“I have no idea,” I said. But the words on the banner in the newspaper photo haunted me: SERVING AMERICA THE VERY BEST: THURINGIA NUTS FRUITS PASTRIES. I could picture ads in the back of National Geographic and Sunset in the 1950s: mail-order fruit and nut boxes from California.
“What if he made it all up?” Lissa asked hopefully.
“Then we’ll just turn around and go on to San Jose. Confirm that Rob was wacko.”
Lissa seemed to take what I said as a cue. She spoke rapidly. “The last trip we took, before we separated, Rob wanted to show me something in San Francisco. We drove all the way from Santa Monica to a salt farm in the South Bay. We took the Dumbarton Bridge and ended up on a dirt road on a levee. All around us were these big, square lagoons filled with purple water. They were drying ponds for salt. Rob told me they were filled with bacteria, halophiles, he called them.”
“Salt-loving,” I said.
“I know that.” She scowled but did not take her eyes off the road. “We stood by the car on the levee and it stank and there were flies everywhere. I wondered if I’d ever be able to use salt again. You know what he asked me?”
I could have sworn that she was leading me on, as if cross-examining a witness; that she already knew. Perhaps Rob had told her more, and she was trying to gauge the depth of my own knowledge. I shook my head.
“He asked me if I ever wondered what was the oldest mind on Earth.”
“Oh, really?” I said.
“He pointed to the ponds. ‘There it is. I wonder what it’s thinking right now,’ he said. ‘I wonder if it’s mad at us?’ That scared me. A long drive just to stare at some stinking ponds. We had a huge fight that night, and broke up a few weeks later. But I wasn’t the one who filed for divorce. Rob did.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“What did he mean?” she asked.
“I suppose he meant that bacteria talk to each other.”
“That’s stupid,” she said, then looked doubtful. “Do they?”
“Yes,” I said. “But not the way we’re talking now. They swap genetic material, plasmids, chemicals.”
“Like in a brain?” Lissa asked.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Doesn’t that scare you? It scares me. If they hate us, there are so many of them, they’ll win.”
I shrugged. “Too many things scare me now,” I said. “I try not to think about all of them at once.”
Lissa braked the car abruptly and put the transmission into neutral. Ahead, in a flat stretch between the sun-yellowed hills, lay a low, brown, cornhusk of a town.
“Behold, the tourist mecca of Thuringia,” I said.
The engine and air conditioner whined a precise Japanese chorus in the central valley heat.
“I don’t want to do this,” Lissa said, and her face was pale, her upper lip damp with nervous sweat.
“You can stay here, I’ll walk in,” I offered.
She thought that over. “No,” she decided.
“We’ll do it for Rob,” I said.
“I’ve done a lot for Rob,” she said, with a bitterness I hadn’t heard before.
We both stared through the dusty windshield at the line of buildings, laid out in random clumps like a herd of drought-stricken cows.
Lissa put the Toyota back into drive and moved us slowly down the last hundred yards of rumpled asphalt. She pulled off and parked beside a chain-link fence held up by iron posts set in concrete and wrapped, for all we could tell, around the entire town. A sign clamped to the fence announced, in white letters on a red background, NATURAL POLLUTION SITE—OFF LIMITS. The fence crossed the road. There was no gate.
“What’s that mean?” Lissa asked.
I puzzled it over. “The town east of here is called Cinnabar. That’s an ore of mercury.”
“Mercury is poison,” Lissa said.
“Pretty nasty stuff,” I agreed. “But I don’t see how it could pollute a whole town. There’s no factory or mine.”
“Are we sure of that? I think we should turn around and go back.”
It was a reasonable suggestion, but something told me the sign wasn’t warning about mercury. “You stay here. I’ll go look,” I said. And added, “I promise I’ll wipe my shoes off when I get back.”
“The hell with that,” Lissa said. “I’ll go in with you.” She tried to put on a brave face.
It wasn’t difficult pushing through the old chain link. I found a rock and battered aside the link tension bar, then kicked it until there was a hole big enough to admit us. I slipped through without difficulty and decided to keep the rock, just in case. Lissa, in her dress, had an awkward moment that showed more thigh than either of us was comfortable with.
She straightened her clothes while I looked down the main drag of Thuringia. It resembled a ramshackle set for a cheap Frankenstein movie. Boarded-up buildings on either side had false fronts in European village style. The paint had been sunned down to a few hints of red and blue and green. The street was covered with dried mud and shallow gulleys from past rains and scattered with tumbleweeds.
“Tumbleweeds come from Russia,” I said to Lissa.
“So?” she asked.
