He made the turn, found himself back on concrete highway. In a little while they found themselves atop an overlook. The road continued on, descending to the vast basin ahead in a series of neat switchbacks. A large truck was grinding its way laboriously up the steep grade.
Ahead lay a vast alkaline lake. A thin ribbon of white, the highway skirted the southern shore before disappearing between two volcanic slopes, like a bit of dental floss cutting between a pair of molars. Something was wrong, Frank told himself. Everything looked too right. His brain was still unwilling to trust his eyes.
Alicia was equally contemplative, but Wendy was bouncing up and down by the time they pulled into the little town that clung to the highway beyond the lake. She read every sign and advertisement aloud, as though claims for fishing lures and ads for chicken dinners were declarations of conquest.
It was so heartbreakingly ordinary it left Frank dazed. He walked through the dream in comparative silence, pumping gas from a real pump, downing fast food at a McDonald’s. The teen who took their orders marveled as they polished off three normal dinners apiece. The sole objection came from Flucca, who was disappointed they hadn’t been able to find a Taco Bell instead.
“Don’t worry,” Alicia told him as she finished her second Big Mac and drained the last of her vanilla shake. “I’ll introduce you to the right people once we’re back in L.A.”
“A dream,” the dwarf mumbled around a mouthful of fries. “My own reality, the city of the holocaust, all a dream. Only this is real. I proclaim it so!”
“We can all relax, then.” Frank wasn’t too tired or relieved to be sarcastic. He tapped his fingernails on the Formica, inhaled the smell of salted potatoes and hot grease. “It’s real, all right. It’s hanging on too long for it to be anything else. We’re back. We made it back. Back to reality, our reality. Back to normalcy.” He smiled at Alicia, then looked to his right. His smile faded. “Only you aren’t normal. Are you, Mouse? Or whatever your name is.”
She sipped daintily at her Coke. “What is normal?”
“Why do you have to answer all my questions with another question? I hate that.”
“Steven’s not here,” Alicia reminded him. “That’s not normal, either.”
“No. It’s not normal and it’s not right.”
“When I reach the Vanishing Point,” Mouse told him, “everything will be made right again.”
“Meaning Steven’ll come back to us? You can promise that?”
She just looked at him. It was not an answer.
They learned they were in Lee Vining, a little tourist town that catered to fishers and hikers. It sat on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, not far from Yosemite National Park. A straight drive of six to eight hours would put them back in Los Angeles Back home.
It meant driving through the desert again, a different part of the same Mojave they’d traversed when starting out, so long ago, on their interrupted journey to Las Vegas. They would pass uncomfortably close to Barstow, to the beginnings of bad memories and disconcerting images. No one paid any attention to them as they exited the restaurant and returned to the motor home.
“What will you do when we reach Los Angeles?” Alicia spoke as she settled back into her seat.
“Continue on my way, with or without you,” Mouse replied. “We have shaken the Anarchis for a while. I feel confident.”
“When we picked you up you were going away from L.A.,” Frank reminded her.
“Sometimes to get where you are going you have to return to where you have been. Traveling a Möbius strip, you would call it. Not all roads take familiar turnings.”
“I don’t understand,” said Alicia.
“I barely understand myself. The way is difficult and complex. The Vanishing Point does not lie on a map, but rather beyond it.” She put a hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “Do not worry about your son. He’s all right. I’m sure of it.”
“I wish I could believe that. I wish I could believe you. I’d feel better if I knew what this obulating was.”
“Someday I think he’ll explain it himself.”
Only exhaustion prevented Frank from driving straight through. After what they’d been through, what they’d experienced, it was a joy to eat ordinary food, to use plain cash and receive change in kind, and to talk with people who looked back at you out of eyes that did not glow. Even Burnfingers Begay, who insisted he needed no sleep, confessed to being tired.
So they spent the night in the town of Mohave, luxuriating in the sappy, reassuring programs and loud commercials on the TV in their room. Not even the rattle of the freight trains that rumbled down the tracks that paralleled the main street could prevent them from sleeping deeply and soundly. Nor could Frank’s unease at closing his eyes one more time in the desert.
He awoke with a start, to what he thought was growling outside their door. It was only a couple of college students starting up their aged, reluctant sedan. He slipped out of bed and cracked the door of their room. The morning smelled of desert dampness, old boxcars, oil, and grease, and coffee. All was as it had been when they’d turned out the lights and gone to sleep, with the addition of sun. He felt almost human as he gently woke Alicia.
