracker and hoped for the best. The television program went to commercial, except it wasn’t really a commercial. It seemed to be a public service announcement about some kind of novena. She wished Father Kasparian would get here, so that she could do what she had to do in the way of greetings, and then disappear. She was beginning to get hyped-up and adrenalized, the way she always did when she went out. In some ways, it was like a drug. By the time it was over, she’d be so pumped up she wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours. She wouldn’t even be able to think straight. That was when she would hit the Net and the Web sites she’d come to rely on—the Freedom from Religion Foundation; the World of Richard Dawkins; the Marbles game—so that she could keep her mind occupied enough so that she wouldn’t think. When she did think, she thought about what it would feel like to do something real about this. She imagined herself chasing them down on foot, pulling them out of their cars, beating her fists into their heads until the skulls cracked and the skin broke open to spill blood.
“Oh, one thing,” Lucinda said. “Your brother called.”
4
At first, Kathi Mittendorf had been shocked to realize how easy it was to join America on Alert—easier than it had been to join the Girl Scout troop in Marshford Township where she grew up, where nobody got a chance to wear a green uniform unless Mrs. Davenport okayed it. Kathi missed Mrs. Davenport daily. She didn’t miss Mrs. Davenport’s daughter, Katy. It was hard to miss somebody who was so obviously destined to become one of the anti-American liberal elite. Kathi had known what they were when she was only ten years old, although she wouldn’t have been able to put a name to them. She thinks she’s so much, people used to say about Katy Davenport, and it was true too. She thought she was just wonderful, because she always got the best grades in school and because she read things from New York like the New York Times and the New Yorker magazine, instead of the things everybody else read, which Kathi had to admit wasn’t much. Still, that was suspicious in itself. Good people didn’t read all the time, and they certainly didn’t read things that made them argue with the teachers about what America had been doing in Vietnam, or why the electoral college should be abolished. Now that Kathi understood the way things worked—the way the Illuminati carefully chose from among the regular people, handpicking the ones who would be allowed to “succeed,” so that it wouldn’t look as if they were running the world the way they really were—she found she was a lot less angry with Katy Davenport. That was a good thing, because for a while there she had been caught up in an anger so deep and implacable that she sometimes found herself sinking in it. It had started on the day that the notice had gone up in front of the guidance counselor’s office, saying that Katy Davenport had been accepted to Yale. She remembered herself standing in the hall, staring at the little card with Katy’s name on it, and on all the other little cards, the kids who were going to Penn State and Swarthmore and Concordia and Duke. It had felt as if she were the only one in school who wasn’t going somewhere after graduation. Her shame had been so deep, it had wormed its way into every atom of her skin. She wanted to run away from home before graduation day. At the very least, she wanted to do something that would get their attention for once, instead of being the one whose name nobody would ever remember when the time came around for reunion s, which she wouldn’t go to, because she wouldn’t want them to see that she was still in town and working at Price Heaven, when they were off being Important.