Deeply Odd

“That works for me, too, ma’am.”

Squinting at the distant eighteen-wheeler as though she might vaporize it with her stare, Mrs. Fischer said, “If I catch the freak laying a hand on a child, I’ll feed his testicles to coyotes while he watches.”

She didn’t look quite so adorable at the moment. She looked like a mean Muppet hot for vengeance.

Eight (#ulink_2209dcb2-c1c9-546b-abc9-22616f1c329d)

IN THE TIGHTLY CLUSTERED SUBURBS JUST NORTH of Los Angeles, the ProStar+ turned away from any hope of the sea, and we followed. Soon Highway 101 became State Route 134, the widest river of concrete that I had yet seen, which offered passage through the metropolitan sprawl to stark and lonely mountains in the east.

I was born in quiet Pico Mundo, where prairie surrendered to desert long before my time, and I lived there for more than twenty years. But the memory of my loss was too much with me in Pico Mundo. Although I knew that Stormy Llewellyn would not have hesitated to cross over to the Other Side, I woke many mornings with the hope that her lingering spirit would come to me, that I might see her again, and I went to bed at night to dream of the reunion that the day had not produced.

When at last I ventured out into the world, seeking peace that I could no longer find in my hometown, I went only as far as St. Bartholomew’s Abbey, on the California side of the Sierra Nevada, high in the mountains, where I stayed as a lay resident in the monks’ guesthouse for half a year. My adventures since leaving the monastery had taken me to the town of Magic Beach, to a roadside enterprise called Harmony Corner, to a strange private estate in Montecito, but only now, for the first time in my life, into the outer precincts of a major city.

Maybe I am by nature too lacking in sophistication to appreciate or adapt to life among teeming multitudes. The sight of one community after another flowing together without discernible borders, the vast valley and the serried hillsides encrusted with miles upon miles of houses and low-rise buildings, here and there clusters of high-rises: It oppressed me, and though we were traveling through it all at great speed—past exits for Burbank and Glendale and Eagle Rock—I felt enchained, claustrophobic.

The volume of traffic increased by the minute. Afraid of losing our quarry, Mrs. Fischer wanted to close the gap between us and the truck.

I insisted that we remain at such a distance that we could just barely see the eighteen-wheeler. “You said he’s all deceit, lies, and trickery, and that’s true. But he’s also … I don’t know. Intuitive. Strangely intuitive. If we aren’t extremely careful, he’ll become aware of us.”

She glanced at me, her face that of a wizened pixie but her eyes as analytic as the lasers of some facial-recognition scanner that could read volumes of information even in the blandest expression that I might turn upon her. “And if we lose him, Oddie?”

“We’ll find him again.”

“How can you be so sure of that?”

Rather than meet that blue stare a moment longer, I shifted my gaze to the habitations of humanity that, in their plenitude, raised an inexplicable but nonetheless terrible foreboding in my heart.

When I didn’t reply to her question, she answered it for me. “Maybe you’re so sure of finding him again because you’re ‘strangely intuitive’ yourself.”

I didn’t respond because her words were not just words; they were also bait. She had her secrets and I had mine, and for the time being, we would keep them to ourselves.

The clear sky, under which I had left Annamaria back at the cottage, remained clear here to the north of the city. But ominous palisades of dark clouds rose in the south and appeared to be falling toward us in a slow-motion avalanche. A wind had come out of the south, as well, shuddering the trees. The high-soaring, graceful flocks of birds seen previously were gone, replaced by quick pairs and lone individuals that flew fast and low, darting as if from one temporary roost to another in search of the safest haven in which to ride out a coming storm.

“What happened to your disguise?” Mrs. Fischer asked.

“Disguise?”

“Oscar’s lovely plaid cap.”

“I don’t know. I must have left it somewhere. I’m sorry.”

“And the sunglasses?”

“They broke when—” I almost said when the cowboy shot me in the throat, but caught myself. “They just broke.”

She clucked her tongue. “Not good. Now there’s just the chin beard and the choice of mustaches.”

“I’m done with disguises, ma’am. They won’t fool this guy.”

Across the wide highway, through the valley, over the tiered foothills, and up the rough slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains, vast ragged shadows suddenly flew northward, although the clear sky revealed no cause for them. In all my troubled life, I had never seen anything like these swift shades, as if aircraft as large as football fields—and larger—passed low overhead in jet-speed squadrons.

I almost exclaimed about them, but then I realized that Mrs. Fischer was unaware of this spectacle. She leaned forward over the steering wheel, squinting to keep the distant ProStar+ in sight among other eighteen-wheelers that might at any moment change lanes and screen her from it. Even if focused intently on the truck, she would have been aware of the racing shadows if she had been capable of seeing them. Evidently, they weren’t real shadows but perhaps were instead portents of some threat, visible only to me.

The many densely populated communities encircling us were more oppressive than ever, huddled, hivelike. In the stroboscopic flicker of light, the impossible shadows seemed not only to race over the landscape but also to flail at it, and the buildings and all the artifacts of mankind appeared to twitch and shiver much as the trees shuddered in the rising wind.

For me and for a moment, present and future became one, the latter floating on the former, sensed more than seen, presenting itself as feelings and metaphors rather than as a detailed vision of what was to come in the days and years ahead. Claustrophobia wound around me, tighter and tighter, as if it were grave cloth and I were being mummified. For all that great cities had to offer, they were nonetheless mazes of streets. Mazes could thwart and trap. Broad, open freeways offered freedom only until clogged with traffic—or barricaded. Any neighborhood, rich or poor, was potentially a ghetto, every ghetto easily converted to a prison, every prison a potential death camp. To both sides of the highway, the residences and offices and retail outlets seemed at one moment to be burnt-out and boarded-up, but an instant later they appeared to be bunkers and battlements arrayed not against a common enemy but each against the other in a war of all versus all. Now I felt the shadows that flailed the land, as though they were accompanied by shock waves, and the flickers of sunlight were almost bright enough to blind. In addition to the broad freeway along which vehicles raced at high speed, I was also aware of these same concrete arteries in a state of sclerosis, perhaps hours or weeks or years from now, commuters halted bumper-to-bumper. As insubstantial as figments of a dream yet terrifying, an angry mob invaded my vague premonition, a faceless horde bringing grim detail to the vision, metastasizing along the lanes of stalled cars and trucks, smashing windows, tearing open doors, dragging motorists and passengers onto the pavement, blades glinting, guns firing, boots stomping terrified faces. Blood.