He made himself linger over breakfast. Waffles and bacon, eggs and hashbrowns and toast. Burnfingers offered to pay for his own, but Frank grandly refused the proffered doubloon.
It was evening when they finally entered Los Angeles. A bad time to be on the road, but Frank didn’t mind. There were only two kinds of traffic in Los Angeles anymore anyway: rush hour and not quite rush hour. He delighted in the sight of the overloaded eighteen-wheeler that crowded him from behind, cheered the Corvette that cut him off in the slow lane. The freeway at rush hour was an old friend newly revisited, harbinger of normalcy, a great rough pet sucking in the sharp odor of unleaded gas and exhaling huge gouts of smog. The lungs of the city breathed around him, and he knew he was home at last.
All that was missing was a familiar, whiny, complaining face from the back of the motor home. Steven’s continued absence was proof that memory and imagination were not the same. Everything he remembered had happened. In his mind’s eye he saw his son happily paddling away into the sky accompanied by a school of oversized angelfish. Not the last image one expected to have of one’s youngest child.
What had been so fascinating? What pull had been strong enough to draw him away from his family? The fish? Obulating—whatever that was? Steven’s farewell had been a confident one. “I’ll be okay!” he’d insisted. How could he be so certain? What ten-year-old knew anything of the future and its prospects? Frank wondered if he’d ever see the overweight little rug rat again.
Of course, he reminded himself unsparingly, they could all four of them just as easily be dead. Or worse, if Mouse’s stories of the Anarchis were true. At least father, mother, and daughter were alive and together instead of chained forever in Hell, imprisoned by thugs in an otherworldly casino, or undergoing the torments nuclear-devastated mutants might devise.
Not at all the thoughts to have while cruising down Artesia Boulevard on a bright, sunny summer morn.
16
IT WAS MIDDAY when he left Sepulveda for the Peninsula road. How reassuring to see the Pacific once more, an endless expanse of steel-gray water stretching toward Asia. They cruised past the neighborhood shopping center, its tile roofs sweating in the sun. Malaga Cove was crowded with surfers. Then up into the Palos Verdes hills.
The openers for the electric gate that guarded the driveway were in the family cars. Frank had to exit the motor home and activate the iron barrier with a key.
“Quite a place you got here,” Burnfingers observed approvingly as they drove toward the house.
“Couple acres.” Frank was unduly modest. “I do pretty good. Work for it.”
Flucca stood by a window. “This is what it looks like on my reality line. The architecture’s different. I wonder what other realities are like? Maybe there are gardens full of unicorns and griffins.”
“Or like the old days when antelope and deer roamed the hills, unrestrained by fences, uncounted by game wardens.” Burnfingers bent to survey the well-tended grounds that formed a green California necklace around the single-story house. “Where men counted coup with clubs instead of H-bombs. Do you know, little singer, where you are now?”
Mouse shook her head. “I’ve never been here before. It lies on a path I must take for the first time.”
It was a rambling ranch-style structure. Lawn, bushes, and flowerbeds had all been recently trimmed. That meant the gardeners had been here within the past couple of days. They had only cutworms and beetles to battle, he mused. Hibiscus and geranium bloomed profusely. Iceplant turned one steep hillside facing the ocean a bright pink. It was all soothing and relaxing. He discovered he was looking forward to getting back to work with messianic intensity.
Sara wasn’t inside. The maid usually left after lunch. Alicia insisted on taking care of her home to the full extent of her abilities, hence they engaged only part-time help. It was just as well. Sara would have been surprised to see them back home so far ahead of schedule.
Frank set the brake, then joined the others in front of the main entrance. Burnfingers was eyeing the still-open gate.
“I expect I will be on my way now.”
“Nonsense! You come right inside and rest.” Alicia took his arm. “You too, Mr. Flucca. I promised I’d call some people on your behalf and I’m going to do exactly that, just as soon as we’ve all settled down a little.”
“Just show me the kitchen.” Flucca was rubbing his hands together in expectation. “It’s been so long since I’ve had a chance to cook with proper utensils I’m afraid I may have forgotten how. Leave dinner to me.”
Mouse was gathering her dress around her, tightening the silken folds. “And I must be on my way. My time is no less precious here than elsewhere.”
“You’ll make better time if you have a good night’s sleep and start fresh in the morning.” Frank knew that tone. His wife would not be denied. “We’ll pay your plane fare if necessary.”
“You forget. I cannot travel by plane.”
