Deeply Odd(42)

Annamaria was silent so long that I thought I had embarrassed her with my confession, but that seemed not to be the case when she spoke. “Young man, there are few people who understand as much about themselves as you understand about yourself, to the depth that you understand it. But your greatest strength is that there are things you don’t recognize about yourself.”

“Which would be what?”

“There’s one kind of ignorance that is the very essence of enlightenment, and I won’t tell you what it is, because it is an ignorance that makes you so beautiful.”

Evidently, I hadn’t embarrassed her, but the word beautiful embarrassed me because it had no relationship to the mug I see in mirrors. “Another riddle,” I said.

“If you want to think it is.”

The hardest crack of thunder yet shook the afternoon, as if the sky were stone that had fractured clean through. Either echoes of the thunder rattled the sheet metal or something in the heating duct was agitated by the storm.

I said, “What frightens me is, there’s a difference in what’s happening today, this time, this situation… .”

“Yes,” Annamaria said, as if she knew of my recent experiences.

I said, “The spirits who seek me out aren’t for the most part malevolent, just lost. The evil that comes my way is mostly stuff we might see in the newspapers and wouldn’t find unusual. An old high-school friend turned child-killer, cops gone bad, terrorists with a boatload of nukes … But what I’ve seen today is different in kind and magnitude. Stranger. Darker. More terrifying.”

“Anyone who learns the true and hidden nature of the world will be terrified, Oddie, but there’s a safe harbor past the terror.”

“Is that what I’m learning today—the true and hidden nature of the world?”

“Tim promises he’ll save two cookies for you. They’re very good, if I say so myself. Listen, because of who you are, it’s inevitable that eventually you will peel the onion, so to speak, and see the truth of everything.”

“I’d rather just chop the onion, fry it with a dribble of olive oil, and put it on top of a cheeseburger. Sometimes I have a dream in which I’m nothing but a fry-cook, with a paycheck every Friday, good books to read, and all my friends in Pico Mundo.”

She said, “But that is only a dream. Your life has always been a journey metaphorically. And since you left Pico Mundo, it has become also a literal journey from which you can’t turn back.”

I watched the grille over the ventilation duct and thought about the quartet of rats abandoning the Phoenix palm in formation, but no pointed twitching nose or radiant blood-drop eyes appeared.

She continued: “Every journey has a destination, known or unknown. In a journey of discovery like yours, the pace quickens and the disclosures mount steadily toward the end.”

“Am I nearing the end of mine?”

“I’d guess that what’s behind you is much more than what lies ahead, though you have a way to go yet. But I’m not a fortune-teller, odd one.”

I said, “You’re something.”

“Be afraid in proportion to the threat,” Annamaria said, “but if you trust yourself, we will see each other again—”

“ ‘—when the wind blows the water white and black,’ ” I finished, quoting her words from earlier in the day. “Whatever that means.”

“It means what it means, Oddie. Remember, there are cookies waiting here for you.”

She disconnected, and I switched off the disposable cell phone.

When I stood up from the bench and stared at the grille near the ceiling, all grew quiet in the duct beyond.

I tucked the pistol in a deep pocket of the raincoat and opened the changing-room door, prepared—though not eager—to learn the true and hidden nature of the world. But first I stopped in the thrift-shop men’s room. Even the most urgent journey of discovery must allow time for the journeyer to pee.





Sixteen


PERCHED ON HER PILLOW, MRS. EDIE FISCHER PILOTED the Mercedes limousine northeast on Interstate 15, into a steadily darkening day, leaving the city and its suburbs well behind us, outracing the storm but not yet the sullen clouds that paved the sky in advance of the downpour. Between Victorville and Barstow, meadows made green by the four-month rainy season gave way to fields of wild golden grass on the brink of the Mojave, where that season had been shorter and drier than it had been across the lower lands closer to the coast. Mile by mile, the gilded grass cheapened to silver, soon the silver grayed, and at last plush meadows succumbed to gnarled and bristling desert scrub.