No, that wasn’t right, he told himself forcefully. Steven had left with them voluntarily. His friends, he’d called them, and seemed to mean it. He’d always enjoyed flying. Frank prayed fervently that wherever his son was and whatever he was doing at that moment, he was enjoying himself.
It was very quiet inside the motor home. As they accelerated, the ominous thunderheads and querulous lightning shrank behind them. Mouse stood in back watching the clumsy, deadly Anarchis recede. It was tenacious but undisciplined. They could not go around it, but as long as the motor home functioned, they could outrun it. It only suspected their presence here, smelled their intentions. Like a blind killer, it would follow remorselessly, intent on stamping out the hope they represented. They had to continue to stay two steps ahead of it. One wrong step and they would all perish.
Along with everything else, she knew.
The Sonderbergs sat side by side, speaking little. They kept their attention on the road ahead, no longer interested in their constantly changing, surreal surroundings. They thought solely of their vanished son.
He’d sounded so relaxed, so confident, Frank mused. Much more sure of himself than any ten-year-old had a right to be. In spite of Mouse’s and Burnfingers’s reassurances he still had to wonder if he’d ever see his boy again. He found himself regretting all the times he’d yelled at him, usually over little things, inconsequentialities. Now he’d lost him to a world of permanent inconsequentiality.
The highway climbed a grassy knoll before splitting on the other side into a second tangle of curls and twists. Burnfingers Begay confidently pointed the way, remembering the view from his earlier near-cosmic vantage point. Frank drove on, through holes in mountains that weren’t solid, avoiding solid holes that drifted in the midst of insubstantial mountains. Climbing vertical lanes that passed between clouds and dived down into dark earth.
They drove a corkscrew of a road, around and around, making half a dozen loops without falling from the summit of each before the highway straightened out. Mist began to close in around them. Frank switched on the motor home’s fog lights. They helped some, but the poor visibility forced him to slow. There’d been no sign of the Anarchis for several hours, but he had no intention of stopping and waiting for the soup to lift. Besides, there was no place to pull over. There was only the road and the fog.
Long, thin shapes with multiple wings were dimly glimpsed rafting through the grayness. They had bright yellow bodies stiff as rulers and tiny, unmoving black eyes. They didn’t so much fly as paddle through the sky. Later they passed a pair of cow-sized creatures that resembled the deep-sea nightmares Frank had once seen in a National Geographic documentary: all mouths and guts. But they had no teeth. They were consuming the fog, taking huge gulps of the stuff. Wherever they bit, a perfect sphere of clarity appeared. They paralleled the motor home for ten minutes, eating lazily, before falling behind.
The road commenced a gradual descent. It also narrowed, which forced Frank to shift into low and kiss the brakes repeatedly as they negotiated one tight turn after another. After a while he could smell the burning brake shoes, a sharp acrid odor which drifted up through the center console.
“Better get to the bottom of this soon, or find a place to pull off,” he grumbled. “We have to let the brakes cool down.”
“Maybe there?”
Alicia pointed. The fog was rising. Trees materialized out of the mist surrounding them. They looked like normal evergreens. Their roots were planted firmly in the ground, not an inch or so above it. As the mist thinned further they could make out a sweeping panorama of high snow-covered peaks and deep tree-lined canyons. A noisy river rushed down the gorge that paralleled the road. The pavement beneath the motor home’s wheels had given way to dirt somewhere back in the fog, Frank didn’t recall when or where. Now it straightened and turned to two-lane blacktop.
As he accelerated tentatively, another car whizzed past in the opposite lane. It held another family. Buick, Chevy, he couldn’t tell. They were all so interchangeable these days, and it went by fast. Not too fast for him to make out a mother, father, and a couple of kids in the back seat. It might have been the Sonderbergs, except all four were five years younger.
It was followed in a couple of minutes by a battered pickup. Each bruise and paint scrape was a wound of reality. The fog had almost dissipated completely.
“Which way?”
Burnfingers’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed the intersection ahead. “I don’t know. I did not see this place. My concern was to find the right road, but I did not have time or vision to follow it to its end.”
“Turn right,” Alicia said suddenly.
Frank eyed her in surprise. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed some kind of special sensing ability.”
“N-no.” She hesitated. “It’s just that right feels, well—right.”
When Burnfingers said nothing, Frank shrugged. “What the hell. I’ve taken everybody else’s advice.”
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.”
