Mao II - Don Delillo [34]
They went out for a real dinner in a restaurant with tasseled menus and a footbridge to the main room. She looked at him for the first time. In other words took him in retroactively, absorbing the accidental wonder of the past day and a half as it registered on his face. They went back to the room. The time was still not right for the sex of compassionate rescue, the sex of self-effacement, and he wondered if he was doing something wrong. She talked and slept and then woke him up to talk some more.
They told her, The trouble with postcult is that you lose your link to the fate of mankind.
They said, We know you’re a good person who’s just going through a rough adjustment while your parents are waiting and praying and writing a steady stream of checks for your emotional rescue.
They forced her to agree that the church had made a drone of her. She chanted, Made me a drone, made me a drone. That night she got out of bed in a glow of tingling light and tried to say something to the woman with the headset but could not speak and found herself some time later on her hands and knees on the toilet floor, vomiting foods of many nations.
They told her, Okay you are going to a deprogramming center where the lost and wan and wounded of many sects and movements are gathered for humane counseling.
Rick arrived with clothes and spending money and a box of specialty foods packed in impressive crinkly straw and they all drove to the airport. Karen found a cancer coloring book in the door pocket and leafed through. When they got out of the car she saw a policeman and decided to stroll over and tell him she’d been kidnapped. She pointed to the perpetrators, who looked—what is the word that sounds like it means calm and assured but actually means you are baffled? They looked nonplussed. Also guilty, which they were, including the cousin with the slash of green hair. So a multivoice discussion starts on the sidewalk outside the terminal with the normal airport scramble all around. One of the men tried to tell the officer about state conservatorship laws, which entitled them—and Karen was running, gone, through the terminal, down some stairs, feeling light and swift and young, hand-paddling through the crowds, then out a lower-level door and into a taxi, softly saying, Downtown.
She didn’t know what city the downtown area belonged to but when she got there she put fifty dollars aside and spent the rest on a Greyhound ticket—ridin’ the dog—and got off three hours later in White Cloud, a name in the sky, where Scott found her walking zigzag on a nearly empty street.
Brita said, “I have an Eve Arnold photograph of White Cloud, Kansas. It shows the main street, I’m fairly certain, and a structure that could be the brick building where Karen was standing when you approached her and there is definitely a tractor or combine or some other high-wheeled farm machine in the picture.”
“But we’re not there, she and I.”
“And there’s the small sign you mentioned on one of the stores with the funny word on it, the Indian word or whatever, and in a way the whole picture, the wide sky and wide street, everything so lonely and eloquent and commonplace at the same time, it all flows into the strange word on that sign.”
“I remember now. Ha-Hush-Kah. A Bill Gray touch. It’s a Bill Gray place. It really is.”
They drove on these same roads finally, going the other way of course, and she asked questions about Bill. Scott realized this was the first time she’d said more than ten words about anything outside herself. He didn’t know whether Bill would let her stay. It turned out the subject never came up in so many words. They walked in and talked to Bill about the trip and he seemed to take to Karen. His eyes showed a detached amusement that meant there are some things that just have to happen before we know how smart or dumb they are.
After she read Bill’s novels she moved from the old sofa into Scott’s