“I don’t want to cause pain,” she began. “But I think you should take it into account. To support my hypothesis, you would say.”
“I’m listening,” I said. But in fact something was wrong with my hearing. I scrubbed my ears with the tips of my little fingers, and still the sound in the car seemed muffled.
“He started losing his bearings after he went to Siberia. It got worse when he met Banning. He wouldn’t shut up at night. He was amazed that someone had got there ahead of him. He became obsessed, then, he started agreeing with whatever Banning would say—”
“The Nazi crap?”
“No,” she admitted. “He didn’t go that far. But he started to avoid me, stay away on any excuse. I loved him, and I tried to stick with him, but he wouldn’t accept my help. He accused me of holding him back. How could I? He wouldn’t even tell me what he was doing! Then he left.”
I tapped my jaw to dislodge whatever was blocking my ears.
She nodded grimly. “And to tell the truth, I was fed up, too. I couldn’t stand it anymore . . .”
The next few words I didn’t catch. I heard a humming and watched the windshield turn white as a sheet of ice. Lissa kept driving, but all the sound had been turned down. I leaned against the cool glass of the side window. Through the corners of my eyes, I watched her lips move.
I was perfectly calm. How nice that I didn’t have to listen. But I would have to come up with suitable responses. “Probably they got to him, by then,” I said, just to stay in the conversation. “Induced madness. That’s likely.”
She pulled over and stopped the car. In silence, she opened my door and helped me out. I saw fields of dark green strawberry plants all around. We were on a dirt road some distance off the freeway. She waved a hand in front of my face. I think she was saying, “Hal, are you all right,” but I wasn’t paying much attention. The calmness was wonderful. After all I had been through, to have this benison delivered to me was a real treat.
She put me in the backseat. I imagined that she took off her clothes, then my clothes, and rubbed her body all over me, going through graceful contortions between the seats. She carefully rubbed her thighs, her labia and pubic hair, on my face, my mouth and nose, and over my own hair, scenting me with hay and roses. She gently inserted her finger up both my nostrils, then into my ears. I felt vividly the press of her smoothly manicured and painted fingernails. Then, as if it were an afterthought, she got me hard and slipped off her panties. She slid down over me, made me come, and went through the process all over again. When she was done, she pulled me from the backseat and dressed me.
It was all interesting and diverting, but it did not break my extraordinary and welcome calm.
“You are a horny bastard,” she said coolly when we were back on the road. I checked my clothes. Shirt all buttoned up. I could hear again. That was nice.
“Did we just make love by the roadside?” I asked.
“We did,” she said. “Thank you for remembering.” She smiled at me, beautiful but chilly.
“Wonderful,” I said. “When are you going to let me drive?”
“Not now,” she said, and shook her head primly. “A freshly fucked male has no sense of danger.”
I could not disagree.
31
SOUTH-CENTRAL CALIFORNIA
My memory of events for the next few hours is muddled. I can revive images of small two-lane highways and dusty towns, and they all seem to bring me like a wash of gravel to a brown strip motel in a small town dotted with drooping, dusty green trees. I think we were somewhere east of Los Angeles.
The calmness had filled me like a transfusion of chicken soup, healing most of my pains and making the rest seem unimportant. I wanted Lissa to rub me again, and on what I believe was our first evening in the motel, she did. She rolled me around on the bed like a happy puppy, inspecting me with sad deliberation.
She rubbed her skin with her hands, spit on her palms, then rubbed her hands on me. Again she inserted fingers into my nose and mouth and ears.
She did not have sex with me. And that was okay. I was just being rewarded for being a good puppy.
She allowed me to sit in a chair on the concrete walkway outside as we waited for the balky air conditioner to cool the room. Just to make small talk, I told her about the air conditioner in the hotel in San Francisco. That made her even more sad.
She sat beside me on the rusted metal chairs and watched the sun go down over reddish mountains. The hotel was empty except for us, a broken-down wreck on a dying old highway. Maybe that was why she had chosen it.
A small white Toyota Celica drove into the parking lot, skirting a deep pothole. The other fellow I had seen in Berkeley, companion to the corpse in the freezer, got out, walked over, took off his Fedora, and waved it at his face to stay cool. He stood in front of my chair, watching me with fixed black eyes.
Lissa spoke with him in a language I did not understand. I smiled at them both. Then he got back into the Toyota and sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, paying no attention to either of us. Arrogant son of a bitch, I thought.
“You know him?” I asked Lissa.
“He’s my trainer,” she said.
“Like a lion tamer?”
“No. Training for the Olympics. But I broke my ankle.”
“Sorry.”
She shook her head. That was long past and very far away.
At some point I thought it was appropriate to ask, “What next?”
“You’re going to stay here,” she answered.
“All right.”
She looked at me. “You know what’s happening?” she asked.
“No.”
“Do you care?”
